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I may as well here pause in my personal narrative to give a short account of the cause of the disastrous revolt of the Indians of Peru, from which so many thousand lives were sacrificed. This was the repartimiento.
They were evidently collected here to be beyond the reach of the Spaniards, and to avoid the flagitious Repartimiento and Meta, the more rigid imposition of which was about that time, I knew, causing great discontent among the people.
The Spanish settlers had three terms which applied to their dealings with the Indians, the encomiendo, the mitad, and the repartimiento, each indicating a form of injustice. The conquerors divided the country between them, and the encomiendos were rights granted them to hold the Indians for a number of years as workers in their fields or their mines.
On this occasion, the marquis gave him some lands and Indians at Cuzco, where he resided till the arrival of the viceroy; when he was about to have returned into Spain with a considerable sum which he had amassed from the Indians of his repartimiento; but not being able to procure an opportunity, he had remained in the country.
After the Conquest, our author still remained attached to the fortunes of his commander, and stood by him through all the troubles which ensued; and on the assassination of that chief, he withdrew to Arequipa, to enjoy in quiet the repartimiento of lands and Indians, which had been bestowed on him as the recompense of his services.
It was said, observed Herrera, that the king rather preferred to employ him in his European affairs, though it could only have been to divert him from other objects. On his death the king resumed to himself the island of Mona, which he had given to him for life, and transferred his repartimiento of two hundred Indians to the vice-queen Dona Maria.
The admiral gave repartimientos to those followers of Roldan who chose to stay in the island, which were constituted in the following manner. The repartimiento had now grown to its second state not lands only, but lands and the tillage of them. We shall yet find that there is a further step in this matter, before the repartimiento assumes its utmost development.
The adjacent territory was parcelled out among the residents, and each colonist had a certain number of the natives allotted to assist him in his labors; for, as Pizarro's secretary remarks, "it being evident that the colonists could not support themselves without the services of the Indians, the ecclesiastics and the leaders of the expedition all agreed that a repartimiento of the natives would serve the cause of religion, and tend greatly to their spiritual welfare, since they would thus have the opportunity of being initiated in the true faith." 5
He was only anxious for a safe refuge from his numerous creditors, being, as were so many of his fellow-countrymen, deeply in debt, in spite of the repartimiento of Indians which had been allotted to him.
It was upon the same occasion of writing home to Spain that the admiral strongly urged upon the Catholic Sovereigns that the Spanish colonists should be allowed to make use of the services of the Indians for a year or two until the colony should be in a settled state, a proposal which he did not wait for their highnesses' authority to carry out, and which led to a new form of the repartimiento.
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