But their remonstrances bore no fruit, and, in 1780, the Corregidor of Chayanta having exacted three _repartos_ in one year, an Indian chief, named Tomas Catari, set the example of revolt; thousands flocked to his standard, and to those of his brothers Damaso and Nicolas; in a few months the whole of Upper Peru (the modern Bolivia) was in revolt, and an army of Indians under Julian Apasa, a baker of Hayohayo near Sicasica, besieged La Paz.[190] At the same time there was an uneasy feeling at Cuzco and throughout Peru, and whispers of a conspiracy amongst the Indians. Don Pedro Sahuaraura, the Cacique of Oropesa, near Cuzco, reported that one Ildefonso del Castillo had solicited him to join the conspiracy; suspicion was thrown on several other influential Indians; and in June 1780 this Castillo, Bernardo Tambohuacto, the Cacique of Pissac, and six others, were put to death at Cuzco.[191] In the following November the Cacique José Gabriel Condorcanqui, better known as Tupac Amaru, raised the standard of revolt, and the last desperate struggle for liberty was commenced by the descendant of the Incas.[192]
"It would be difficult," says Dean Funes, "to find in the history of revolutions one more justifiable and less fortunate than that of Tupac Amaru. America had, in those days, become the theatre of the most wide-spread tyranny; but the Indians of Peru were those on whose necks the yoke weighed heaviest. _Mitas_ and _repartos_ were, in Peru, the deadly plagues of Spanish invention, which devoured the human race."[193]
I am enabled to give a more correct and circumstantial account of the great rising of the Peruvian Indians in the end of the last century than has yet appeared in Europe; although, as this interesting subject is a digression from the main purpose of the present work, I shall be obliged to compress my narrative within the narrow limits of one or two chapters.[194] In this brief sketch of the state of the Peruvian Indians under Spanish rule, I have endeavoured to establish the fact that Tupac Amaru's rebellion was justified because the oppression of his people had become intolerable, and because all law was set at defiance by the Spanish officials. He protested, not against the tyranny of the laws, but against the infringement of laws, and the oppressive acts done in spite of the laws, by those whose duty it was to administer them.