and move to Corpus Christi. There he repaired with about five hundred men,
all who remained of the two thousand six hundred and thirty
with which he sailed from Cadiz. The horses he abandoned on the pampa;
there they became the ancestors of the innumerable herds which at one time
overspread the Argentine Republic from the Chaco to Patagonia,
and whose descendants to this day stock the `estancias' of that country.**

--
* The great Las Casas, who made seven voyages from America to Spain
-- the last at the age of seventy-two -- to protect the Indians,
had a strong opinion about `conquerors' and `conquests'.
In the dedication of his great treatise on the wrongs of the Indians,
he says: `Que no permita (Felipe II.) las atrocidades
que los tiranos inventaron, y que prosiguen haciendo
con titulo de "conquistas". Los que se jactan de ser "conquistadores"
a que descienden de ellos son muchomas orgullosos arrogantes y vanos
que los otros Espan~oles.' Strange that even to-day
the same `atrocidades' of `tiranos' are going on in Africa.
No doubt the descendants of these `conquerors' will be
as arrogant, proud, and vain as the descendants of the `conquistadores'
of whom Las Casas writes.
** Mendoza left (`Azara Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural
de los Quadrupedes del Paraguay', etc.) five mares and seven horses
in the year 1535. In 1580 Don Juan de Garay, at the second founding
of the city, already found troops of wild horses. The cattle increased
to a marvellous extent, and by the end of the century
were wild in Patagonia. Sarmiento (`Civilisation et Barbarisme')
says that early in this century they were often killed by travellers,
who tethered their horses to the carcasses to prevent them
from straying at night.