consisting of eleven ships and eight hundred men, entered the Plata, and laid the foundation of Buenos Ayres. One of his first acts was to murder his deputy-commandant, Juan Osorio; and one of the next to make war on the powerful and vindictive tribe of the Quirandies, who possessed the country round his new settlement: the consequences of which were, that they reduced him to the most horrid state of famine, burnt his town about his ears, and eventually obliged him to set sail homeward, on which voyage he died.
These were proceedings as impolitic as they were wicked, in the attempt to colonize a new, a vast, and a warlike country; but it was the mode which the Spaniards had generally practised. They seemed to despise the natives alike as enemies and as men; and they went on fighting, and destroying, and enslaving, as matters of course. As they were now in a great country, abounding with martial tribes, we must necessarily take a very rapid glance at their proceedings. They advanced up the Paraguay, under the command of Ayolas, whom Mendoza had left in command, and seized on the town of Assumpcion, a place which, from its situation, became afterwards of the highest consequence. This noble country, stretching through no less than twenty degrees of south latitude, and surrounded by the vast mountains of Brazil to the east, of Chili to the west, and of Moxos and Matto Grosso to the north, is singularly watered with some of the noblest rivers in the world, descending from the mountains on all sides, and as they traverse it in all its quarters, fall southward, one after another, into the great central stream, till they finally debouche in the great estuary of the Plata. Assumpcion, situated at
