has excited enthusiastic descriptions from all the travelers who have
penetrated this marvelous country. A thousand miles up the river, in
Misiones, near the point where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet, are
located the famous Iguazú Falls. The great cascade, fifty feet higher
and with a lateral extent 1250 feet greater than Niagara, lies in the
midst of a primeval forest. The enormous volume of water bursts through
a series of thickly wooded islands with a roar that is all the more
impressive to the spectator because of the solitude that reigns
throughout this scantily populated region. The hand of man has done
nothing here—no attempt has been made to harness the mighty power;
nature has been left alone to revel in utter abandon.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
URUGUAY
One of the first inquiries that engages the mind of the visitor to
Uruguay and Argentina is why the great body of water that separates the
two countries—apparently an arm of the sea—should not be called the
_Gulf_ of La Plata. After a brief stay in this region of great cities,
great productiveness, and great opportunities, it will probably occur to
him that dwellers among such great things could be satisfied with
nothing less than an estuary of the broad Atlantic to serve as a river
for their capitals. If the Paraná and Uruguay—mighty rivers which rank
in size immediately behind the Mississippi—had joined their floods some
miles above Buenos Aires, instead of flowing separately into La Plata, a
stream of unquestionable status might have satisfied their demands; but
the God of Waters willed otherwise, evidently not anticipating the
greatness of these people and their illimitable ambition.
The exact point at which La Plata River merges with the Atlantic is also
a matter of speculation among geographers. For all practical purposes,
however, Montevideo, the capital, metropolis, and chief port of Uruguay,
lies just beside this phenomenon. One can say, therefore, that the
eastern side of the little peninsula on which the main city is built
faces the ocean, while the southern and western fronts, bordering the
bay of the actual port, look upon the river Plata.
Taking the night boat at Buenos Aires, one arrives in Montevideo in the
early morning after a pleasant ride of just a hundred miles diagonally
across the river, and is immediately impressed with the picturesqueness
of El Cerro, an ancient fortress that still poses as the guardian of the
entrance of the river. Much more important to-day, however, is the
lighthouse that rises from this height. Entering the port the visitor
comes upon a modern city of almost four hundred thousand inhabitants,
possessed of all the attributes of the present-day metropolis; an
adequate and up-to-date system of docks, fine business blocks, public
buildings, plazas, boulevards, and broad streets laid out on the
checkerboard scheme, sewer, water, and lighting systems, and extensive
and well-managed electric tramway lines.
To the Buenos Airean, naturally enough, Montevideo is a second Brooklyn,
for the “ferry” trip of a hundred miles is not incongruous where people
think in superlatives. Here the Buenos Airean may come, after a period
of consuming activity in his own more closely built city, for rest and
soul expansion among the leisurely and dignified Montevideans, and, at
the expense of his neighbor, even permit himself a bit of friendly chaff
in which he might venture to use the word “soporific.” The Montevidean
by no means resents the imputation. There is no resentment because,
although a restful atmosphere does pervade the city, there is not the
slightest taint of stagnation. The Montevidean is conscious that his
sturdy, vigorous, and even bellicose race has built up a nation unique
in South America in its promise of material prosperity; that his country
is among the richest in the quality and varied productiveness of its
soil of any on the continent, and that his city, housing a third of the
country’s population, is the pivot of the nation’s astonishing
commercial activity and one of the most healthful and delightful
residence cities in the world.
Montevideo was founded in 1726, but remained a comparatively unimportant
way station until some thirty years ago, when it began to imbibe the
modernism of its big rivals in Brazil and Argentina. To-day it is almost
as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires, the Italian element predominating among
the foreigners, with the British preëminent as investors of capital, as
in the latter city. To the superb Solis Theater come all the European
companies that appear in Buenos Aires; club life is best represented in
the Club Uruguay and the English Club, situated on opposite sides of the
Plaza Matriz; and afternoon tea has come to be an important feature of
the social life, several tea houses being now distributed over the
leisure sections of the city.
The pride of the Montevidean is Prado Park. He has made of it one of the
fairest gardens imaginable—its lakes and rolling lawns and great variety
of trees and flowering bushes, its intersecting avenues of towering
eucalyptus trees rivaling Japan’s famous avenue of cryptomerias, on the
road to Nikko, all give pleasure to the city’s thousands, who, like
Parisians, seek the country scenes for their holiday amusements. Driving
along Agraciado Road and other plane-tree-shaded avenues, the visitor
reaches either of the pleasure suburbs of Colón or Pocítos.
In these excursions he has an excellent opportunity to note the varied
styles of architecture coming into vogue in the more progressive cities
of South America; they range from the comfortable bungalow of the
British residents, to that strange development of the old Spanish home
(the _quinta_) in which the wealthy Spanish-Americans love to house
themselves on the outskirts of the cities. Until recent years the
Spanish house in town and country was bare and unlovely on the outside;
its beauty and richness were confined to the interior surroundings of
the _patio_; where, in feudal privacy, the family secluded itself.
To-day, in the new era of civic pride and the freer association of
society in the modern boulevard and café life, the adornment is extended
to the outside, and the effort made, by the addition of pinnacles and
towers and much delicate tinting, to add to the attractiveness of the
“city beautiful.” In the business sections, of course, the modern
architecture corresponds for the most part with the type seen in the
great cities of Europe and North America.
[Illustration: SOLIS THEATER, MONTEVIDEO.]
[Illustration: CAGANCHA PLAZA, MONTEVIDEO.]
In October, when the summer comes into these latitudes south of the
Equator, the _quintas_ assume a most entrancing aspect. Some of them,
set in the midst of gardens many acres in extent, are veritable haunts
of delight. Toll has been levied upon every resource to add to their
charm. The gardens are inclosed within hedges that blaze with the color
of the hedge-rose, honeysuckle, bougainvillea, wistaria, and other
creeping vines. Inside, forming a background, may be seen a goodly
growth of ivy-covered oaks or chestnut trees. Within, nearer the
fairy-like home, and in the random of artistic disorder, are many
flowering bushes and trees—lilacs mingling their scent with magnolia,
orange, myrtle, and mimosa—while the lawns are carpeted with a brilliant
profusion of periwinkles, pansies, marigolds, arum lilies, and
carnations, the whole yielding up the delights of its ever changing
fragrance as the wondering guest wanders about in company with his
courtly host and hostess.
In entire harmony with this perfection of nature is the beauty of the
women. They are justly famous. To the far-famed grace and natural
Spanish stateliness of her sisters throughout South America, the
Uruguayan señorita adds a freshness of complexion and sprightliness of
temperament that go to make a most bewitching consummation of feminine
charm. Her praises are sung by all visitors; not less appreciative, her
own kith and kin liken her, in their poetic way, to all pleasant things
from a dove to the moon.
It is with genuine regret that the traveler leaves the hospitable
capital for a trip through the country; but he will soon discover that
the delightful climate (like that of Tennessee, but without the snows of
winter) is characteristic of Uruguay as a whole. From the capital
radiate some fifteen hundred miles of good railways penetrating Brazil
at several points, and also tapping the commerce along the Uruguay
River.
The country he will see is one great rolling pasture as large as all New
England, and with occasional ridges of mountains. None of these,
however, exceeds two thousand feet in height. Until recently Uruguay was
given over almost entirely to the raising of cattle and sheep; now it
promises great strides in products of the soil. Indeed, it is the boast
of the Uruguayan that not an acre of his country’s 72,000 square miles
of territory is unproductive. Here can be seen growing corn, wheat, and
potatoes, and a great impetus has of late been given to viticulture—and
there is no fear of either drought or frost. So far, however, only about
three per cent. of the territory is under cultivation in foodstuffs. In
1909 Montevideo handled imports to the value of $35,000,000 and exports
amounting to $32,000,000, while the ports of Rocha, Maldonado, and
Colonia, on the south coast, and Salto, Paysandú, Fray Bentos, Mercédes,
and others on the Uruguay, handled three millions more of imports and
exports. Her production in cattle in that year amounted to 6,827,428, in
sheep 16,608,717, and in pigs, horses, mules, and goats 700,000.
At Fray Bentos, on the Uruguay River, the Liebig Company has located a
great plant, slaughters over three hundred thousand head of cattle a
year, and does an enormous business in extract of beef, canned meats,
hides, tallow, hair, horn, and other by-products. A day’s sojourn in the
prosperous, if soup-laden, atmosphere will give one a proper
appreciation of the rest of the country, for nowhere has Nature been
more lavish with her favors, nowhere has she distributed more favorable
conditions for life and national prosperity—everything man needs for
food or clothing is here capable of being raised. Every section is
reached by navigable rivers, which also furnish abundant water for
irrigation and mechanical purposes. The country being on a gold basis,
its credit in the European money markets is excellent.
Uruguay, as one historian expresses it, has always been the cockpit of
the southern half of the continent. From the time of the appearance of
the first whites in the Plata region—Diaz de Solis in 1515, and ten
years later Sebastien Cabot—down to the period of Hernando Arias and
Garay, who, in about 1580, permanently established the power of Spain on
the river Plata, the Spanish and Portuguese settlements on the Plata and
Uruguay had to contend with the incessant hostilities of a race of
Indians—the Charrúas, who, next to the Araucanians of Chile, had the
distinction of offering the most vigorous and successful opposition to
the dominion of the Europeans in South America.
Throughout the colonial régime, Uruguay constituted the eastern border
province (_Banda Oriental_) of Spain’s La Plata colony, and was the
storm center of the Spanish and Portuguese strife for territorial
control. Following this period came the abortive invasion of the English
in 1806, and, a few years later, the wars of independence. When Spanish
rule came to an end in the Plata country, the _Banda Oriental_ became
the bone of contention between Brazil and the newly born state that is
now Argentina—a veritable new-world Flanders and the theater of many
fierce battles. Brazil held the province from 1817 to 1829, and called
it her Cis-platine Province. Finally, on May 1, 1829, Uruguay achieved
her independence and set up a government of her own under the style of
the Oriental Republic of Uruguay.
There is good reason, then, why the Uruguayans should have emerged from
these three hundred years of turbulent character building into
independence with a bellicose personality exactly suited to the
Montague-and-Capulet existence that prevails in her politics between the
_Blancos_, or reactionists, and the _Colorados_, who now hold the
political power and stand for progress. The forcefulness of the nation
is now finding its expression in industrial and commercial enterprises
and has made of her chief port a powerful commercial rival of the busy
mart across the Plata.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
V
PARAGUAY
Paraguay is in the longitudinal center of South America, and, with the
exception of Bolivia, is the only country on the continent that does not
border on the sea. Next to Uruguay it is the smallest of the South
American republics, possessing a territory of 196,000 square miles.
Until the break with Spain, in 1813, it was, like Uruguay, part and
parcel of La Plata colony, under the jurisdiction of the Viceroy of
Buenos Aires, and was known as the Province of Paraguay. As will be
observed from a glance at the map, it is hedged in by Bolivia, Brazil,
and Argentina, and is separated from its twin sister, Uruguay, by an arm
of the mother country (Misiones Territory) that reaches up into Brazil
between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers.
For a proper acquaintance with the country it must be conceived as a
dual personality, for it is divided longitudinally by the river Paraguay
into western Paraguay, or the Chaco, and eastern Paraguay, or Paraguay
proper. It is in the latter region that the republic has its being and
in which the visitor’s interest is naturally centered. El Chaco is a
vast, thickly wooded, and, for the most part, savage and unexplored
section that was awarded to Paraguay by our President Hayes as
arbitrator of its boundary dispute with Argentina; in gratitude the
government named the chief settlement in the territory Villa Hayes. The
region is now given over almost wholly to the immigrant Swiss, German,
Italian and other communities that have been started on the west bank of
the river, and to nomadic bands of still uncivilized Indians.
With a climate similar to that of southern California, Paraguay,
throughout its entire extent, is blessed with abundant rain the year
round. It is well watered and quite thickly wooded, and thus protected
from the intense heat usual in low-lying countries.
Eastern Paraguay resembles Uruguay in its rolling, fertile areas, but is
more mountainous. On the northern frontier is the range known as the
Quinze Puntas. Inclosing the country on the east are the Cordilleras of
Amambay and Mbaracayú, while down the center, from north to south, run a
broken series of lesser sierras and the range called Caaguazú, forming a
ridge or backbone that subdivides this half of Paraguay into the two
great basins drained by the Paraná River on the east and the Paraguay on
the west.
Almost the whole of Paraguay proper has forests of valuable woods with
occasional clear places, where settlers have made serviceable the
marvelous fertility and luxuriance of the soil. For centuries this
region has been the barrier between the two distinct phases of Spanish
civilization in South America—the golden empire of Peru and the
agricultural colonies on the Plata and its tributaries—just as Uruguay
has been the buffer state between the Portuguese and Spanish peoples.
These phases have merged but little and to-day present a most
interesting contrast.
From the time of Cabot’s fortified settlement of Asunción (now the
capital of Paraguay) at the junction of the Paraguay and Pilcomayo
rivers, in 1536, whence his lieutenant, Domingo Irala, made his vain
attempt to penetrate into Peru, down to the present, Paraguay has been
isolated to a considerable degree from the march of progress. The six
hundred adventurers who followed the fortunes of Irala stayed on the
land, intermarried with the Guarany Indians and bred the mixed race that
was the foundation of the nation of to-day; and the Indians developed,
along with the mestizos, to a status unique in South America. Evading
the abject slavery that decimated the aboriginal races throughout the
Andean region, the Guaranies were taught the arts of the soil and war by
the Jesuits, and, during the hundred and fifty years of the latter’s
sway, achieved a stage of development corresponding to that of the
peasantry of France.
[Illustration: GOVERNMENT PALACE, ASUNCIÓN.]
[Illustration: VIEW OF ASUNCIÓN AND RIVER PARAGUAY FROM ROOF OF THE
CENTRAL RAILROAD STATION.]
The story of the Jesuit missions which occupied the Paraná basin, is an
important and thrilling chapter in Latin-American history. Early in its
life, the Society turned its attention to the evangelization of South
America; it was the genius of its founder, Ignatius Loyola, that
perfected the organization to accomplish this. In 1550 the Jesuit
Fathers began their work on the Brazilian coast settlements, but were
driven farther and farther inland by the Portuguese as it became
apparent that their policy of education and uplift would put an end to
the enslavement of the natives which was the basis of the economic
scheme of the colonists. Eventually, some time about 1586, the Jesuits
entered the Paraguay region, won the confidence of the Guaranies and
purposed to “reduce” the tribes of the whole Plata country. They met
with the same opposition from the Spanish colonists and their stronghold
became restricted to the secluded and isolated region mentioned—the
Paraná basin and Misiones territory of Argentina.
Here, for over a hundred years, under the protection of the official
sanction won from the Spanish King, Philip III, they worked among their
proselytes. They learned and perfected the native dialects; taught the
men to cultivate the soil, and the women to spin and weave cotton;
induced them to clear the forests and to build and live in towns, and
even organized them into an effective militia, which more than once
enabled them to preserve the integrity of the remarkable state—a state
unique in a way, since it was virtually under the direct control of the
General of the Order, although within the territorial sovereignty of
Spain. This “republic” lasted until 1769, when the famous decree of the
King of Spain banished the Jesuits from all his dominions; but the
effects of their presence are still noticeable throughout Paraguay and
Misiones.
It is a matter of wonder to this day how the Jesuit Fathers, even taking
into consideration their unquenchable zeal and marvelous energy and
determination, ever succeeded in reaching so isolated a territory and in
traversing it in every direction, as they did, in pursuit of their
campaign. Even to-day it is well-nigh impossible to reach the heart of
the region—the great cataract of Guayra, which, hundreds of miles from
the habitations of man, isolated by jagged mountains, fiercely swirling
waters and the wild tangle of underbrush that make headway through the
awesome tropical forest very difficult, constitutes one of the most
majestic of nature’s wonder-works in South America. Situated about a
hundred miles up the Paraná River from the better known Iguazú Falls,
the Guayra cataract lies on the frontier with Brazil. A volume of water
twice as large as that which thunders over Niagara is forced through a
gorge two hundred feet wide from a stream two and a half miles in width.
The roar of its plunge of fifty-six feet to the lower levels, adds the
essential note to this tremendous symphony of primeval nature. Outside
the Arctic regions, one explorer declares, no part of the world is less
accessible than the Paraná above the Great Cataract.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits the Paraná basin reverted to forest
and the nation pursued its checkered career in the section drained by
the Paraguay. This river intersects the republic from north to south and
is navigable through its entire course by ocean steamers, which pass up
from Buenos Aires through the Paraná, and past Corrientes, where the two
great streams join forces.
On the left bank of the Paraguay, at the point of its confluence with
the equally great Pilcomayo, the traveler comes to the ancient city of
Asunción, the capital of the country. Here was the seat of the colonial
authority over Plata settlements until Buenos Aires grew into
importance. It has a population of 52,000, and is now thriving and
prosperous, rapidly taking on the cosmopolitanism that characterizes the
other ports of South America. The capital, and indeed the whole country
has but recently entered into a new life, a life as sharply contrasted
with its period of political storm and stress as the transition was
sudden.
For, during the first sixty years after the country had attained its
freedom from Spain, Paraguay’s progress was stifled by a succession of
tyrants—remarkable men, all three of them, but men who, as a result of
their rule, well-nigh cost her her national existence. The first of
these, Dr. José Rodríguez Gaspar Francia, had been the dominating figure
in the revolutionary junta, and afterward, with his confrère, General
Yegros, had been appointed Consul and invested with the supreme power.
“He was a lawyer,” Dawson tells us, “who had become a sort of demigod to
the lower classes by his fearless advocacy of their rights, and inspired
almost superstitious reverence by his reputation for learning and
disinterestedness.” A year later, the historian continues—
“He forced Yegros out, and, with general consent, assumed the
position of sole executive, and, in 1816, was formally declared
supreme and perpetual dictator. For the next twenty-five years
he was the government of Paraguay. History does not record
another instance in which a single man so dominated and
controlled a people. A solitary, mysterious figure, of whose
thoughts, purposes, and real character little is known, the
worst acts of his life were the most picturesque and alone have
been recorded. Although the great Carlyle includes him among the
heroes whose memory mankind should worship, the opinion of his
detractors is likely to triumph. Francia will go down to history
as a bloody-minded, implacable despot, whose influences and
purposes were wholly evil. After reading all that has been
written about this singular character, my mind inclines more to
the judgment of Carlyle. I feel that the vivid imagination of
the great Scotchman has pierced the clouds which enshrouded the
spirit of a great and lonely man, and has seen the soul of
Francia as he was. Cruel, suspicious, ruthless, heartless as he
undeniably became, his acts will not bear the interpretation
that his purposes were selfish or that he was animated by mere
vulgar ambition....
“He absorbed in his own person all the functions of government;
he had no confidants and no assistants; he allowed no Paraguayan
to approach him on terms of equality. When he died, a careful
search failed to reveal any records of the immense amount of
governmental business he had transacted during thirty years. The
orders for executions were simply messages signed by him and
returned to be destroyed as soon as they had been carried out.
The longer he lived, the more completely did he apply his system
of absolutism, the more confident he became that he alone could
govern the people for their good. He adopted a policy of
commercial isolation, and intercourse with the outside world was
absolutely forbidden. He neither sent nor received consuls nor
ministers to foreign nations. Foreign vessels were excluded from
the Paraguay River and allowed to visit only one port in the
southeastern corner of the country. He was the sole foreign
merchant. The communistic system inherited from the Jesuits was
developed and extended to the secular parts of the country....
Dreading interference by Spain, Brazil, or Buenos Aires, he
improved the military forces and began the organization of the
whole population into a militia. His policy, however, was
peaceful....