W. H. Koebel

“ That a mere handful of men should have banded themselves together to conquer a nation which counted its subjects by the hundred thousand, and which could claim a civilization that included great armies, remains almost beyond belief. The Incas themselves, moreover, were a conquering race, and their troops had marched to the north and to the south in their thousands, conquering nations less important than their own, and thus adding to the extent of the one formidable Empire of the Southern Continent. ”

“ Of all the Viceroyalties in the world, that of Peru was undoubtedly the proudest during the earlier Spanish colonial period, for the holder of the high office governed not merely a country, but the greater half of a vast Continent. Seeing that the colonial policy of Spain invariably tended to pit one of her subordinate Powers against another in order to avoid the acquirement of too much authority on the part of any special person, it was only natural that the authority of the Viceroy, although great, was not supreme even in his own dominion. ”

“ Columbus was admittedly a visionary. It was to the benefit of his fellow Europeans and to the detriment of the South American tribes that to his dreams he joined the practical side of his nature. Certainly the value of imagination in a human being has never been more strikingly proved than by the triumph of Columbus.
The enthusiasm of the great Genoese was of the kind which has tided men over obstacles and difficulties and troubles throughout the ages. He was undoubtedly of the nervous and highly-wrought temperament common to one of his genius. ”

“ The troops were landed on the Peruvian coast, and they marched inland, defeating such small forces as endeavoured to oppose their progress. The valour and greed of the little army were every day becoming more deeply stirred by the trophies of gold and silver which they captured as they went. Fate was fighting strongly in favour of these desperate Spaniards. No circumstances could have been better adapted to successful invasion than those which obtained when Pizarro and Almagro entered the country, although these adventurous spirits knew nothing of this at the time. ”

“ In order to arrive at a just appreciation of the situation it is necessary to realize that, although the policy of Spain had consistently demonstrated itself as discouraging towards learning and progress in every direction, to such an extent had the population of the colonies grown that this task of repression of the intelligence of a Continent had now become Herculean and altogether beyond the powers of the moderately energetic Spanish officials. ”

“ Amid the chaos which prevailed in Europe it was practically impossible to discover in whose hands the actual authority lay in Spain. The Spanish King, his rival Prince, Joseph Buonaparte, the Junta of Seville—all these reiterated their claims to the supreme authority. The storm of contradictions and disclaimers ended by proving clearly to the colonists what was actually the case. In Spain no single supreme authority existed. ”

“ A real crisis now arose. The Brazilians, devoted to Dom Pedro, implored him to remain; the Portuguese garrison spoke of removing him on a homeward-bound ship by force. The whole city was agog, and the excitement at fever-heat. In the midst of the turmoil the Brazilian troops surrounded the Portuguese, and, after obtaining a great strategic advantage, ordered them to march on board the vessels of the fleet bound for Lisbon. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The influx of foreigners alone worked an enormous influence in this direction. A country which until the revolution had been governed in a more autocratic fashion than probably any other in the modern history of the world had suddenly opened its doors, and its people stood blinking in the powerful light shining from the European civilization—an outer world, of which the majority of the colonists had had no previous conception. ”

“ Had Lopez been content to continue to act as supreme and all-powerful lord of every man and thing within his own frontiers, the affairs of Paraguay, enlivened at intervals by those salutary orgies of executions, might have drowsed on indefinitely. For a man of the temperament of Francisco Solano Lopez such comparative repression was impossible. He had dreamed himself Emperor of South America, and this he was determined to be. ”

“ On the whole, the rule of the Incas over the conquered races was beneficent, and these latter, sensible of the advantages offered them, were quite willing to weld themselves into the common Empire. Almost the sole respect in which they showed themselves merciless was in the manner in which their religious sacrifices were carried out. The Sun frequently proved himself greedy of human blood, and he was never stinted by his priests; human life, indeed, in the more populous centres was held rather more cheaply than is usual among people who had attained to the civilization of the Incas. ”

“ Death became rife among their ranks, and the hardships endured drove them to open rebellion. The armour and weapons of the Spaniards rendered any attempts of the kind abortive, and massacres and torturing completed the enslaving process of the wretched race.
Communication between the New and Old World was at that time, of course, slow and precarious in the extreme. Nevertheless, tidings of what was going on in the island of Hispaniola at length found their way to the ears of Ferdinand and Isabella. ”

“ The details of the men's discontent and of the leader's courage, persistence, and strategy have been the subject of thousands of works. The great contrition, moreover, of his mutinous crew, when after five weeks' sailing they sighted land, and their sudden admiration and almost worship of the great navigator, afford too familiar a subject to be dealt with here. Suffice to say that Columbus took possession of this first land—the island which he believed to form part of a continent—in the name of the Crown of Castile and Leon, christening this herald of a new world San Salvador. ”

“ The Dutch, always on the look out for a weapon with which to flog their enemies the Spaniards, had managed to glean intelligence of the successful warfare which the Araucanians in Southern Chile were waging against the Spanish troops. When the news of the separation of Portugal from Spain reached Holland, the position of that country's forces in Brazil became automatically somewhat unsettled—at all events in theory, and finally in practice. It was then that the idea occurred to them to establish settlements in equally fertile and less tropical climates. ”

“ Having now definitely obtained possession of the enormous territories of South America, it was equally the policy of both Spain and Portugal to retain the enjoyment of the new lands and of their produce for themselves alone. In order to effect this, stringent laws were laid down from the very inception of the colonization of the Continent. In a nutshell, they amounted to this: none but Spaniards might trade with the Spanish possessions of South America, and none but Portuguese with the Colony of Brazil. ”

“ A single tide of invasion was not sufficient to satisfy a mind such as his. Gathering together a second powerful army, he determined to strike at the south-eastern portion of Brazil in addition to its province of Matto Grosso. In order to effect this he demanded in arrogant tones from Argentina permission for his troops to cross the Argentine province of Corrientes. To this, as neutrals, it was impossible for the Argentines to consent. As a result, Lopez in a fury declared war upon Argentina, and, as though even this did not suffice, he next found himself at grips with the Uruguayan forces. ”

“ The fact, indeed, was that, although the acts and circumstances, politically speaking, of the River Plate provinces grew wilder and more desperate, the human substance of the nation was steadily improving and becoming enlightened—a somewhat curious paradox! Even during the tyranny of the most remorseless of the caudillos the enlightenment was working its way among the mass of the people. ”

“ To enter into the details of individual cases is impossible here, since volumes could be written on every separate decade, and on a score and more of the personalities of this particular epoch in Argentina alone. Paraguay stood out as an exception to the rest. In that State the reins of power fell into the hands of Dr. Francia, a merciless autocrat, who suffered nothing whatever to be disturbed within the frontiers of his country, and who now ruled with a ferocious tyranny, such as had scarcely been approached even in the darkest days of the early colonial age. ”

“ In South America itself, nevertheless, the social gap between the Spaniard and the colonial continued entirely unbridged, and the contempt of the European officials for the South American born was as openly expressed in as gratuitous a fashion as ever. Indeed, as the opportunities for education broadened for the colonists, it would seem that their Spanish alleged brethren affected to despise them still more deeply—no doubt as a hint that no mere learning could alter the solid fact that their birth had occurred without the frontiers of European Spain. ”

“ Hernandarias, it must be said, makes one of the most remarkable figures of all the high officials of the River Plate. He proved himself a strenuous warrior, and, anxious to extend his frontiers, he carried on a tremendous warfare with the fierce Indians of the Pampa. The Governor, moreover, was gifted with no little foresight and practical common sense. Finding it impossible to establish a footing among the implacable natives of Uruguay, he caused a number of cattle, horses, and sheep to be sent across the great river, and to be let loose among the rich pastures of that country. ”

“ Thus in India and in Africa the gulf between the white and the black has continued unbridged. The representatives of the British have remained as a governing race, relying upon the strict justice of their rule for its preservation. They have refrained from interference in the thousand jealousies and caste regulations with which the East Indies were, and are, honeycombed, becoming active only when oppression became barefaced. These officials, that is to say, have made a point of respecting the religions of the various tribes, and have even encouraged them to continue unmolested. ”

“ In the north of the Continent the enervating climate, facile conquest, and easy life had naturally tended to atrophy the energy of the Spaniards. In Chile, on the other hand, the constant and fierce struggles of the warlike natives, the hardships and frugal living, and the temperate and exhilarating atmosphere, tended not only to preserve the energy, but even to increase the virility of the settler in the south. ”

“ The Dutch had overrun Northern Brazil for the sole ostensible reason that it was a possession of Spain. Now that Portugal had freed herself from Spain, and that Brazil in consequence was once again a purely Portuguese possession, all reason for the Dutch occupation of the coast of Brazil was at an end. In Europe the situation was this: The Dutch and the Spaniards had been for generations at deadly enmity, while the rivalry between the Portuguese and the Spaniards had induced a hostility rather less deadly, it is true, but, nevertheless, sufficiently keen for the purposes of war. ”

“ The same news is carried likewise with great speed to Panama, from whence the merchants set out disguised like peasants, with their silver in jars covered with meal to deceive the officers of the revenue.... There is no trade more profitable than this, for their payments are made in ready money, and the goods sell higher than they would at any other market. It is not on this coast alone, but everywhere upon the Spanish Main, that this trade is carried on; nor is it by the English alone, but by the French from Hispaniola, and the Dutch from Curassoo, and even the Danes have some share in it. ”

“ Thus from the very inception of the Portuguese colonial era we are confronted with a race of half-castes, and we see the forces brought about by a mixture of blood and climatic conditions working more powerfully in the Portuguese colonies than in any others. The result was, in one sense, the formation of a new race, and an almost complete absence of rebellion and native unrest in those parts where genuine civilization had been attempted. ”

“ After a while Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, began to see that the materialization of his lifelong ideal was now no longer a matter of the dim distant future. The struggle had been severe, and the fortunes of war had proved fickle at the beginning. At one period it had seemed that even Nature had fought against the South American cause. At Barquisimeto an earthquake had shattered the barracks of the soldiers of the Independence, and many hundreds of troops were crushed beneath the ruins. ”

“ To expect fair government under conditions such as these was to conceive human beings on a higher plane than that on which they are wont to be planned. Indeed, notwithstanding the atrocities and financial iniquities which were rife throughout Spanish and Portuguese Colonies, to imagine the various officials as necessarily inhuman and criminal is, of course, absurd. ”

“ In the various treaties which were engineered from time to time between the Spaniards and the Araucanians, one of the most important clauses which the Spaniards invariably endeavoured to insert was to the effect that the Indians were to oppose to the utmost of their power by force of arms the founding of any foreign colony in the territories occupied by them. Thus the attitude of the Araucanians towards foreigners was apt to depend to some extent on whether they happened to be at peace or at war with their Spanish neighbours. ”

“ For each the situation in the New World formed an ample and, indeed, justifiable field.
Long before the first outbreak of hostilities in America Miranda had played the part of stormy petrel in other continents. Born in Venezuela, he had the advantage of a wider knowledge of the world than many of his compatriots; he had already taken an active part in the struggle between North America and Great Britain, and he had joined with Lafayette in the territories of the then British Colonies in order to assist the revolutionaries in their campaign. ”