mained, we may learn from a horrible fact, which she tells us she relates on good authority. "In the Captaincy of Porto Seguro, within these twenty years, an Indian tribe had been so troublesome that the Capitam Môr resolved to get rid of it. It was attacked, but defended itself so bravely, that the Portuguese resolved to desist from open warfare; but with unnatural ingenuity exposed ribbons and toys, infested with small-pox matter, in the places where the poor savages were likely to find them. The plan succeeded. The Indians were so thinned that they were easily overcome!"—Voyage to Brazil, p. 9.
But if any one wishes to learn what are the wretched fruits of all the bloodshed and crimes perpetrated by the Spaniards in America, he has only to look into Sir F. B. Head's "Rough Notes on the Pampas," made in 1826. What a scene do these notes lay open! Splendid countries, overrun with a most luxuriant vegetation, and with countless troops of wild horses and herds of wild cattle, but thinly peopled, partly with Indians and partly with the Gauchos, or descendants of the Spanish, existing in a state of the most hideous hostility and hatred one towards another. The Gauchos, inflamed with all the ancient demoniacal cruelty and revenge of the Spaniards,—the Indians, educated, raised, and moulded by ages of the most inexpiable wrongs into an active and insatiable spirit of vengeance, coming, like the whirlwind from the deserts, as fleet and unescapable, to burn, destroy, and exterminate—in a word, to inflict on the Gauchos all the evils of injury and death that they and their fathers have inflicted on them. As Captain Head scoured across those immense plains, from Buenos
