This hideous cruelty was literally carried into effect, in all its revolting details. On Friday the 18th of May, 1781, after the great square had been surrounded by Spanish and negro troops, ten persons came forth from the church of the Jesuits. One of these was the Inca Tupac Amaru, who had, in the early morning, been visited in prison by Areche, and urged to betray all the accomplices in his rebellion.[232] "You and I," he replied, "are the only conspirators: you for having oppressed the country with exactions which were unendurable, and I for having wished to free the people from such tyranny."[233] The Inca's companions in misfortune were his wife Micaela, his sons Hipolito and Fernando, his brother-in-law Antonio Bastidas, his uncle Francisco Tupac Amaru, Tomasa Condemaita the Cacica of Acos, José Verdejo and Andres Castelo, captains in the Inca's army, and the executioner Oblitas.
Verdejo, Castelo, Oblitas, and Bastidas were hung at once. The rest were heavily chained, tied up in the bags which are used for carrying the maté or Paraguay tea, and dragged backwards into the centre of the square by horses. Francisco and Hipolito Tupac Amaru, the one an old man verging on fourscore years, the other a youth of twenty, then had their tongues cut out, and, with Tomasa Condemaita, were garrotted by an iron screw, the first that had been seen in Cuzco. Micaela, the wife of the Inca, was then placed on the same scaffold, her tongue was cut out, and the screw was placed round her neck in presence of her husband; but she suffered cruelly, because her neck was so small that the screw failed to strangle her. The executioners then placed a lasso round her neck, and pulled different ways, at the same time kicking her in the stomach and bosom until they succeeded in killing her. The Inca was then taken into the centre of the square, his chains were taken off, and his tongue was cut out. He was then thrown on the ground; lassos, secured to the girths of four horses, were fastened to his wrists and ankles, and the horses were made to drag different ways, "a spectacle never before seen at Cuzco." As the unfortunate Inca's body was thus raised into the air, his youngest son Fernando, a child of ten years, who had been forced to witness this horrible massacre of his relations, uttered a heartrending shriek, the knell of which continued to ring in the ears of those who heard it to their dying day.[234] The horses did not pull at the same time, and the body remained suspended like a spider for many minutes, until at last the brutal miscreant Areche, who was looking on from a window in the College of the Jesuits, caused the head to be cut off.[235] The child Fernando was then passed under the scaffold, and sentenced to be banished for life to one of the penal settlements in Africa.