and Colonel Gamarra, both Peruvians, with 2,000 men, to occupy the valley of Ica, and spread a false report that Arenales was about to return with another expedition to the Highlands. La Serna was too well informed to trouble himself about reports, and knew well the quality of the two Patriots now in command at Ica.
Early in April Canterac, with 2,000 men and three guns, marched from Jauja, and Valdés with 500 from Arequipa. The Patriot army evacuated Ica at their approach, but their retreat by night was intercepted, they were thrown into disorder and cut to pieces. The Royalists made more than 1,000 prisoners, including fifty officers, took four guns and two flags, and returned in triumph, after shooting one in every five of the officers of the Numancia battalion, whom they had made prisoners.
Tristan and Gamarra were tried by court-martial, and shown to be utterly incompetent for such a command; but the chief blame of the disaster fell upon San Martin himself, who had appointed them.
This defeat was in some measure compensated the following month by the fall of Quito, which terminated the war in the North, and San Martin not having been able to effect his proposed interview with Bolívar, who did not come to Guayaquil when expected, when he returned to Lima left the civil administration in the hands of Torre-Tagle, and devoted his attention exclusively to the army. He issued a proclamation in which he promised the Peruvian people that the war should be concluded in the year 1822, then current, and on the 4th July signed a provisional treaty with Columbia.
At the same time he applied for help to the Government of Chile, and to the governors of the various Argentine Provinces, bordering the eastern slopes of the Andes, now de facto independent States, an endeavour to unite all Spanish America in one grand effort to crush the Royalist cause in its last stronghold, the Highlands of Peru.
Still harping on the ideas he had disclosed at Pun-
