The Purple Land: Appendix

Appendix

HISTORY OF THE BANDA ORIENT�L

The country, called in this work the Purple Land, was discovered by
Magellan in the year 1500, and he called the hill, or mountain, which
gives its name to the capital, Monte Vidi. He described it as a
hat-shaped mountain; and it is probable that, four centuries ago, the
tall, conical hat, which is worn to this day by women in South Wales,
was a common form in Spain and Portugal.

In due time settlements were made; but the colonists of those days
loved gold and adventure above everything, and, finding neither in the
Banda, they little esteemed it. For two centuries it was neglected by
its white possessors, while the cattle they had imported continued to
multiply, and, returning to a feral life, overran the country in amazing
numbers.

The heroic period in South American history then passed away. El Dorado,
the Spaniard's New Jerusalem, has changed into a bank of malarious
mist and a cloud of mosquitoes, Amazons, giants, pigmies.

"The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders,"

when closely looked for, turned out to be Red Indians of a type which
varied but little throughout the entire vast continent. Wanderers from
the Old World grew weary of seeking the tropics only to sink into
flowery graves. They turned away sick at heart from the great desolation
where the splendid empire of the Children of the Sun had so lately
flourished. The accumulated treasures had been squandered. The cruel
crusades of the Paulists against the Jesuit missions had ceased for
the inhuman slave-hunters had utterly destroyed the smiling gardens
in the wilderness. A remnant of the escaped converts had gone back to
a wild life in the woods, and the Fathers, who had done their Master's
work so well, drifted away to mingle in other scenes or die of broken
hearts. Then, in the sober eighteenth century, when the disillusion
was complete, Spain woke up to the fact that in the temperate part of
the continent, shared by her with Portugal, she possessed a new bright
little Spain worth cultivating. About the same time, Portugal discovered
that the acquisition of this pretty country, with its lovely Lusitanian
climate, would nicely round off her vast possessions on the south side.
Forthwith these two great colonising powers fell to fighting over the
Banda, where there were no temples of beaten gold, or mythical races
of men, or fountains of everlasting youth. The quarrel might have
continued to the end of time, so languidly was it conducted by both
parties, had not great events come to swallow up the little ones.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the English invasion burst
like a sudden terrible thunderstorm on the country. Montevideo on the
east and Buenos Ayres on the west side of the sea-like river were
captured and lost again. The storm was soon over, but it had the effect
of precipitating the revolution of 1810, which presently ended in the
loss to Spain of all her American possessions. These changes brought
only fresh wars and calamities to the long-suffering Banda. The ancient
feud between Spain and Portugal descended to the new Brazilian Empire
and the new Argentine Confederation, and these claimants contended for
the country until 1828, when they finally agreed to let it govern
itself in its own fashion. After thus acquiring its independence, the
little Belgium of the New World cast off its pretty but hated
appellation of Cisplatina and resumed its old joyous name of Banda
Orient�l. With light hearts the people then proceeded to divide
themselves into two political parties--Whites and Reds. Endless
struggles for mastery ensued, in which the Argentines and Brazilians,
forgetting their solemn compact, were for ever taking sides. But of
these wars of crows and pies it would be idle to say more, since, after
going on for three-quarters of a century, they are not wholly ended
yet. The rambles and adventures described in the book take us back to
the late 'sixties or early 'seventies of the last century, when the
country was still in the condition in which it had remained since the
colonial days, when the ten years' siege of Montevideo was not yet a
remote event, and many of the people one met had had a part in it.

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