He made, however, an exception of M. Bompland, the well-known companion of Baron Humboldt, whom he had some years before caused to be seized and carried off by an armed force, sent across the Paranã for the purpose, whilst engaged in his own inoffensive pursuits in the province of Corrientes. As there was no accredited French agent at Buenos Ayres at the time, I took upon myself to make another application to Francia, specially in favour of an individual in whose fate I could justly say that all the scientific world was interested; and I further offered to guarantee the fulfilment of any promise M. Bompland might himself choose to make, in case of his liberation, to return at once to Europe. I wrote in the same sense to M. Bompland, and enclosed my letter, open, to the Dictator, to forward to its destination if he approved of it. But, instead of doing so, he returned it to me, with a rude intimation that that must close our correspondence.[58]
I believe he was disappointed at finding that I could not concur with him in his notion of opening a direct trade between Great Britain and Paraguay, on which it appeared he had long set his heart, the rather as he expected thereby to be able to show to his own subjects his independence of his neighbours, and especially of the Buenos Ayreans.
That so extraordinary a state of things should so long have existed is I believe entirely to be ascribed to the miserable weakness of the adjoining provinces, which, had they been able to make the slightest combined effort, might long ago have put an end to the tyrannical rule of this crazy old despot. Nature will probably do this ere long, when it may be expected that Paraguay will once more join the confederation of her sister provinces.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] The same saints are invoked to keep down the rats—another plague of these countries—attracted, no doubt, by the smell of beef everywhere, as they are in the abattoirs of Paris. The eleven thousand Virgins were the guardian angels against the locusts.
[54] The best sort of tea, in which the Indians paid their annual tribute to the Crown.
[55] The Indians, under the system of the Jesuits, had been accustomed to work in community for a common stock, out of which all the wants of every individual were regularly and adequately provided for.
[56] A commutation of these tithes for a fixed revenue was agreed upon between the church and the municipal government of Assumption at an early period of the Spanish rule in that country.
[57] The Reign of Don Gaspar de Francia in Paraguay, being an account of a six years' residence in that Republic, by Messrs. Rengger and Longchamps, translated, 1827.