South America Observations and Impressions

Comparing the Indians of the Andes with those of the plateau of Anahuac, and especially with the Aztecs, the former appear a less vigorous and forceful people, and distinctly inferior as fighting men. The North Americans generally, including not only the Mexicans, but such tribes as the Sioux, the Comanches, and the Iroquois, loved war, and were as brave and fierce in it as any race the world has seen. The South Americans, except of course the Araucanians of Chile, the Charruas of Uruguay, and perhaps also the Caras of Quito, were altogether softer. They still make sturdy soldiers when well led, and do not fear death. But they shewed little of the spirit and tenacity of the Red Men of the North. Even allowing for the terror and amazement inspired by the horses, the firearms, the armour, and the superior physical strength of the Spanish invaders, who were picked men, some of them veterans from Italian wars, the resistance of the Peruvians was strangely feeble. They were also mentally inferior. The Spaniards thought the Mexicans far more intelligent. Neither race had made the great discovery of alphabetic writing, but those of Anahuac had come much nearer to it with their quasi-hieroglyphic pictures than had the Peruvians with their Quipus, knotted strings of various colours. On the other hand the rule of the Incas and their more pacific type of civilization represent a more fully developed and better settled system of administration than the military organization of those allied pueblos which were led by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). These latter did no more than exact tribute and require contingents in war from the tribes who dwelt round them on the Mexican plateau and between the plateau and the Gulf, while the Incas not only exercised undisputed suzerainty for a thousand miles to the south of Cuzco and nearly another thousand to the north, but had devised, in their own domain of central Peru, a scheme of government whose elaboration witnesses to the political capacity of the rulers. Even if we discount a good deal of the description given by the early writers of the "State Socialism" established by the Incas, it seems probable that more was done in the way of regulating the productive activities of the subjects than in any other primitive people, either of the ancient or of the modern world. Public officials, it is said, regulated the distribution and cultivation of the land, its produce being allotted, partly to the Inca, partly to the service of the Sun, his temples and ministers, partly to the cultivator or the clan to which he belonged. Thus State Socialism was strengthened by its association with a State Church, and as everybody was free to worship his local huacas as well as the Sun there was nothing to fear from heresy or non-conformity. The Incas maintained roads, some of which are said to have been paved,37 and tambos or rest-houses along the roads, together with a service of swift messengers whose feats of running excited the admiration of the Spaniards. They made plans in relief of their cities, and some accounts declare that they adorned their walls with pictures of former sovereigns. By the general testimony of the early Spanish writers, the country was peaceful and orderly. Other vices, including that of drunkenness, are charged upon them, but theft and violence were extremely rare. Indeed, the habit of obedience was cultivated only too successfully, for it made them yield, after a few scattered outbursts of resistance, to a handful of invaders.

The political astuteness of the Incas, visible in their practice of moving conquered tribes, as did the Assyrian kings, to new abodes and replacing these by colonists of more assured loyalty, was perhaps most conspicuous in the success that attended their scheme of basing imperial power upon national Sun worship, making the sovereign play on earth the part which the great luminary held in the sky, and surrounding his commands and his person with an almost equal sanctity. The Inca was more to his subjects than any European or Asiatic monarch has ever been to his, more than was the Mikado in Japan or the Czar to the peasantry of Russia a century ago.

When the Spanish invasion broke like a tornado upon Peru, it was natural that the Inca throne should be uprooted and the ancient Sun worship with it. But the Conquerors also therewith destroyed, in the thoughtless insolence of force and greed, the whole system of society and government. Some of them, writing twenty or thirty years later, expressed their regret.38 Wretchedness had replaced prosperity; such virtues as the people had possessed were disappearing, their spirit was irretrievably broken. The serfdom to which the peasantry were by the Conquest subjected was not paternal, as that of the Incas had been, and was harsher, because the new master was a stranger without sympathy or compassion. There was no one to befriend the Indian, save now and then a compassionate churchman; and even if he could get the ear of the Viceroy or bring his appeal to the Council of the Indies in Spain, the oppressor on the spot was always able to frustrate such benevolent efforts. How far the people died out under these new conditions is matter of controversy, but it seems clear that the coast valleys (already declining as the result of frequent wars) were soon almost depopulated; and in place of the eight millions whom the Viceroy Toledo's enumeration reported in 1575,39 there were in 1794 only 608,000 Indians and 244,000 mestizos within the seven Intendancies of Peru (excluding what is now Bolivia).

It is the extraordinary interest of the subject, – a religion and a polity resembling in so many points those of Old World countries, yet itself altogether independently developed – that has drawn me into this digression, for all that I had intended was to describe the impression which the existing ruins make, and what it is that they seem to tell us about the capacities of the race that has left them as its monument. They are far scantier than are the remains of the Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations, and they are as inferior in material grandeur and artistic quality to those remains as the race was intellectually inferior not only to the Greeks, but also to our own early Celtic and Teutonic ancestors of the first five Christian centuries who produced few buildings and had not advanced in settled order and in wealth so far as the subjects of the Incas. Nevertheless, the Peruvian remains do bear witness to two elements of strength in the American race. One of these is a capacity for the concentration of effort upon any aim proposed and for a scrupulously exact and careful execution of any work undertaken. The other is a certain largeness and boldness of conception, finding expression not only in the plan of great buildings, but also in an administrative system which secured obedience over a vast area, which diffused its language over many diverse tribes, and impressed upon them one worship and (to some extent at least) one type of society. That a people who wanted so many advantages possessed by the peoples of the Old World should have effected these things shews the high natural quality inherent in some at least of the aboriginal races of the Western Hemisphere.

Was this semicivilization of Peru – and one may ask the same question regarding that of Mexico – still advancing when it was suddenly and irretrievably swept away by the Spanish Conquest? Did it possess such further possibilities of development as might have enabled it, had it been spared, to have made some substantial contribution, whether in art, or in industry, or in the way of intellectual creation, to the general progress of mankind? Or had it already reached the full measure of its stature, as the civilization of Egypt seems to have done some time before the Persians conquered that country, or as that of China did many centuries ago? This is a question which the knowledge so far attained regarding the pre-Conquest ages of Peru does not enable us to answer.40 Could the voyage of Columbus have been postponed for four or five hundred years, Peruvians and Mexicans might have risen nearer to an equality of intelligence with the European peoples, however inferior they had remained for the purposes of war. But America once discovered, the invasion of Mexico and Peru was certain to follow; and so soon as the Old-World races with their enormous superiority poured in among those of the New World, the weaker civilization could not but be submerged, submerged so utterly that little or nothing of it remained to be taken up into and incorporated with that of the invaders.

It is this complete submersion that strikes one so forcibly in Peru and Mexico; perhaps even more forcibly in the former than in the latter. The aborigines went under at once. In Peru and Bolivia they constitute the majority of the population. But to the moral, intellectual, and political life of Peru and Bolivia they have made no contribution. Even to its art and its industries they supplied nothing except painstaking artificers, retaining the old talent for stonework, which they did at the bidding of Spanish masters. Negatively and harmfully, they have affected politics by preventing the growth of a white agricultural class and by furnishing recruits to the armies raised by military adventurers. The break between the old Peru of the Incas and the newer Peru of colonial times was as complete as it was sudden. The earlier has passed on nothing to the later, because the spirit of the race was too hopelessly broken to enable it to give anything. There remains only the submissiveness of a downtrodden peasantry and its pathetic fidelity to its primitive superstitions. Some old evils passed away, some new evils appeared. Human sacrifices ended, and the burning of heretics began.

CHAPTER V

LA PAZ AND THE BOLIVIAN DESERT

Bolivia was for two centuries after the Spanish Conquest a part of Peru and has neither natural boundaries nor any distinctive physical character to mark it off from its neighbours, Peru on the northwest and Argentina on the southeast. It is an artificial creation, whose separate national existence is due to two events. After the Jesuits had, by the king of Spain's decree in 1769, been forced out of Paraguay, which they had ruled with considerable success for many years, the Spanish government found that it was more and more difficult to administer from Lima their vast southeastern dominions lying to the east of the Andes, since these were then becoming more and more exposed to contact with European nations, reaching them across the Atlantic. Accordingly, they created, in 1776, the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires and assigned to it all the River Plate countries, while for the southeastern parts of what had hitherto been upper Peru they set up a separate administrative authority with the seat of its audiencia at Chuquisaca. Then came the War of Independence. When that struggle ended with the decisive battle of Ayacucho, in 1824, and the surrender of Lima and Callao, the triumphant revolutionary leaders determined to maintain the political separation from Peru of this southern region, which had been under the audiencia of Chuquisaca, and to constitute a distinct republic lying between Peru and Argentina. To this new creation the name of Bolivia was given in honour of Simon Bolivar, the "Liberator," himself a Venezuelan. Independent it has since then remained, having, however, lost in an unfortunate war with Chile a large slice of territory adjoining the Pacific. It is now, except Paraguay, the only entirely inland state in South America. And just as on no side has it anything that can be called a natural frontier, neither have its inhabitants any distinctive quality or character to distinguish them sharply from other peoples. They differ but little from the Andean Peruvians, being of similarly mixed Spanish and Indian blood and living under similar physical conditions.

Bolivia includes several regions quite different in their character. Nearly all the western part is a desert, with a few mining towns scattered here and there, a desert enclosed by the two great almost parallel Cordilleras of the Andes. The southeastern part is a plateau, or rather succession of plateaux, lying on the eastern side of the Eastern Cordillera, and gradually sinking into those vast levels on the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, from which rivers flow northward into the Amazon and southward to form the Paraná and Rio de la Plata. Much of this region is too dry or too rugged for cultivation or even for ranching. Yet much is also valuable for one or other purpose, and capable of supporting an agricultural population as well as that which lives off the mines. The third or northeastern region is a part of the great Amazonian low forest-covered country, – the so-called Selvas (woodlands), – which stretches out to the east from the declivities of the Eastern Cordillera, and is still, save for a few white settlements, inhabited only by wild Indians. Thus in the enormous total area of Bolivia, 605,000 square miles, there are only 2,000,000 people, and the large majority of these are Indians, uncivilized in the forests, semicivilized in the other regions. The white population, estimated at 200,000, most of whom, however, have some Indian blood, is virtually confined to a few towns, only one of which, La Paz, has more than 25,000 people. Santa Cruz (de la Sierra), far out in the eastern lowlands, and Chuquisaca, now called Sucre, Cochabamba, and Potosi, with its wonderful mountain of silver, have some families of Spanish blood. Oruro and Uyuni in the desert are mining towns with the mixed population that gathers in such places. La Paz, the largest city, and virtually, though not officially, the capital, has 50,000 inhabitants, the bulk of whom are Indians. These six towns are far apart, there are few inhabitants between them, and these are nearly all Indians. Till the railroad from Uyuni by Oruro to La Paz was made, communication was very slow and difficult. Anyone can see what obstacles to economic and political progress such conditions create.

The traveller who approaches La Paz from Lake Titicaca – and this has been the usual route from the coast – rises slowly through the bare hills amidst which Tiahuanaco stands till he emerges on an immense level, stretching south to a distant horizon, and bounded on the west by bare rolling mountains and on the east by the still loftier Eastern Cordillera. Here in the bleakest spot imaginable, about 13,000 feet above sea-level, the railway from Guaqui, the port on Titicaca, meets the railway from Antofagasta, the Chilean port on the Pacific, four hundred miles away to the south, and this is the point to which a third railway is now converging, that which is being built to connect La Paz with Arica on the Pacific, one hundred miles to the west. From this point, called Viacha, the route turns eastward towards the Cordillera, the line climbing slowly in wide sweeps over the dusty and shrubless plateau on whose thin grass sheep are browsing. There is not a house visible and the smooth slope seems to run right up against the mountain wall beyond. Where can La Paz be? asks the traveller. Presently, however, he perceives strings of llamas and donkeys and wayfarers on foot moving along the slope towards a point where they all suddenly vanish and are no more seen. Then a spot is reached where the railway itself seems to end between a few sheds. He gets out and walks a few yards to the east and then suddenly pulls up with a start on the edge of a yawning abyss. Right beneath him, fifteen hundred feet below, a grey, red-roofed city fills the bottom of a gorge and climbs up its sides on both banks of the torrent that foams through it. Every street and square, every yard and garden, is laid out under the eye as if on a map, and one almost seems to hear the rattle of vehicles over stony pavements coming faintly up through the thin air.

I had often heard La Paz described as lying in a deep rift of volcanic origin, due to a sudden subsidence in the course of an eruption, or perhaps to an earthquake. Such a hypothesis seemed natural in a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. But there is no trace here of any volcanic action, whether eruption or disruption. This barranca– it is the Spanish name for such a hollow – has evidently been scooped out by the action of water. The sloping plateau up which the railway rises from Viacha is an immensely thick alluvial or lacustrine deposit of earth and gravel, doubtless formed in the days when the whole region between the Eastern and Western Cordilleras formed part of a far larger Lake Titicaca. The torrent which comes down from the snows of the Cordillera Real to the north has cut its way down through this deposit and thus formed the "gulch," to use the word which, in western North America, is appropriated to gorges hollowed out by streams. The sides of the hollow are all of earth, extremely hard, and in many places almost precipitous, but there is no rock, certainly no igneous rock, visible anywhere.

How did so strange a site come to be chosen? Apparently in the first instance because gold had been found in the earth along the river, and the Spaniards set the Indians to wash it out for them. This industry has long been abandoned; but the spot, first settled in or about 1548, when the civil wars among the Conquistadores were ended by capture and execution of Gonzalo Pizarro, and called Our Lady of Peace, was recommended for continued occupation by its having a copious and perennial stream, by its sheltered position, and by its standing at the opening of a deep ravine through which a track leads down along the banks of the river, into the forest country on the east. Through this ravine it is supposed that Lake Titicaca formerly sent its surplus waters to the Atlantic. No spot within many a mile is so well protected from the fierce winds that sweep over the plateau. Up there nothing will rise three feet from the ground. Down below flowers are grown and trees can be coaxed up to give shade and put forth branches in which birds can sing.

From the edge of the barranca– it is called the "Alto" – electric cars descend into the city by a track which doubles hither and thither in zigzags along the face of the almost precipitous declivity. The line has been skilfully laid out, and as the cars are light and fitted with powerful brakes, the descent is perfectly safe, steep as is the grade. Such a railway is, of course, not capable of carrying heavy goods traffic; but there is not, and may not for a long while be, any great quantity of heavy traffic to carry. The new line, which is to connect the city with the coast at Arica, is meant to have its terminal station at the southern end of the barranca, where descent from above is somewhat easier.

La Paz has the distinction of being the loftiest capital city in the world, as it stands 12,470 feet above sea-level, more than 2000 feet higher than Quito, and 5000 feet higher than Mexico. Lhasa in Tibet comes next to it at 11,830 feet. The mean annual temperature is 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The keen air which this elevation gives has a fine, bracing quality, yet there are disadvantages. One is never warm except when actually in the sunlight, and there are no fires, indeed, hardly any fireplaces, partly, no doubt, because there is nothing to burn, the country being treeless and coal far distant. The inhabitants get accustomed to these conditions and shiver in their ponchos, but the traveller is rather wretched after sunset, and feels how natural was Sun worship in such a country. So thin is the air that people with weak hearts or narrow chests cannot live here. An attack of pneumonia is rapidly fatal, because there is not enough oxygen to keep the lungs going under stress, and the only chance for the patient is to hurry him down to the coast by railway. Pressure on the breathing and palpitation of the heart are the commonest symptoms of the soroche, or puna, the so-called mountain sickness which prevails all over the plateau at heights exceeding 10,000 feet, many persons suffering from it at even lower levels. Less frequent symptoms are nausea and vomiting, violent headache, and general disturbance of the digestive organs. Some constitutions are, of course, much more liable to suffer than others are, but all who come from the lowlands experience a difficulty in any violent physical exertion, such as running uphill or lifting heavy weights. We enquired before leaving the coast whether any remedies or preventives could be applied, and were told that drugs were of little or no use, the best prophylactic being to abstain from smoking, from drinking, and from eating. I observed only the second of these directions, but neither of us suffered in any way, not even at heights exceeding 15,000 feet, save that it proved desirable in climbing hills to walk more slowly than we were accustomed to do at home, and that, when lying down in bed at night, we found ourselves drawing a few very long and deep breaths before sleep came. English and North American acquaintances in La Paz told us that to play single sets in lawn tennis was too hard work, because the effort of getting quickly to different corners of the court tried the lungs; and we heard of people who, having come here for business purposes, found, after a few months, that it was prudent to return to the coast for an interval of rest. The native Indians, being to the manner born, seem to suffer from the thinness of the air no more than they do from the cold, and in the days of the Incas they performed extraordinary feats of swift running for long distances.

The causes which make elevation above the sea affect our organs more on some mountains than on others have never been fully ascertained. Sir M. Conway thinks that the rarity of air is more felt in dry regions, as here in the central Andes and in Colorado, where I personally remember to have found it a greater hindrance to exertion at 8000 feet than on the Alps at 15,000 feet. Others declare that it is more severe in moist and rainy weather than in clear weather. One may venture to suggest that it is more felt on a plateau or wide mass of lofty mountains than on a narrow range where there is abundance of denser air just below, which rises from the valley. This would explain why climbers suffer so little from it in the Alps. Such experience as I have had on the Himalayas and in America as well as on the North American ranges and in Hawaii favours this view.

The lesson of slowing down one's pace in walking uphill is soon learnt in La Paz, for, as it stands on very irregular ground, sloping sharply on both sides to the stream which traverses it in a broad, stony channel, all the streets are steep, except those that run along the bottom of the valley parallel to the stream. All are very roughly paved, so driving is no great pleasure till you get outside the town upon one or two well-kept suburban avenues. Still less is riding, till one has learnt to trust the experienced local animal to keep his feet on the large, smooth cobblestones. In such a city, where there never were rich people and no church had any special sanctity, one cannot expect to find that charm, frequent in the old cities of Spain, which arises from the variety of architectural detail in the buildings. Few in La Paz bear an air of antiquity, few have anything picturesque in gables or doors or windows. The same thing is true of the churches also. Some have a more spacious interior than others, some a richer façade, some statelier towers, but all are of the invariable late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century type, with the same heavy and often tawdry ornament in the nave and choir. The churches of the friars have often more quality than the others; and here San Francisco with its handsome front and elaborate reredos pleased us better than the Cathedral. There are a few good houses, some of which tradition allots to former governors, with galleries built round the patio and gateways surmounted by armorial bearings, but the patio is cheerless, for it is apt to be a reservoir of chilled air. The central Plaza, where one usually looks to find the best that a town can do, is here quite small, but tastefully laid out. On one side of it are the government offices, on another the seat of the legislature, not a bad building, if it were not surmounted by a zinc spire. The markets are the most interesting places, because here, as in the open-air booths of the Plaza San Francisco and still more in the large covered passages of the principal Mercado (much like an Oriental bazaar or the Suk at Tunis), one sees not only the various fruits and roots and grains, the scanty produce of the plateau and of the nearest warmer valleys, together with such textile fabrics as native industry weaves or embroiders, but also the natives themselves in all their variety of costume. The Indian wears a felt hat, and the mestizo (half-breed), who belongs to a higher social stratum, a straw one. The former has always, the latter often, a woollen poncho, brightly coloured, over his rough and dirty cotton shirt and short, loose trousers. The white man, or the mestizo of the upper class who considers himself to be white, wears a European cloth coat, and usually for warmth's sake a cloak or overcoat above it; this is the distinctive note of social pretension. The native women are gorgeous in brilliantly coloured woollen petticoats, very heavy and very numerous. Orange and pink are the favourite colours. Strong and solidly built as these Indian women are, one wonders how their waists can support the weight of three, four, or even five of these thick pieces of closely woven cloth.