This colonization system was broken up by the Mamelucos, the greedy folk of San Paolo, who, having enslaved the Indians of that part of Brazil, cast envious eyes upon the peaceful labour of the missions, which they longed to impress in their own services. They therefore began a series of merciless onslaughts on the settlements, which, however, valiantly defended themselves for a time. But the Arcadia was doomed to fall, and the Jesuits were expelled from Paraguay in 1768, and little remains now but the ruin of their wonderful work, which Nature rapidly covered up with her generous robes of flower and foliage, as if desirous of hiding from view the brutalities of mankind in this one of her fairest provinces of South America.
We shall now leave this fertile heart of the continent, to traverse with rapid strides a region of a very different nature: that of the "Far South"—a south, however, whose attributes of climate and general environment are not such as we generally associate with that point of the compass, and of which we have obtained a passing glimpse in our survey of the great Cordillera.
In the southern-most part of the New World, the tapering portion of the South American continent, lies a vast region of which comparatively little is heard or known, yet one which in the future must take its place in the economic development of the globe. This is the Territory extending throughout the lower portion of Argentina, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.
It is a land lying far beyond the Tropics, in part a sort of Siberia of South America, terminating in those regions which Magellan described as "stark with eternal cold."
We generally speak of Argentina and Chile as if they were compact topographical and political entities, instead of territories between two and three thousand miles long, covering zones on the surface of the globe comparable, as far as latitude is concerned, to one extending from nigh mid-Africa, through Europe into Scotland, with climate similarly varying.
But this southern land has great possibilities. It has received a bad name, largely resulting upon the description of Darwin, who visited it in the voyage of the Beagle, a reputation which more recent travellers have shown not to be deserved. Darwin spoke of the "curse of sterility" and of the eternally "dreary landscape," but, like Siberia, Patagonia may prove to be a region desirable in many respects.
Yet Patagonia strikes the traveller as huge and elemental, and settlement and development, as far as they go, are but the work of the few recent years. It offers great and abrupt contrasts of pampa and mountain, with rivers cutting across the plains from the Andes to the Atlantic.
"On the Atlantic coastline it is four or five days' ride to the nearest farm. In the interior Nature enfolds you with her large, loose grasp. Who, having once seen them, can forget the Pampas? Evening, and the sun sloping over the edge of the plain like an angry eye, an inky-blue mirage half blotting it out; in the middle distance grass rolling like an ocean to the horizon, lean thorn, and a mighty roaring wind. This wild land, ribbed and spined by one of the greatest mountain chains in the world, appears to have been the last habitation of the great beasts of the older ages. It is now the last country of all to receive man, or rather its due share of human population. Out there in the heart of the country one seems to stand alone, with nothing nearer or more palpable than the wind, the fierce mirages, and the limitless distances."[40]
However, farms and cattle ranges are springing up, and Nature has placed in one spot on the coast an important petroleum field, to say nothing of the valuable forests.