Note 12 — Chapter VI · THE BORDER VALLEYS OF THE EASTERN ANDES

The Spanish occupation of the eastern valleys was early and extensive. Immediately after the capture of the young Inca Tupac Amaru and the final subjugation of the province of Vilcapampa colonists started the cultivation of coca and cane. Development of the main Urubamba Valley and tributary valleys proceeded at a good rate: so also did their troubles. Baltasar de Ocampo writing in 1610 (Account of the Province of Vilcapampa, Hakluyt Soc. Publs., Ser. 2, Vol. 22, 1907, pp. 203-247) relates the occurrence of a general uprising of the negroes employed on the sugar plantations of the region. But the peace and prosperity of every place on the eastern frontier was unstable and quite generally the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries saw a retreat of the border of civilization. The native rebellion of the mid-eighteenth century in the montaña of Chanchamayo caused entire abandonment of a previously flourishing area. When Raimondi wrote in 1885 (La Montaña de Chanchamayo, Lima, 1885) some of the ancient hacienda sites were still occupied by savages. In the Paucartambo valleys, settlement began by the end of the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth before their complete desolation by the savages they were highly prosperous. Paucartambo town, itself, once important for its commerce in coca is now in a sadly decadent condition.