WHEN the expedition against Buenos Ayres was ready to sail, I obtained General Whitelocke’s permission to go with the army, under the hope of recovering the property I had in that city, and offered my service to the commissary-general, whom I accompanied. As the details of that disastrous enterprise have been long before the public in an official form, and as my own observations on the occasion are of no general interest, the reader will excuse me if I forbear all mention of them, and confine myself to some general remarks on the colony.
The population of Buenos Ayres and its immediate suburbs, exclusive of the country in its vicinity, has been ascertained to amount to upwards of sixty thousand souls. The proportion of females to males is said to be as four to one, but if we take into consideration that many men are almost daily arriving from Europe, as well as from the South American provinces, and that under the old government neither the militia nor the marine was recruited from the mass of the population, we shall find reason to conclude that the proportion of the sexes is not so unequal. In the interior, the excess of males is very great, for as the lands are granted in large tracts only, and but poorly cultivated, there is no encouragement for the laboring classes to marry and settle upon them. The poor are compelled to remain single, from the very bare resources on which they depend for subsistence, and are accustomed to consider the married state as fraught with heavy burthens and inevitable misfortunes. It is not uncommon to find estates, larger than an English county, with hardly more than an hundred laborers upon them, who subsist upon the sale of a little corn, which each is permitted to grow for himself, but only to such an extent as a single man can plough.
The various races which compose the population are as follow:
1. Legitimate Spaniards or Europeans. In Buenos Ayres there are about three thousand; in the interior the number is very trifling, except in Potosi, which, being a mining country, contains many.
2. Creoles; legitimate descendants from Spaniards or Europeans.
3. Mestizos, the offspring of European and Indian parents.
4. Indians, almost all of whom have some mixture of Spanish blood.
5. Brown mixtures of Africans and Europeans.
6. Mulattos of various degrees.