desired result began with the fights at Tucumán in the northern part of
Argentina, in the fall of 1812, and at Salta, a little farther north, in
February, 1813. By these battles the persistent efforts of the royalist
forces in Peru to put an end, to the _junta_ government of 1810 in the
Plata settlements, were checked under the leadership of Manuel Belgrano.
But on the first of October following, the Royalists, in violation of
the armistice entered into after Salta, almost destroyed Belgrano’s army
at Vilcapujio. Disastrous as was the reverse for the time-being, this
before long proved a distinct service to the colonists, for it placed in
command of the remnants of Belgrano’s army General José de San Martín,
one of the two great patriots who finally brought the war to a
successful issue, and who had then just returned with the experience and
prestige acquired by twenty years’ service in the Peninsula armies
against Napoleon’s famous marshals. The other of these great patriots
was Simon Bolívar.
San Martín recognized at once the futility of pursuing the campaign and
attacking the Royalists in the mountainous regions of Bolivia, with over
a thousand miles of difficult roads between his army and base of
supplies. He conceived, therefore, the idea of compelling Spain to
defend her own bases at Lima and Callao, and to this end elaborated a
plan for the invasion of Chile and capture of Valparaiso, and, from
thence, a combined military and naval attack on the capital of Peru, the
seat of Spain’s continental power. With this purpose in view, he
repaired to the almost inaccessible town of Mendoza on the Argentine
slope of the Andes, on about the same parallel with the Chilean capital,
Santiago, and remained there two years, recruiting and training a strong
force and accumulating equipment.
Shortly after he had established his camp of instruction, the Chileans
under General Bernardo O’Higgins had extorted from the Royalist General
at Talca a truce whereby the protracted struggle to maintain the _junta_
government in Chile was for the moment suspended. This truce of Talca,
however, was repudiated by the Viceroy at Lima, and General Ossorio was
soon on his way south with another Royalist army, against which,
weakened by local political dissensions, the Chilenos were unable to
prevail, and were decisively beaten at Rancagua in October, 1814. As
this meant a complete restoration of Spanish authority in Chile,
O’Higgins and a few of his officers made their escape with the wreck of
their army, crossed the Andes and placed themselves under the command of
San Martín.
In January, 1817, San Martín’s army, four thousand strong, was ready to
move against the unsuspecting Spanish in Chile, who had been led by a
stratagem to believe that he would enter the country through one of the
more easily accessible of the Andean passes to the south. San Martín,
however, chose the highest and most terrible of them all, one four
thousand feet higher than St. Bernard, and which lay to the north
instead of south of Aconcagua, and accomplished a feat which, in
endurance and skill, is thought by the historians to have surpassed
Napoleon’s famous crossing of the Alps. Descending the western slope, he
fell upon the Spanish outpost at La Guardia on the 7th of February, and
on the 12th, surprised and defeated Ossorio’s main force at Chacabuco.
Two days later the liberating army entered Santiago. The patriot
government was at once re-established and the directorship conferred on
O’Higgins after San Martín, refusing to be diverted from his plans for
the liberation of the entire continent, had declined the honor.
On the first day of the ensuing year the independence of Chile was
proclaimed. _De facto_ independence was not achieved until the decisive
defeat of the Royalists on the plains of Maypú, on the 5th of April,
1815, and then, with Chile cleared of Spanish troops, and the port of
Valparaiso at his service as a base of supplies, San Martín was ready to
enter upon the next stage of his work—the liberation of Peru.
[Illustration: SAN MARTÍN’S PASSAGE OF THE ANDES—FROM VILA’S FAMOUS
PAINTING.]
Another period devoted to recruiting, organizing, and drilling elapsed.
In August, 1820, his combined military and naval expedition set out from
Valparaiso with some 4500 troops. Thus far this stronghold of Spain had
undergone less violent revolutionary disturbances than any other part of
her American possessions. In 1820 it was fully under the control of Don
Joaquín de la Pezuela, the forty-fourth successor of Pizarro. But it was
three years now since Pezuela had reported to the Madrid government that
he stood over a volcano liable to burst into action at any moment, and
had received no aid, a situation San Martín understood. In this
expedition he was ably seconded by Lord Cochrane, a former British naval
officer, who was to render most valuable service in the naval warfare
that was at once begun against the Viceroy. Cochrane’s first success was
the capture of Valdivia, Spain’s best harbor on the Pacific south of
Valparaiso, in spite of the fact that his rockets were filled with sand
instead of powder, the Chilean authorities having imprudently employed
Spanish prisoners in the manufacture of ammunition.
Arrived off Callao, the seaport of Lima, the liberators entered upon
operations and negotiations lasting several months, during which
effective missionary work in the cause of independence was done
throughout Peru by San Martín’s lieutenants. At last, on the 6th of
July, 1821, the Spanish leaders, neglected by their home government, and
realizing the ineffectiveness of their forces, evacuated Lima, which was
at once occupied by San Martín. He did not come, he said, as a
conqueror, and it was with much hesitation that he accepted the supreme
power offered by the patriots; he styled himself Protector of Peru,
promising to surrender the government to the people as soon as the
Peruvian congress should be assembled to take over the burden, and
retained his control of the embryo republic for a year, notwithstanding
the hostility that was engendered by misconception of the high purposes
embodied in the title he assumed. The wisdom of his retention in power
at such a critical period is hardly to be contested.
This was the decisive campaign of the war of independence on the
continent. The future of Buenos Aires and Chile, of New Granada and
Venezuela, and of all the Spanish settlements depended on the battles
that were now to be fought in the mountains of Peru, where the Royalist
forces had concentrated, for this was the very heart of the Spanish
stronghold. San Martín was not to fight these final battles, but to him
is due the credit of conceiving the plan of action, of executing it
almost to the end, and of showing, by his retirement in favor of a more
convincingly popular fellow-patriot of the north, a modesty, soundness
of judgment, and generosity almost unparalleled among statesmen—for in
the meantime the northern movement, under the direction of Simon
Bolívar, was approaching Peru. It arrived at the coast town of Guayaquil
in the spring of 1822. San Martín immediately repaired to that port for
a conference, leaving his administration in the hands of the Marquis of
Torre Tagle, a member of the old nobility who had turned revolutionist,
and Bernardo Monteagudo.
The meeting of the two Liberators marked the close of San Martín’s
military career. He saw clearly that there could be no room for himself
and a brilliant, ambitious, magnetic leader like Bolívar in the same
sphere of action, that it was necessary for the welfare of the common
cause that one of them should retire. He was great and patriotic enough
to make the sacrifice. Returning to Lima, he resigned the supreme
authority and retired to Europe. There was no place for him in Buenos
Aires, except as a leader in the civil wars which by this time were
distracting the country, and this rôle he disdained. In 1850 he died in
France at the age of seventy-two, after a thirty years’ struggle with
sickness and poverty, but attended always by his devoted daughter. After
his death his body was brought to Buenos Aires and reverently placed in
a tomb, one of the handsomest in the world, about which stand three
marble figures representing Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru.
Bolívar’s career had begun in Venezuela, where he was born. After
Spain’s suppression of the _junta_ established in Caracas in 1810,
Bolívar, with the revolutionist Miranda, had landed in Venezuela and
called into being the first congress of the people, and the independence
of the country was proclaimed. In the fighting that followed, the
movement thus started met a speedy end—literally shattered by an awful
earthquake that occurred on Holy Thursday of 1812, which the Royalists
claimed was a stroke of Divine vengeance against those who would have
overthrown the anointed of the Lord.
Miranda was captured and ended his days in a Spanish prison, but Bolívar
escaped into New Granada and soon had full sway in the revolutionary
councils of the northern provinces. In 1813 he founded at Bogotá an
active revolutionary _junta_ and a military organization. With the
latter he struck the Royalists at Cucutá, just within the eastern border
of Colombia, and passed over the mountains to Caracas, proclaiming war
to the death. Here his rôle of Dictator began. His career, however, was
punctuated by many disasters before the decisive battle of Boyacá placed
Bogotá permanently in his hands and gave assurance of eventual success.
But from this triumph Bolívar hurried to the revolutionary congress he
had some time before called at Angostura and procured the enactment of a
law providing for the union of Venezuela and New Granada, to form the
Republic of Colombia, and was elected President; and by the end of the
year 1821 all of this territory, except Panama and Puerto Cabello, near
La Guayra, had been freed from the control of Spain.
The famous battle of Pichincha, won on the 24th of May, 1822, by
Bolívar’s great lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre, gave Ecuador also to
the northern federation; later it was formally incorporated into the new
Colombian Republic. Still for two years the final clash between the
Royalists and the patriots was deferred, during which time the confusion
of sectional interests and negotiations by the now desperate mother
country threatened to undo the great work of the liberators. But once
more Bolívar triumphed. By the withdrawal in his favor of San Martín,
harmony was restored; with his victory at Junín on the 6th of August,
1824, and the decisive battle on the plain of Ayacucho, midway between
Lima and Cuzco, on the 9th of December, the war came to an end. In that
brilliantly fought battle the patriot army, again under Sucre, defeated
a largely superior force commanded by the Viceroy in person in less than
eighty minutes. The Viceroy wounded and a prisoner, and his men having
deserted by hundreds, his second in command sued for terms, and that
afternoon fourteen generals, five hundred and sixty-eight officers of
other grades, and three thousand two hundred privates became prisoners
of war.
[Illustration: STATUE OF BOLÍVAR, LIMA.]
Following this victory, Sucre proceeded to Charcas and convened the
patriot congress which in August, 1825, proclaimed the Republic of
Bolívia, and became its first President. Bolívar was then at the head of
affairs in Peru. He soon, however, relinquished his dictatorship and
returned to Bogotá to resume, for a brief term, his functions as
President of the federation of Colombia. From that time on he sank
rapidly from his apogee and, beset on all sides by the enemies his
supposed imperial designs had made for him, died on his estate of Santa
Marta on the 17th of December, 1830, at the early age of forty-seven.
Disheartened, his personal fortune gone, he had abandoned any designs of
that character he might once have had and only a few days before the end
wrote to the Colombians: “My last wishes are for the country’s
happiness. If my death can contribute to the quieting of party strife
and to the consolidation of the union, I shall go down to the grave in
peace.” To him also in after years his people erected monuments in tardy
recognition of his matchless services.
The Portuguese provinces were the only ones to continue the monarchical
system. They too, however, declared themselves independent, and became
known as the Empire of Brazil, until 1889, when the present republic was
declared.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
BRAZIL
I
The United States of Brazil, next to our own United States, form the
largest of the American republics. Brazil has an area fifteen times
greater than Germany’s, sixteen times as great as that of France,
250,000 square miles greater than ours, excluding Alaska and our island
possessions. At its greatest width, the country extends inland more than
2000 miles and its coast line on the Atlantic is more than 3700 miles
long, twice the distance from Portland, Maine, to Key West; yet the
population, although it has doubled in the last forty years, is not
quite a fourth as large as our own. It is estimated that if the whole
country were as densely populated as France, the inhabitants would
number 622,000,000, or, if as densely populated as Germany, 955,000,000.
Some time it may be. Except in the regions near the large cities, only a
small part is even sparsely settled now.
It argues well for the industry and enterprise of what inhabitants there
are, however, that Brazil’s international commerce is relatively nearly
as great in proportion to her population as ours. Some idea of the
remarkable progress she has made is given in the following extract from
a pamphlet recently published by the _Commissão de Expansão Economica_,
entitled “Do you Know the Wealth of Brazil?”
“In the colonial days, the foreign trade of Brazil was done
exclusively through Lisbon, under the protection of Portuguese
men-of-war.... The colonial produce was distributed among the
principal Portuguese commercial centers and the imports came
exclusively from Portugal to the ports of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro,
Pernambuco, Pará, and Maranhão. Until the end of the eighteenth
century, the foreign trade of Brazil was continued more or less
on this basis, but the exports were considerably more than the
imports. By decree of January 28, 1808, the King of Portugal,
Don João VI of Braganza, lately arrived at Bahia” (when he fled
from the Peninsula as a result of Napoleon’s invasion),
“resolved to open all the ports of Brazil to the commerce of
foreign nations, until then closed for the benefit of Portugal.
The first consequence of this decree was the establishment of
commercial relations with England. English agencies were opened
at Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco for the purpose of
importing manufactured articles and exporting sugar, alcohol,
gold, cotton, hides, coffee, cocoa, timber, and indigo. After
the proclamation of independence in 1822, the trade developed
enormously, France, the United States of America, Germany,
Holland, and Sweden following the example of England.... From
1846 to 1875 the imports increased 110 per cent. and the exports
175 per cent. From 1876 to 1905 the imports increased 175 per
cent. and the exports 272 per cent.... In 1909 its total value
was £101,844,549 (over $500,000,000).”
In 1910 it was $545,581,275, in which we participated to the extent of
$142,437,986, including $58,808,467 worth of coffee and $47,409,030
worth of rubber that were exported to us. For the principal industry is
still, as it has always been, agriculture, though in the mountainous
sections there are vast regions containing gold and precious stones and
minerals of incalculable value, millions of square miles in the interior
still covered with virgin forests; and yet even the relatively small
sections that have been cultivated produce more than three-fourths of
all the coffee consumed in the world and more than three-fifths of all
the rubber, not to mention the other products. But within the last few
years immigration has been encouraged and many conditions that were
preventing development have been improved. Wonders have been
accomplished in making the cities as healthful as any in the world. The
railroads have been, and are still being, extended tremendously and
facilities for commerce along the great inland waterways continually
increased.
The first of the important seaports of Brazil that are accessible by
steamer from New York is Belém, the capital of the State of Pará. It
ranks only as the fifth in size, but to the tourist it is of surpassing
interest because it is situated on the Pará River, the southern or
commercial mouth of the Amazon, that mightiest and most majestic of all
the rivers in the world.
Imagine!—a river more than 3400 miles in length, with its source in the
Peruvian Andes, 16,000 feet above the level of the sea—a river which,
with its vast tributaries, many of them themselves from a thousand to
two thousand miles in length, drains a territory of 2,300,000 square
miles, two-thirds as large as our United States, and so rich in
indigenous resources, and so fertile, that many years ago, when it was
wholly a wilderness, the great scientist Von Humboldt said of it that
“it is here that one day, sooner or later, will concentrate the
civilization of the globe”—a river that is a mile and a half wide at
Tabatinga, the last Brazilian port to the west, and gradually broadens
on its way to the sea until it attains a width of 150 miles at its
northern mouth alone, and discharges into the Atlantic a volume of water
more than four times as great as the outpour of the Mississippi—a river
that is navigable, that is now actually being navigated by _ocean
liners_, for 2000 miles, clear across Brazil to Iquitos in the frontier
of Peru.
Yet, although as early as 1541 Francisco de Orellana, one of Pizarro’s
little band of conquerors, who had crossed the Andes in quest of the
fabulous country of _El Dorado_, and, after having traversed the whole
course of the river through Brazil with a few companions in a canoe, had
made his way back to Spain and told amazing stories of the wealth of the
region he had discovered, and although a century later the astronomer La
Condamine, and still later Baron von Humboldt, Castelnau, and others had
successively published alluring accounts of their explorations in the
same region, it was not until 1867 that the river was opened to free
navigation.
It is gratifying to reflect that, probably more than to any other
outside influence, it was due to the publication of the report of an
expedition undertaken in 1851 by William Lewis Herndon, a lieutenant in
the United States Navy, and to the explorations of Louis Agassiz, a
Harvard professor, that the interest was aroused which at last brought
this about. Lieutenant Herndon, like Orellana, started from Lima, and,
braving the passes of the Andes, entered the Amazon from one of its
western affluents and made the journey in a canoe, with only a Peruvian
guide and a few Indian rowers, all the way to its mouth. Professor
Agassiz, whose explorations were begun fifteen years later, started from
Belém and traveled in a steamboat, such as it was, accompanied by his
wife and a corps of scientists, and was given every assistance possible
by the late Emperor Dom Pedro, who took a lively interest in the
expedition. But even then in Brazil, the Professor says in his book, “so
little was known of the Amazon that we could obtain only very meager,
and usually rather discouraging, information concerning our projected
journey. In Rio, if you say you are going to ascend their great river,
your Brazilian friends look at you with compassionate wonder. You are
threatened with sickness, with intolerable heat, with mosquitoes,
_jacaraes_ (alligators), and wild Indians.”
Lieutenant Herndon, however, had already made known to the scientific
world that the climate is healthful, notwithstanding the mosquitoes;
that, humid and hot as it is during certain hours of the day, the nights
are always cool, and that “the direct rays of the sun are tempered by an
almost constant east wind, laden with moisture from the ocean, so that
no one ever suffers from the heat;” and, when he got back to Rio de
Janeiro, Professor Agassiz assured the Brazilians that this was so.
Arthur Dias indignantly protests (in his _Brazil of To-day_) that “it is
not true, as they say, that the climate of this region prevents the
existence and the extending of the population.” “It is a legend, a
fiction,” he adds. Mozans, who made a similar journey to Herndon’s very
recently, also testifies to the same effect.
Here in this Amazon country, Lieutenant Herndon had reported, “we see a
fecundity of soil and a rapidity of vegetation that is marvelous and to
which even Egypt, the ancient granary of Europe, affords no parallel....
Here trees, evidently young, shoot up to such a height that no
fowling-piece will reach the game seated on their topmost branches. This
is the country of rice, of sarsaparilla, of cocoa, of tonka beans, of
mandioca, black pepper, arrowroot, ginger, balsam, tapioca, gum copal,
nutmeg, animal and vegetable wax, indigo and Brazil nuts, of India
rubber, of dyes of the gayest colors, drugs of rare virtue, variegated
cabinet woods of the finest grain and susceptible of the highest polish.
Here dwell the wild cow, the fish ox, the sloth, the anteater, the
beautiful black tiger, the mysterious electric eel, the boa constrictor,
the anaconda, the deadly coral snake, the voracious alligator, monkeys
in endless variety, birds of the most brilliant plumage, and insects of
the strangest form and gayest colors.”
More than forty years of progress and improvement have passed since Dom
Pedro decreed that the river should be open to international trade, yet
all these wonders may still be seen there—the vast expanses of water,
the shore lines varied by lofty bluffs and low plains of sand, rugged
rocks and dense masses of foliage, the river surface dotted by islands,
large and small—the magnificent forest still crowding to the banks and
teeming with all the exuberant life and brilliant hues of the
tropics—giant _sumaumeras_, their crests towering high above all other
trees, their huge, white-barked trunks and limbs standing out in
striking relief from the masses of green; tall cocoanut palms, tufted at
the top with fan-shaped leaves cut into ribbons and bedecked with creamy
blossoms; slender, graceful _assai_ palms, tall and clean-stemmed like
the cocoanuts, but with fluffy, feathery crowns; wine palms from which
the flowers hang in long, crimson tassels, studded with berries of
bright green; _jupati_ palms with plumelike leaves forty to fifty feet
long that start near the base of the trunk and curve upward on all sides
in the form of a vase; the familiar fan palm, and a legion of others.
And there are rubber trees, which resemble in this region our northern
ash; stately _castanhas_, the trees on which the Brazil nuts grow, and
_cacaos_, that look like our cherry trees, only they give us our
chocolate and cocoa beans instead and have blossoms of a saffron tint;
mahoganies, rosewoods and satinwoods and great sheaves of whispering
bamboo; myriads of ferns and exquisitely tinted orchids, acacias,
scarlet passion flowers, begonias, yellow and blue—flowers innumerable
in the wildest profusion. Not little ones like our violets hiding
modestly among the mosses and grass, but big blossoms growing
luxuriantly on bushes and on the parasite vines that twine about the
trunks of the trees and hang in festoons from their branches, until the
whole river border seems ablaze with their vivid lights; and there are
still the monkeys and beautiful butterflies and humming birds, and the
parrots, macaws, herons, egrets, toucans, and countless other gorgeously
feathered birds, and the Indian villages, too, in the midst of their
orange and banana groves or huddled near the beaches where the turtles
breed.