Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/125



LETTER II.

MONTE VIDEO â€” THE MURDER OF GENERAL FLORES.

Monte Video, August 11, 1868.

My dear Z ,

You ordered me to report to you in these letters more about men and modernisms tlian concerning cities and antiquities. I will therefore sketch the capital of this wee Republic, a South American Monaco, a dwarfish abortion amongst the Giants, with the very broadest touches.

Monte Video (not Video) has little of history, but " en revanche '* an awful name, " Cidade de San Filipe y Sant- iago de Monte Video."^ The Sjfaniards and Portuguese, whilst fighting for the Colonia and the Islet rock of Martin Garcia, mere wards, wholly neglected this, the true key of the vast Platine valley, and allowed the hide huts of pauper fishermen to occupy the only good port at the mouth of the Southern Mississippi. Presently it was fixed upon by the Brazilo-Portugiiese as a smuggling station, a fibre con- nected with the heart of the great Viceroyalty further inland. As late as 1726 the Governor of Buenos Aires, D. Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, described as a man of '^'^bizarra y arrogante presencia,^^ received the orders to crush the contraband, then worth to the Portuguese two annual mil- lions of dollars ; to drive the interlopers from their forts into the pauper land, now called the Province of Sao Pedro do Bio Grande do Sul, and with money supplied by the Viceroy of Potosi (not Potosi), and by the corvee of en- slaved aborigines, to found, in 1726, the settlements of