CATTLE RAIDING 49 



of the conquest the productive regions of the continent, 

 which suppHed the export trade with Europe, were very 

 limited in extent. Pastoral colonization began at once, 

 and spread over a very wide area. Herds of oxen, for 

 meat or draught, horses, and mules, made their way 

 toward the centres of consumption : towns like Lima, 

 Bahia, and Rio, the Peruvian mines, and the sugar- 

 refineries of the north-east of Brazil, and later toward 

 the yerbales of Paraguay or the seaports of the Caribs 

 and the Rio Grande do Sul, where the jerked meat 

 industry developed. The cattle routes converge upon 

 these centres. 



The export of cattle and mules from the Argentine 

 plains to Peru was fully established by the close of the 

 sixteenth century, and it seems to have continued 

 without interruption ever since. Upper Peru is, how- 

 ever, not the only market on which the Argentine 

 breeders lived. At the end of the eighteenth century 

 DAzara demanded that they should permit the sale of 

 horses and mules to Brazil, for use in the mines. The 

 cattle traffic with Portuguese territory had not then 

 assumed the form of a regular commerce, and the 

 Brazilians made raids on the north-eastern provinces 

 for the animals they needed — 60,000 a year, DAzara 

 says. I The export of cattle to Paraguay and Misiones 

 was, on the other hand, of substantial economic import- 

 ance in the eighteenth century. Before the Revolution, 

 Rengger says, as many as 200,000 head of cattle passed 

 yearly from Corrientes to Paraguay, which paid for 

 them in mate and tobacco. 3 This trade was kept up 

 intermittently in the nineteenth century. The exports 

 from Corrientes were especially important at the time 

 when the Paraguay stock was reconstituted after the 

 war (40,000 head of cattle in 1875). 



1 Memorias sobre el estado rural del rio de la Plata en 1801, Escritos 

 postumos de D. Felix de Azara, published by D. Augustin de Azara 

 (Madrid, 1847). 



2 A. Rengger, Reise nach Paraguay in den Jahren 1818 bis 1826 

 (Aarau, 1835). 



4 



