The most fertile parts of the globe have always been fought for the most. Uruguay has been the Flanders of South America. Her admirable commercial position at the mouth of the river Plate has made her capital one of the great emporiums of the continent. On the track of the world's commerce, open to the currents of intellectual and industrial life which sweep from Europe into the luxuriant country of the southern half of South America or around to the Pacific, her people have always been in the vanguard of Spanish-American civilisation. Her productive, well-watered, and gently rolling plains are well adapted for agriculture and unsurpassed for pasturage. Here the Indians struggled hardest to maintain themselves and longest resisted the Spanish conquest. From colonial times, Argentines have crowded in from the west, Brazilians from the north, and Buenos Aireans and Europeans from the coast, until this favoured spot has become the most thickly populated country of South America.

The very strategic and industrial desirability of this region, and the ease with which it can be invaded, have made it the scene of constant armed conflict. Uruguay has been the cockpit of the southern half of the continent, and its people have been fighting continually through the one hundred and fifty years during which the country has been inhabited. They fought for their independence against the Spaniards, then against the Buenos Aireans, then against the Brazilians, then against the Buenos Aireans again, and in the intervals they have fought pretty constantly among themselves. In colonial times Montevideo was Spain's chief fortress on this coast, and that city has always been the favourite refuge for the unsuccessful revolutionists and exiles from the neighbouring states. The blood of the bravest and most turbulent Argentines and Rio Grandenses has constantly mixed with its population. By habit, tradition, and inheritance the older generation of Uruguayans in both city and country are warlike.

Though the military spirit had been vastly stimulated by peculiar political and racial circumstances, in later times commercialism has been nourished by geographical situation and the fertility of the soil and by European immigration. The interplay of these contending forces has been producing a marked people—a vigorous, turbulent race whose energies have apparently been chiefly employed in war, but who have found time in the intervals of foreign and civil conflict to make their country one of the wealthiest and most industrially progressive countries in South America. They are like the Dutch in their turbulence and in their eagerness to make money; and they are also like the Dutch in their determination to maintain at all hazards their separate national existence. Nevertheless, the origin of Uruguay was artificial. The reason for the country's separation from Buenos Aires was that Brazil regarded it as unsafe to permit Argentina to spread north of the Plate.

The territory of Uruguay is that irregular polygon which is bounded on the south by the Plate estuary; on the west by the Uruguay River; on the south-east by the Atlantic; and on the north-east by the artificial line which separates it from Brazil. Though the most favoured in soil, climate, and geographical position, it is the smallest country in South America, the area being only seventy-three thousand square miles. In prehistoric days, when a vast inland sea occupied what is now the Argentine pampa, Uruguay was the northern shore of the great strait which opened into the pampean sea. It is the southern extremity of the eastern continental uplift of South America. The last outlying ramparts of the Brazilian mountain system, greatly eroded and planed down into low-swelling masses little elevated above the sea, run south-west from Rio Grande into Uruguay, dipping into the Plate at the southern border. The north shore of the Plate estuary is bold, and not flat as is the opposite shore of Buenos Aires. There are, however, no mountains, properly so-called, in Uruguay, and nearly the whole surface is a succession of gently undulating plains and broad ridges intersected by countless streams, and covered, for the most part, with luxuriant pasture. The abundance of wood and water is an immense advantage to settlers, whether pastoral or agricultural. The extreme south-western corner, near the mouth of the Uruguay River, is alluvial. On the Atlantic coast there are level, marshy plains, due to the slow secular rising of the land and consequent baring of the ocean's bed.

The country is easily penetrable in every part. There are no mountain ridges or dense forests to interrupt travel, and most of the rivers are easily fordable. On the west, the broad flood of the Uruguay River gives easy communication to the ocean, while it affords protection against sudden invasions from the Argentine province of Entre Rios. The low and sandy foreshore of the Atlantic has no harbours, but after rounding Cape Santa Maria and entering the estuary of the Plate, there are several bays which afford some shelter for shipping. Maldonado, Montevideo, and Colonia are the principal ports, but the extreme shallowness of the Plate prevents them from being classed as first-rate harbours for modern vessels. At Montevideo itself, large modern steamers must anchor several miles out.

Possibly the present territory of Uruguay was reached by the Portuguese navigators who reconnoitred the coast of Brazil in the first few years of the sixteenth century, but they certainly made no settlements and left no clear record of their voyagings. In 1515, Juan Diaz de Solis, Grand Pilot of Spain, was sent out by Charles V. to reconnoitre the Brazilian coast in Spanish interests. He did not land on the shore of Brazil proper, but kept on to the south until he reached Cape Santa Maria, which marks the northern side of the entrance to the river Plate. To his left hand stretched beyond the horizon a flood of yellow fresh water flowing gently over a shifting, sandy bottom nowhere more than a few fathoms below the surface. It was evident that he was out of the ocean and sailing up a river of such magnitude as had never been dreamed of before. He followed along the coast, skirting the whole southern boundary of what is now the republic of Uruguay and finally reached the head of the estuary. Directly from the north the Uruguay, a river five miles wide, clear and deep, seemed a continuation of the Plate, but from the west the numerous channels of the ParanÁ delta poured in an immense muddy discharge double the volume of the wider river. At the junction was an island which Solis named Martin Garcia after his pilot. He resolved to take possession of the country in the name of the Crown of Castile, and to explore the coast. He disembarked with nine companions on the Uruguayan shore: here the little party was unexpectedly attacked by Indians; Solis and all his men but one were killed, and the ships sailed back to Spain without their commander.

Three years later Ferdinand Magellan, on his epoch-making voyage around the world, visited the coast of Uruguay. On the 15th of January, 1520, he came in sight of a high hill overlooking a commodious bay. This he called Montevideo—a name which has been extended to the city which long after grew up on the other side of the harbour. Magellan ascended the estuary, hoping that he might find a passage through to the Pacific Ocean, but after he had entered the Uruguay its clear water, rapid current, and want of tides convinced him that it was only an ordinary river and not a strait.

Spain determined to take possession of the Plate, and in 1526 sent out an expedition for that purpose under Diego Garcia. At the same time Sebastian Cabot was preparing another expedition, which was ordered to follow in Magellan's track and to make observations of longitude on the Atlantic coast of South America and in the East Indies. Spain and Portugal had already begun to dispute about the correct location of the line which they had agreed should divide the world into a Spanish and a Portuguese hemisphere, and which was believed to pass near the Plate. Garcia was delayed on the coast of Brazil, so Cabot reached the mouth of the estuary first. The latter had encountered bad weather and lost his best ship, and when he sighted the coast of Uruguay his men were discouraged. They remained in the mouth of the river for some time, and to their surprise a solitary Spaniard was encountered on the shore, who proved to be the only survivor of the party that had gone ashore with Solis ten years before.

Soon Cabot and his men heard tales of silver mines far up the river, and of the existence of a great civilised empire on its remote headwaters. Silver ornaments were shown which had come down hand to hand from Peru or Bolivia. Cabot determined to abandon his commission to the Moluccas, and to find the country whence the silver came. Naturally, his first effort was directed up the broad channel of the Uruguay, but on ascending this river it was soon evident that the mines and civilised country he was seeking did not lie on its banks. Fifty miles up the river at San Salvador the Spaniards attempted to establish a little post which is sometimes referred to as the earliest settlement in Uruguay or Argentina. It was probably intended as a mere supply depot and point of refuge, conveniently near the sea to aid the up-river expedition. However, the warlike Indians of Uruguay soon left no trace of it. Cabot entered the ParanÁ, where he spent three years in an unsuccessful effort to reach Bolivia. He and Garcia sailed back to Spain without leaving even a settlement behind them, but they were thoroughly convinced that an adequate expedition could find the silver country.

The tribes who inhabited Uruguay were the fiercest Indians encountered by the conquerors of South America. For two centuries they succeeded in preventing the establishment of settlements in their territory and kept out Spanish intruders at the point of the sword. The Spaniards greatly coveted the north bank of the Plate and made effort after effort to get a foothold there, but these savages managed to maintain themselves for a hundred and fifty years in the very face of Buenos Aires. The river shore itself was the last accessible and fertile region to be subjected to the whites. A century elapsed after the foundation of Buenos Aires before Colonia was occupied by the Portuguese, and another fifty years went by before Montevideo had been settled and fortified. Uruguay in pre-Spanish times, as well as since, was a meeting-ground for different peoples. One after another the Guarany tribes crowded into this favoured region from the north and west, and the old inhabitants had to fight and conquer, or be thrust into the sea. The bravest, best armed, and best organised tribes survived in the harsh struggle. Of the Indians inhabiting Uruguay when the Spaniards discovered the Plate, the principal ones were the Charruas. They occupied a zone extending around from the Atlantic, along the Plate, and a short distance up the Uruguay. This strong and valiant race never submitted to the Spaniards, and when at last they were defeated and crowded back from the coast well on in the eighteenth century, they retired to the north and maintained their freedom for many years. They belonged to the great family of Tupi-Guaranies, who occupied most of eastern South America at the white man's advent, but they were more nomadic in their habits and had developed the art of war to greater perfection than the mother tribes of the more tropical parts of South America.

In their fights against the Spaniards, they sometimes gathered armies of several hundreds which fought with a rude sort of discipline, forming in column and attacking in mass with clubs after discharging their arrows and stones. Possibly they learned some of their tactics from the white men, but it is certain that before the invasion they had developed a tribal organisation which enabled them to bring far larger bodies into the field than the tribes to the north, and that soon after the arrival of the whites they learned the military uses of the horse. Personal bravery and fortitude were the virtues most admired among the Charruas, and they chose their chiefs from those who had most distinguished themselves in battle. They did not practise cannibalism like their brother Guaranies on the Brazilian coast; they killed defective children at birth; they were moderate in their eating, lived in huts, and in winter covered themselves with the skins of animals. Altogether, they seem to have much resembled the more warlike tribes among the North American Indians and to have made the same effective resistance to the whites as did the Iroquois or Creeks. Such a fierce and indomitable people terrorised the Creoles, and settlement proceeded on lines of less resistance. The coast of Uruguay was long known as the abode of red demons who showed little mercy to the adventurous white who dared build a cabin on the shore, or ride the plains in chase of cattle. The forts established from time to time by the Spanish authorities in the early days were invariably starved out and abandoned, and the white man obtained a foothold only after the Portuguese and Spanish governments had fortified towns with walls, ditches, and artillery, which could be supplied with provisions from the water side, and after Entre Rios had been overrun by the gauchos.

Warned by the experiences of Solis and Cabot on the north shore, Mendoza, the first adelantado of the Plate, on his arrival in 1535, selected the south bank of the river as the site of the fortified port which he proposed to establish at the mouth of the ParanÁ as a base for his projected expedition up the river. His effort failed completely; he abandoned Buenos Aires, and the remnants of his expedition fled to Paraguay and founded Asuncion. In 1573 Zarate, the third adelantado, made a serious effort to establish a post in Uruguay. He had three hundred and fifty well-armed Spanish soldiers, more than the number with which Pizarro had conquered the empire of Peru, but they were not enough to make any impression on the Charruas. A company of forty men hunting wood was set upon and massacred, and when the main body tried to avenge this defeat, it, too, was driven back and only escaped to the island of Martin Garcia after losing a hundred men. The survivors were rescued by Garay, the most expert and successful Indian fighter of the time.

This experienced and far-sighted officer wisely left the Charruas alone and devoted his efforts to the other side of the river, where, in 1580, he founded the city of Buenos Aires. Hernandarias, the Creole governor of Buenos Aires, who shares with Garay the honour of establishing the Spanish power in Argentina, and who had already defeated the Pampa Indians from the Great Chaco in the north to the Tandil Range in Buenos Aires province, attempted, in the early years of the seventeenth century, to subdue the Charruas. He disembarked at the head of five hundred men in the western part of Uruguay. Few details of the campaign which followed have been preserved, but it is certain that the Spanish force was destroyed and that Hernandarias himself barely escaped with his life. Thenceforth, for more than a century, the Spaniards made no serious attempts to interfere with the Charruas; the coast of Uruguay was shunned by European ships, and the interior remained absolutely unknown.

It is probable, although not certain, that the Jesuits on the Upper Uruguay established some villages of peaceable Indians in the north-western corner of Uruguay proper, in the middle of the seventeenth century. A few Indians, it is certain, gathered under Jesuit control on an island in the Lower Uruguay, some fifty miles above Martin Garcia, about 1650. This was known as the Pueblo of Soriano, and is often referred to by Uruguayan historians as the first permanent settlement in their country. However, no real progress was made toward getting possession of Uruguay. The Charruas proved refractory to Jesuit influence, and only the milder Yaros and the tribes on the Brazilian border could be converted.

The horses and cattle which the Spaniards had introduced multiplied into hundreds of thousands and roamed undisturbed over the rolling, grassy plains of Uruguay, and occasionally parties of Creoles would land on the shore of the Plate and at the risk of their lives kill some steers and strip them of their hides. As time went on, the Indians became used to the white men and some trading sprang up, but for a full century after Buenos Aires had been in existence Uruguay remained unsettled by civilised man.