South America Observations and Impressions. Viscount James Bryce
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the land was as unmitigated a bit of desert as I had ever seen, with only a few stunted, prickly, and woody stemmed plants supporting a feeble life in the hollows of the ground, still it was exhilarating to tread at last the soil of a new continent and receive a new impression.
The first view of Peru answers very little to that impression of a wealthy land called up by the name of this country, more familiar and more famous in the olden days than that of any other part of the colonial empire of Spain. Nevertheless, it is a curious fact that the wealth of Spanish Peru belonged more to her barren than to her fertile and populous regions. In the days of the Incas it was otherwise. They ruled over an agricultural people, and though they had gold in plenty, gold to them was not wealth, but material for ornaments. Apart, however, from agriculture, of which I shall speak later, the riches of Peru have consisted of three natural products, which belong to the drier tracts. These are the guano of the rainless islands off the coast, the nitrate deposits in the province of Tarapaca and the mines of silver and copper. Of these three, the guano has now been nearly exhausted, and while it lasted it enriched, not the country, but a succession of military adventurers. The nitrate regions have been conquered by Chile and seem unlikely ever to be restored. The most productive of the silver mines were taken away when Bolivia, in which they are situated, was erected into a separate republic, and such mines as remain in the High Andes, doubtless of great and not yet fully explored value, are in the hands of foreign companies and syndicates. Little good have these bounties of nature done to the people of Peru, whether Spanish or Indian.
From Panama to Payta the direct steamers take five days, and from Payta to Callao it is two days more, so the whole voyage is about as long as that from New York to Liverpool in the quick liners. This is one of the least troubled parts of the ocean; that is to say, gales are rare, and hurricanes, like those of the Caribbean, unknown. There is, however, usually a pretty heavy swell, and when there has been a storm some two or three hundred miles out to the west, the great rollers come in and make landing along the coast no easy matter. As the ship keeps too far out for the details of the coast to be visible, the voyage is rather monotonous, especially in the cloudy weather we encountered. Here in the Antarctic current one has lost the pleasure of watching the gauzy gleam of the flying fish, but sea-birds appear circling round the ship and pelicans abound in the harbour. Whales, following the cold water northward, are seen spouting and are beset and attacked by their enemy the thresher, while whenever the ship anchors in a roadstead to discharge or take in cargo, seals and sea lions gambolling among the waves give a little amusement. The crew were Chileans, – they are the only South Americans with a taste for the sea – the passengers mostly natives of the various republics along the coast, for these steamers furnish the only means of communication north and south, but there are usually some English commercial men and North Americans looking after their mining interests or prospecting for railways across the Andes. There is much more variety than one usually finds in an Atlantic liner, but much less than in a Mediterranean or Black Sea steamer, where on the same deck you may see the costumes and hear the tongues of seven or eight nations. The Spanish-Americans are not very communicative to strangers, but whoever speaks their language can learn a good deal from them about minerals and revolutions, – the two chief products of the northwest coast.
To sail along a coast without a chance of examining its natural beauties or the cities that stud it, is in most cases mortifying, but here in the six hundred miles between Payta and Callao one has this consolation, that there is nothing to see, and you cannot see it. The shores are brown, bare and unpeopled, while the heavy cloud roof that hangs over the sea, hides the tops of the hills also, and cuts off all view of the snowy Cordillera far behind. The towns are few and small, because the land is sterile save where one of the Andean streams gives fertility to a valley. One would naturally suppose that the country had always been even as it is now. But the ruins of ancient cities here and there prove that it must once have been far more populous. A census taken soon after the Conquest shewed that there were in the Valley of Piura 193,000 Indians. In 1785 the inhabitants, then mostly negroes, numbered only 44,500. Of these ruins the largest are those of a city often called Chimu, from the title of the king who ruled there, near the town of Truxillo, to which Pizarro, when he founded it, gave the name of his own Estremaduran birthplace. The remains cover a wide space and shew that the people who dwelt here and in the other coast valleys must have made considerable advances toward civilization, for the pottery and other utensils are better in artistic style than any other remains found in South America. The kingdom of the Chimu was overthrown by the Incas a century before the Spanish Conquest, and nothing is known of the race except that its language, called Mochica, was quite different from that of the mountain tribes who obeyed the Incas. Whether the people perished under Spanish oppression, or whether they moved away, when in the confusion that followed the Conquest, the irrigation works that made cultivation possible were allowed to fall into decay – this is one of the many riddles of Peruvian history.
Gazing from the deck hour after hour on this dreary coast, and remembering that the Atlantic side of the Continent in the same latitude is one of the best watered and richest parts of the tropics, one is struck by the unfortunate physical conditions that make useless a region whose climate, kept so cool by the Antarctic current would otherwise have fitted it for the development of progressive communities. Such communities did exist among the subjects of the Chimu, but being confined to a few valleys, they were not strong enough to resist the impact of the more numerous mountain tribes. Thus it was only on the plateau behind that a great nation could grow up. With a moderate rainfall these six hundred miles of coast might have been one of the most fertile parts of South America, and the history of Peru would have been altogether different. The absence of rain has provided a compensation in the form of a product which, though it cannot be used on the spot, became serviceable to other countries, and might have given Peru the means of developing mines or building railroads. The droppings of the swarms of sea-birds that frequent the rocky islands along the coast instead of being, as in other countries, washed away by showers, have accumulated till they formed those huge masses of guano which eighty years ago began to be carried away and sold to European countries as the most efficient fertilizers. The Inca sovereigns knew their value and are said to have protected the birds. Unfortunately, this easily obtained source of national wealth excited the cupidity of revolutionary leaders, each of whom fought for power because power meant the command of the revenue derivable from these deposits. Not much is now left, and the republic has been none the better for them. Some of the largest were on the Chincha Islands. The islets are all bare, some shewing bold lines and sharp peaks which remind one of those that fringe the coast of Norway about the Arctic circle.
The entrance to Callao, the port of the city of Lima, which lies seven miles inland and is five hundred feet higher, has a certain grandeur. A range of hills abuts on the sea, forming a bold cape, and opposite to it, leaving an entrance a mile or two wide, rises a lofty island, steep, bare and brown like the islands of the Red Sea, which reduces the long surges of the Pacific and gives a comparatively quiet anchorage in the spacious bay within. The town of Callao, consisting of steamship offices and warehouses and shops dealing in the things ships need, offers nothing of interest, except the remains of the fort of St. Philip, the last building where the flag of Spain floated on the mainland of the New World. So the traveller hurries by the steam railroad or the electric line up to Lima.
We came full of the expectations stirred long ago by the fame of the city Pizarro built, and in which he ruled and perished, hoping to find in it another and a still more picturesque and more truly Spanish Mexico. It was long the first city of South America, into which the silver mines poured fabulous wealth. Its Viceroy was the greatest man in the Continent, a potentate whose distant master could seldom interfere with him, for there were no telegraphs or steam vessels in those days. Nobody but the archbishop could oppose him; nor need he fear anybody but the head of the Inquisition and the head of the Jesuits. The pomp that surrounded him, the pageants with which his entrance was celebrated, were like those of a Mogul Emperor.
Lima was called by Pizarro the City of the Kings, i. e. the Three Wise Men of the East, but the name it now bears, a variant from that of the river Rimac, soon prevailed. It stands in a wide flat valley, guarded by steep mountains to the north, on both banks of the broad stony bed of the Rimac, a large part of whose waters has been diverted for irrigation. Except where this river water has made cultivation possible, the plain is bare, being part of the coastal desert. The high range of