Spain's Discovery of America.—Town or communal government has been characteristic of Spain since before the Roman conquest. The Visigoths, who destroyed the advanced civilisation they found in the Peninsula, never really amalgamated with the subject population, and, happily, they did not succeed in destroying the municipalities. The liberal, civilised, and tolerant Saracens who drove out the Goths, left their Christian subjects free to enjoy their own laws and customs. The municipalities gave efficient local self-government while a system of small proprietorships made the Peninsula prosper, as in the best days of the Roman dominion. The population of Spain reached twenty millions under the Moors, but finally dynastic civil wars enabled the remnant of Visigoths who had taken refuge in the northern mountains to begin the gradual expulsion of the Mahometans. In the midst of these currents of war and conquest setting to and fro, the old municipalities survived unchangeable, and always supplying local self-government.
A tendency toward decentralisation was ingrained in the Spanish people from the earliest times. It was increased by the method in which the Christian conquest of Mahometan Spain was achieved. The Visigothic nobility, starting from separate points in Asturias and Navarre, advanced into Saracen territory and established counties and earldoms which were virtually independent of their mother-kingdoms. The Asturians expanded into Leon and thence over Galicia, northern Portugal, Old and New Castile. The power of the Leonese monarch over Galicia was nominal; Castile and Portugal separated from Leon almost as soon as they were wrested from the Mahometans. The Basques were always independent, and Navarre, though it became the mother of Aragon, had little connection with the latter region. On the Mediterranean shore Charlemagne drove the Moors from Catalonia and made it a province of his empire, but no sooner was he dead than it became independent. Toward the end of the thirteenth century. The Christian conquest was virtually completed, and the Peninsula had been divided into four kingdoms. Each of these was, however, in reality only a federation of semi-independent feudal divisions and municipalities united by personal allegiance to a single sovereign. In the course of the continual quarrelling of the monarchs their kingdoms frequently divided, coalesced, and separated again. The death of a king or the marriage of his daughter was often the signal for war and a readjustment of boundaries, but these overturnings did not much affect the component and really vital political units.
More significant than the political kingdoms were the linguistic divisions. Spain then spoke, and still speaks, three languages, each of which has many dialects. From Asturias and Navarre the language, now known as Castilian, had spread over the central part of the Peninsula south to Cadiz and Murcia. From Galicia the Gallego had spread directly south along the Atlantic, where one of its dialects grew into the Portuguese. On the east coast the Catalonian, imported from Languedoc by the French conqueror, is a mere derivative of the Provençal. Its dialects are spoken all along the Mediterranean coasts of Spain as far south as Alicante, as well as in the Balearic islands.
By 1300 A.D. two great political divisions, Castile and Aragon, covered three-fourths of the Peninsula, and their boundaries were well established; each, however, was a mere loose aggregation of provinces, and every province had its own laws and customs, its jealously guarded privileges, its legislative assembly, and its free municipalities. Galicia had never become incorporated with Leon; the Basques ruled themselves; Catalonia was really independent of Aragon; Castile had, from the beginning, been virtually independent, although under the same monarch as Leon, and, indeed, had taken the latter's place as the metropolitan province of the kingdom.
FERDINAND, KING OF SPAIN.The one great unifying force was religious sentiment, stimulated into fanaticism by centuries of wars against the infidels. Nevertheless, during the two centuries before the discovery of America the Spaniards absorbed much culture from their Moorish subjects. In 1479, the whole Peninsula, except Portugal and Granada, was politically united by the accession of Ferdinand to the throne of Aragon, and of Isabella to that of Castile and Leon. With local liberties intact, and peace prevailing throughout its whole extent, the Peninsula enjoyed a prosperity unknown since the golden era of the Moors. The population rose to twelve millions; Andalusia, Galicia, Catalonia, and Valencia were among the most flourishing and thickly settled parts of Europe, while the military qualities of the aristocracy of Castile and Leon and Aragon gave the new power the best armies of the time.
Colonies founded by a monarchy so organised could never be firmly knit to each other nor to the mother country. The nobility of the sword would try to establish feudal principalities; the new cities would endeavour to exercise the local functions of the old Peninsular municipalities; and the spirit of local independence still animating Catalonians, Basques, Galicians, and Andalusians would be repeated on a new continent. The only bond of union would be personal allegiance to the monarch.
In the fourteenth century, Christian navigators reached the Canary Islands—sixty miles from the African coast and six hundred south-east of Gibraltar. The assurance that land did really exist below the horizon of that western ocean, so mysterious and terrible to the early navigators, gave them confidence to push farther into the deep. In navigation, the Spaniards lagged behind their Portuguese neighbours. But among the Spanish kingdoms Castile took the lead because her Andalusian ports of Cadiz, San Lucar, Palos, and Huelva faced on the open Atlantic. These towns swarmed with sailors who had followed in the track of the Portuguese and visited their new possessions. The Castilians and Andalusians were naturally jealous of the successful Portuguese. Madeira, the Azores, the Cape Verdes, and the gold mines of the Guinea coast had fallen to the latter, while the Spaniards had only the Canaries. They gave an eager ear to the rumours that were rife in the Portuguese islands of more marvellous discoveries still to be made—of islands beyonds the Azores. An adventurous Italian, Christopher Columbus, wandering among the Portuguese possessions, heard the stories. Happily for Spain, he believed them and resolved to lead an expedition to the farther side of the Atlantic. He entered her service and proved to be an enthusiast of rare pertinacity. It is immaterial whether the idea of a route to the East Indies by the west occurred to him at the same time he became convinced that there were islands in the far Atlantic waiting to be discovered. That which is certain is that he devoted his life to persuading someone in authority to entrust him with ships and men to make a voyage to the far West. The pilots at Palos backed him, and he finally secured the desired permission and means from Isabella of Castile. Her interest in exploration and colonisation had been shown fifteen years before, in her energetic measures in conquering the Canaries and forcing the Portuguese to renounce their claims to those islands, and she well deserves the title of founder of the colonial empire of Spain.
THE AUTHENTIC PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.
The story of Columbus's first voyage needs no retelling. He journeyed so far to the west that he returned convinced he had reached the longitude of eastern Asia, and the noise of his great discovery resounded through Europe and began the transformation of the world. Since the last great century—the thirteenth—Christendom had retrograded. The Tartars dominated Russia and the Turks were pressing hard on Germany. Unless the Christian world could find an outlet—unless it could create other resources for itself and outside of itself; unless feudalism should find an employment for its military energies outside of the vicious circle of fruitless and purposeless dynastic wars, it seemed not improbable that Mahometan aggression would continue until all Europe lay under the deadening influence of the Turk. Only in the Peninsula was apparent that spirit of expansion which is the best indication of internal vitality in a nation. The military nobility, whose determined fanaticism, magnificent courage, and spirit of individual initiative had driven the Moors out of Spain in the thirteenth century, welcomed this fresh opportunity to slay the infidel and carve out new fiefs for themselves.
Conquest of the Andes.—Columbus showed strategic genius of the highest order in choosing Hayti as the site of the first settlement. That island afforded an admirable base for the conquest of the New World. It was large enough to furnish provisions, and was conveniently situated with reference to the coasts and islands of the Caribbean. Gold washings were soon discovered in the interior and the unwarlike inhabitants were at once impressed into slavery to dig in the mines. The news of gold stimulated interest as nothing else could have done. The Castilian government took immediate steps to exclude all other nations. The Pope divided the globe between Spain and Portugal, and a treaty to this effect was negotiated between the two countries. Spaniards swarmed over to Hayti, and thence expeditions were sent out in every direction, headed by private adventurers bearing their sovereign's commission. The other Antilles were soon explored and, by the end of the century, the Spaniards had reached the South American mainland and rapidly explored its coast from the Amazon up to the Isthmus. Gold was picked up in the streams flowing from the Columbian Andes into the Caribbean. A few years later the north-western coast of South America was granted out to noble adventurers who undertook its conquest and exploitation with their own means. The Isthmian region became the new centre of Spanish power and commerce in America. In 1513, Balboa crossed the Isthmus to the Pacific Ocean—an event second in its far-reaching consequences only to Columbus's first voyage. During the following years the Gulf of Mexico was explored, and in 1518 the greatest statesman and general whom Spain ever sent to the new world—Hernando Cortes—began the conquest of the empire of the Aztecs.
FRANCISCO PIZARRO.The mining done in Hayti and along the Caribbean coast seemed pitiably insignificant compared with the treasures found in Mexico. There followed a new influx of gentleman adventurers who scoured the coast in every direction seeking another defenceless empire and mines as good as those of Mexico. The expeditions down the Pacific coast of South America started from the Isthmus. Peru was soon found, and in 1532, Pizarro and his band of blood-thirsty desperadoes, with inconceivable audacity, struck a vital blow at the heart of the great empire of the Incas by capturing its emperor. Within half a dozen years nearly the whole of the vast region over which the Inca power had extended was overrun and the outlying provinces were ready to submit at demand.
The rapidity with which a little band of Spaniards conquered the vast and warlike empire of the Incas is well-nigh incredible. The terror inspired by horses and firearms did much, but the capture of their emperor demoralised the imperial Inca tribes still more. Once in the possession of the sacred person of the monarch, the Spaniards were regarded by the Indians as his mouthpiece and the successor to his power. From Cuzco, the capital, a splendid system of roads and communications radiated to every part of the empire. The military and political dominance of the imperial tribes had weakened the power of resistance in the provinces. The elaborate structure which had been built up by the Incas rather facilitated than hindered the Spanish conquest, once the decisive blow had been given at the centre. The provinces submitted to the new rulers as fast as the Spanish columns could march over the magnificent mountain roads.
South from Cuzco the Inca empire extended 2000 miles. It covered the whole Andean region as far as the 37th degree of south latitude and extended from the Pacific to the eastern slopes of the Andean foothills. In the present Argentine it included the tribes living in the lesser chains which occupy the north-western part of the republic. Some of these Argentine tribes seem to have been only tributary to the Incas, others were completely dependent, and extensive colonies had been founded in the cotton regions. The general language was Inca, and that admirable system of irrigation and intensive culture which made Peru proper a garden had been introduced on the eastern slopes of the southern Andes.
The southern part of the great Bolivian plateau seems to have submitted quietly to the Spanish conquerors, and the stream of adventurers passed on to the south. In 1542, Diego de Rojas led the first expedition, of which a record has survived, down through the Humahuaca valley into the actual territory of the Argentine. He himself perished in a fight with a wild tribe near the main chain of the Andes, but his followers continued their march. Near Tucuman, they passed out from the mountain defiles unto the pampa, and, leaving the desert to their right penetrated through Santiago and Cordoba, to the Paraná.
No permanent settlement was then made, but the reports of thousands of peaceable and wealthy Indians inhabiting irrigated valleys, and the accounts of the magnificent pastures which stretched away to the east, soon tempted the Spaniards to take permanent possession. Seven years after the first exploration a town was founded in latitude 27°, midway between the Andes and the Paraná. About the same time other adventurers came pouring over the Andes from northern Chile, and this current soon joined that from the north. The Spaniards established themselves as feudal lords, and the unhappy Indians were divided among them. In one district, forty-seven thousand Indians were divided among fifty-six grantees. In 1553, Santiago de Estero, for many years the capital of the province of Tucuman was founded.
In 1561, the governor of Chile sent from Santiago de Chile over the Andes an expedition which founded the city of Mendoza in a most beautiful region, where the vine flourishes in perfection, and where a wonderful system of irrigation, inherited from the Indians, still exists to attest the latters' engineering skill. Next year San Juan was founded, and these two towns were the centres for the settlement of the province of Cuyo, which remained a part of Chile for two hundred years. The immigrants from northern Chile and Bolivia established Tucuman in the tropical garden spot of the republic in 1565. From Santiago del Estero, in 1573, an expedition was sent two hundred and fifty miles to the south to a region of fertile valleys and plains at the foot of a beautiful mountain range. This was Cordoba, which at once became, and has since remained, the most populous of the interior provinces.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish power was firmly established in settlements that have since become the Argentine provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Tucuman, Catamarca, Santiago, Rioja, and Cordoba. All these really formed a southern extension of Upper Peru. Their geographical, political, and commercial relations were with Charcas, Potosí, and Lima. The discovery, in 1545, of the great silver mines at Potosí at once made the high Bolivian plateau, then known as the Audiencia of Charcas, the most valuable and important province of all the Spanish monarch's South American empire. In 1571, the discovery of quicksilver mines in Peru vastly increased the output of precious metals; in 1575, the wonderful Oruro mines were opened, and before the end of the century the copper-pan amalgamation process was invented in Bolivia, revolutionising the production of silver.
MINING SCENE.The resulting prosperity of the mining regions of Bolivia stimulated the settlement of the north-western provinces of the Argentine. The miners needed provisions which could not well be raised in the neighbourhood of Potosí. There was a demand for cattle for beef, and for horses and mules for transportation. A solid economic foundation was thus provided for the plains settlements, and the enslavement of the Indians and the breeding of cattle went on apace. By the end of the sixteenth century north-western Argentine—the province of Tucuman, as it was then called—was the seat of many thriving settlements whose Spanish inhabitants were mostly pastoral. The Indians in the neighbourhood of each settlement had been reduced to slavery, and cultivated the fields that had been their fathers' for the benefit of their white masters. The Spanish proprietors lived like feudal lords, while the Spanish authorities left these remote regions largely to their own devices.
Conditions in Cuyo, the western province just across the Andes from Santiago de Chile, were substantially the same. A political dependency of Chile, the few external relations it had were with that captaincy-general. The Spanish grantees ruled their Indian slaves in patriarchal fashion; agriculture was the principal occupation; pastoral industry was not so profitable as in Tucuman, and the region was more isolated. In both Tucuman and Cuyo Spanish rule was superimposed upon a previously existing commercial and social structure. There was no attempt to expel or destroy the aborigines. On the contrary, they were the sole labourers and their exertions the chief source of the wealth of their conquerors. There began a process of approximation and mutual assimilation between the Spaniards and their semi-civilised subjects. While the former continued to be a privileged and ruling caste, the latter absorbed much European knowledge from them. The Indian language long held its own alongside of the Spanish and is still spoken in many parts of the region.
On the Atlantic side, among degraded peoples who had not progressed beyond the wandering and tribal stages of existence. Spanish settlement proceeded on entirely different lines. There existed no well-organised body politic, into whose control the conquerors could step with hardly an interruption to industry. Campaigns could not be made with the confident expectation of finding abundant accumulations of food en route. Expeditions among the squalid tribes were slow and dangerous and settlement stuck close to the rivers instead of following fearlessly across the plateau to the spots where the finest lands and the most flourishing Indian communities lay ready for the spoiler.
The beginnings of the coast provinces were painful and disastrous; the settlements were feeble; centuries elapsed before the natural advantages of the region were utilised, and before its accessibility and fertility drew a great immigration. The assimilation of Indian blood did not take place on a large scale, and the immigrants and their descendants became perforce horsemen and fighters.
Discovery of the Plate.—The Portuguese discovery of the east coast of South America, in 1500, was a disagreeable surprise to the Spanish government. The Treaty of Tordesillas had been framed with the purpose of giving America to Spain, while Africa and the shores of the Indian Ocean were left to Portugal. Nevertheless, the Portuguese vigorously asserted their right to the prize they had picked up by accident and insisted on the letter of the treaty. They promptly explored the coast as far south as Santa Catharina, six hundred miles north of the Plate, but they had asserted no ownership farther south at the date when the Spanish expeditions began to be sent to the South Atlantic.
In 1516, a celebrated sea-captain from the north of Spain—Juan Diaz de Solis—was sent out by the Castilian government to explore the southern part of the continent. He simply reconnoitred the Brazilian coast, where the Portuguese had not yet established any settlements, and, pressing on to the south, finally reached the Plate. His first impression on rounding Cape St. Maria, where the Uruguayan shore turns to the north-west, was that he had reached the southern point of the continent and discovered the sea route into the Pacific. But the freshness of the water in the great estuary undeceived him. Following along the northern bank, he landed with a small party and was attacked and slain by a tribe of fierce and intractable Indians.
When the news reached Lisbon, the Portuguese government protested against this invasion of territory, which it claimed lay east of the Tordesillas line. Portugal, however, did not follow up her protest or try to take possession for herself. At this very time a celebrated Portuguese navigator, Fernando Magellan, disgusted by the neglect of his own country, was urging the Spanish government to give him the means of carrying out his great project for the circumnavigation of the globe. He was confident he could reach the East Indies by rounding the southern point of South America or by finding a passage through the continent in higher latitudes than had yet been reached. The year 1519, when Magellan sailed from San Lucar on the first voyage around the world, was big with fate for Spain. Cortes was adding a new empire by the conquest of Mexico, thus giving Spain control of the world's supply of precious metals. The popular assemblies of Castile and Aragon, of Catalonia, Valencia, and Galicia, were preparing for a hopeless struggle against the might of a monarch who ruled two-thirds of Europe. At the very moment that Charles V. was crushing Peninsular freedom by brutal military force, the genius of Magellan and Cortes gave him the whole of America. Spain had heretofore been a federation of self-governing communes and provinces, but their independence was now destroyed. Military despotism proved strong enough to crush liberty, although it was unable to stamp out the feeling of local segregation. The very soldiers that conquered America took over an instinctive feeling that the central government was dangerous and inimical to the people—a sentiment which has always survived in some form among their descendants.
Magellan stopped at the Plate in the beginning of 1520, and explored the estuary to make sure that it did not afford the passage he was seeking. In October he reached the mouth of the strait that bears his name, and, wonderfully favoured by wind and weather, threaded his way to the Pacific in five weeks. Subsequent wayfarers were not so fortunate and the strait never became a practicable commercial route until after the introduction of steam navigation. In the succeeding hundred years not half a dozen ships reached the Pacific around South America. Practically, the Pacific was accessible only over the Isthmus or by the immensely long journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Nevertheless, the importance of this epoch-making voyage has not been overestimated. The Pacific became, in a sense, a Spanish lake, in which she could maintain at will a naval preponderance. She occupied the Philippines and secured control at leisure of the Pacific coast of America. However, the scientific results were more important. Thereafter, the thorough exploration of all the shores of the South Sea was only a question of time. Magellan's voyage made geography an exact science. He sketched the map of the world with broad and sure strokes and left nothing for subsequent explorers except the filling-in of details.
The occupation of the Philippines and Moluccas gave rise to new disputes between Spain and Portugal as to their rights under the Treaty of Tordesillas. The imperfect instruments of those days left the line doubtful on the eastern South American coast, as well as on the other side of the world. In 1526, Sebastian Cabot was sent by the Spanish government to determine astronomically the location of the line in America, and then to follow Magellan's track to western Asia. At the mouth of the Plate he heard rumours among the Indians of silver mines on the river's banks and of the existence of a great and wealthy empire at its headwaters. This was Peru—not yet reached by the Castilians on their way south from the Isthmus, but the coast Indians showed Cabot silver ornaments which had been passed from hand to hand from the highlands of Peru and Bolivia down the river to the Atlantic.
Cabot and his band of adventurers determined to neglect their surveying, trusting that the discovery of silver mines would excuse their disobedience. They spent three years in vain journeying and prospecting—exploring the Uruguay to the head of navigation and following up the Paraná as far as the Apipé rapids. Signs of neither silver nor gold, nor of civilised inhabitants, were found on either river. Their upper courses came down from the east—the direction opposite to that in which Eldorado was reported. The gently flowing Paraguay, coming down the plains in the centre of the continent, seemed to offer a better hope of success. But Cabot's forces and provisions were inadequate to penetrating farther north than the present site of Asuncion. Returning to a fort he had left on the lower Paraná, he found that it had been taken by Indians and its garrison massacred. Discouraged by such a succession of difficulties and misfortunes, he returned to Spain.
The news of Cabot's expedition, and its failure, stimulated the Portuguese to undertake the colonisation of the east coast of South America. Affonso da Souza started from Lisbon with an expedition, intending to take possession of the Plate. Lack of provisions, fear of the Indians, the presence of a Portuguese castaway—one of those insignificant chances that sometimes change the course of empires as a twig diverts the current of a river—stopped Alfonso before he reached his destination. Instead of establishing a colony on the estuary he founded San Vicente, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. This became the southern outpost of the Portuguese possessions, and the temperate zone of South America was left open for the Spaniards to occupy when they chose.
Two years after Cabot's failure, Pizarro overran Peru. All Europe rang with the exploit. The Spanish king was besieged by nobles who literally begged the privilege of risking their lives and fortunes in America. These "adelantados" contracted to conquer, at their own charges, the particular districts granted them, certain profits being reserved to the crown, and Charles V. freely granted such patents. Among the grantees was a Basque nobleman, Pedro de Mendoza, to whom was given the territory beginning at the Portuguese possessions south two hundred leagues along the Atlantic coast toward the Strait of Magellan. He raised more than two thousand men and reached the Plate in 1535, where he immediately founded a city on the south bank which he named Buenos Aires. He intended to make it a base for an advance up the Paraná to find and conquer another Peru. His attempt was foredoomed to failure. The Indians surrounding Buenos Aires were implacable in their hatred of the invaders. They lived in scattered little tribes, and neither would nor could furnish food enough to maintain the Spaniards. The provisions brought from Spain were inadequate; sorties were useless; the Indians fled from large parties and ambushed small ones. The preparations for the advance up the river were delayed for months. Hundreds died of hunger and disease. Within a year the place had to be abandoned, and in a desperate condition the expedition fled up the river to Cabot's solid fort. Here the adelantado stopped, sick and discouraged, while a few hundreds of the more daring and persevering pressed on to the north, determined to reach Eldorado. Arrived at the junction of the Paraguay and Paraná, they chose the former river, and pushed on up it as far as the twentieth degree, to a place they called Candelaria. There they found vast lakes and swamps spreading to the west. It was necessary to protect their retreat before plunging into the difficult country that extends across to Bolivia. Accordingly, they divided and one party remained on the dry ground near the river, while two hundred desperate adventurers pressed on through the wilderness, hoping to reach the Bolivian plateau.
The party that stopped behind as a reserve was commanded by Domingo Irala, the real founder of the Spanish settlements in the Paraná valley. The main expedition never returned. Years afterward friendly Indians brought back the tale that it had reached the slopes of the Bolivian mountains, obtained much gold and silver and started back triumphantly, but had perished to the last man in an Indian ambush not far from the Paraguay and safety. Irala waited the appointed time and then floated down the river. He and his companions were well-nigh in despair. So far as they knew, they were the only survivors of the three thousand people who had accompanied Mendoza. To the north the country was inhospitable and impenetrable, and from their experiences of the year before they knew that at the mouth of the river no provisions or succour were to be had. On their way up the river they had passed, about the twenty-fifth degree, a beautiful and fertile rolling country, covered with magnificent forests, with park-like openings, and inhabited by a large and friendly Indian population. Opposite the mouth of the Pilcomayo, where there was a large Indian village, they stopped on their downward journey, determined to settle down and take some repose from their interminable and fruitless wanderings in search of the will-o'-the-wisp Eldorado. There, in 1536, they founded the city of Asuncion, the first Spanish settlement on the Atlantic slope of South America.
The Foundation of Buenos Aires.—The failure of Mendoza, first adelantado, to establish a colony on the Plate, did not discourage others from soliciting the grant of his territory. In 1540, Cabeza de Vaca, a "conquistador" celebrated for his feats in Florida, was appointed adelantado and set out gallantly to find the second Peru, which everyone believed to exist at the headwaters of the Paraguay. Intent on reaching the interior as soon as possible, he made no attempt to establish a town and port at the mouth of the river Plate, but landed at Santa Catharina on what is now the Brazilian coast in the latitude of Paraguay, and set off across country with four hundred men and twenty horses. The distance was a thousand miles; the route led up a heavily wooded mountain range on the coast, and thence across a broken, but open, plateau, where great rivers point out the natural routes to the Paraná. The soil was fertile and the Indians along the road were able to furnish considerable food supplies. Cabeza de Vaca made the journey without appreciable loss and arrived in Asuncion eager to take command and dash across to the Andes. But the sturdy Basques had selected their able countryman—Domingo Irala—as chief of the colony and gave the new adelantado a cold welcome. Irala insisted that a reconnoitring expedition be sent before risking the body of the Spaniards. Its command was given him and he penetrated almost to the headwaters of the Paraguay. Next year Cabeza de Vaca followed, but as soon as he left the Paraguay he got into difficulties. He could not penetrate the swamps nor make headway against the savage Indians who lived between the river and the eastern slopes of the Cordillera. He returned defeated and discouraged, and the people of Asuncion bundled him back to Spain.
Though Irala subsequently did succeed in reaching Peru, by the route up the Paraguay, no practical results followed. Paraguay remained isolated from the Spanish empire on the Pacific coast until a roundabout communication was established down the river and thence west across the dry and level plains that stretch from the mouth of the river Plate to the Cordillera.
The early days of the Asuncion settlement were stormy. The rough adventurers fell to fighting among themselves, and their cruelties often drove the patient and submissive Indians into rebellion. Their greed for bigger plantations and more slaves pushed them on to conquering the aborigines in an expanding circle. By 1553 they had founded a settlement on the Upper Paraná and were dominant from river to river in the southern half of the present territory of Paraguay. Until his death, in 1557, Irala was the dominating personality in the colony. According to his lights he was just in his dealings with the Indians. When he died the settlement was firmly on its feet, and even the Indians revered him as their benefactor. The mass of the population was Indian, and Guarany has always remained the prevalent language in Paraguay. Absolutely isolated from the other European colonies, and almost without communication with the mother country, the settlement was, however, an unpromising affair. The few hundreds of Spaniards might have sustained their social and military superiority over the hordes of Indians by whom they were surrounded, but, without material and intellectual communication with Spain, they could achieve no commercial success.
YOUNG GAUCHO.An outlet to the sea was necessary. The original settlers had been adventurers, willing to follow Mendoza through swamp and forest up to the walls of Eldorado, and their children were not less enterprising. The horses brought over by the adelantados had multiplied amazingly, and were spreading wild over the pampa to the south. Cattle, sheep, and goats bred by millions. Before long the attractions of a pastoral life began to appeal to the Spaniards and creoles of Asuncion. The braver and more energetic preferred the free open existence of the pampa to idleness in the sleepy villages of Paraguay.
The Argentine nation proper began its existence when the creole mounted his horse and took to cattle-breeding on the plains. The possession of horses, as much as of firearms, gave the gaucho his military predominance over the fiercest aborigines, and the horse was also the cornerstone of his industrial system. The cattle of the open pampa gave him an unlimited supply of the best food, and his horses enabled him to procure it with a minimum of effort. Irala's successors repeatedly tried to establish a colony near the mouth of the Plate, but they were not successful until the creoles on horseback had pushed their way south along the pampa and driven back or subdued the wandering Indians. In 1560, the Guaranies of Paraguay were definitely crushed in the horribly bloody battle of Acari, but it was not until 1573 that the Spaniards from Asuncion succeeded in founding a city south of the confluence of the Paraná and Paraguay. Santa Fé was the first Spanish settlement on the Plate in territory now a part of the Argentine Republic.
The man who led the creoles to the pampa was Juan de Garay, a Basque, who had been one of the soldiers in the army that conquered Peru. His energy and vigour, and the bravery of the creole cavalry who followed his expeditions down the river and over the pampas, at length opened up communication from Paraguay to Europe and gave Spain a seaport on the South Atlantic. Curiously enough, in the very year that Garay founded Santa Fé, the Spaniards from Peru founded Cordoba—the most eastward of the Andean settlements. Their hard riders had pushed on from Cordoba, reconnoitring as far as the Paraná and there ran across Garay's men. The two currents of Argentine settlements met almost at the beginning, though two centuries were to elapse before they completely coalesced.
Eight years later, Garay succeeded in founding Buenos Aires after Zarate, the third adelantado, had failed as badly as any of his predecessors. Garay, by sheer force of energy and fitness, became the real ruler of the settlements. Active, far-sighted, and able, he perceived that a purely military establishment at the mouth of the river was foredoomed to failure. To be permanent, the port and town must be self-sustaining, and therefore must be surrounded by farms and ranches and be accessible by land from the upper settlements. In the spring of 1580, the acting governor sent overland from Santa Fé two hundred families of Guarany Indians, accompanied by a thousand horses, two hundred cows, and fifty sheep, besides mares, carts, oxen, and other necessaries. The soldiers of the convoy were mostly creoles born in Paraguay. Boats carried down from Santa Fé arms, munitions, seed grain, tools, and whatever in those rude days was essential to a settlement. He, himself, went by land with forty soldiers, following the highland that skirts the west bank of the Paraná from Santa Fé to Buenos Aires.
The Plate estuary affords no proper harbours; the immense volume of water spreading over vast shallow beds chokes it with sand-bars, and the shores are so shelving that even small boats cannot approach the land. The north side is bolder, and at Montevideo and at the mouth of the Uruguay affords bays partly sheltered from the storms which sweep up over the level pampas and make anchorage in the river so unsafe. But the north bank was cut off from land communication with the existing Spanish towns by the mighty Uruguay and Paraná, and Garay desired that his new city should be always accessible from his older settlements on the right bank of the Paraná. His choice of the particular spot where the largest city of the southern hemisphere has since grown up, seems to have been determined by a few trifling circumstances. He kept as near the head of the estuary as possible, in order to shorten the land route from Santa Fé, and picked upon a slight rise of ground between two draws, which made the site defensible. The fact that a nearby creek—the Riachuelo—afforded a shelter for little boats, may also have been given weight in reaching a decision.
Though his settlers did not number five hundred, Garay laid out his city like a town-site boomer. The surrounding country was divided into ranches and the neighbouring Indians were distributed among the citizens of the new town. A "Cabildo," or city council, was named, with the full paraphernalia of a Spanish municipal government. The new town started off in the full enjoyment of all the guarantees known to immemorial Spanish constitutional law. Troubles broke out almost immediately between the creole settlers and the Spaniards who had been sent over by the adelantado to fill offices and get the best things in distributions of land and slaves. Garay had hardly left the town to look after the rest of the province than the creoles, indignant over unfair treatment, forcibly demanded an open Cabildo. This was an extraordinary popular assembly which, according to old Spanish custom, might be called at critical times, and was something like a town meeting. In theory, the property-owners and educated citizens were called together merely to give advice, but in practice, it was a tumultuous assemblage to overawe the office-holders. The Argentine creoles were doing nothing more than asserting their constitutional rights as vassals of the king of Castile. They compelled the Spanish office-holders to compromise.
Meanwhile, Garay was clinching his claim to immortality as the founder of the Spanish power on the Plate. He explored the pampas to the south and west of the new city, and reduced many of the tribes to slavery or vassalage. He found the plains already overrun with hundreds of thousands of horses—the descendants of the few abandoned there forty-five years before when the remnants of Mendoza's ill-starred expedition fled up the river. On his way back to Santa Fé this great Indian fighter was ambushed by Indians and stabbed while he slept.
His death was followed by outbreaks among the creoles, who resented the efforts of the adelantado's new representatives to establish a monopoly in horse-hair. Scarcely had they found a way to make a little money, by hunting wild horses for their hair, than the officials tried to absorb all the profit. The struggle between the repressive commercial policy of Spain, and the interests of the Plate colonists, began with the foundation of the colony of Buenos Aires and went on for more than two hundred years.
In 1588, the creoles obtained a foothold in the extreme north of the mesopotamian region by founding the city of Corrientes near the junction of the Paraná and Paraguay. All the new commonwealths south of Asuncion obtained a solid economic foundation in the herds of cattle and horses which covered the plains. In the regions adjacent to the Andes the Spaniards did not become so exclusively pastoral as their brethren of the pampas near the Plate. While they had more and better Indian slaves, their pasturage was not so good. Though apparently more isolated, their proximity to Upper Peru and the trade that went on with that great mining country—the goal of fortune-hunting Spaniards in those years—placed them more directly under the control of the viceregal authorities. Tucuman was a mere southern extension of the jurisdiction of the Audiencia at Charcas, and Cuyo was an integral part of Chile, but this did not prevent the early development of a strong sentiment in favour of local self-government and of hatred of the imported Spanish satraps.
By the year 1617 the settlements on the Lower Paraná had become of considerable importance. Buenos Aires was a town of three thousand people; the right bank of the river as far as Santa Fé was a grazing-ground for the herds of the creoles; towns and ranches were flourishing in Corrientes. In that year the Spanish crown abolished the office of adelantado and erected the lower settlements into a province separate from Paraguay. The new province included the territory that is now Uruguay, as well as the four actual Argentine provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fé, Entre Rios and Corrientes. Entre Rios and Uruguay were, however, as yet entirely unsettled.
While the creoles were thus firmly establishing themselves along the Lower Paraná and in the Andean provinces, the Jesuits were converting the Indians in the east of Paraguay, and early in the seventeenth century these indefatigable missionaries had penetrated to the Upper Paraná, crossed it, and were gathering the Indians by thousands into peaceful villages.
South from where the great mass of the Bolivian Andes shoves a shoulder to the east, as if seeking to join the Brazilian mountain system, and from where a low ridge stretches out to form the watershed between the Madeira and the eastward-flowing affluents of the Paraguay, extends an immense flat plain. Two thousand miles from north to south, and nearly five hundred miles in breadth, hardly a hillock rises above its surface from the foothills of the Andes westward to the sea. In the tropical North its surface is partly covered with trees, but south of the Chaco the only woodlands are narrow belts following the streams. Everywhere stretch the grassy plains, without an obstruction or interruption. The soil is a fine alluvium, full of the right chemical elements, and admirably adapted to agriculture, wherever the rainfall is sufficient. As a pasture-ground it is the finest on the planet. Within recent geological times this plain was the bottom of a great shallow gulf which received the detritus washed down from the Andes on the one side and the Brazilian mountains on the other. The gradual uplifting of those youngest mountains—the Andes—raised their flanks until the adjacent floor of the gulf appeared dry land, a land all ready and prepared for human occupancy. Nowhere does man encounter fewer obstacles to his freedom of movement or find it easier to procure his food supply than on the pampa—the characteristic topographical feature of the political division of South America known as Argentina.
Skirting the ridge on the east and draining the vast slopes of the Brazilian mountains of their tropical rainfall, is the great river Paraná. In latitude 27° it turns abruptly to the west, as if about to cross the pampa, but a hundred miles farther on it resumes its southward course. At this last turn the Paraná flows into a river which comes straight down from the north, draining the bed of the old inland sea that used to divide South America. This junction of the Paraná and the Paraguay forms the second largest river in the world—a river without obstructions to navigation, but which is so immense that it cannot be bridged. In latitude 32° it turns back to the south-east, soon receives the Uruguay—a swifter stream, that drains the southern part of the Atlantic highlands—and then opens out into the great shallow estuary known as the River Plate. Between the Uruguay and the Paraná is the Argentine Mesopotamia—a flat region where the low-lying plains, covered with luscious grasses, intersected with streams, and interspersed with timber, gradually rise up-stream into the highlands of the Missions.
ARGENTINA, PARAGUAY, URUGUAY, BOLIVIA AND CHILE
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FOREST SCENE IN ARGENTINA.To the west the pampa is bounded by the foothills of the Andes and the parallel chains with which that great mountain system reinforces its flanks. At the Bolivian frontier, the great outward-jutting shoulder of the Andes looms up among a series of subordinate chains. South of them, for a thousand miles, is a belt of broken country averaging two hundred miles in width. The pampa creeps up to the very foot of the mountain ranges and where it is watered blossoms like a garden. A quarter of the population of the Republic lives in the irrigated valleys of these Andean provinces.