CHAPTER IV.
Situation of Monte Video—Signs of a Disturbance—Frightful Deaths from Cholera—Number in Buenos Ayres—and the Camps—Infatuation of the People—Anecdote—Sudden Revolution—Conspirators—Murder of Flores the President—Defeat of Conspirators—Murders of Blancoes—Dreadful Occurrence in the City from Executions—And Cholera—Death of Twenty-nine Chief Citizens—List of the Proscribed—Periodical Revolutions—Extreme Atrocity—How Flores Gained the Presidency—Impunity of Murderers in Roman Catholic Countries—Readily Leave for Buenos Ayres—The River Plate—Its Shallowness—Buenos Ayres–Curious Mode of Disembarking Goods—Cruelty to Horses—Ceremony of Mass for the Dead in a Church.
The city of Monte Video lies at the north entrance of the estuary of the Plate. The river is called Plate, but pronounced Playte, Plate being Spanish for silver—"the silver river." The city is approached in shallow water, which loses its blue sea colour for many leagues before you get near it. Some sand banks about here are dangerous for shipping. The river is in no place more than nineteen feet deep, although it is 150 miles wide at the mouth, yet, from the vast amount of mud brought down from the great rivers Parana, Negro, Paraguay, and their confluents, it abounds in shallows. It is continually running seaward at about three miles an hour.
The harbour itself of Monte Video is of a horse-shoe form, with a small conical hill on the left side as you enter. The city, with its 80,000 inhabitants, is built on
