42 TRAVELS IN URUGUAY.
a hill on the right of the entrance; with the custom houses and warehouses on the lower parts adjoining the quay. There were about 1000 vessels in the harbour, none of any size. The national guard ships were lying out from five to ten miles off.
As we approached the landing-place there seemed to be a great deal of excitement among the people; while the flags of different European nations were hoisted over the custom houses and chief buildings. It appeared that Edwardo Flores, the son of the president, had seized the fort which lies at the lower part of the city near the water, with some of the troops, and had just before been compelled to evacuate it, by the French and English, who had restored it to Flores again. This it will be seen connects itself with what shortly occurred.
I stayed eighteen days in Monte Video, and saw many things that gave me no prepossessing idea of the place or people, nor of the governments of these South American cities. In the first place the cholera had made, and was still making, most frightful ravages. The accounts also from the city and camp of Buenos Ayres were awful. In that city people were carried off by thousands; 18,400 having been computed to have perished in it. Nearly half the inhabitants of the city had fled into the camp there to avoid it. In that camp it became even worse, in many places no one being left to bury the dead; and pigs were eating the bodies. Sheep, cattle, and horses. were scattered over the whole country, their owners having all perished by cholera. Numbers of children, whose parents had died, were found crowded together, in a starving state, in the sheep corals. A gentleman
