the Spaniards in possession of the strategic points, and the inhabitants divided in their sympathies, would be suicidal. On the other hand, to attack and defeat the Spanish forces in Peru itself was absolutely necessary. The three hundred thousand inhabitants of Argentina, distracted by intestine warfare, could not hope indefinitely to resist the Spanish power, backed by secure possession of the rest of the continent. Decisive victories were necessary to encourage the partisans of independence in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
San Martin's solution of the problem was to organise an army on the eastern slope of the Andes; to invade Chile; to drive the Spaniards thence, and make that country the base of further operations; to improvise a fleet and with it gain command of the Pacific; and, finally, to attack Peru from the coast. The scheme seemed complicated, but San Martin was one of those rare geniuses born with a capacity for taking infinite pains, and his pertinacity was indefatigable. He foresaw and provided against every contingency and carried his plan to a triumphant conclusion. The story of the liberation of South America within the succeeding eight years might be completely told in the form of two biographies—San Martin's and Bolivar's.
Trusting the defence of the Bolivian frontier to a few line soldiers and the gauchos of Salta, San Martin solicited and obtained an appointment as Governor of Cuyo. This province was directly east of the populous central part of Chile, and was the refuge of the patriot Chileans who had been compelled to flee into exile after quarrels among themselves had delivered their country to the Spaniards. His authority was purely military and derived only from the dictum of the revolutionary government at Buenos Aires, but San Martin was not a man to hesitate on account of scruples over constitutional questions. He laid the province under contribution and started to create an army capable of crossing the Andes and coping with the Spanish regulars in Chile. The inhabitants of Cuyo were determinedly anti-Spanish, brave, enduring, and enthusiastic. It was a good recruiting ground in itself; the Chilean exiles were numerous and all anxious to join in an effort to redeem their country. The government at Buenos Aires sent him a valuable addition in a corps of manumitted negro slaves, but his nucleus was the regiments which he himself had drilled at Buenos Aires. Though civil wars went on in the coast provinces, he was not to be diverted from his purpose. He kept aloof from them, and for three years laboured steadily, building his great war machine—recruiting, drilling, instructing officers, taxing his province, gathering provisions, building portable bridges, making powder, casting guns, organising his transport and commissariat.
Meanwhile, Alvear, his old colleague in the Spanish army, had assumed the leading position in the oligarchy that ruled at Buenos Aires. He suppressed the triumvirate and placed his relative, Posadas, at the head of the government. The patriot armies were besieging Montevideo from the land side, but it was not until a fighting demon of an Irish merchant captain, William Brown, had been placed in command of a few ships which the Buenos Aireans had gathered, that there was any hope of reducing the place. This remarkable man was nearly as important a factor as San Martin himself in the war against Spain. With incredible audacity he attacked the Spanish ships wherever he found them. Numbers and odds made no difference, and he was never so dangerous as just after an apparent reverse. His victory of the 14th of June put the Spanish fleet out of commission; the reduction of Montevideo followed, as a matter of course; and the destruction of the Spanish sea power on the Atlantic side made San Martin's campaign on the Pacific coast possible.
Civil wars broke out between the Buenos Aires oligarchy and local military chiefs in the gaucho provinces and soon hurled Posadas from power. He was succeeded by Alvear, but the commanders of the armies refused to recognise the latter's authority and an insurrection in Buenos Aires itself drove him, too, into exile. One military dictator succeeded another, while the provinces more and more ignored the Buenos Aires pretensions to hegemony. The frail fabric of the confederation fast crumbled into fragments. With the end of the Napoleonic wars re-enforcements began to arrive from Spain, and the royal arms were again victorious and threatened to wipe out the distracted Republic. Rondeau, one of the generals who had helped depose Posadas and Alvear, had been rewarded with command of the army of the north. Disregarding the experience of his predecessors, he made the third great effort to conquer Bolivia and strike at the heart of Spanish power in Peru by the overland route. His campaign ended with the crushing defeat at Sipe-Sipe. Considerable Spanish forces followed him down into the Argentine plains, but, as San Martin had predicted, the gaucho cavalry under Guëmes were able to keep back their advance.
Belgrano and Rivadavia had been sent to Spain in 1813 to try to arrange terms on the basis of autonomy, or the making of Buenos Aires a separate kingdom under some member of the Spanish family. They were informed that nothing except unconditional submission would be accepted, and they were then ordered to leave Madrid. Scheme after scheme was presented in Buenos Aires, discussed, and abandoned. Belgrano wanted to make a descendant of the Incas emperor of South America. Others wished to offer submission to Great Britain in return for a protectorate. The English government rejected the overtures. A more popular idea was to elect a monarch from the Portuguese Braganza family, then reigning in Brazil. The only definite result of all these confused negotiations was a formal declaration of independence made on the 9th of July, 1816, by a Congress at which most of the provinces were represented, and which met in the city of Tucuman. Many of the members had no hope of being able to enforce such a declaration. However, it cleared the way for obtaining foreign help, and negotiations were continued with a view to inducing some European prince to accept the throne.
Artigas, the independent military chieftain of Uruguay and Entre Rios, attacked in 1813 the Missions to the left of Upper Uruguay which the Rio Grande Brazilians had seized twelve years before. He was defeated by the troops of John VI., who followed him into Uruguay proper and in 1816 captured Montevideo. Though the Buenos Aireans had been compelled to concede Uruguay's independence, this movement excited among them an intense jealousy of the Portuguese. The scheme for a Braganza monarch at once became unpopular and impracticable.
The taciturn general in Cuyo was, however, preparing a thunderbolt that would clear the Argentine sky of all these clouds except that most portentous of all—civil war. After three years of incessant preparation, San Martin believed that his army was ready to undertake the great campaign. Though it numbered only four thousand men, it was the most efficient body of troops that ever gathered on South American soil. Among the Argentine contingent were the picked youth of Buenos Aires and the provinces—reckless, enthusiastic youths whose ambition, patriotism, or love of adventure made them willing to follow anywhere San Martin might dare to lead. Not inferior to their white comrades were the manumitted negroes. The cruelest charges and the heaviest losses fell to their lot and few of them ever returned over the Andes. The Chilean exiles were picked men—those who preferred death to submission, or who had offended so deeply that their only hope of seeing their homes was to return sword in hand. This force had been drilled and instructed in all the art of war as practised during the Napoleonic era by San Martin himself, a veteran soldier of the great European campaigns—one who had fought with Wellington and against Massena and Soult. He was indefatigable in attending to details, and he seems to have foreseen everything. The last months were spent in preparing rations of parched corn and dried beef; in gathering mules for mountain transportation, and in making sledges to be used on the slopes which were too steep for cannon on wheels. The most careful calculations were made of the distances to be traversed; every route was surveyed; spies were in every pass; the Spaniards were kept in uncertainty as to which of the numerous passes along hundreds of miles of frontier would be used for the attack. San Martin's real intentions were not revealed by him even to the members of his staff until the very eve of the advance.
When summer came in 1817, and all the passes were freed from snow, he was ready. In the middle of January he broke camp at Mendoza and divided his army into two divisions. Directly to the west was the Uspallata Pass, then as now the usual route between western Argentina and central Chile. Its Chilean outlet opens into the plain of Aconcagua, which is north of Santiago and only separated from that capital by one transverse spur of the Andes. Off to the north was the more difficult pass of Patos, its eastern entrance also easily accessible from Mendoza, though by a longer detour, and opening at its other end into the same valley of Aconcagua. The smaller of the
