These, too, remained entirely unsubdued to the last.
They had the ill-fortune to be favoured with fewer natural advantages
than the Araucanians. They had neither woodland valleys nor mountains in
which to take shelter in the time of need. They fought on a plain which
was as open as day, and as flat as a table from horizon to horizon. No
crude strategy was possible--at all events, in the daytime--and the
attack of the charging Indians was necessarily visible from a distance
of leagues.
From time to time a certain number of these fierce tribesmen were
captured, but their fiery spirits could brook no domestic tasks, and
when, at a very much later date, some of them were shipped upon a
Spanish man-of-war with the purpose of testing their value as sailors,
they rose in mutiny and slew many officers and men, and, indeed,
obtained temporary control of the ship, until, seeing the uselessness of
further efforts, they flung themselves overboard in a body.
It was the ancestors of such men as these who had in the first instance
disputed the soil with the Spaniards. There is no doubt that, while the
metal-bearing lands fell into the opened mouths of the Spaniards as
easily as over-ripe plums, the maintaining of a foothold in the southern
plains was a precarious and desperate matter.
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