HISTORY OF THE BANDA ORIENTAL
The country, called in this work the Purple Land, was discovered byMagellan in the year 1500, and he called the hill, or mountain,which gives its name to the capital, Monte Vidi. He described it as ahat-shaped mountain; and it is probable that, four centuries ago, thetall, conical hat, which is worn to this day by women in South Wales,was a common form in Spain and Portugal.
In due time settlements were made; but the colonists of those days lovedgold and adventure above everything, and, finding neither in the Banda,they little esteemed it. For two centuries it was neglected by its whitepossessors, while the cattle they had imported continued to multiply,and, returning to a feral life, overran the country in amazing numbers.
The heroic period in South American history then passed away. El Dorado,the Spaniard's New Jerusalem, has changed into a bank of malarious mistand a cloud of mosquitoes, Amazons, giants, pigmies.
"The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders,"
when closely looked for, turned out to be Red Indians of a type whichvaried but little throughout the entire vast continent. Wanderersfrom the Old World grew weary of seeking the tropics only to sink intoflowery graves. They turned away sick at heart from the great desolationwhere the splendid empire of the Children of the Sun had so latelyflourished. The accumulated treasures had been squandered. The cruelcrusades of the Paulists against the Jesuit missions had ceased for theinhuman slave-hunters had utterly destroyed the smiling gardens in thewilderness. A remnant of the escaped converts had gone back to a wildlife in the woods, and the Fathers, who had done their Master's work sowell, drifted away to mingle in other scenes or die of broken hearts.Then, in the sober eighteenth century, when the disillusion wascomplete, Spain woke up to the fact that in the temperate part of thecontinent, shared by her with Portugal, she possessed a new brightlittle Spain worth cultivating. About the same time, Portugal discoveredthat the acquisition of this pretty country, with its lovely Lusitanianclimate, would nicely round off her vast possessions on the south side.Forthwith these two great colonising powers fell to fighting over theBanda, where there were no temples of beaten gold, or mythical races ofmen, or fountains of everlasting youth. The quarrel might have continuedto the end of time, so languidly was it conducted by both parties, hadnot great events come to swallow up the little ones.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the English invasion burstlike a sudden terrible thunderstorm on the country. Montevideo onthe east and Buenos Ayres on the west side of the sea-like river werecaptured and lost again. The storm was soon over, but it had the effectof precipitating the revolution of 1810, which presently ended in theloss to Spain of all her American possessions. These changes broughtonly fresh wars and calamities to the long-suffering Banda. The ancientfeud between Spain and Portugal descended to the new Brazilian Empireand the new Argentine Confederation, and these claimants contended forthe country until 1828, when they finally agreed to let it govern itselfin its own fashion. After thus acquiring its independence, the littleBelgium of the New World cast off its pretty but hated appellation ofCisplatina and resumed its old joyous name of Banda Oriental. With lighthearts the people then proceeded to divide themselves into two politicalparties--Whites and Reds. Endless struggles for mastery ensued, in whichthe Argentines and Brazilians, forgetting their solemn compact, were forever taking sides. But of these wars of crows and pies it would be idleto say more, since, after going on for three-quarters of a century, theyare not wholly ended yet. The rambles and adventures described in thebook take us back to the late 'sixties or early 'seventies of the lastcentury, when the country was still in the condition in which ithad remained since the colonial days, when the ten years' siege ofMontevideo was not yet a remote event, and many of the people one methad had a part in it.
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