Argentina

The most stupendous achievement ever attained by a nation in so short a time was the discovery, conquest, and settlement of Mexico and South America by Spain within the compass of a century. To fix indelibly and for ever upon the peoples of a vast continent the language, religion, customs, polity, and laws of a nation on the other side of the globe called for qualities which could only be temporarily evoked by an irresistible common sentiment. The sentiment which gave to Spain for a time the potency to carry through simultaneously the tasks of imposing religious orthodoxy upon Christendom and founding her great colonial empire was pride: pride of religion, race, and person, deliberately fostered by rulers for political ends. This origin of the delusive strength that carried the Conquistadores through an untracked continent regardless of perils and sufferings, and made South America Spanish, rendered inevitable that the rewards, national and individual, should disappoint the recipients. For pride and its concomitant covetousness are never satisfied; and the frenzied thirst for rapid riches and distinction that spurred the Spanish explorers and conquerors onward rarely ended in the idle luxurious dignity that was their goal, and it ultimately brought to the mother country nought but penury and degradation.

It was ignorance of economic truth that led Spaniards in the sixteenth century to regard the possession of the precious metals as wealth, regardless of circumstances: and the error coloured the whole domination of Spain in the New World. That the nation and the individual should hope to become permanently powerful and rich by obtaining vast stores of the metallic medium whilst discouraging productive industry appears to modern ideas ridiculous, but to the discoverers of America it was regarded as quite the natural course of events. The effect is seen in the rapid subjection and development of the regions believed to be rich in the precious metals, and the comparative neglect of the vast territories where patience and the labour of man were needed to win nature's abundant bounty from the fertile soil.

The west side of the South American Continent, though furthest from Europe, therefore took precedence of the eastern coast in the efforts and regards of the conquerors. When the piled-up riches of the Incas and the inexhaustible mines of the Peruvian Andes beckoned to the greedy adventurers from the mother country, the endless alluvial pampas and dense primeval forests of the east might call in vain. From Panama down the Pacific Coast, therefore, the main tide of conquest and empire flowed, drawn by the magnet gold; and on the northern continent a similar course was taken. The Aztec empire with its accumulated treasures absorbed an ever-increasing stream of Spaniards, whilst the more northern territories now included in the United States were left later to English settlers, whose hopes were not centred upon wringing yellow metal from the earth, but upon founding a free new agricultural England across the sea.

Thus it happened that to navigators in search of the short cut to Asia rather than to the typical Conquistador was left the first exploration of what we now know is the coming emporium of the South American Continent and its permanent centre of productive prosperity. Domingo de Solis, chief pilot of Spain, was sent by Charles V. to South America not as a settler, or primarily as a gold-seeker, but as an explorer; and when in 1508 he entered the noble Bay of Rio Janeiro it seemed at last that the object of his quest was gained, and that here was the coveted waterway to the East. But he soon found out his mistake, and when, sailing further south, he crossed the wide estuary of the River Plate, his hopes again rose that this tremendous volume of water, a hundred and fifty miles wide at the mouth, was not a river merely, but the ocean channel to the Pacific. Returning home with his hopes still high Solis, was authorised by his sovereign to explore his important discovery, and in 1516 he sailed into the delta of the great network of streams that have brought down upon their bosoms from the far Andes in the course of ages a large portion of the continent as we now know it.