Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/123



FROM RIO DE JANEIRO TO MONTE VIDEO. 93

the next projection, the Punto del Este, is the true portal

of that river,

" to whose dread expanse, Continuous depth, and wondrous length of course. Our floods are rills."

The fixed white light of Maldonado, dim as that of any coaler, has been compared with a sentinel placed to plunder the poor : here begin the perils which caused the old navigators to call its river " Boca," " hell of pilots/^ Evidently the Phare should be at the danger^s end, and this is certainly Gorriti of the " Indians," alias Isla de Lobos, a rookery of seals and sea-lions. The Oriental Government having farmed out the hunting, on March 26, 1866, removed the light, because it injured a valuable trade. Mr. Buckley- Matliew, Minister Plenipotentiary to the Argentine Confede- ration, worked manfully to restore the " Lobos Light," and failed. The saintly owner of the rocky islet, an English- man well known from Monte Video to Tucuman, will, let us not doubt, embrace in turn the opportunity of wrecking fewer ships and losing fewer lives at the risk of catching fewer seals.

As we run along the coast, I recognise the country to be geographically the Brazil ; the hillocks, in fact, are the toe- tips of the gigantic Serra do Mar, eastern ghauts of the empire of the Southern Cross, whose stony wall has so long donjon'd us. Since 1806 it has been occupied alternately by English and Spanish, Portuguese and Brazilian troops. The latter have had it twice, and will have it again â€” as a Russian patriot, I would give my life for Stamboul ; as a Persian for Herat ; as a Brazilian, for the Banda Oriental. And we Englishmen do not forget that the incapacity of a genei'al of the Great Georgian epoch lost to us a colony which now would have been the grand depot of Eastern South America, and the brightest jewel of the British crown.