1535 Early Spanish Efforts
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 Parana 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.
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