Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/172



142 TO THE COLONIA AND BUENOS AIRES.

to England the Asiento or slave importing contract, and thus built Liverpool and Bristol. In 1720 the Governor and Captain-General of Buenos Aires^ D. Bruno Mauricio de Zabala, was ordered by his crown to keep the Portuguese within certain limits, which were exceedingly uncertain. His successor Salcedo also threw himself heart and soul into the cause; and the result was the stubborn investment of 1736. It was ceded to Spain by the Treaty of Limits (January 13, 1750), a convention so upright as to be an era in the annals of diplomacy, and to cause an uncontemplated amount of misery. The melancholy result, the Guaranitic or Jesuit war, is admirably described in the Brazilian epic poem par excellence, "O Uruguay" of Jose Basilio da Gama. To the great joy of the Portuguese the treaty was annulled by Charles III. in 1761, enabling them to keep "The Colony." Then came the desperate siege (Oct. 30, 1762) by the Viceroy Lieut.- General D. Pedro de Zeballos, when the Portuguese squadron was destroyed despite the efforts of Captain Macnamara, of the Lord Clive, and of Penrose the poet, who went forth, not

The capitulation of the place, and the razing of the fortifi- cations, caused the death of the purest and the most pa- triotic of Portugal's many patriots. Gomes Freyre de Andrade, first Viceroy of Bio de Janeiro. The hero, however, broke his heart prematurely, for the new colony was in 1763 restored, by the Treaty of Paris, to Portugal. She yielded it up by the Second Treaty of Limits (S. Ildefonso, 1777), and she then finally retired from the Banda Oriental.
 * ' To sail triumphant o'er La Plata's tide."

The "endless question" of La Colonia stiU has significance. Like the present war it was a chronic struggle between the two great branches of the Ibero- American family. With your permission, therefore, I will throw overboard the