Chap. X. 



FRUITS OF THE REBELLION. 



169 



of the cells, at length caught sight of a youth whose 

 countenance bespoke his origin. He addressed him in 

 Quichua, and found that he was speaking to Fernando Tupac 

 Amaru. While talking to him Ocampo received a blow 

 from the butt end of the musket of a Swiss sentry, whom, 

 however, he induced to permit him to continue the conver- 

 sation. It appeared that the government allowed Fernando 

 six rials a day, but that the soldiers of the guard cheated 

 him of half. Ocampo gave him two or three dollars a week 

 during his stay in Cadiz ; and this is the last we know^, for 

 a certainty, of the last surviving child of the unfortunate 

 Inca.^ 



The fate of these poor Indians, the remaining descendants 

 of those Incas of Peru whose remarkable civilization, and 

 great power and wealth, became a proverb dm-iug the six- 

 teenth century, will not fail to be interesting to those who 

 have become acquainted, through the pages of Robertson, 

 Prescott, or Helps, with the history of the Spanish conquest 

 of Peru. The sufferings and death of Tupac Amaru and his 

 family form a very sad story, yet they did not suffer and die 

 in vain : and it must be recorded of them that, unlike other 

 dispossessed families, they sacrificed themselves, not for their 

 own selfish ends, but in the hope of serving their people. 

 They did not die in vain, for in their fall they shook the 

 colonial power of Spain to its foundation. Not only was the 

 system of repartos at once abolished, and the mitas con- 

 siderably modified, but in 1795 the hated office of corregidors 

 was replaced by that of intendentes, and from the cruel death 

 of the last of the Incas may be dated the rise of that feeUng 

 which ended in the expulsion of the Spaniards fr-om Peru. 



^ Dou Liiis Ocampo related this 

 anecdote to Gen. IVIiller in 1835, when 

 lie was still living at Cuzco, but up- 

 wards of eighty years of age. After 

 Peru had become independent, in 

 about 1828, a person, calUng himself 



Fernando Tupac Amaru, appeared in 

 Buenos Ayres, and went on to Luna, 

 becoming a monk in the convent of 

 San Pedro ; but he is beUeved to have 

 been an impostor. 



