[Ill.u.s.tration: DOCKS AT BUENOS AIRES.]

The description of the white man's spread over this immense country--the largest, except Brazil, of the South American states, and of all these the most immediately and unquestionably suitable for maintaining a large population of European blood--is tedious when told in detail. But it is a story fraught with significance for the future of the world. On the plains of Argentina the descendants of the Spanish conquerors have fought out among themselves all the perplexing questions arising from the adaptation of Spanish absolutism and ancient burgh law to a new country and to personal freedom. After more than half a century of civil war, const.i.tutional equilibrium has been attained. The country ought to be interesting where there has grown up within a few decades the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, and the largest Latin city, except Paris, in the world. The growth of Buenos Aires has been as dizzying as that of Chicago, and the world has never seen a more rapid and easy multiplication of wealth than that which took place in Argentina between the years of 1870 and 1890. Interesting, too, is Argentina as the scene of the most extensive experiment in the mixture of races now going on anywhere in the world except in the United States. In forty years more than two millions of immigrants have made their homes in Argentina. The majority are from Southern Europe, but the proportion of British, Germans, French, Belgians, and Swiss is a fifth of the whole. Will the Northerners be a.s.similated and disappear in the ma.s.s of Southerners, or will they succeed in impressing their characteristics on the latter?

Will a mixed race be evolved especially suited to success in subtropical America? Will the system of administration painfully evolved out of the old Spanish laws prove permanently suited to the great industrial and commercial state that is growing up on the Argentine pampa? Will the munic.i.p.al and bureaucratic system prove adaptable and elastic enough to furnish a political framework for the tremendous economic development which has already made such strides, but which really has only begun?

Will the intellectual and social ideals of the coming Argentine nation be military, bureaucratic, leisurely, or will they be purely commercial?

Certain answers to these questions cannot yet be deduced from the data furnished by the history of Argentina. Their solution, however, inheres in the past of its people. The future of Argentina will have a profound influence on the rest of the continent. It has the largest territory except Brazil, the greatest per capita wealth, its population is increasing most rapidly, and it has received the greatest amount of foreign capital. Immigration and investment in the other countries may be expected soon to begin on a large scale. The experience of Argentina promises to prove invaluable to all of South America.

CHAPTER II

THE SPANISH COLONIAL SYSTEM

Spain, as a world-power, reached her apogee in the year 1580, when Juan de Garay founded Buenos Aires. In that year Portugal was united to the Spanish Crown, and the East Indies and Brazil doubled Spain's colonial dominions. But at the very same moment the first symptom of her decline appeared. For the first time it was proved to the world that she could not hold the seas against her young rivals from Northern Europe. Sir Francis Drake, the earliest harbinger of Britain's dominance on the seas, appeared off the Plate on his way to the Pacific. Spain had trusted that the difficulty of threading the Straits of Magellan would protect the South Sea, but Drake slipped through in a spell of favourable weather and found few Spanish ships which were fit to fight him along all the coast to Panama. Drake's wonderful raid humbled Spanish pride where Spain was thought strongest, and encouraged Englishmen to fight with a good heart, a few years later, the overwhelming Invincible Armada.

In 1616 a great Dutchman, Schouten, found the pa.s.sage into the Pacific around Cape Horn. This discovery revolutionised the navigation routes of the world. Heretofore the only practicable commercial route to the Pacific had been across the Atlantic to the north sh.o.r.e of the Isthmus.

Nombre de Dios was the metropolis and the market where all the goods for South America were landed. Those intended to be sold on the sh.o.r.e of the Caribbean were sent along its coast, and those intended for the Pacific were carried overland to Panama to be shipped on coasters down to their destination. Direct communication across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires was forbidden by the Spanish government.

Schouten's epoch-making discovery opened up the way for countless Dutch and English ships to ply a contraband trade with the towns of the Pacific coast, but did not induce the Spanish government to change its time-honoured policy or vary its trade routes. America was treated as the private property of the sovereign of Castile, and its commerce was to be exploited for his sole benefit. No Spaniard was allowed to freight a ship for the colonies, or to buy a pound of goods thence, without obtaining a special permission and paying for that privilege. Cadiz was the only port in Spain from which ships were permitted to sail for America, and the whole trade was farmed out to a ring of Cadiz merchants. To protect this monopoly and to prevent the export of gold and silver were the chief purposes of the Spanish colonial policy. Every port on the seaboard of Spanish South America was closed to trans-oceanic traffic, except Nombre de Dios on the north sh.o.r.e of the Isthmus. The towns on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts might admit coasting vessels properly identified as coming from the Isthmus and loaded with the consignments of the Cadiz monopolists, but the South Atlantic ports were absolutely closed so far as law could close them.

Legally, no ships whatever, coasters or ocean carriers, could enter and unload at Buenos Aires. Her imports from Spain must first go to the Isthmus, be disembarked, and then transported across the mule-paths to the Pacific. Thence the goods had to go in coasters to Callao, in Peru, where they were again disembarked, transported up the Andean pa.s.ses along the Bolivian plateau, and finally down into the Argentine plain.

Under such conditions in the southern provinces European manufactures could only be sold at fabulous prices.

On the other hand, such a system made exports impossible, except those of precious metals and valuable drugs. Hides, hair, wool, agricultural products, would not stand the cost of such long transport by land and sea. The Spanish authorities seem deliberately to have come to the conclusion that America should be confined to producing gold and silver, and they ruthlessly strangled all other industries. The Plate settlements especially suffered from the ruinous consequences of this system. Having no mines of precious metals, they were considered worthless; their interests were ignored, and their complaints given no attention. The mere existence of Buenos Aires was a source of anxiety to the monopolists and to the Spanish government. They feared that the English or Dutch might take possession of the mouth of the Plate and thence send expeditions to intercept gold and silver shipments along the overland routes. More immediate and real was the danger of the establishment of a contraband trade which would deprive the Cadiz merchants of their enormous profits on goods sent by the Isthmian route.

The home government enacted laws of incredible severity in trying to enforce this policy. In 1599 the governor of Buenos Aires was instructed to forbid all importation and exportation under penalty of death and forfeiture of property. The shipping of hides and horsehair to Spain would seem to be harmless enough, but the Spanish government dreaded that gold and silver might be smuggled out in the packages. The government would lose its royal fifth and the precious metals might be sent to Spain's rivals and enemies in Europe. According to the economic ideas then accepted, gold and silver alone const.i.tuted wealth, and every ounce mined in America which did not reach Spain's coffers was considered irretrievably lost. To prevent clandestine shipments of the precious metals all commercial intercourse from the coast to the interior was made illegal, and no goods whatever were permitted to pa.s.s along the road between Buenos Aires and Cordoba.

In the very nature of things such laws were unenforcible. Even the governors sent out for the special purpose of repressing evasions recommended modifications. But the Cadiz monopolists were stubborn and their influence with the Court was all-powerful. The laws remained on the statute books only to be constantly disregarded. No human power could keep people who lived on the seash.o.r.e, and who had hides, wool, and horsehair to sell, from exchanging them for clothing and tools.

Perforce Buenos Aires became a community of smugglers. English and Dutch ships surrept.i.tiously landed their cargoes of manufactures and took their pay in hides or in silver dollars that had escaped the Spanish soldiers on the road down from Potosi.

Rio and Santos, in Brazil, became intermediate warehouses for the commerce of the Plate. The officials in Buenos Aires itself connived at evasions, and the very governors made great fortunes in partnership with smugglers. The guards along the interior routes shut their eyes when the mule trains pa.s.sed, and the goods of Flanders and France reached Cordoba, Santiago, Potosi, and even Lima, by way of Buenos Aires, and were sold at prices with which the Cadiz monopolists could not compete.

Silver came surrept.i.tiously from Chile and Bolivia to pay for these goods. The net result was that trade followed its natural and easiest route, although there was a fearful waste of energy in the process. The bribe-taking official, the idle soldier at the road station, the smuggler handling his goods in small boats and risking his life at night, and the numerous middle men absorbed what might have been legitimate profit to the seller or to the consumer. Commerce was half strangled, and with it the industries of the Spanish colonies. Civil government itself suffered, for a community whose daily occupation it was to break one law could not be expected to have much respect for other laws, nor for the bribe-taking rulers and mulish legislators.

Nevertheless, against these outrageously unreasonable regulations the colonists for centuries made no armed protest. They never questioned the abstract right of the Crown to forbid them to sell what the labour of their hands had produced. They evaded but did not contest. Centuries of this sort of thing ingrained into South Americans the belief that industrial and commercial activity exists only by sufferance of the government. The right to sell, to buy, to exercise a profession or a trade, depended on the permission of the government. The people saw the executives taxing industry at their pleasure, and suppressing its very beginnings, until such a procedure came to seem a matter of course.

Commercial spirit was constantly hampered and business skill deprived of its rewards. The evil effects of such a policy can be seen at every step of the development of the Spanish-American countries. It is no wonder that office-holding became the most popular of avocations. The farmer, the stock-raiser, and the merchant seemed to be allowed to exist only to pay the Spanish functionary, instead of the government's existing for the benefit of the producing community. To this day, service with the government is more esteemed than commercial pursuits. The national ideals are only slowly becoming industrial.

The King of Castile was absolute sovereign and sole proprietor of America. The continent was an appanage of his crown; it did not form an integral part of Spain; America and Spain were connected solely through their common allegiance to him. The King governed America directly, a.s.sisted not by his regular ministers, but by a body of personal advisers called the Council of the Indies. His representatives in South America were the Viceroys of Mexico and Peru. The latter's jurisdiction extended over all South America. Certain great territorial divisions had been made Captaincies-General, and though theoretically subordinate to the Viceroy, they were in effect independent of him. In the great capital cities sat bodies of high judicial and executive officials known as Audiencias. Among their functions was that of exercising the powers of the Viceroy during his absence. Charcas, the capital of the mining region of Bolivia, was the seat of an Audiencia, and since this city had no resident Viceroy or Captain-General its Audiencia was the real supreme authority over the Argentine and all the territory east of the Cordillera, from Lake t.i.ticaca to the Straits.

Viceroyalties and Captaincies-General were divided into provinces, each of which was ruled by a royal governor. When the Spaniards permanently occupied a new region their first step was to found a city and organise a munic.i.p.al government. Like the Romans, they knew no other unit of political structure. The governing body was called a Cabildo and consisted of from six to twelve members who held office for life. It conducted the ordinary judicial and civil administration through officers selected by itself and from its own members. Though the governor was _ex-officio_ president of this body, and although its members had bought their places, they were not mere figureheads to register his will. Limited though their functions were, they represented the time-honoured governmental form into which Spaniards had always crystallised, and the Creoles could not be prevented from obtaining a preponderant influence in them. Throughout colonial times they represented local and Creole interests and operated continually as a check to the aggression of the military governors.

The territorial jurisdiction of a munic.i.p.ality was usually ill-defined.

Indeed, as a rule, in the days of settlement it extended in every direction until the claim of another city was encountered, and the terms "city" and "province," were, therefore, usually synonymous. As population grew denser new cities were founded which as munic.i.p.alities were independent of the capital town, but they were not necessarily separated from the original province. The Cabildo of the capital of a province bore a peculiar relation to the royal governor, and often tried to exercise a control over the affairs of the whole province, deeming themselves his a.s.sociates and the sharers of the functions he exercised, outside of its own boundaries, as well as within them. This a.s.sumption was favoured by the fact that no general body representing all the cities of a province existed, nor any const.i.tutional machinery by which they could act in common.

Spanish-Americans have known only two forms of government, which have everywhere and always co-existed, though they seem inconsistent. First, there is an executive--the limits of his power ill-defined, and often imposing his will by force, in essence arbitrary and personal, and feared rather than respected by the people; secondly, the Cabildos and the modern deliberative bodies. Never really elective, these have nevertheless performed many of the functions of bodies truly representative; they have checked the arbitrary executives and furnished a basis for government by discussion. For centuries the communities looked to them for the conduct of ordinary local governmental affairs, and they survived all the storms of colonial and revolutionary times. On the other hand, their importance in the Spanish governmental scheme has been a most potent influence in preventing the growth of local representative government by elective a.s.semblies and officials.

Consequently, in national matters, freely elected and truly representative a.s.semblies have been hard to obtain. Legislation has been controlled by the functionaries, and there has been no general and continuous partic.i.p.ation in governmental affairs by the body of the people. Government by discussion and by the common-sense of the majority is difficult to establish among a people accustomed for centuries to seeing matters in the hands of officials whom they had no practical means of holding to responsibility. The people have rarely felt that the executive was their own officer. He was imposed on them from above, he was not amenable to them, and so far as they were concerned he ruled at his own risk. The Creoles were intensely democratic in feeling and hard to control, and when they could not tolerate an executive they turned him out by force, because no effective machinery existed by which they could turn him out peaceably.

Though the colonial governor was required to give an account of his administration at the close of his term, as a matter of fact he was an irresponsible and despotic satrap, who taxed, judged, and imprisoned people at his pleasure, restrained only by his traditional respect for the Cabildos and by the fear of exciting revolt. He commanded the armed forces, and his power was, in fact, rather military than civil in origin, method, and application. The Cabildos selected the ordinary judicial officers of first resort from among their own members' list, but their authority was not very effective outside the town itself. The vast plains between the settlements were largely governed patriarchally by the ranch owners and the popular and capable gauchos who grew into leaders.

A taste for town life soon became characteristic of the Spanish-Americans, and wherever able they crowded into the towns in preference to staying on their ranches. Wealth, intelligence, and political activity, therefore, came to be concentrated in a few _foci_.

The system of granting immense tracts of land and dividing up the Indians as slaves among the proprietors would apparently have a tendency to produce a landed aristocracy. But the money profits in colonial days were small, and the great landowner lived in the same style as his poorer neighbour. t.i.tles of n.o.bility did not exist, and the const.i.tution of society was decidedly democratic. From the very earliest times no love was lost between the Creoles and the newly arrived Spaniards. The governor was almost invariably a Spaniard, while the Cabildo and its officers were usually Creoles.

CHAPTER III

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The greatest name in the history of Buenos Aires during the early years of the seventeenth century is that of Hernandarias Saavedra. Of distinguished ancestry and pure Spanish blood, he was born at Asuncion in 1561. A thorough Creole, his education was confined to the instruction he received at the convent of the Franciscan Fathers in his native town. At fifteen he left school and joined an expedition against the Indians of the Andes. He showed remarkable capacity in fighting on the plains, and his shrewdness and firmness in dealing with the aborigines were even more valuable than his courage. Juan de Garay, the far-sighted Basque who founded Buenos Aires, was the patron, model, and hero of young Hernandarias, who followed him in his great expedition over the southern pampa. When Garay, the great Indian fighter and coloniser, perished, his mantle fell on the young man's shoulders. In 1588 Hernandarias distinguished himself in the defence of Corrientes against the Indians of Chaco and was the leader in the difficult campaigns undertaken in retaliation. By the time he had reached thirty he was the leading Creole in all the vast region from the Upper Paraguay down to Buenos Aires, and when the Spanish Lieutenant-General of Asuncion was deposed an open Cabildo called him to the vacancy.

Eleven years later (1602) the governor of Buenos Aires died, and by common consent Hernandarias filled the office _ad interim_. This popular selection was soon confirmed by royal commission. He signalised his term of office by an expedition down the coast in which he carried the terror of the white man's arms to the limits of the continent, and defeated the Indians wherever they resisted. Severe with the Indians when occasion demanded, he was inflexibly just, and as a rule protected them against the unlawful aggressions of his countrymen. Though he did so much to curb their military power, he left behind him the name of being their best friend. He manumitted his own slaves; he opposed the extension of the system of "encomiendas" with its enslavement of wild Indians, and after his first term as governor of Buenos Aires he was named official protector of the aborigines.

Although a Creole, such was his ability as a military leader, and his shrewdness, wisdom, and firmness as a civil ruler, that the Spanish government could not ignore him. Though a governor was soon sent out from Spain to replace him and fatten off the provincials, Hernandarias remained the most powerful man in the colony. The Spanish authorities found that they needed him, and he retained their confidence as well as that of the Creoles. He wisely advised the latter against open opposition, believing that continued peace must make the colony so strong that its interests could not continue to be ignored. In 1610 the Spanish government promulgated laws forbidding the further enslavement of Indians, and Hernandarias did much to secure their enforcement. At the same time he encouraged the Jesuits to extend their missions over the upper valley of the Uruguay, while he secured the ranchers of the western plains against the encroachments of these energetic priests. The Creoles prospered in the pastoral pursuits on the pampas, while the Jesuits developed the more purely agricultural resources of the wooded hills in the east. The success of his policy soon became evident in the increasing prosperity of the colony. Three hundred thousand hides were smuggled out of Buenos Aires in British ships alone in the year 1658, and by 1630 the Jesuit missions extended in a broad, continuous belt along the Parana and the Uruguay from the Tropic of Capricorn to the thirtieth degree. They were the rulers of a great theocratic republic, whose area could not have been less than 150,000 square miles, and whose population of something like a million was concentrated in thriving and peaceful villages. The Jesuits systematically studied the resources of the country and taught their Indians the cultivation of many crops suitable for export. Their territory was commercially tributary to Buenos Aires and contributed to her growth and prosperity.

When the governorship of Buenos Aires again became vacant in 1615, by the death of the Spanish inc.u.mbent, Hernandarias entered on his own third term, and two years later, by his advice, the rapidly growing province was divided. Paraguay became a separate province, and the new province of Buenos Aires included all the territory east of Tuc.u.man and south and east of Paraguay. The three provinces of Paraguay, Buenos Aires, and Tuc.u.man were administratively separate, and each was directly dependent upon the Audiencia at Charcas and the Viceroy at Lima. One immediate purpose of the Spanish government, in erecting Buenos Aires into an independent province, was the enforcement of the prohibition of trade. It was thought that a governor always on the ground, and concentrating his attention on the subject, would be efficient in that direction. However, the result was the opposite of that expected. No governor of Buenos Aires could avoid making the interests of his capital city his own. If honest, he was constantly pressing the home government to open the doors a little and to make exceptions of particular cases; if dishonest, he went into partnership with the traders.

Hernandarias's career is the one striking example of success by a Creole in colonial times. Though the conquest and settlement of South America was accomplished by individual initiative, the men who had done the pioneering, who had fought and journeyed and suffered, who had stained their souls with horrible cruelties, whose adventures and successes would not be credited if the physical evidences did not prove the truth of the chronicles, were displaced with scant ceremony to make room for impoverished Court favourites. If the original conquerors were thus badly treated, the Creoles, unfortunate to have missed the inestimable advantage of being born on Castilian soil, could not look for favour, or equal treatment with the office-holders sent out from Madrid year after year.

The story of the provinces that now form the territory of the Argentine Republic has not great interest during the long years that intervene from the completion of the romantic conquest until the uprising against Spanish authority. With the end of the sixteenth century, the spirit of enterprise among both Spaniards and Creoles diminished. Throughout the seventeenth century little progress was made in extirpating the savage Indians even in regions as close to Buenos Aires as Entre Rios and Uruguay. Settlements were confined to the right bank of the Parana, and the Indians on the left bank, protected behind the wide flood of that river's delta, were left undisturbed. On the other hand, the dry and level pampas gave easy access to the thriving towns of the province of Tuc.u.man. The Cordoba range, the greatest of the outworks of the Andes, rises from the plain less than two hundred miles from the Parana at Santa Fe, and only four hundred miles from Buenos Aires itself. The city of Cordoba, in the fertile and well-watered slope at the foot of the sierra, was the capital of the province, the seat of a university from 1613, and the centre of Creole culture. The intercourse of the Buenos Aireans with their neighbours of the interior constantly increased in spite of the prohibitions of the Spanish government, while Cordoba and the other towns of Tuc.u.man prospered with the sale of pack-mules to the mines of Bolivia.

In the fertile Andean valleys of Rioja and Catamarca had lived since Inca times the powerful nation of the Calchaquies. Though they had acknowledged the suzerainty of the Cuzco emperors, they were ruled by their own chiefs. The first Spaniards that penetrated south from the Bolivian plateau failed to reduce them to submission. After a bitter experience the invaders pa.s.sed to the west. For fifty years this gallant people were left undisturbed in their Andean fastnesses. Late in the sixteenth century aggressions again began. The Indians fought desperately, but were overcome. Forty thousand were sold into slavery; eleven thousand were exiled to Santiago del Estero, to Santa Fe, and Buenos Aires. The town of Quilmes, now one of the suburbs of Buenos Aires, was named from the mountain fastness where the Calchaquies made their last stand. Rosario was also settled by families of these brave Indians who were dragged across the pampas by the victorious Spaniards.

About 1655 a leader presented himself to the remnants of this warlike people, claiming to be the descendant and heir of the ancient Inca princes. He was known to the Indians as Huallpa-Inca, while the Spaniards called him Bohorquez. A woman of his own race, by the name of Colla, accompanied him, and she was greeted with all the ceremonious honours that belonged to the Inca Queen according to ancient customs.

Even the Jesuit missionaries recognised the validity of the claims of Bohorquez, but the governor regarded him only as a menace to Spanish rule. He was pursued relentlessly; his followers rose in revolt; the rebellion spread northwards, but with the capture of the Inca it collapsed. He was sent to Lima, tried for treason, and executed, while the Calchaquies were placed under a military deputy-governor, subordinate to the governor of Tuc.u.man. Their descendants have repeatedly proved that they came of fighting stock. They were among the best soldiers on the patriot side in the war of independence; the province of Rioja never submitted to Rosas, it resisted Mitre even after Pavon, the last and decisive battle of the civil wars, and it was the last province to give its allegiance to the confederation.

The third province into which the whole territory which is now Argentina was then divided, was Cuyo,--including the three modern provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luiz. In its early years, these settlements did not extend far from the Andes. Late in the sixteenth century San Luiz was added, thus connecting the Spanish dominions from Chile across to the borders of Cordoba.

The complicity of the Spanish governors with the contraband commerce which they were especially charged to suppress is abundantly shown by contemporary doc.u.ments. The very first governor sent to Buenos Aires after its erection into a separate province was accused of agreeing to allow a Lisbon merchant to land a shipload of goods. He fled to sanctuary among the Jesuits and there perished of grief and shame. But others were more impudent and successful. Mercado Villacorta came to his post announcing that he would so effectively enforce the prohibition that "not a bird could pa.s.s with food in its beak from Buenos Aires to the interior." However, not many months pa.s.sed before a Dutch ship applied for permission to disembark its cargo, presenting papers signed by a natural son of King Philip himself. The captain offered to turn over his cargo in return for a certain amount of hides, wool, silver, and enough food to take him back to Flanders. The proposition, on its face, was very advantageous, and Villacorta accepted it on account of the royal treasury. He made a faithful return of the enormous profits accruing from the cargo of the ship in question, but neglected to report that three other Dutch ships were anch.o.r.ed just out of sight and that she pa.s.sed over to them in the night what had been laden on her the day before. By chance, a royal commissioner was in Flanders and watched the unlading of all four ships. He certified that three million dollars worth of hides, wool, woods, and silver were taken out of their holds.

Villacorta was cashiered for the moment, but a few years later we find him installed as governor of Tuc.u.man. Another governor, Andres de Robles, engaged so publicly and impudently in fraudulent transactions and corrupt contracts that his conduct was the text of sermons in all the churches, but he calmly went his way and paid no attention to the clerical boycott and priestly denunciations. Imports by way of Buenos Aires increased so rapidly that soon the Cadiz monopolists were complaining to the Council of the Indies that the Potosi shops were filled with goods which had come by way of the Plate. Absolute prohibition had manifestly failed, and so palliative measures were tried. Permission was given to special ships to sail from Cadiz for Buenos Aires, carrying only enough merchandise to supply the demand of Buenos Aires itself, and giving bonds to return to Cadiz, so that the return cargo could be checked over to see that no silver was included.

Naturally, this system proved impracticable and only opened another road to evasion.

The first severe blow to the extension of the Spanish dominions over the valley of the Parana was struck by the Portuguese Creoles of So Paulo in 1632. Though King Philip of Spain was at that time also monarch of Portugal and Brazil, the Paulistas viewed with alarm and jealousy the encroachments of the Jesuits into the regions lying to the south-east of the homes they had occupied for a century. They had had a hard fight to keep the Jesuits from establishing villages in their own neighbourhood, and now they saw these old enemies creeping up the slope of the tributaries of the Upper Parana, shutting them off from expansion over the remoter interior. The Paulistas hated Spaniards and Jesuits; they wanted Indian slaves; they recked little of the fine-spun discussions as to the whereabouts of the dividing line between the Castilian and Portuguese possessions; their allegiance to the Spanish monarch sat lightly upon them. Their homes were on the headwaters of tributaries of the Parana, and their expeditions followed fearlessly down the streams and across the plateau and burst unheralded on the northern villages of the Jesuits. The poor Indians were defenceless and totally unprepared.

The Jesuits had taught them the arts of peace but not of war; they had no arms; their spiritual rulers had bethought themselves safe in these remote plateaux in the middle of the continent; the few thousands of Paulistas, away over on the Atlantic border, had not been considered worth taking into consideration. Though few in number, the band of Portuguese Creoles created immense havoc. The Jesuit chroniclers say that three thousand Paulistas killed and carried away into captivity four hundred thousand Indians in a few years. This is certainly an exaggeration, but we know that all the Jesuit villages were wiped out as far south as the Igua.s.su, and that north of that tributary the Spanish line was pushed back to the Parana. The Jesuits protested, but their complaints availed nothing. A few years later Portugal regained its independence of Spain and the work of the Paulistas stood. Spain lost her opportunity of securing the whole Plate valley, and the way was opened to the Brazilians to make the interior of the continent Portuguese.

The Paulistas' raids extended as far as the Jesuit villages in Paraguay and those on the Upper Uruguay, but here the priests managed to hold their own. Portugal's next move toward getting possession of all the territory east of the Parana and the Uruguay was made from the coast.

In 1680, an expedition sent by the governor of Rio landed directly opposite the city of Buenos Aires and built a fort--calling it Colonia.

This was the first permanent occupation of Uruguayan soil, either by Portugal or Spain. Both nations claimed it under differing interpretations of the Treaty of Tordesillas. Portuguese historians claim that the Paulistas had explored and a.s.serted a right to the region in the early years of the seventeenth century; and Spanish authorities state that Jesuits had established a mission on the Lower Uruguay about the same time. As a matter of fact, Colonia was the first permanent European settlement south of Santa Catharina and north of the Plate, on or near the Atlantic coast.

The governor of Buenos Aires promptly raised a force, sailed across the estuary, and captured the new fort. However, Spain's diplomatic position in Europe at the time did not justify risking serious trouble over a matter that seemed so trifling as the possession of a piece of desert in South America. The governor was ordered to restore Colonia to the Portuguese authorities, leaving open for subsequent discussion and determination the question as to which nation was ent.i.tled to the territory on the north bank. With some interruptions, Portugal remained in possession of the port of Colonia for a century, and its existence was a constant source of annoyance to the Buenos Aireans. It immediately became a rival for the trade with the interior, and its merchants had the advantage of the open aid of their own government. Their compet.i.tors at Buenos Aires across the river were confessedly engaged in breaking the law of their country. Exportable goods were never safe from seizure until they had left Argentine soil. Colonia was a convenient storing-place, and the river crafts, once within its port, could discharge at their leisure, free from anxiety that active officials might threaten to enforce inconvenient laws. Every time a war broke out between the two countries in Europe, the exasperated governor of Buenos Aires would send over an expedition and capture the Portuguese town.

Three times was it taken and as often restored on the conclusion of peace. Colonia in Portuguese hands interfered with the trade of Buenos Aires merchants, and the illicit gains of Spanish officials, and also destroyed any remnant of efficiency remaining to the prohibition of commerce across the Atlantic. Back of these commercial and temporary considerations was the menace to the future occupancy by Spaniards of the vast and fertile region extending from the boundaries of So Paulo to the mouth of the Uruguay.

CHAPTER IV

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY