were mostly pastoral. The Indians in the neighbourhood of each settlement had been reduced to slavery, and cultivated the fields that had been their fathers' for the benefit of their white masters. The Spanish proprietors lived like feudal lords, while the Spanish authorities left these remote regions largely to their own devices.
Conditions in Cuyo, the western province just across the Andes from Santiago de Chile, were substantially the same. A political dependency of Chile, the few external relations it had were with that captaincy-general. The Spanish grantees ruled their Indian slaves in patriarchal fashion; agriculture was the principal occupation; pastoral industry was not so profitable as in Tucuman, and the region was more isolated. In both Tucuman and Cuyo Spanish rule was superimposed upon a previously existing commercial and social structure. There was no attempt to expel or destroy the aborigines. On the contrary, they were the sole labourers and their exertions the chief source of the wealth of their conquerors. There began a process of approximation and mutual assimilation between the Spaniards and their semi-civilised subjects. While the former continued to be a privileged and ruling caste, the latter absorbed much European knowledge from them. The Indian language long held its own alongside of the Spanish and is still spoken in many parts of the region.
On the Atlantic side, among degraded peoples who had not progressed beyond the wandering and tribal stages of existence. Spanish settlement proceeded on entirely different lines. There existed no well-organised body politic, into whose control the conquerors could step with hardly an interruption to industry. Campaigns could not be made with the confident expectation of finding abundant accumulations of food en route. Expeditions among the squalid tribes were slow and dangerous and settlement stuck close to the rivers instead of following fearlessly across the plateau to the spots where the finest lands and the most flourishing Indian communities lay ready for the spoiler.
The beginnings of the coast provinces were painful and disastrous; the settlements were feeble; centuries elapsed before the natural advantages of the region were utilised, and before its accessibility and fertility drew a great immigration. The assimilation of Indian blood did not take place on a large scale, and the immigrants and their descendants became perforce horsemen and fighters.
Discovery of the Plate.—The Portuguese discovery of the east coast of South America, in 1500, was a disagreeable surprise to the Spanish government. The Treaty of Tordesillas had been framed with the purpose of giving America to Spain, while Africa and the shores of the Indian Ocean were left to Portugal. Nevertheless, the Portuguese vigorously asserted their right to the prize they had picked up by accident and insisted on the letter of the treaty. They promptly explored the coast as far south as Santa Catharina, six hundred miles north of the Plate, but they had asserted no ownership farther south at the date when the Spanish expeditions began to be sent to the South Atlantic.
In 1516, a celebrated sea-captain from the north of Spain—Juan Diaz de Solis—was sent out by the Castilian government to explore the southern part of the continent. He simply reconnoitred the Brazilian coast, where the Portuguese had not yet established any settlements, and, pressing on to the south, finally reached the Plate. His first impression on rounding Cape St. Maria, where the Uruguayan shore turns to the north-west, was that he had reached the southern point of the continent and discovered the sea route into the Pacific. But the freshness of the water in the great estuary undeceived him. Following along the northern bank, he landed with a small party and was attacked and slain by a tribe of fierce and intractable Indians.
When the news reached Lisbon, the Portuguese government protested against this invasion of territory, which it claimed lay east of the Tordesillas line. Portugal, however, did not follow up her protest or try to take possession for herself. At this very time a celebrated Portuguese navigator, Fernando Magellan, disgusted by the neglect of his own country, was urging the Spanish government to give him the means of carrying out his great project for the circumnavigation of the globe. He was confident he could reach the East Indies by rounding the southern point of South America or by finding a passage through the continent in higher latitudes than had yet been reached. The year 1519, when Magellan sailed from San Lucar on the first voyage around the world, was big with fate for Spain. Cortes was adding a new empire by the conquest of Mexico, thus giving Spain control of the world's supply of precious metals. The popular assemblies of Castile and Aragon, of Catalonia, Valencia, and Galicia, were preparing for a hopeless struggle against the might of a monarch who ruled two-thirds of Europe. At the very moment that Charles V. was crushing Peninsular freedom by brutal military force, the genius of Magellan and Cortes gave him the whole of America. Spain had heretofore been a federation of self-governing communes and provinces, but their independence was now destroyed. Military despotism proved strong enough to crush liberty, although it was unable to stamp out the feeling of local segregation. The very soldiers that conquered America took over an instinctive feeling that the central government was dangerous and inimical to the people—a sentiment which has always survived in some form among their descendants.
Magellan stopped at the Plate in the beginning of 1520, and explored the estuary to make sure that it did not afford the passage he was seeking. In October he reached the mouth of the strait that bears his name, and, wonderfully favoured by wind and weather, threaded his way to the Pacific in five weeks. Subsequent wayfarers were not so fortunate and the strait never became a practicable commercial route until after the introduction of steam navigation. In the succeeding hundred years not half a dozen ships reached the Pacific around South America. Practically, the Pacific was accessible only over the Isthmus or by the immensely long journey around the Cape of Good Hope. Nevertheless, the importance of this epoch-making voyage has not been overestimated. The Pacific became, in a sense, a Spanish lake, in which she could maintain at will a naval preponderance. She occupied the Philippines and secured control at leisure of the Pacific coast of America. However, the scientific results were more important. Thereafter, the thorough exploration of all the shores of the South Sea was only a question of time. Magellan's voyage made geography an exact science. He sketched the map of the world with broad and sure strokes and left nothing for subsequent explorers except the filling-in of details.
The occupation of the Philippines and Moluccas gave rise to new disputes between Spain and Portugal as to their rights under the Treaty of Tordesillas. The imperfect instruments of those days left the line doubtful on the eastern South American coast, as well as on the other side of the world. In 1526, Sebastian Cabot was sent by the Spanish government to determine astronomically the location of the line in America, and then to follow Magellan's track to western Asia. At the mouth of the Plate he heard rumours among the Indians of silver mines on the river's banks and of the existence of a great and wealthy empire at its headwaters. This was Peru—not yet reached by the Castilians on their way south from the Isthmus, but the coast Indians showed Cabot silver ornaments which had been passed from hand to hand from the highlands of Peru and Bolivia down the river to the Atlantic.
Cabot and his band of adventurers determined to neglect their surveying, trusting that the discovery of silver mines would excuse their disobedience. They spent three years in vain journeying and prospecting—exploring the Uruguay to the head of navigation and following up the Paraná as far as the Apipé rapids. Signs of neither silver nor gold, nor of civilised inhabitants, were found on either river. Their upper courses came down from the east—the direction opposite to that in which Eldorado was reported. The gently flowing Paraguay, coming down the plains in the centre of the continent, seemed to offer a better hope of success. But Cabot's forces and provisions were inadequate to penetrating farther north than the present site of Asuncion. Returning to a fort he had left on the lower Paraná, he found that it had been taken by Indians and its garrison massacred. Discouraged by such a succession of difficulties and misfortunes, he returned to Spain.
The news of Cabot's expedition, and its failure, stimulated the Portuguese to undertake the colonisation of the east coast of South America. Affonso da Souza started from Lisbon with an expedition, intending to take possession of the Plate. Lack of provisions, fear of the Indians, the presence of a Portuguese castaway—one of those insignificant chances that sometimes change the course of empires as a twig diverts the current of a river—stopped Alfonso before he reached his destination. Instead of establishing a colony on the estuary he founded San Vicente, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. This became the southern outpost of the Portuguese possessions,