THE COLONIZATION OF THE SOUTH
It was natural that after the first occupation of the New World the
tendency of the explorers should have been to turn their attention to
the south and to the still undiscovered lands. At the first glimpse the
aspect of the Atlantic coast to the south of Brazil gave little promise
of the wealth--that is to say, of the gold--sought by the pioneers,
since its shores were low, marshy, and alluvial.
In 1515 Juan de Solis sailed to the mouth of the River Plate, and landed
on the coast of Uruguay. His party were immediately attacked by Charrua
Indians, and the bodies of De Solis himself and of a number of his crew
were stretched dead on the sands. This ended the expedition, for the
survivors left the place in haste and returned to Spain.
In 1526 Sebastian Cabot explored the River Plate, and, sailing
up-stream, investigated the Parana, and discovered the waters of the
Paraguay River itself. In these inland waterways his fleet was met by
that of another pioneer, Diego Garcia. This latter, doubtless from
chivalrous motives, gave the _pas_ to Cabot, and turned the bows of his
vessels down-stream. It was Cabot's intention to establish himself
permanently on the shores of this great river system. Near the present
site of the town of Rosario he built the fort of Sancti Spiritus.
Seeing, however, that his appeals to Spain for assistance remained
unanswered, he eventually abandoned his attempt. There seems little
doubt that he withdrew practically all his forces from the River Plate;
but there are legends of some survivors who remained in the district
after the main expedition had left. Some old historians allege that
these underwent strange experiences and hardships, but the veracity of
such narratives is more than doubtful.
[Illustration: ATAHUALPA.
The last Chief of the Peruvians.]
It was in 1535, the year when Valdivia marched southward from Peru to
conquer Chile, that the conquest and actual colonization of the River
Plate was first seriously undertaken. Pedro de Mendoza, a soldier of
fortune, ventured on the attempt. Mendoza's career as a mercenary
soldier had proved quite unusually profitable even for those days, and
he had acquired a large fortune at the sack of Rome alone. His purse
provided a really formidable expedition.
The voyage to the mouth of the River Plate on this occasion was more
productive of incident than was usual, even in those days of adventurous
pioneers. The halts at Teneriffe and at Rio de Janeiro had resulted in
some dissensions among Mendoza's men, and the execution by the orders of
the Chief of one of his most popular leaders had all but caused open
mutiny at the latter place. Nevertheless, when his forces landed at the
site of the present town of Buenos Aires, they constituted a formidable
company of men, admirably equipped with everything that the science of
the age could devise for the purpose of conquest and colonization,
particularly the former.
Having founded his settlement, Mendoza set himself to deal with the
Indians and to bring them into subjection. In a very short while he
found out that it was a very different tribe of aborigines with which he
had to deal to the peace-loving inhabitants of Peru and the north-west.
The agile, hardy, and fierce Pampa Indians, having once fallen foul of
the invaders, allowed them no respite. Attacked by day and night,
deprived of all supplies of food, Mendoza's troops began to suffer from
exhaustion and hunger, to say nothing of the wounds inflicted by their
enemies.
In the end, the leaders had to admit to themselves that the place was no
longer tenable. Nevertheless, neither Mendoza nor his men had any
intention of abandoning permanently these fertile plains through which
ran the great rivers. The scarcity of minerals in these districts had
now become sufficiently obvious to them; yet even to men in quest of
little beyond gold the extraordinary fertility of the alluvial soil was
not altogether lost. With a courage and pertinacity which does the
adventurers every credit, they determined, instead of abandoning the
river and putting out to sea, to sail far up-stream into the unknown,
and to seek their fortune inland.
Mendoza's expedition first of all established itself for a while on the
site of Sancti Spiritus, Cabot's old abandoned fort, which they now
rechristened Corpus Christi. Shortly after their arrival at the place,
Mendoza himself, who had doubtless suffered many disillusions concerning
the gold and precious stones of these districts, and whose health had
given way beneath the stress of the hardships and of the numerous
precarious situations in which he had found himself, set sail for Spain.
It was to be his fate never to return to his native land, since he died
on his way home.
Juan de Ayolas was now left in command of the Spanish force. He was an
able commander, and a man of determined character, eminently fitted to
conduct an expedition such as this. Without hesitation, the new leader
purposed to make his way farther up the stream. He got together the
ships once again, and, manning them, he made his way from point to
point along the great river system, attacked here and there by the
Indians on the banks, and occasionally challenged by flotillas of
canoes, which boldly came out to assume the aggressive. But in every
case the lesson taught the Indians was a severe one, and, undeterred by
the hostility shown him, Ayolas sailed inland until he came to Asuncion
in Paraguay. At this spot the expedition came to a halt, and the weary
pioneers landed, and immediately became lost in admiration of the
fertile and delightful country in which they now found themselves.
There is no doubt that to the new-comers the country in the
neighbourhood of Asuncion, with its pleasant valleys, rolling country,
and forest-covered hills, must have come in the shape of a relief after
the apparently interminable passage of the plains. It was the spot at
which the pioneer would naturally halt, and endeavour to found his
settlement.
The Guarani Indians extended but a cold welcome to the daring
adventurers. Their temperament was by nature far less warlike than that
of the savage and intrepid natives in the regions of the coast. These
Guarani Indians, nevertheless, made some show of aggression, and would
doubtless have been glad to scare away these undesired strangers. Owing
to this, a collision between the two forces occurred; but so crushing
was the defeat of the Indians that they resigned themselves submissively
to the Spaniards, and henceforth became a vassal tribe, lending
assistance to their white masters in both civil and warlike occupations.
Immediately after the victory, the Guaranis were set by the Spanish to
assist in the construction of the new town, which was to be the
head-quarters of the Imperial power in the south-east of the Continent.
Once definitely settled here, the _conquistadores_ set themselves to
extend the frontiers of their dominions, which in the first place were
confined to the neighbourhood of the new town of Asuncion itself.
The tribes in the immediate neighbourhood were now more than merely
friendly: they were actively servile. But the case was different with
the other native peoples, more especially with the Indians in the Chaco,
the wooded and swampy district on the opposite side of the river. These
showed themselves fiercely inimical to the new-comers, and it was seldom
that the Spaniards were without a feud of some kind to suffer at their
hands.
The new colonists had now time to look about them. Much had happened
since they had first landed on the shores of the River Plate, but the
main object of the expedition still remained clear to them. This was the
discovery of a road from the south-east to Peru. Ayolas determined to
take up this fascinating quest in person. Accompanied by a number of
men, he sailed up the river until he came to a spot at which he judged
that an attempt at the overland journey might well be attempted. Leaving
Domingo Martinez de Irala, his lieutenant, in charge of the ships and of
a force of men, Ayolas marched into the forest and disappeared into the
unknown. It was his fate never to return. His company, ambushed and cut
up by a tribe of hostile Indians, perished to a man.
It was months before Irala learned of the catastrophe. In the belief
that his chief was still in the land of the living, he waited with his
ships and men at the point where Ayolas had disembarked, varying his
vigil from time to time by a cruise down-stream in search of provisions.
The news came to him at length, shouted out by hoarse defiant voices
from the recesses of the forest on the banks. For a while the Spaniards
would not believe the surly message of death given by the unseen
Indians. In the end, however, its truth could not be doubted, and Irala
assumed command of the party. Returning to Asuncion, he was unanimously
appointed Governor by the settlers of the place.
[Illustration: SUGAR-MAKING.
A seventeenth-century representation of the whole of the processes of
the manufacture of sugar.
_From "Historia Antipodum."_]
The character of Domingo Martinez de Irala was eminently suited to the
post he now held. His courage was high, his determination inflexible,
and his energy abundant. It is true that, in the same manner as his
colleagues of the period, he was frequently totally careless of the
means employed so long as the end was achieved. Nevertheless, he was in
many respects an ideal leader, and his vigorous personality kept in
check both the ambitions of the Spanish cliques and the dissatisfaction
of the less friendly Indians.
Irala was destined to undergo many vicissitudes in the course of his
Governorship. Very soon after he had been elected to this post it was
his fate to be superseded for a while. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca,
having obtained the appointment in Spain itself, came out by Royal
Licence to govern the new province of which Asuncion was the capital.
Cabeza de Vaca was essentially a humanitarian Governor, who proved
himself extremely loth to employ coercion and the sword, which means, in
fact, he only resorted to with extreme reluctance as a very last
resource. His courage and determination were evidenced by his overland
journey; for, instead of sailing up the great river system from the
mouth of the River Plate, he brought his expedition overland from Santa
Catalina in Brazil, advancing safely through the numerous tribes and
difficult country which intervened between the coast and Asuncion.
The temperament of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, however, was of too
refined and trusting an order to deal with the turbulent and somewhat
treacherous elements which abounded at Asuncion. After a while a revolt
occurred, brought about probably by the Governor's objection to the
wholesale plundering and enslavement of the Indians by the Spaniards.
The populace turned strongly against the Governor. Cabeza de Vaca was
flung into prison, and sent a prisoner to Spain, after which drastic
procedure Irala was once again elected Governor by the colonists.
Doubtless Cabeza de Vaca possesses the chief claim to sympathy of all
those who had to do with Paraguay at this early period of its existence;
yet at the same time it is impossible to refrain from admiration of the
sheer determination and willpower with which Irala pursued his career.
For years Irala's position remained utterly precarious. He was the
chosen of the colonists, but not of the Court of Spain, which alone
possessed any legal right to appoint a person to so high an office as
his. No exalted personages were more jealous of their privileges than
these. Several times Irala was on the point of losing his Governorship,
but on each occasion the measures he adopted, aided by good fortune,
tided him over the crisis, and left him continuing in the seat of
authority. In the end, after undergoing innumerable anxieties, Irala at
last succeeded in obtaining the Royal Licence for the Governorship of
Paraguay.
All the while his energy continued undiminished, and it was due to him
that the colonization of the country made such rapid strides. The means
by which this end was effected were, from the modern point of view,
entirely dubious, for it was Irala who instituted in Paraguay
_encomiendas_, or slave settlements, into which the natives of the
country were congregated in order that their labour might be employed in
agriculture and similar occupations. This, however, was the ordinary
procedure of the period, and, as historians have already pointed out,
Irala's faults, although serious enough, were really nothing beyond
those of his age. In any case, his name stands as that of one of the
most powerful of the _conquistadores_. During the later years of his
office a comparatively undisturbed era obtained, and he held the reins
of the Paraguayan Government with a firm hand till his death, which
occurred at the age of seventy-one.
On Irala's death, it was only natural that those elements of discord and
jealousy which his strong personality had kept in check should break
out, and cause no little confusion and strife. For a while the
Governorship of Paraguay was sought by many, and the conflicting claims
led to numerous disputes, and even occasional armed collisions. One of
the most notable of the Governors who succeeded Irala was Juan de Garay.
It was this _conquistador_ who was responsible for the second and
permanent founding of the city of Buenos Aires. Garay was a far-seeing
man, who, having established a number of urban centres inland, saw
clearly the importance of a settlement at which vessels from Europe
could touch on their first arrival at the Continent.
So the stream of white men, having been in the first instance swept by
the force of circumstances rather than its own desire from the coast in
a north-westerly direction, began now to roll back towards the coast
once again, without, however, yielding up any of the territories which
it had occupied in the interior.
In 1580 Juan de Garay determined that the supreme effort should be made.
He led an expedition down the stream, and on the spot where Pedro de
Mendoza had founded his first ill-fated settlement he built the pioneer
structures of the second town of Buenos Aires. The wisdom of this move
was evident to all, provided the place were able to withstand the
attacks of the surrounding Indians. In this the garrison succeeded, and
Buenos Aires, having now taken firm root, began the first slow growth
of its development, which eventually made of it the greatest city in
South America.
In the meantime much had been effected towards the colonization of the
land to the west of the Andes. As has been related, Almagro's
unfortunate expedition returned, dejected and diminished in numbers,
from the apparently inhospitable soil in the south. This disaster lent
to Chile an unenviable but entirely undeserved notoriety. Pedro de
Valdivia was the next to venture into these regions. Valdivia naturally
enjoyed several advantages over his predecessor, for he knew now, by the
other's experiences, the dangers and perils against which he had to
guard. In consequence of this his expedition met with considerably more
success than had been anticipated. Marching southward across the great
Atacama Desert, he penetrated to the fertile regions of the land, and
founded the town of Santiago.
All this was not effected without encountering the hostility of the
local Indians, and the inhabitants of the new town carried their lives
in their hands for a considerable while after the foundation of the
city. Perhaps, indeed, no pioneers experienced greater hardships than
did those of Chile. For the first few years of its existence every
member of the new colony became accustomed to live in an unceasing
condition of short rations, and it was on very poorly furnished stomachs
that the garrison was obliged to meet and to repel the attacks of the
natives. In the end, however, the seeds which had been brought by the
adventurers took root and grew. Provisions became fairly abundant, and
the settlements in the neighbourhood of Santiago were now firmly
established.
Valdivia, determined to extend his frontiers, marched to the south. It
was in the neighbourhood of the Biobio River that he first encountered
the Araucanian warriors of the true stock. Here his forces met with a
rude awakening. In discipline and fighting merit the companies of the
Araucanians stood to the remaining tribes of South America in the same
relation as did the Zulu regiments to the other fighting-men of Africa.
A furious struggle began which was destined to last for generations and
for centuries. But at no time were the fierce Araucanians subdued,
although it fell to their lot to be defeated over and over again, as,
indeed, proved the fate of the Spaniards likewise.
Some notion of the tremendous vigour with which these wars of the south
were waged may be gathered from "La Araucana," the magnificent epic
written by Ercilla, the Spanish poet, who composed his verses hot from
the fight, his arms still weary from wielding the sword.
One of the first of the notable Spanish victims in the course of these
wars was Valdivia himself. Attacked by furious hordes of Araucanians and
overwhelmed, the intrepid European and his army perished to a man; while
the Araucanians in triumph swept northwards, to be hurled to the south
again by the next wave of battle which chanced to turn in favour of the
Spaniards.