26 



INTRODUCTORY. 



fort that had been built in Chanchamayo, and breaking up the roads. 

 The Tarma people never forgave this, and in 1808 Urrutia, the Inten- 

 dente of that province, addressed a pamphlet to Abascal, the Viceroy, 

 setting forth the advantages of the Chanchamayo, and depreciating the 

 Mayro or Huanuco route to the Montana. 



" Surely, surely," says he, (and I entirely agree with him,) " nothing 

 but the especial concitation of the devil (thus interfering with the con- 

 version of the heathen) could have induced the government to so 

 suicidal a step as to break up so thriving a colony as that at Chan- 

 chamayo." He says that he can scarcely refrain from tears at think- 

 ing to what it would have grown in the twenty-five years that have 

 been lost between then and now. He writes with earnestness; and 

 probably would have succeeded in obtaining the aid of the government, 

 but that the cloud of the revolution was then above the horizon, and 

 Viceroy and Intendente soon had other matters to think of. 



In 1827 General La Mar again ordered the opening of the Chan- 

 chamayo country. The direction of the work was given to my 

 acquaintance and very good friend General Otero, then prefect of the 

 department. He pushed the matter of opening the roads with suc- 

 cess for some time ; but the roughness of the country, the difficulty of 

 obtaining supplies, and the steady hostility of the Indians, interposed 

 so many obstacles, that the work languished and was finally aban- 

 doned ; the Indians taking possession of the few plantations that had 

 been made. 



In 184*7, however, the people of Tarma resolved to take advantage 

 of so fine a country so near them. They republished the pamphlet of 

 Urrutia; made an appeal to the government, and themselves broke 

 into the country under the lead of Colonel Pablo Salaverry. They 

 drove the Indians over the rivers of Chanchamayo and Tulumayo ; 

 and Don Ramon Castilla, the President, (ever alive to the interests of 

 his country,) sent a company of eighty soldiers, under a captain in the 

 navy named Noel, with engineers, artificers, tools and supplies, and 

 constructed the little stockade fort of San Ramon, at the junction of 

 these rivers. Under the protection of this fort the Tarma people have 

 begun to clear and cultivate, and the former desert is now beautiful 

 with the waving cane, the yellow blossom of the cotton, and the red 

 berry of the coffee. 



Juan Centeno, deputy in Congress from Cuzco, in strong and earnest 

 terms advocated the propriety of taking the Cuzco route, telling me 

 that ten thousand dollars, appropriated by the government for the 

 survey of the river Amaramayo, now lay in the treasury, waiting the 



