Part 12

In the upper valleys of the rivers Daule, Chone and Tachi, there still survive some families of the “painted Indians,” who were referred to by Cieza de Leon as Manivis, now usually called Colorados, but whose own name is Sacchas, men or people. They are naturally of a light yellow hue, some with light hair and eyes, but are accustomed to go naked and cover their skin with a reddish vegetable pigment, which on the face is laid on in decorative lines. Their language,[263] with which we have some acquaintance, appears to belong to the same family as that of the Barbacoas, to whom the Jesuit Father Luca della Cueva went as missionary in 1640, and that of the Iscuandes and the Telembis, all residing in the forests near the coast, between 1° and 2° north latitude. These are described by M. André, who visited them in 1880, as of mixed blood and reduced to a few hundreds, but still retaining something of their ancient tongue, of which he obtained a vocabulary of 23 words. The Cuaiqueres he reports as also speaking this idiom.[264]

Velasco mentions that the Barbacoas, Telembis and Iscuandes formed a confederation governed by a council of nine members chosen equally from the three tribes.

To the south of the Telembis and adjoining the Kechua-speaking Malabas in the district of La Tola were the Cayapas, of whom some remnants remain, still preserving their native tongue. A vocabulary of it, obtained by H. Wilcszynski, has recently been published.[265] On comparing it with the Colorado vocabulary secured by Bishop Thiel and edited by Dr. Seler, it is clear that they are dialects of the same stock, as will be seen from these examples:[266]

CAYAPA. COLORADA. Head, _mishpuca_, _michu_. Hair, _achua_, _apichu_. Eye, _capucua_, _caco_. Fingers, _fia-misho_, _té-michu_. Fire, _nin-guma_, _ni_. Water, _pi_, _pi_. Rain, _shua_, _chua-ptana_. Tree, _chi_, _chi-tue_. Night, _quepe_, _quepe_. Sister, _in-socki_, _soque_. House, _ia_, _ya_. White, _fiba_, _fibaga_. To sleep, _casto_, _catzoza_. To drink, _pi-cushno_, _cuchi_.

The Cayapas are described as well-built, with oval faces and roman noses.[267]

As the Barbacoas were the first known and probably the most numerous member of this family, I shall select their name to apply to them all, and classify the group as follows:

BARBACOA LINGUISTIC STOCK.

_Barbacoas_, on Upper Patia and Telembi. _Cayapas_, on coast near La Tola. _Colorados_, on Daule, Chone and Tachi Rivers. _Cuaiqueres_, on the coast about 1° N. Lat. _Iscuandes_, on Rio Patia. _Manivis_, head-waters of Rio Telembi. _Sacchas_, see _Colorados_. _Telembis_, on Rio Telembi.

I have, in obedience to a sense of caution, treated of this stock as separate from the Cocanuca; but the fragmentary vocabularies at my command offer a number of resemblances between the two, and I expect that ampler material will show increased analogies, probably to the extent of proving them branches of the same family tree.

In the roughest part of the Eastern Cordillera, about the head-waters of the two rivers Fragua, (between 1° and 2° north latitude), live the _Andaquis_. They are wild and warlike, and are the alleged guardians of the legendary _Indeguau_, “House of the Sun,” a cavern in which, according to local tradition, lies piled the untold gold of the ancient peoples.[268] At the time of the conquest their ancestors are said to have occupied the fertile lands between the Magdalena and Suaza rivers, especially the valley of San Augustin, where they constructed mysterious cyclopean edifices and subterranean temples, and carved colossal statues from the living rock. These have been described and portrayed by intelligent travelers, and give us a high opinion of the skill and intelligence of their builders.[269]

The only specimen I have found of the Andaqui language is the vocabulary collected by the Presbyter Albis. Its words show slight similarities to the Paniquita and the Chibcha,[270] but apparently it is at bottom an independent stock. The nation was divided into many sub-tribes, living in and along the eastern Cordillera, and on the banks of the rivers Orteguasa, Bodoquera, Pescado, Fragua and San Pedro, all tributaries of the Caqueta.

The home of the _Mocoas_ is between 1° and 2° north lat. along the Rio de los Engaños or Yari, (whence they are sometimes called Engaños or Inganos), and other tributaries of the Caqueta.[271] They are partially civilized, and have seven or more villages near the town of Mocoa. They are the first natives encountered in descending the eastern slope of the Cordillera. Unfortunately, we have a very imperfect knowledge of their language, a few words reported by the Presbyter Albis being all I have seen. So many of them are borrowed from the Kechua, that I have no means of deciding whether the following list of the stock is correct or not:

MOCOA LINGUISTIC STOCK.

_Almaguereños_. _Engaños_ or _Inganos_. _Mesayas_. _Mocoas_. _Pastuzos_. _Patias_ (?) _Sebondoyes_.

Of these, the Patias dwelt on the lofty and sterile plain between the two chains of the Cordilleras in Popayan. The Sebondoyes had a village on the Putumayo, five leagues south of the Lake of Mocoa (Coleti).

The region around the Gulf of Guayaquil was conquered by the Inca Tupac Yupanqui about 1450.[272] The accounts say that it had previously been occupied by some five-and-twenty independent tribes, all of whom were brought under the dominion of the Kechuas and adopted their language. The most prominent of these were the _Cañaris_, whose homes were in the hot valleys near the coast. Before the arrival of the Incas they had a certain degree of cultivation, being skilled in the moulding of copper, which they worked with a different technique from the Kechuas. Many of their copper axes are ornamented with strange figures, perhaps totemic, cut into the metal. As much as five or six hundred pounds’ weight of these axes has been taken from one of their tombs.[273] Some of the most beautiful gold work from the Peruvian territory has been found in modern times in this province, but was perhaps the work of Kechua rather than of Cañari artists.[274]

The original language of the Cañaris, if it was other than the Kechua, appears to have been lost.

2. THE PERUVIAN REGION.

The difficulty of a linguistic classification of the tribes of the Peruvian region is presented in very formidable terms by the old writers. Cieza de Leon said of this portion of the continent: “They have such a variety of languages that there is almost a new language at every league in all parts of the country;”[275] and Garcilasso de la Vega complains of the “confusion and multitude of languages,” which gave the Incas so much trouble, and later so much impeded the labors of the missionaries.[276] An authority is quoted by Bollaert to the effect that in the vice-royalty of Quito alone there were more than forty distinct tongues, spoken in upwards of three hundred different dialects.[277]

Like most such statements, these are gross exaggerations. In fact, from all the evidence which I have been able to find, the tribes in the inter-Andean valley, and on the coast, all the way from Quito, under the equator, to the desert of Atacama in 25° south latitude, belonged to probably four or at most five linguistic stocks. These are the Kechua, the Aymara, the Puquina, the Yunca, and the Atacameño. Of these, the first three were known in the early days of the conquest, as “the three general languages”--_lenguas generales_--of Peru, on account of their wide distribution. But it is quite likely, as I shall show later, that the Aymara was a dialect, and not an independent stock.

_1. The Kechuas._

The Kechua in its various dialects, was spoken by an unbroken chain of tribes for nearly two thousand miles from north to south; that is, from 3° north of the equator to 32° south latitude. Its influence can be traced over a far wider area. In the dialects of Popayan in Ecuador, in those on the Rio Putumayo and Rio Napo, in those on the Ucayali and still further east, on the banks of the Beni and Mamore, in the Moxa of the Bolivian highlands, and southeast quite to the languages of the Pampas, do we find numerous words clearly borrowed from this widespread stock.

This dissemination was due much more to culture than to conquest. It was a tribute to the intellectual superiority, the higher civilization, of this remarkable people, as is evident by the character of the words borrowed. It is a historic error to suppose that the extension of the Kechua was the result of the victories of the Incas. These occurred but a few centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, and their influence was not great on the native tongues, as even the panegyrist of the Incas, Garcilasso de la Vega, confesses.[278] The opinion of Von Tschudi was so positive on this point that he says: “With a few unimportant exceptions, wherever the Kechua was spoken at the time of the conquest, it had been spoken thousands of years before the Inca dynasty began.”[279] The assertion of Garcilasso de la Vega, that the Inca gens had a language of its own, has been shown to be an error.[280]

Where should we look for the starting-point, the “cradle,” of the far-spread Kechua stock? The traditions of the Incas pointed to the shores and islands of Lake Titicaca as the birth-place of their remotest ancestors; but as Markham has abundantly shown, this was a pure myth. He himself is decidedly of the opinion that we must search for the cradle of the stock in the district of Cuzco, perhaps not far from Paucartambo, “The House of the Dawning,” to which other venerable Incarian legends assigned the scene of the creation of their common ancestors.[281]

But there are many reasons, and to me satisfactory ones, for believing that the first Kechuas appeared in South America at the extreme north of the region they later occupied, and that the course of their migration was constantly from north to south. This was also the opinion of the learned Von Tschudi. He traces the early wandering of the Kechua tribes from the vicinity of Quito to the district between the Andes and the upper Marañon, thence in the direction of Huaraz, and so gradually southward, following the inter-Andean plateau, to the northern shore of Lake Titicaca. There they encountered warlike tribes who put a stop to their further progress in that direction until the rise of the Inca dynasty, who pushed their conquests toward the south and west.

The grounds for this opinion are largely linguistic.[282] In his exhaustive analysis of the Kechua language, Von Tschudi found its most archaic forms in the extreme north, in the dialects of Quito and Chinchasuyu. This is also my own impression from the comparison of the northern and southern dialects. For instance, in the Chinchaya (northern), the word for water is _yacu_, while the southern dialects employ _yacu_ in the sense of “flowing water,” or river, and for water in general adopted the word _unu_, apparently from the Arawak stock. Now, as Karl von den Steinen argues in a similar instance, we can understand how a river could be called “water,” but not how drinking water could be called “river;” and therefore we must assume that the original sense of _yacu_ was simply “water,” and that the tribes who retained this meaning had the more archaic vocabulary.[283]

Mr. Markham indeed says: “In my opinion there is no sufficient evidence that the people of Quito did speak Quichua previous to the Inca conquest;” and he quotes Cieza de Leon to the effect that at the time of the Spanish conquest they had a tongue of their own.[284] I have, however, shown how untrustworthy Cieza de Leon’s statements are on such subjects; and what is conclusive, there were Kechua-speaking tribes living at the north who never were subjugated by the Incas. Such for instance were the Malabas, whom Stevenson, when visiting that region in 1815, found living in a wild state on San Miguel river, a branch of the Esmeraldas.[285] This is also true, according to the observations of Stübel, of the natives of Tucas de Santiago in the province of Pasto in Ecuador.[286]

This opinion is further supported by a strong consensus of ancient tradition, which, in spite of its vagueness, certainly carries some weight. Many of the southern Kechua tribes referred for their origin to the extreme northwest as known to them, to the ancient city of Lambayeque on the Pacific coast, a locality which, according to Bastian,[287] held a place in their traditions equivalent to that of Culiacan, “the Home of the Ancestors,” in the legendary lore of the Aztecs.

The legends of the ancient Quitus have been preserved in the work of Juan de Velasco, and although they are dismissed with small respect by Markham, I am myself of the opinion that there is both external and internal evidence to justify us in accepting them as at least genuine native productions. They relate that at a remote epoch two Kechua-speaking tribes, the Mantas on the south, and the Caras on the north, occupied the coast from the Gulf of Guayaquil to the Esmeraldas River. The Caras were the elder, and its ancestors had reached that part of the coast in rafts and canoes from some more northern home. For many generations they remained a maritime people, but at length followed up the Esmeraldas and its affluents until they reached the vicinity of Quito, where they developed into a powerful nation under the rule of their _scyri_, or chiefs. Of these they claimed a dynasty of nineteen previous to the conquest of their territory by the Inca Huayna Capac. They inherited in the male line, and were monogamous to the extent that the issue of only one of their wives could be regarded as legal heirs.[288] They did not bury their dead, as did the southern Kechuas, but placed them on the surface of the soil and constructed a stone mound or tomb, called _tola_, over the remains, resembling in this the Aymaras.

The extent of the Kechua tongue to the north has not been accurately defined. Under the name _Yumbos_, or _Yumbos de Guerra_, the old Relations included various tribes in the Quito region who had not been reduced by the Spanish Conquistadores.[289] A recent traveler, M. André, states that the Yumbos belong to the family of the Quitus, and include the tribes of the Cayapas, Colorados and Mangaches.[290] Of these, the Cayapas and Colorados, as I have shown, belong to the Barbacoa stock, though the term _Colorados_ “painted,” is applied to so many tribes that it is not clear which is meant. The geographer Villavicencio observes that “the Napos, Canelos, Intags, Nanegales and Gualeas, collectively called Yumbos, all speak dialects of the Kechua.” The modern Canelos he describes as a cross between the ancient Yumbos and the Jivaros, to whom they are now neighbors, while the modern Quitos adjoin the Zaparos. Their language, however, he asserts, has retained its purity.[291]

Whether we should include in this stock the Macas, who dwell on the eastern slope of the Andes a few degrees south of the equator, is not clear, as I have found no vocabularies. Velasco refers to them as a part of the Scyra stock, and they are in the Kechua region. Mr. Buckley, who visited them a few years ago, describes them as divided into small tribes, constantly at war with each other. Their weapons are spears and blow-pipes with poisoned arrows. Hunting is their principal business, but they also raise some maize, yucca and tobacco. Polygamy prevails along with the patriarchal system, the son inheriting the property of his father. Some rude pottery is manufactured, and their huts of palm leaves are neatly constructed. Like the Jivaros, they prepare the heads of the dead, and sometimes a man will kill one of his wives if he takes a fancy that her head would look particularly ornamental thus preserved.[292]

The southern limit of the Kechua tongue, before the Spanish conquest, has been variously put by different writers; but I think we can safely adopt Coquimbo, in south latitude 30°, as practically the boundary of the stock. We are informed that in 1593 the priests addressed their congregations in Kechua at this place,[293] and in the same generation the missionary Valdivia names it as the northern limit of the Araucanian.[294] Doubtless, however, it was spoken by outlying colonies as far south as the river Maule, in south latitude 35°, which other writers assign as the limit of the conquests of the Incas.

Cieza de Leon and other early Spanish writers frequently refer to the general physical sameness of the Peruvian tribes. They found all of them somewhat undersized, brown in color, beardless, and of but moderate muscular force.

The craniology of Peru offers peculiar difficulties. It was the policy of the rulers to remove large numbers of conquered tribes to distant portions of the realm in order to render the population more homogeneous. This led to a constant blending of physical traits. Furthermore, nowhere on the continent do we find skulls presenting more grotesque artificial deformities, which render it difficult to decide upon their normal form. When the latter element is carefully excluded, we still find a conflicting diversity in the results of measurements. Of 245 Peruvian crania in the collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, 168 are brachycephalic, 50 are dolichocephalic, and 27 mesocephalic. Of 13 from near Arica, all but one are dolichocephalic. Of 104 from Pachacamac, 93 are brachycephalic and none dolichocephalic. It is evident that along the coast there lived tribes of contrasted skull forms. From the material at hand I should say that the dividing line was near Pisco, those south of that point having elongated, those north of it rounded heads. The true Kechuas and Aymaras are meso or brachycephalic. The crania from the celebrated cemetery of Ancon, which is situated on the coast near Lima, are mostly deformed, but when obtained in natural form prove the population to have been mesocephalic, with rounded orbits (megasemes) and narrow prominent noses (leptorhines). An average of six specimens yielded a cubical capacity of 1335 cub. cent.[295]

The cubical capacity of the Peruvian skulls from the coast generally averages remarkably low--lower than that of the Bushmen or Hottentots. Careful measurements give the capacity at 1230 cubic centimeters.[296] They almost reach the borders of microcephaly, which Broca placed at 1150 cubic centimeters.

Although the Spanish writers speak of the Inca as an autocratic despot, a careful analysis of the social organization of ancient Peru places it in the light of a government by a council of the gentes, quite in accordance with the system so familiar elsewhere on the continent. The Inca was a war-chief, elected by the council as an executive officer to carry out its decision, and had practically no initiative of his own. Associated with him, and nearly equal in power, was the _huillac huma_, or “speaking head,” who acted as president of the tribal council, and was the executive officer in the Inca’s absence. The totemic system still controlled the social life of the people, although it is evident that the idea of the family had begun to assert itself. The land continued to be owned by the gens or _ayllu_, and not by individuals.[297]

Agriculture had reached its highest level in Peru among the native tribes. The soil was artificially enriched with manure and guano brought from the islands; extensive systems of irrigation were carried out, and implements of bronze, as spades and hoes, took the place of the ruder tools of stone or wood. The crops were maize, potatoes both white and sweet, yucca, peppers, tobacco and cotton. Of domestic animals the llama and paco were bred for their hair, for sacrifices and as beasts of burden, but not for draft, for riding nor for milking.[298] The herds often numbered many thousands. The Inca dog was a descendant of the wolf,[299] and monkeys, birds and guinea pigs were common pets.

Cotton and hair of the various species of the llama were spun and woven into a large variety of fabrics, often ornamented with geometric designs in color. The pottery was exceedingly varied in forms. Natural objects were imitated in clay with fidelity and expression, and when a desirable model was not at hand, the potter was an adept in moulding curious trick-jars that would not empty their contents in the expected direction, or would emit a strange note from the gurgling fluid, or such as could be used as whistles, or he could turn out terra-cotta flutes and the like. Not less adroit were the artists in metal, especially in bronze and in gold and silver. The early writers are filled with expressions of astonishment at the amount, variety and beauty of the Incarian gold work. Its amount we may well credit when we are told that the value of the precious metals shipped to Spain within twenty-five years after the conquest was four hundred million ducats of gold. There are specimens enough remaining to judge of its artistic designs. They are quite ingenious and show dexterous manipulation, but rarely hint at a sense of the beautiful.

Peruvian architecture was peculiar and imposing. It showed no trace of an inspiration from Yucatan or Mexico. Its special features were cyclopean walls of huge stones fitted together without mortar; structures of several stories in height, not erected upon tumuli or pyramids; the doors narrowing in breadth toward the top; the absence of pillars or arches; the avoidance of exterior and mural decoration; the artistic disposition of niches in the walls; and the extreme solidity of the foundations. These points show that Inca architecture was not derived from that north of the isthmus of Panama. In the decorative effects of the art they were deficient; neither their sculpture in stone nor their mural paintings at all equalled those of Yucatan.

The only plan they had devised to record or to recall ideas was by means of knotted strings of various colors and sizes, called quipus. These could have been nothing more than mere mnemonic aids, highly artificial and limited in their application.

The official religion was a worship of the sun; but along with it were carried the myths of Viracocha, the national hero-god, whom it is not difficult to identify with the personifications of light so common in American religions. The ceremonies of the cult were elaborate, and were not associated with the bloody sacrifices frequent in Yucatan and Mexico. Their mythology was rich, and many legends were current of the white and bearded Viracocha, the culture hero, who gave them their civilization, and of his emergence from the “house of the dawn.” According to some authorities which appear to be trustworthy, the more intelligent of the Kechuas appear to have risen above object-worship, and to have advocated the belief in a single and incorporeal divinity.

A variety of ancestral worship also prevailed, that of the _pacarina_, or forefather of the _ayllu_ or gens, idealized as the soul or essence of his descendants. The emblem worshipped was the actual body, called _malqui_, which was mummied and preserved with reverential care in sacred underground temples.

The morality of the Peruvians stood low. Their art relics abound in obscene devices and the portraiture of unnatural passions. We can scarcely err in seeing in them a nation which had been deteriorated by a long indulgence in debasing tastes.