Page:A history of Chile.djvu/150

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134 A HISTORY OF CHILE New Granada sought to destroy the junta at Quito, assisted by the viceroy of Peru. The patriots of La Paz were defeated, and the most terrible cruelties per- petrated upon them by the inhuman Goyeneche. The leaders of this early revolution, the Lauzas and Rodri- guez, fell among the victims. The junta of Quito was also compelled to yield to the superior forces brought against it. The revolution next broke out in Buenos Ayres and Caracas ; in the former place the viceroy, Cisneros, was deposed and a junta formed, May 22d, 1810. Cas- telli's eloquence in the congress, which was assembled, confounded the royalists and paved the way for a revo- lution. Spain could do little to assist the royalists in the southern provinces, having as much as she could do in the north. Napoleon had at this time nearly completed her degradation; Ferdinand VII. and the royal family were under surveillance at Bayonne; the crown of Spain had been renounced by Ferdinand in favor of Joseph Bonaparte; the Council of the Indies had transferred the Spanish provinces to Bonaparte ; Napoleon had, as we have seen, dispersed the central junta in Spain, May 1810, and had (1808) sent envoys to the provinces to notify them of the cessions of Bayonne ; all this had brought confusion into the whole Spanish world. The patriots of Spanish-Amer- ica deemed this a fitting time to throw off the intolera- ble yoke of the mother country. The royalists, looking to the loaves and fishes they had so long enjoved, would have submitted to Bonaparte rather than have had no king. After some successes, followed by reverses in Mon- tevidio and the province of Salta, the patriots of Bue- nos Ayres finally made a treaty with the Brazilian Por- _tuguese sent against them to Montevideo, the Spanish