the ocean channel to the Pacific. Returning home with his hopes still high Solis, was authorised by his sovereign to explore his important discovery, and in 1516 he sailed into the delta of the great network of streams that have brought down upon their bosoms from the far Andes in the course of ages a large portion of the continent as we now know it.

To the Spaniard's eyes the land was not inviting. Far stretching plains of waving grasses, great expanses of marsh and swamp, league after league. No palaces and temples of hewn stone, like those of Peru and Mexico, met the eye here; no promise of gold in the fat alluvial soil; no cities where the arts were practised and treasure accumulated. Such Indians as there were differed vastly from the mild serfs of the Incas. Nomad savages were these; robust, stout, and hardy, elusive of pursuit and impossible of subjection in their wandering disunity. For three hundred miles through the endless pampa-country Solis sailed onward up the stream, his hopes that this way led to the Indies gradually fading as he progressed, until he and his men fell into a trap laid for them by the pampa Indians and were slaughtered.

Four years afterwards Magellan on his epoch-making voyage sailed up the great river; but he too fell a victim to the perils of the way in the Asiatic seas, and never returned to Spain to tell of his discoveries in the heart of South America. Then Sebastian Cabot, the Englishman in the service of Spain, was sent to explore, and if possible to take possession of the land for Charles V.; for the Portuguese claimed indefinite territory in this direction under the convention of Tordesillas, and it behoved Spain to assert ownership before it was too late. High up the river Paraguay Cabot found a country with different features and peopled by another race. Silver ornaments, too, he found in plenty amongst these Guaranies, to whom distant echoes of Inca influence had reached across the wastes and mountains to the west. But here, many hundreds of miles from the ocean and far from any base of supplies, it was impracticable for Cabot with the resources at his disposal to effect a settlement, and he also returned to Spain with his story of silver as an incentive for further expeditions.

This was in 1527, and in the following year the first attempt to establish a permanent footing on the Plate was made by the building of a fort at Rosario, but this was soon abandoned for a site on the sea coast of what is now a part of Brazil to the north of the river. In the meantime the Portuguese were busy advancing their posts to the north of the delta in order to assert their claims; and in face of this, rather than because remunerative metallic treasure from the new territory was to be expected, Charles V. authorised an extensive colonising experiment to be made and the great waterway and its banks claimed for Spain. The stirring history of Mendoza's attempts to found a settlement on the Paraná, the establishment of Buenos Aires and its abandonment again and again, the fateful colonisation of Asuncion, far up the river in the heart of the continent, the heroic adventures of Irala, Ayolas, and Cabeza de Vaca, and the reconquest of the river territories down to the sea from the isolated Spanish post of Asuncion eight hundred miles up stream, is adequately told in Mr. Hirst's pages, and need not be related here.

The permanent fixing of the flag of Spain on the territory east of the Andes was not less heroic an achievement than the more showy conquests of Peru and Mexico; for in the former case the incentive of easily won gold was absent, and the object was more purely national than was the case elsewhere. But, though it was necessary for Spain to assert her ownership over these endless pampas and the unexplored wastes beyond, the new territory was always subordinated to the gold-producing viceroyalty of Peru across the Andes. A glance at the map will show the almost incredible obstacles wilfully interposed by the home authorities upon the River Plate colonies in forcing the latter not only to be subject in government to the Viceroy of Peru, but to carry on most of their commercial communications with the mother country across the wide continent from the Pacific coast by way of Panama and Peru. The law was, of course, extensively evaded, and the luxuriant fertility of the pampa both for agriculture and grazing made the River Plate colonies prosperous in spite of Government restrictions.

The English slave-traders and adventurers made no scruple of braving the King of Spain's edicts; and the estuary of the Plate, within a few weeks' sail of Europe, saw many a cargo welcomed upon a mere pretence of force by the colonists whose lives were rendered doubly hard by the obstacles placed in their way by their own Government. In 1586 the Earl of Cumberland's ships on a privateering expedition to capture every Spanish and Portuguese vessel they encountered sailed into the River Plate and learnt some interesting particulars of the settlements from one of the unfortunate shipmasters they had plundered. These give a good idea of the difficulties under which traffic was then carried on. "He told me that the town of Buenos Aires is from the Green island about seventy leagues' standing on the south side of the river, and from thence to Santa Fé is one hundred leagues, standing on the same side also. At which town their ships do discharge all their goods into small barks, which row and tow up the river to another town called Asuncion, which is from Santa Fé a hundred and fifty leagues, where the boats discharge on shore, and so pass all their goods by carts and horses to Tucuman, which is in Peru." The commerce here referred to was probably the contraband trade done in spite of the Spanish regulations, for it was found that even to the far distant towns in the interior, like Tucuman and Mendoza, it was easier and cheaper thus to convey goods from Europe by the eastern coast than from the Pacific across the almost impassable Andes.

The Earl of Cumberland's factor gives also an account of the Spanish settlements then (1586) existing on the River Plate.[1] "There are in the river five towns, some of seventy households, some of more. The first town was about fifty leagues up the river and called Buenos Aires, the rest some forty or fifty leagues from one another, so that the uppermost town, called Tucuman, is two hundred and thirty leagues from the entrance to the river.[2] In these towns is great store of corn, cattle, wine and sundry fruits, but no money of gold or silver. They make a certain kind of slight cloth, which they give in truck for sugar, rice, marmalade, and sucket, which were the commodities this ship (i.e., the prize) had."

Thus with everything against it except its irrepressible natural advantages of soil and climate and its lack of mineral wealth, the colony grew in prosperity in spite of man's shortsightedness. There was no temptation here, even if it had been possible, for the Spaniards to exterminate the aborigines by forced work in unhealthy mines. The innumerable herds of cattle and horses that in a very few years peopled the pampa from the few animals brought from Europe and abandoned by the first settlers provided sustenance, even wealth, with comparatively easy labour to the mixed race of Indians and Spaniards, which took kindly to the half-wild pastoral life in harmony with the nomadic traditions of the