British exploits in South America; a history of British activities in exploration, military adventure, diplomacy, science, and trade, in Latin-America

Front matter

nu(:

%.Jy

Ho.

Part II The British In Colonial South America (-^^

V Early British Adventures in Spanish America . 101 VI Some Eighteenth-Century British Voyages to

South America 116

VII The British Expedition to the River Plate . . 141 VIII British Guiana and the Falkland Islands . . 156 IX British Fighters in the Cause of South Ameri- L^

can Independence (I) 163

X British Fighters in the Cause of South American Independence (II) 188

XI British Fighters in the Cause op South American Independence (III) 214

Part III

south AMERICA IN THE EARLY PART OP THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

XII The First British Relations with the New

Republics .:- 235

XIII Early Travelers and Traders in the Republics . 255

XIV The British in Brazil (I) 281

XV The British in Brazil (II) .;.... 295

XVI The British in Brazil (III) 311

XVII The British in Brazil (IV) 327

Contents

CHAPTER FAQB

XVIII The British in Brazil (V) 340

XIX The British in Brazil (VI) 364

XX The British in the South American Internal

Wars 374

Part IV

scientific and literary observers

XXI Some British Naturalists in South America . 395 XXII South America in English Print 420

XXIII Achievements of the British in the Nineteenth

Century (I) 481

XXIV Achievements of the British in the Nineteenth

Century (II) 494

XXV Achievements of the British in the Nineteenth

Century (III) 512

XXVI To-day and To-morrow in South America . . 525

Bibliography of Modern Works 555

British Arrivals in the River Plate at the Beginning OP THE XIXth Century .... 570 Index 573

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A South American Home Frontispiece

TAOING PAGE

Sir John Hawkins ..." 20

Sir Francis Drake 20

The Santos Eiver in Brazil 48

Old Fort at Mouth of Santos Eiver, Brazil 48

Island of Juan Fernandez 88i

Valdivia, Chile (1836) 102'

Conference of President O 'Higgins with the Indians . . 112

Ambrose O 'Higgins 124^

Sir Home Riggs Popham 144 ^

Lieutenant-General Whitelocke 144

General San Martin 168 "^

General Bolivar 184 '^

An Early View of Valparaiso, Chile 190 '^

Plaza de la Independencia, Santiago, Chile (early XlXth

century) 206 '

Araucanian Witch Doctors at "Work 218 '^

An Early Raid by Araucanian Indians, Chile 228^

A British South American on His Rancho 244

British South Americans 244

Crossing the Andes 262

South American Indian Encampment 276

Rio de Janeiro (1809) 300

Landing Stage, Rio de Janeiro (early XlXth century) . . 332

Public Gardens (1835) 332

Sugar Loaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro 372

Garibaldi 380 v'

General Rosas 380 ^^

ILLUSTRATIONS

TAOINO

PAQE

South American Indians 412

South American Cattle 432

South American Oxen 432

Early View of Valparaiso, Chile 456

Plaza San Martin, Mendoza, Argentina 472 '

Cattle Market at Montevideo 488

Plaza Constitucion Station, Buenos Aires 496

Avenue de Mayo, Buenos Aires 496

South American Indians 508 '

Old Print of the Llama and Indians 508

A Modern British South American Ship 516

Early Type of Royal Mail Steam Packet Company Ship . . 516

Railroad Construction in South America 520

Forest Clearing in South America 520 '

Viaduct Construction in South America 532

Bridge Construction in South America 532

Avenue Rio Branco, Rio de Janeiro 548

Street Scene in Rio de Janeiro 548 '

The publishers acknowledge with thanks the courtesy of The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in supplying several of the above illustrations.

PAET I THE NAVIGATORS

Chapter I The Romantic Peeiod In South America

The charm of the Americas — Iberian navigators — Prince Henry of Portugal and his seamen — Some famous captains — Columbus — ^Manner in which the English were attracted to the new lands — The English crusaders as comrades of the Portuguese — Ramifications of friendship which succeeded the first alliance — The interchange of Portuguese wines and English cloth — The alliance consolidated in battle against the Spaniards — The treaty of Windsor — The marriage of John of Portugal to Philippa of England — Prince Henry, the navigator of English blood on his mother's side — Some ethics of the slave trade — Effect of the discoveries of the new lands upon the English in Portugal — The return of the galleons — Awakening of the navigating spirit in the West of England — The story of Robert Machin — ^Romance which is alleged to have led to the discovery of Madeira by the English — Death of Machin and Anna d'Arset — Links connecting the tale with the accepted discovery of the island by Joao Gongalves Zarco — Sebastian Cabot — His South American discoveries made in the Spanish service — Condition of South America when William Hawkins, father of Sir John, set sail for that continent in 1530 — Achievements already effected by the navigators and conquistadores — Iberian colonization — Extent of the continent occupied — Questions of Indian and Negro labor — Doctrine of Las Casas — ^The early English navigators unwittingly act as the avenging spirits of the slaughtered Indians — Mistaken policy of the Spanish Einpire.

THE rich flavor of such names as the Spanish Main and the South Seas has retained its charm almost unimpaired from the dawn of the New World to the present day. For four centuries the promise of the new and rich lands has drawn adventurers from the North to compete with each other and with the descendants of those Iberian conquistador es who first set foot on the neck of a wondering continent.

The tale of the early Iberian navigators is clear enough, from the brave band of Portuguese voyagers, fathered by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, to Columbus and his comrades. It was the Portuguese who first drove boldly into the Western Ocean. Their seniority as discoverers is not to be questioned. It was some three quarters of a century before Columbus set sail for the West when their two seamen, Bartholomeu Perestrello and Joan Gongalves Zarco, discovered the islands of Porto Santo and Madeira respectively in 1419 and 1420: But after this the more famous of the Portuguese navigators, such as Nuno Tristao, Vasco da Gama, and Pedro Alvarez Cabral (although this last was at a later period responsible for the discovery of Brazil), forsook the western course for the southern, and, fringing the African coast, turned to the east, and sought India and China by way of the Cape of Good Hope.

The significance of the voyages of Columbus and of the other navigators in the service of the neighboring kingdom of Spain is perhaps even more generally understood. The manner in which one of these great events followed on the heels of another has been made abundantly clear. But what of the English? How did these Northern islanders come to put their spoke into these new wheels of land and water from which their home was so remotely situated? What was it that first set on the track of the tropical seas the bearers of such charmed names as Hawkins, Drake, Ealeigh, Cavendish, and Dampier? For a sufficiently comprehensive answer to all this it is necessary to hark back to a precolonial age, almost three centuries before the discovery of Madeira.

It was as early as 1147 that a number of English crusaders, on their way to the Holy Land, halted on the banks of the Tagus, and assisted the Portuguese to capture the city of Lisbon from the Moors. The men of the oak and the men of the olive found that, however much they might differ in complexion, they had at least much sympathy in common. Thus was begun the alliance between England and Portugal.

The relations between the two countries rapidly became consolidated. The following year, 1148, we find an Englishman, Gilbert of Hastings, as Bishop of Lisbon. In 1217 another fillip was given to this international friendship by the arrival of a second, and more formidable, army of English crusaders, by whose assistance a Moorish army of fifty-five thousand men was completely defeated.

Nearly twenty years after the falling through of a proposed matrimonial alliance between the English and Portuguese royal houses, the earls of Lancaster and Arundel arrived in Portugal in 1344, charged with an important mission of friendship, and three years after this some further matrimonial schemes were drawn up, but these, too, proved abortive. These delicate failures seemed to have no ill effect on the relations between the two countries. Commercial bonds had now entered into the field to strengthen the military friendship. Through the instrumentality of a young Portuguese wine merchant, sent on a mission to London, many special agreements and clauses were arrived at between the English and Portuguese merchants. As a result, the red wines of the Douro Mountains and the CoUares and Algarve slopes began a northward journey in ships, which they have continued practically without intermission from that day to this, while the first consignments of an equally lengthy and unbroken procession of English clothes began to come rolling southwards across the Bay of Biscay.

It is certainly curious that in those days of small and cranky ships we should have established our most intimate relations with a people dwelling just the wrong side of the dreaded Bay of Biscay ! The bay whose entrance is guarded by the jagged and equally menacing rocks of Ushant! But so it was. At the beginning of the fourteenth century English merchants were already familiar with Portuguese soil, while in 1381 two thousand fresh English men-at-arms set sail for the Tagus. Four years later these were followed by five hundred English archers, who fought side by side with the Portuguese among the vines and olives, and whose long-bows twanged to some purpose on the field of Aljubarrota, where the Castilian knights went down before them.

In 1386, the following year, the treaty of Windsor confirmed the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, and this friendship — no new thing even at the time of the compact — ^has lasted, practically unbroken, from that day to this. Surely this must constitute the oldest-standing known treaty in the history of the world !

The following year John of Gaunt triumphantly entered Portugal at the head of an English army of two thousand lances and three thousand archers, and on the second of February, 1387, his daughter Philippa, by his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, was married to King John of the then solid realm of Portugal.

Those who have taken the trouble to wonder what these affairs of crusaders, cloth, and port wine have to do with the English in South America will now begin to obtain some inkling. For one of the issue of this marriage was Prince Henry the Navigator, the first and greatest patron of deep-sea voyagers, who devoted himself heart and soul to the science of discovery. It was he who called astronomers and mathematicians to his aid, and who, zealously studying the problems of the ocean in his austere Sagre Castle on the southern Portuguese coast by Cape St. Vincent — the nearest point in all Europe to tropical America! — directed the voyages of those famous mariners who sailed into the unknown.

Thus the friend and patron of the Portuguese sea captains — the leading navigators of their day — was of English blood on his mother's side. It was under his auspices that central and southern Africa, India, and Brazil were discovered, and that Lisbon became the western gate of Europe, while decaying Venice bewailed the loss of her monopoly of the overland trade route to India.

From the modern point of view it can scarcely fail to militate against Prince Henry's repute that he should have been the founder of the Negro slave-trade. But, according to the morality of the fifteenth century, the procedure was not only excusable; it was sound policy. For centuries the Portuguese had become accustomed to the enslaving of prisoners in the hands of the Moors, and they themselves — in common with all the European nations of the Mediterranean coast line — ^had retaliated in similar fashion, until that degraded condition had grown to be regarded as a part of ordinary life. The war-worn and depopulated lands of Southern Portugal were sorely in need of tillers. It must be the business of his captains, the Navigator decided, to supply this need. A point of interest in connection with this is that it was owing to their intimate association with the Portuguese, whose example they copied, that the English first approached the coasts of Spanish America as carriers of those slaves who were destined to labor in the mines and plantations of the conquistador es.

The noises of these great discoveries sounded but dully in the ears of most of the Northern Europeans, who had small means of grasping fully what was afoot. But the case was very different with those English who, encouraged by the crown and welcomed by the inhabitants, found themselves in Portugal at that period. These saw with their own eyes the return of the deeply laden galleons, as their painted bows breasted the rapid tide of the broad Tagus. They watched the processions bearing treasure, spices, strange woods, and stranger aboriginal huinan beings from the landing place at Belem to the center of Lisbon.

They heard, moreover, with their own ears the barking of the cannon and the booming of the church bells that saluted the return of a rich armada from the Indies or Brazil. Many of them made overtures to the returned mariners, and, over deep cups of Lisbon wine, listened eagerly to the tales of the glittering South — tales of what the sailors had actually seen, as well as those vaporings of their vivid imaginings concerning what lay behind the mere fringe of the New World that they had so far explored.

When these tales floated northwards from the blue skies to the gray, they were answered by a stir in the blood of the Englishmen, more especially in the West, the center of the chief intercourse with Portugal, where the bales of cloth slid down into the holds and the barrels of wine rumbled out on to the quays. We thus at length arrive in England, together with these amazing reports and rumors ! Very soon the echoes of these began to be heard in Plymouth, where William Hawkins, a fine old sailor of King Henry the Eighth's, was preparing to unfurl his sails for the first equatorial voyage ever made by an Englishman with an English crew.

But before we get into the stride of this — or into the wash of Hawkins' wake, whichever you prefer — let us dispose of three remaining preliminary matters and thus clear the decks for consecutive action.

The first of these concerns the story of Robert Machin, almost certainly the first Englishman, mythical or physical, to sail the Western Ocean. The legend runs that in the first half of the fourteenth century there lived in the southwest of England a man, Robert Machin, of a gentle but impoverished family. In an ill-starred moment he became enamored of a lady, Anna d'Arset, of a rank superior to his own. In addition to her noble birth, Anna d'Arset possessed rare beauty, large fortune, and stern relatives. These last, observing with sordid anger that the Lady Anna regarded Machin with favor, caused him to be flung into prison, and presently forced Anna d'Arset into a marriage with an abhorred but wealthy nobleman.

The marriage once celebrated, all futile romance was considered at an end. The detested husband bore his bride away to his castle near Bristol, and Machin, now considered a negligible factor, was released from his cell. But his persecutors had failed to reckon with the real ardor of the foiled lover. Machin, collecting a small band of tried friends, proceeded to Bristol, and opened his plan of campaign. He succeeded in communicating with the Lady Anna, whose conjugal ideas appear to have been in advance of her times, and eventually procured her escape from the castle. This once effected, the entire party fled from Bristol in a small vessel, hoping to reach France. But the elements showed no greater pity upon the lovers than had Anna d'Arset's family. Assailed by tempestuous weather, the amateur sailors missed their desired port, and in great tribulation were tossed about for days on the broad, roaring ocean.

On the dawn of the fourteenth morning, the hapless wanderers discerned the loom of a dark mass across the waters. Full daylight revealed an island. They had arrived at a fair spot, Madeira. The storm had died away ; all was peace and sunshine now. White and yellow birds flitted about the vessel, while for a background stood the fairylike island.

Here Machin landed, accompanied by his ladylove and some others of the party. But misfortune still dogged the pair. Lost in the rapture evoked by their surroundings, the small company delayed the landing of such few necessary articles as they had brought with them. A sudden tempest arose and blew the vessel from its anchorage out to sea. The next morning there was no trace of it, nor of the party that had remained on board. This final catastrophe marked the end of the beautiful Anna d'Arset, doubtless much weakened by her sufferings at sea. Neither the beauty of the spot nor the presence of Machin sufficed to counteract the shock. She expired in the arms of her agonized lover, and he, for his part, survived her but a few days.

Machines last request to his friends was that his remains should be placed in the same grave with those of his beloved. His wish was faithfully executed. Above the bodies of the ill-fated couple was erected an altar shaded by the branches of a stately tree. Upon the altar was inscribed the tragic history of Machin and Anna d'Arset, and a pious request that if Christians should ever come to settle in the island they should erect a church upon the spot.

A number of the earlier historians seem inclined to give full credence to this story. Gaspar Fructuoso, the sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicler, for one, endeavors with some seeming success to pick up links connecting the tales told by the survivors of Machin 's voyage with the accepted discovery of the island by the one-eyed explorer, Joao Gongalves Zarco, in 1420.

Even at the present day the very rare visitors to the little Madeirense town of Machico — the nomenclature is significant — are shown a very small and ancient chapel, which is said to be in part the original building which Zarco piously constructed over the bodies of the dead lovers.

But the features of the tale, if they ever existed in material life, are much obscured by the mist of ages. Perhaps at this stage of the book it may seem that I have dragged in Machin and the Lady Anna rather superfluously by their dead or mythical heels. I have merely introduced them to show the possibility that an Englishman made an excursion into the Western Ocean before any other European plowed it with his keel on his way to the Americas in search of the road to India.

The second matter may be tackled with considerablymore assurance, since, concerning Sebastian Cabot, it rests at least on a secure historical basis. The memory of Cabot, great navigator and explorer though he was, suffers just a little from the variety of his interests, when living. The name of Columbus, though himself an Italian, is an indissoluble part of the birthright of every Spaniard. There are other explorers, too, whose feats have made them part and parcel of a land which could not claim them by birth or descent.

But the case of Cabot is not on all fours with any of these. A Venetian by birth and an Englishman by choice, he served the Spanish Empire as well as the land of his adoption. On this account it is a little difficult to determine the neighborhood of his correct niche in history. It is doubtless owing to this that some inevitable neglect has supervened, and that many of the more intimate details of his career are unknown. *'He gave England a continent," says an American author, "and no one knows his burial-place."

Some side issues of the evil fate which has dogged this great man's memory enter even into these pages, for, although Cabot, having two Englishmen in his company, sailed southwards to investigate Brazil and the river Plate in 1527, and thus formed one of the first flight of the explorers of the South American mainland, he achieved this not in the English service but as a high official of the Spanish marine. So, for the particular purposes of this book Cabot must remain unclaimed, and the first of the English keels to enter the Southern Ocean and our picture must be that of the first of the three most notable generations of navigating Hawkins'.

Before setting sail with him we must take a rapid survey of South America as it was when the first flight of seamen from the North were preparing to invade its privacy.

When William Hawkins set sail from Plymouth in

1530, the tide of Iberian colonization had not yet swollen to its full flood. Spain had succeeded in planting her foot firmly on the coast of what is now Venezuela and on the Isthmus of Panama, whence she was preparing to send her forces southwards to conquer the Pacific slope. But the great Empire of the Incas still lay intact among its gigantic mountain ranges, and Pizarro had not yet destroyed the Inca rule, nor slain the Emperor Atahualpa, nor plundered the heavy gold of the sacred cities near Lake Titicaca.

It was only on the eve of such mighty occurrences as these that William Hawkins sailed his ship out of Plymouth. At that period, too, was still lacking the Spanish colonizing stream which, headed by Pedro de Mendoza, was to set in from the southeast and embrace the countries of the river Plate and Paraguay.

The coast of Brazil had been explored by Cabral, Pinzon, and others, and the wonted stone pillars engraved with the arms of Portugal had been left at various points on the shore. Moreover, the Portuguese, following another custom of theirs, had marooned a few of their condemned criminals among various tribes of the coastal Indians — a procedure which had a double advantage in that it served to test the real sentiments of the Indians (for if the Portuguese were found alive in their midst by any subsequent expedition it might be taken for granted that the natives were friendly!), and to prepare, by this humble and somewhat maculate instrumentality, the mind of the aboriginal for the advent of the white man.

But the actual settlements of the Portuguese on the Brazilian coast had as yet scarcely come into being. Bahia, the first real center of Portuguese colonization, was still the haunt of Indians, and Rio de Janeiro itself had not yet even been discovered.

It was only on a narrow strip of the right shoulder of the continent, therefore, that active colonizing was proceeding. Elsewhere the red-skinned South American Indian was still permitted to attend to his own affairs himself and had not yet been forced into the fatally hard labor of the mines, which sent so many millions of these unfortunate folk to their death.

It is true that the pity which cannot fail to be meted out for the sufferings of these long-dead Indians is in some instances apt to be tempered by a closer acquaintance with some branches of the modern race. After reading ''Richard Spruce," for instance, the inclination is to bestow an extra amount of commiseration on the aboriginal female and a lesser amount on the male. That botanist's opinion of the average Indian of the forests with whom he was brought into contact was that :

''He is naturally apathetic and dislikes exertion; but he makes his wife work like a slave. On the Rio Negro I have seen the poor women grating mandiocca by moonlight until midnight; and they must be stirring before daybreak to give their husband his morning drink ; while he, extended in his hammock, is warming his nether extremities near a fire which must not be allowed to go out. When I had seen this, I felt no pity for the Indian when the white man took him by force to row his boats and do other work for him. * '

But this comment affords no excuse for the methods adopted by the conquistador es.

Those who endeavor to follow the workings of fate and of a poetic justice, which is only too rare on this earth, may derive an instance from the retribution which overtook the Spaniards in their inhuman policy toward the aboriginal tribes. So stupendous was the wastage of native life that the Indian's best friend, Bishop Las Casas, saw no other remedy but the homeopathic measure of the introduction of the Negro slave — in order that the sturdy African should bear part of the other's burden, and that, instead of the extinction of the one race, the two should continue to live and to labor side by side.

The remedy served well enough to tide over the crisis ; but it was in this remedy that lay the seeds of incalculable loss and tribulation to the Spaniards of the succeeding generations. For it was this transport of the Negro slave from West Africa to South America that brought upon the scene such men as Sir John Hawkins and his bold sea-dogs. And when the Spaniards, resenting the growing familiarity of these sailors with their tropical coasts, turned upon them to chase them away, they frequently enough found the proof that they had caught a tartar in the torn planks of their sinking galleons and the smoke and flames of their burning coast towns.

So the early English navigators — although they had no intention of posing for the part — of which, indeed, they were profoundly unconscious — served as very efficient avenging spirits of the countless slaughtered Indians. At the same time it must be candidly supposed that this retribution would never have been brought about had not the Spaniards begun their long, incessant, and hopeless struggle to retain as their close and private property the territories of a continent and a half !

It is clear enough now that no empire, however majestic, could build a fence strong enough to shut off so large a part of the world from the rest of the earth's inhabitants. But Spain made a conscientious and costly endeavor to achieve the impossible, and it was in the course of frustrating this attempt that the admirable group of Elizabeth's English sailors learned much of their seamanship !

CHAPTEE II

THE FIEST ENGLISH MAEINEKS TO SAIL THE SPANISH MAIN

William Hawkins not the first Englishman to sail South American seas — Sir Thomas Pert — Thomas Tison — William Hawkins' voyage to the Brazilian coast — Marine superstitions of the period — William Hawkins' intercourse with the Brazilian Indians — One of these latter is taken to England to be shown to King Henry VIII — Notwithstanding the Indian's death, the English hostage is released by the Brazilians on William Hawkins' return to Brazil — Other early voyagers — Robert Eeniger — Thomas Borey — Thomas Pudsey — Sir John Hawkins — Spanish attitude toward foreign seamen — Pope Alexander VI's division of the earth — Establishment of the Inquisition in Lima — John Hawkins carries slaves from West Africa to Spanish America — Respectability of the sixteenth-century slave trade — General theories concerning the Negro — John Hawkins' financial supporters — Reception of his squadron in Hispaniola and on the mainland — A profitable expedition — John Hawkins' second voyage — Episodes in West Africa — Trade complications in Spanish America — The ways of imperial officialdom — On his next voyage John Hawkins is accompanied by Drake — Drake's youth — ^How his early days were spent — Hawkins' squadron off West Africa — Fruitless treaty with a Negro potentate — Increasing oflBcial difficulties concerning the disposal of slaves in Spanish America — John Hawkins storms Rio de la Hacha — His squadron treacherously attacked in the harbor of San Juan de Ulloa — Losses of the English after a desperate defense — ^Escape of John Hawkins in the Minion, and of Drake in the Judith — ^Privations endured on the homeward voyage — Drake's voyage in the Pacha — El Draque avenges San Juan de Ulloa — Depredations on the Spanish Main — The Pacific sighted — Captain John Oxenham penetrates to these forbidden waters — His achievements there — ^Some of his men betrayed by floating feathers — Capture and execution of his company — Drake, Queen Elizabeth, and King Philip of Spain — Circumnavigation of the world — His squadron, men, and sentiments — Some episodes of the voyage — Paraphernalia of a progress of state — Feats of compression — Drake loses his cap to a Southern Indian — The tragedy of San Julian — Execution of Captain Doughty — ^The Golden Hind sails alone into the Pacific Ocean — The rich reward of his daring — ^The toll of the South Sea — Lady Elliott Drake and Miss Zelia Nuttall on Sir Francis Drake — A notable map— Episodes on the Pacific coast — Effect on the morale of the Spaniards — Drake's last voyage — In the course of a less successful expedition — Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake die within a short period of each other — Andrew Barker's voyage — Mutinous spirit of the oflBcers and crew — Punishment dealt out to the survivors of an imfortunate expedition — Richard Hawkins' voyage to the Spanish Main in 1593 — His theories concerning the nomenclature of ships — His prolonged fight against an overwhelmingly superior Spanish fleet, commanded by Don Beltran de