Though the military spirit had been vastly stimulated by peculiar political and racial circ.u.mstances, in later times commercialism has been nourished by geographical situation and the fertility of the soil and by European immigration. The interplay of these contending forces has been producing a marked people--a vigorous, turbulent race whose energies have apparently been chiefly employed in war, but who have found time in the intervals of foreign and civil conflict to make their country one of the wealthiest and most industrially progressive countries in South America. They are like the Dutch in their turbulence and in their eagerness to make money; and they are also like the Dutch in their determination to maintain at all hazards their separate national existence. Nevertheless, the origin of Uruguay was artificial.

The reason for the country's separation from Buenos Aires was that Brazil regarded it as unsafe to permit Argentina to spread north of the Plate.

The territory of Uruguay is that irregular polygon which is bounded on the south by the Plate estuary; on the west by the Uruguay River; on the south-east by the Atlantic; and on the north-east by the artificial line which separates it from Brazil. Though the most favoured in soil, climate, and geographical position, it is the smallest country in South America, the area being only seventy-three thousand square miles. In prehistoric days, when a vast inland sea occupied what is now the Argentine pampa, Uruguay was the northern sh.o.r.e of the great strait which opened into the pampean sea. It is the southern extremity of the eastern continental uplift of South America. The last outlying ramparts of the Brazilian mountain system, greatly eroded and planed down into low-swelling ma.s.ses little elevated above the sea, run south-west from Rio Grande into Uruguay, dipping into the Plate at the southern border.

The north sh.o.r.e of the Plate estuary is bold, and not flat as is the opposite sh.o.r.e of Buenos Aires. There are, however, no mountains, properly so-called, in Uruguay, and nearly the whole surface is a succession of gently undulating plains and broad ridges intersected by countless streams, and covered, for the most part, with luxuriant pasture. The abundance of wood and water is an immense advantage to settlers, whether pastoral or agricultural. The extreme south-western corner, near the mouth of the Uruguay River, is alluvial. On the Atlantic coast there are level, marshy plains, due to the slow secular rising of the land and consequent baring of the ocean's bed.

The country is easily penetrable in every part. There are no mountain ridges or dense forests to interrupt travel, and most of the rivers are easily fordable. On the west, the broad flood of the Uruguay River gives easy communication to the ocean, while it affords protection against sudden invasions from the Argentine province of Entre Rios. The low and sandy foresh.o.r.e of the Atlantic has no harbours, but after rounding Cape Santa Maria and entering the estuary of the Plate, there are several bays which afford some shelter for shipping. Maldonado, Montevideo, and Colonia are the princ.i.p.al ports, but the extreme shallowness of the Plate prevents them from being cla.s.sed as first-rate harbours for modern vessels. At Montevideo itself, large modern steamers must anchor several miles out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HARBOUR AT MONTEVIDEO.]

Possibly the present territory of Uruguay was reached by the Portuguese navigators who reconnoitred the coast of Brazil in the first few years of the sixteenth century, but they certainly made no settlements and left no clear record of their voyagings. In 1515, Juan Diaz de Solis, Grand Pilot of Spain, was sent out by Charles V. to reconnoitre the Brazilian coast in Spanish interests. He did not land on the sh.o.r.e of Brazil proper, but kept on to the south until he reached Cape Santa Maria, which marks the northern side of the entrance to the river Plate.

To his left hand stretched beyond the horizon a flood of yellow fresh water flowing gently over a shifting, sandy bottom nowhere more than a few fathoms below the surface. It was evident that he was out of the ocean and sailing up a river of such magnitude as had never been dreamed of before. He followed along the coast, skirting the whole southern boundary of what is now the republic of Uruguay and finally reached the head of the estuary. Directly from the north the Uruguay, a river five miles wide, clear and deep, seemed a continuation of the Plate, but from the west the numerous channels of the Parana delta poured in an immense muddy discharge double the volume of the wider river. At the junction was an island which Solis named _Martin Garcia_ after his pilot. He resolved to take possession of the country in the name of the Crown of Castile, and to explore the coast. He disembarked with nine companions on the Uruguayan sh.o.r.e: here the little party was unexpectedly attacked by Indians; Solis and all his men but one were killed, and the ships sailed back to Spain without their commander.

Three years later Ferdinand Magellan, on his epoch-making voyage around the world, visited the coast of Uruguay. On the 15th of January, 1520, he came in sight of a high hill overlooking a commodious bay. This he called Montevideo--a name which has been extended to the city which long after grew up on the other side of the harbour. Magellan ascended the estuary, hoping that he might find a pa.s.sage through to the Pacific Ocean, but after he had entered the Uruguay its clear water, rapid current, and want of tides convinced him that it was only an ordinary river and not a strait.

Spain determined to take possession of the Plate, and in 1526 sent out an expedition for that purpose under Diego Garcia. At the same time Sebastian Cabot was preparing another expedition, which was ordered to follow in Magellan's track and to make observations of longitude on the Atlantic coast of South America and in the East Indies. Spain and Portugal had already begun to dispute about the correct location of the line which they had agreed should divide the world into a Spanish and a Portuguese hemisphere, and which was believed to pa.s.s near the Plate.

Garcia was delayed on the coast of Brazil, so Cabot reached the mouth of the estuary first. The latter had encountered bad weather and lost his best ship, and when he sighted the coast of Uruguay his men were discouraged. They remained in the mouth of the river for some time, and to their surprise a solitary Spaniard was encountered on the sh.o.r.e, who proved to be the only survivor of the party that had gone ash.o.r.e with Solis ten years before.

Soon Cabot and his men heard tales of silver mines far up the river, and of the existence of a great civilised empire on its remote headwaters.

Silver ornaments were shown which had come down hand to hand from Peru or Bolivia. Cabot determined to abandon his commission to the Moluccas, and to find the country whence the silver came. Naturally, his first effort was directed up the broad channel of the Uruguay, but on ascending this river it was soon evident that the mines and civilised country he was seeking did not lie on its banks. Fifty miles up the river at San Salvador the Spaniards attempted to establish a little post which is sometimes referred to as the earliest settlement in Uruguay or Argentina. It was probably intended as a mere supply depot and point of refuge, conveniently near the sea to aid the up-river expedition.

However, the warlike Indians of Uruguay soon left no trace of it. Cabot entered the Parana, where he spent three years in an unsuccessful effort to reach Bolivia. He and Garcia sailed back to Spain without leaving even a settlement behind them, but they were thoroughly convinced that an adequate expedition could find the silver country.

The tribes who inhabited Uruguay were the fiercest Indians encountered by the conquerors of South America. For two centuries they succeeded in preventing the establishment of settlements in their territory and kept out Spanish intruders at the point of the sword. The Spaniards greatly coveted the north bank of the Plate and made effort after effort to get a foothold there, but these savages managed to maintain themselves for a hundred and fifty years in the very face of Buenos Aires. The river sh.o.r.e itself was the last accessible and fertile region to be subjected to the whites. A century elapsed after the foundation of Buenos Aires before Colonia was occupied by the Portuguese, and another fifty years went by before Montevideo had been settled and fortified. Uruguay in pre-Spanish times, as well as since, was a meeting-ground for different peoples. One after another the Guarany tribes crowded into this favoured region from the north and west, and the old inhabitants had to fight and conquer, or be thrust into the sea. The bravest, best armed, and best organised tribes survived in the harsh struggle. Of the Indians inhabiting Uruguay when the Spaniards discovered the Plate, the princ.i.p.al ones were the Charruas. They occupied a zone extending around from the Atlantic, along the Plate, and a short distance up the Uruguay.

This strong and valiant race never submitted to the Spaniards, and when at last they were defeated and crowded back from the coast well on in the eighteenth century, they retired to the north and maintained their freedom for many years. They belonged to the great family of Tupi-Guaranies, who occupied most of eastern South America at the white man's advent, but they were more nomadic in their habits and had developed the art of war to greater perfection than the mother tribes of the more tropical parts of South America.

In their fights against the Spaniards, they sometimes gathered armies of several hundreds which fought with a rude sort of discipline, forming in column and attacking in ma.s.s with clubs after discharging their arrows and stones. Possibly they learned some of their tactics from the white men, but it is certain that before the invasion they had developed a tribal organisation which enabled them to bring far larger bodies into the field than the tribes to the north, and that soon after the arrival of the whites they learned the military uses of the horse. Personal bravery and fort.i.tude were the virtues most admired among the Charruas, and they chose their chiefs from those who had most distinguished themselves in battle. They did not practise cannibalism like their brother Guaranies on the Brazilian coast; they killed defective children at birth; they were moderate in their eating, lived in huts, and in winter covered themselves with the skins of animals. Altogether, they seem to have much resembled the more warlike tribes among the North American Indians and to have made the same effective resistance to the whites as did the Iroquois or Creeks. Such a fierce and indomitable people terrorised the Creoles, and settlement proceeded on lines of less resistance. The coast of Uruguay was long known as the abode of red demons who showed little mercy to the adventurous white who dared build a cabin on the sh.o.r.e, or ride the plains in chase of cattle. The forts established from time to time by the Spanish authorities in the early days were invariably starved out and abandoned, and the white man obtained a foothold only after the Portuguese and Spanish governments had fortified towns with walls, ditches, and artillery, which could be supplied with provisions from the water side, and after Entre Rios had been overrun by the gauchos.

Warned by the experiences of Solis and Cabot on the north sh.o.r.e, Mendoza, the first adelantado of the Plate, on his arrival in 1535, selected the south bank of the river as the site of the fortified port which he proposed to establish at the mouth of the Parana as a base for his projected expedition up the river. His effort failed completely; he abandoned Buenos Aires, and the remnants of his expedition fled to Paraguay and founded Asuncion. In 1573 Zarate, the third adelantado, made a serious effort to establish a post in Uruguay. He had three hundred and fifty well-armed Spanish soldiers, more than the number with which Pizarro had conquered the empire of Peru, but they were not enough to make any impression on the Charruas. A company of forty men hunting wood was set upon and ma.s.sacred, and when the main body tried to avenge this defeat, it, too, was driven back and only escaped to the island of Martin Garcia after losing a hundred men. The survivors were rescued by Garay, the most expert and successful Indian fighter of the time.

This experienced and far-sighted officer wisely left the Charruas alone and devoted his efforts to the other side of the river, where, in 1580, he founded the city of Buenos Aires. Hernandarias, the Creole governor of Buenos Aires, who shares with Garay the honour of establishing the Spanish power in Argentina, and who had already defeated the Pampa Indians from the Great Chaco in the north to the Tandil Range in Buenos Aires province, attempted, in the early years of the seventeenth century, to subdue the Charruas. He disembarked at the head of five hundred men in the western part of Uruguay. Few details of the campaign which followed have been preserved, but it is certain that the Spanish force was destroyed and that Hernandarias himself barely escaped with his life. Thenceforth, for more than a century, the Spaniards made no serious attempts to interfere with the Charruas; the coast of Uruguay was shunned by European ships, and the interior remained absolutely unknown.

It is probable, although not certain, that the Jesuits on the Upper Uruguay established some villages of peaceable Indians in the north-western corner of Uruguay proper, in the middle of the seventeenth century. A few Indians, it is certain, gathered under Jesuit control on an island in the Lower Uruguay, some fifty miles above Martin Garcia, about 1650. This was known as the Pueblo of Soriano, and is often referred to by Uruguayan historians as the first permanent settlement in their country. However, no real progress was made toward getting possession of Uruguay. The Charruas proved refractory to Jesuit influence, and only the milder Yaros and the tribes on the Brazilian border could be converted.

The horses and cattle which the Spaniards had introduced multiplied into hundreds of thousands and roamed undisturbed over the rolling, gra.s.sy plains of Uruguay, and occasionally parties of Creoles would land on the sh.o.r.e of the Plate and at the risk of their lives kill some steers and strip them of their hides. As time went on, the Indians became used to the white men and some trading sprang up, but for a full century after Buenos Aires had been in existence Uruguay remained unsettled by civilised man.

CHAPTER II

PORTUGUESE AGGRESSIONS AND THE SETTLEMENT OF THE COUNTRY

In 1680 the governor of Rio de Janeiro sent some ships and a force of soldiers to the Plate, with orders to occupy a point on the north bank in the name of the king of Portugal. Spain claimed that her dominions extended as far up the coast as the southern border of the present state of So Paulo, and Portugal was equally stubborn in insisting that her rightful territory extended west and south as far as the mouth of the Uruguay. Neither country had made any settlements in the disputed region, and Portugal had determined to take advantage of the negligence of the Spanish government and be first in the field. To establish a post only twenty miles from the capital of the Spanish possessions and more than a thousand miles south of the last Portuguese town seemed an audacious step, but its success would secure for Portugal the whole intermediate territory, as well as give her a port which would insure her merchants the command of the trade of the Plate valley.

The Portuguese commander landed unopposed on the sh.o.r.e of the estuary directly opposite Buenos Aires, and immediately began to throw up walls, dig a ditch, and lay out a town called Colonia. When the news reached Buenos Aires, the indignant governor raised a force of two hundred and sixty Spaniards and three thousand Indians, crossed the river, and fell upon the little body of Portuguese in the midst of their delving and shovelling. The attack was at first repulsed, but superior numbers were soon effective. The enemy surrendered, and the Spaniards threw down the walls and destroyed the beginnings of the town. The Portuguese government protested, claiming that the governor's action was a wilful and inexcusable aggression against the forces of a friendly power operating in territory which had never been occupied by Spain. The Madrid government disavowed the act, and the Portuguese resumed possession of Colonia in 1683. They rebuilt its walls and made the place safe against the attacks of Indians. At once it became a centre for contraband traffic. The Spanish laws and colonial policy forbade vessels to land at Buenos Aires. In defiance of the prohibition, illegal trade had been carried on, but the lading of vessels lying in the Buenos Aires roads was conducted at great risk. Officials might order the seizure of the goods, and enormous bribes had to be paid to functionaries; often the governor was the smuggler's partner, but he was a partner who demanded an exorbitant share of the profit. In Colonia, however, merchandise could be safely stored and embarked at leisure, so the latter place rapidly absorbed the export trade and became an _entrepot_ for imported goods destined for sale in the valley of the Plate and in Bolivia.

Spain had restored Colonia under protest and without prejudice, explicitly reiterating her own claim to exclusive proprietorship of the north bank of the Plate. The diplomatists agreed that the question of right should remain open for determination at some future day, but all Spanish subjects considered the existence of Colonia as a violation of Spanish soil, and whenever a war broke out in Europe between the mother countries, the Buenos Aireans were in the habit of promptly sending an expedition across the river to capture the Portuguese town. Three times was it wrenched from the Portuguese, and three times was it restored on the conclusion of peace.

In 1705, Spain and Portugal being engaged in war, the governor of Buenos Aires dislodged the Portuguese garrison from Colonia and the place remained in Spanish possession until after the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. Their eleven years' possession at last convinced the Spaniards that the settlement of the north bank was feasible. By 1708 the Charrua raids had so far lost their terrors that the Jesuit mission at Soriano was safely removed from the island in the Uruguay River to the mainland opposite. The trade in Uruguayan hides and horsehair increased, and private expeditions henceforth frequently crossed the estuary.

It had long been known that the best harbours on the Uruguayan coast were at Montevideo and Maldonado, where partially sheltered bays, with water deep enough for the vessels of the eighteenth century, were overlooked by beautiful and defensible town sites. Montevideo is a hundred miles east of Colonia, and Maldonado another hundred miles farther on toward the Atlantic. The advisability of seizing and fortifying one or both of these places was frequently mooted in Buenos Aires, after the restoration of Colonia in 1716. Nothing, however, was done until 1723, when word came that the Portuguese had again antic.i.p.ated the Spanish authorities and had occupied and begun to fortify Montevideo for themselves. The governor of Buenos Aires immediately sent an overwhelming force which compelled the Portuguese to retire. This time neither dilatory diplomacy nor official inept.i.tude prevented his doing the right thing to save Uruguay to the Spanish Crown, and the following year he finished the Portuguese walls at Montevideo, and in 1726 the ground plan of a town was laid out and a few families were brought from Buenos Aires and the Canary Islands. Within a few years there were a thousand people in the place, and it had been surrounded with walls and defended by artillery. Four years later, Maldonado was established. No serious trouble was experienced with the Indians at either place, and the Spaniards began to spread their ranches over the neighbouring south-eastern part of Uruguay.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONTEVIDEO.

[From an old print.]]

Almost simultaneously with this important event, the Creoles from Santa Fe province crossed over into the wide plains which lie between the Parana and the Uruguay, and defeated the Charrua tribes who had kept the Spanish out of that region for one hundred and fifty years. Soon the gauchos were in possession of Entre Rios as far as the Uruguay. The Charruas east of the Uruguay could not prevent the gauchos from making their way across the river to build their cabins and ride the plains after cattle. The settlement of western Uruguay began, but, except Colonia and Soriano, no towns were founded. The half-Indian gauchos lived a semi-nomadic life and needed and received little help from the authorities in their constant fights against the Indians.

Shortly after the foundation of Montevideo, a Portuguese expedition tried to recover the place, but it was found to be too strong to attack, and the party resolved to establish a town farther up the coast. Three hundred miles to the north-west is found the only opening into the great system of lagoons which stretches along the seaward side of Rio Grande do Sul, and at that strategic point the Portuguese, in 1735, built a fort and town.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the situation between Spain and Portugal in the whole region between the Plate, the Uruguay, and the sea had become very strained. Colonia was completely isolated and the Spaniards controlled all the rest of Uruguay's western and southern water-front. The Portuguese settlements in the seaward half of Rio Grande were prospering and multiplying, soon to furnish thousands of gauchos, as ready as any who rode the Argentine pampas to sally forth for war or plunder. The territory which the Jesuits had held for more than a century on the east bank of the Upper Uruguay lay directly back of these Portuguese settlements and was more easily accessible therefrom than from Montevideo. In 1750 Spain agreed to exchange the Seven Missions for Colonia. The Portuguese promptly took measures to secure the ceded territory, attacked the Indian villages, and ma.s.sacred or drove off most of the inhabitants. The Jesuits vigorously protested, and outraged Spanish public opinion demanded the abrogation of the treaty, so a few years later the desolated territory was restored to Spanish possession and Colonia remained Portuguese.

In 1762 Spain and Portugal were again engaged in war, and the governor of Buenos Aires attacked Colonia with a force of twenty-seven hundred men and thirty-two ships. The fortifications were strong and the Portuguese offered a tenacious resistance. After a well-contested siege the place surrendered, only to be given back to Portugal the ensuing year. Meanwhile, troops had been sent up from Montevideo against Rio Grande and the Portuguese settlers driven back to the north-east corner of the state, only to rise again when the Spanish troops were gone and to begin a guerrilla warfare which never ceased until they had regained their towns.

The eighteenth century had entered on its last quarter before the Spanish home government took any real steps to drive the Portuguese out of Colonia and to reclaim the disputed territory as far north as So Paulo. The Atlantic slope of Spanish South America was erected into a Viceroyalty, and in 1777 the greatest fleet and army ever sent by Spain to America reached Buenos Aires under command of the new Viceroy. The Portuguese had no forces able to cope with his army and fleet, and he carried all before him. The island of Santa Catharina in the north of the disputed territory was captured, Colonia was taken, and an army of four thousand men started on a triumphal march north-westward to sweep the Portuguese from the coast. The Spaniards were at the gates of Rio Grande when news came that peace had been declared. Orders from home compelled the Viceroy to stop his northward progress while the diplomats agreed on a division. The treaty of San Ildefonso in the main gave each country the territory its citizens actually occupied. The Seven Missions remained Spanish, and the Portuguese were deprived of the southern half of the great lagoon and of Colonia. Santa Catharina was restored, and the right of Portugal to the vast interior and to the regions of the Upper Parana and Paraguay were confirmed. Rio Grande remained Portuguese and Uruguay was a.s.sured of being thenceforth and for ever Spanish in blood and speech.

CHAPTER III

THE REVOLUTION

With the treaty of San Ildefonso, Uruguay began her real existence.

Montevideo was made the greatest fortress on the Atlantic coast, commanded by its own military governor, strongly garrisoned and provisioned, and with over one hundred cannon mounted on its walls. The Charruas had long been driven back from the coast, and as soon as the danger of Portuguese interference was over settlements spread rapidly along the whole southern border. Prior to 1777 there were only five towns in Uruguay, but within the next five years the number tripled. By the year 1810 there were seventy-five hundred people living in the city of Montevideo, seventy-five hundred in its immediate district, and sixteen thousand in the outlying settlements. Outside of Montevideo, cattle-herding was the sole business, and the people were a hard-riding, meat-eating, bellicose race. Immediately to the north-east lived fifty thousand Rio Grandenses of Portuguese blood and speech, who, in like surroundings, had acquired the same pastoral and semi-nomadic habits as their Argentine and Uruguayan neighbours, and who constantly made incursions over the Spanish border. The Uruguayan gauchos retaliated, and for nearly a century continuous partisan warfare went on, for these half-savage cattle-herders recked little of treaties or boundary lines.

The Spanish guerrillas bore the name of _blandenques_, and in this school of arms the future generals of Uruguay's war of independence were trained. Most of the forays were only for the purpose of stealing cattle or burning cabins built in coveted regions; nevertheless, one of these expeditions changed the nationality of a territory larger than England.

In 1801 the Rio Grandenses conquered the Seven Missions, thus doubling at a single stroke the area of their own state and reducing Uruguay to substantially its present dimensions.

As the seat of the largest Spanish garrison, Montevideo naturally became the centre of pro-Spanish feeling and influence in the Plate and the home of families who boasted distinguished Castilian descent and conservative principles. In the interior settlements Creole influences predominated, and the population was substantially h.o.m.ogeneous with that of the Argentine provinces on the other side of the Uruguay River.

Between the aristocratic Montevideans and the gauchos of the country districts there was little sympathy.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRIDGE AT MALDONADO.]

In 1806, the English captured Buenos Aires, and many Spanish officials and officers fled to Montevideo for refuge. The garrison of Montevideo furnished troops and arms for the expedition which soon went across the Plate and triumphantly recaptured Buenos Aires. Late that same year, British troops from the Cape of Good Hope seized Maldonado harbour in eastern Uruguay. As soon as re-enforcements arrived a movement was made against Montevideo. On the 14th of January, 1807, the city was besieged by sea and land. The attacking and defending forces were about equal in number, although the British regulars were far superior in discipline and effectiveness to their opponents, half of whom were militia. A sortie in force was completely defeated, with a loss of one thousand men, and after eight days of bombardment the British effected a breach in the wall and took the town by a.s.sault, the Spaniards losing half their force and the remainder scattering. A great fleet of merchant vessels had accompanied the British expedition, and as soon as the town surrendered their goods were landed, and the English traders took possession of the shops almost as completely as the British soldiers did of the fortifications. Uruguay was opened up to free trade, the gauchos were soon selling their hides and horsehair for higher prices than they had ever received, and buying clothes, tools, and the comforts and luxuries of civilised life at rates they had never dreamed possible.

A few months later the English attacked Buenos Aires, but were overwhelmingly defeated, and the British general found himself in such an awkward situation that, in order to obtain permission to withdraw his army, he had to agree to evacuate Montevideo. The convention was carried out and the British soldiers left the Plate forever, but the British merchants remained behind. Although the English occupation of the city had lasted so short a time, it created an unwonted animation in Montevideo by the establishment of a great number of mercantile and industrial houses. From this time, Montevideo's commerce a.s.sumed greater proportions and it became a place of real commercial importance, as well as a military post. Both city and country had tasted the delights of commercial freedom, and material civilisation had received its first great impulse.

Elio, the Spanish military governor of Montevideo, suspected the loyalty of Liniers, the Frenchman, who, because he had led in the fighting against the English, had been created viceroy at Buenos Aires. Spanish affairs at home were in confusion and fast becoming worse confounded.

The old king had abdicated in favour of his son; civil war had broken out on the Peninsula; the new king had been compelled by Napoleon to resign, and Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed monarch of Spain. The Spanish nation refused to accept Joseph and a revolutionary government was set up in Seville. Elio, as a patriotic Spaniard, promptly swore allegiance to this junta, but the Viceroy and the Buenos Aires Creoles hesitated as to their course of action. The Montevidean governor and the Buenos Aires Viceroy quarrelled; the former accused the latter of unfaithfulness to Spain and disavowed his authority, and the latter retaliated by issuing a decree deposing Elio. On receiving news of this act, which was strictly legal under Spanish law, the Montevideo Cabildo met in extraordinary session and appointed a junta, which was to be dependent solely and directly upon the authority of the banished legitimate king and in no way upon Buenos Aires so long as Liniers remained Viceroy. Thus early did Montevideo act independently of Buenos Aires.

Although the sentiment of loyalty was much stronger in Montevideo than in Buenos Aires, the English invasion was no sooner over than there became manifest something of the same profound division between Creoles and Spaniards. Three years, however, pa.s.sed without disturbances; and even when the news of the overthrow of the new Spanish Viceroy by the populace of Buenos Aires on the 25th of May, 1810, reached Montevideo, the governor was able to prevent any revolutionary manifestations of sympathy. On the 12th of July a small part of the garrison rose in a mutiny, which was easily suppressed. In January, 1811, Elio returned to Montevideo with a commission as Viceroy and bringing considerable re-enforcements. He declared war on Creole revolutionists at Buenos Aires and imprisoned the Montevideans suspected of Creole sympathies and revolutionary ideas.

Among those who escaped to Buenos Aires was one destined to be the founder of Uruguayan nationality. This was Jose Artigas, then captain of guerrilla cavalry. Although born in Montevideo he had lived the life of a gaucho from boyhood, and since 1797 had been a leader of the gaucho bands who were continually fighting the Rio Grandenses. He happened to be in Colonia on the occasion of Elio's declaration of war against the Creoles and at once fled to Buenos Aires. The junta there gave him a lieutenant-colonel's commission and some substantial help. The gauchos of the south-eastern part of Uruguay had meanwhile risen against the Spanish governor, and within a few weeks Artigas was back on Uruguayan soil at the head of a considerable force, while all around him bands of gauchos under other chiefs were preparing to resist the Spaniards. His bravery, energy, and good luck in the field, and his ruthless maintenance of discipline, gave him an ascendancy over all the others.

In April, 1811, Belgrano, the chief general of Buenos Aires, arrived with re-enforcements. Shortly after, a Spanish detachment, which had reached the western part of Uruguay, was captured, and the gaucho leaders advanced almost to the walls of Montevideo. A force of one thousand Spaniards started out to meet them and, on the 18th of May, met with complete defeat at the battle of Las Piedras. For this victory Artigas was promoted by the Buenos Aires Junta, and became the greatest military figure on the patriot side. With a considerable army of gauchos from both banks of the Uruguay and of patriots from Buenos Aires he began a siege of Montevideo.

The siege, however, did not last long. The great expedition sent by the patriots to Bolivia was overwhelmingly defeated in the battle of Huaqui, and the Buenos Aires Junta, horribly alarmed for their own safety, ordered all the troops under their control to return and help defend that city. At the same time a Portuguese army advanced from Brazil with the avowed purpose of saving Montevideo from being lost to Spain, but really to take possession of Uruguay for King John's own benefit.

Artigas was compelled to retire to the Argentine, and Uruguayan historians say that on his long retreat to the Uruguay River he was accompanied by practically the whole rural population of the country.

The semi-nomadic habits of the gauchos made such a migration easy, and they quickly found new homes on the opposite sh.o.r.e in Entre Rios, whence it would be easy to return as soon as the Portuguese troops retired.