Part 6 GUATEMALA Although the Captaincy General of Guatemala's Pacific coast had been under firm Spanish control for centuries they had almost n0 footholds on the Caribbean. There the British Baymen of Belize and Shoremen of the Miskito Coast held sway with a fluid coalition of independent Sambo-Miskito, Sumu, Carib and other Indian tribes admixed with escaped slaves. They were separated from the Spanish on the Pacific coast by an inhospitable interior across which they regularly raided. It required a major combined arms conventional campaign under Matias de Galvez (brother of Jose de Galvez and father of Bernardo) between 1779 and 1783 to drive the British from the Caribbean coast but the cost of maintaining a standing militia and colonisation proved prohibitive in the apalling climate and after the resultant financial cuts the Baymen were able to reassert their independence at the Battle of St. Georges Cay in 1798. However, the Spanish did manage to prevent the Shoremen reestablishing a permanent control of the Miskito Coast even though they themselves only managed to retain an effective presence on the Caribbean around fortifications at Trujillo and Omoa (in modern Honduras). The Yucatan maintained a garrison at Bacalar to contain the Baymen from the north. NUEVA GRANADA In 1769 a revolt by the Guajiro Indians of the Riohacha peninsula, strongly influenced by their British trading connections, wiped out seventy years of missionary work. In the succeeding years four Spanish fortified settlements were established in the region but in 1775 the Spanish forces suffered a serious defeat at Apiesi from which their reputation had not recovered by the time regular troops had to be withdrawn to garrison Cartagena in 1779 after war broke out with the British. Amongst other disciplined militia units raised were two squadrons of Pardo dragoons formed in 1778 and 1779. As regular forces were diverted to Darien in the mid-1780s these squadrons were permanently mobilised and effectively became standing units. Nueva Granada's other hostile Indian frontier on the Isthmus of Darien was jungle and so the local regular frontier forces were light infantry. Their opponents here were the Cuna Indians. In the 1760s a string of seven fortified posts was built along the Pacific side of the isthmus and manned by two companies of local Pardo militia. By the 1780s they had been absorbed into the regular establishment as the Chiman and Darien Light Infantry Companies, although they appear not to have received uniforms and were expected to equip themselves out of their own pay. After Spain's entry intc the American War of Independence the British promoted several Cuna attacks, one of which resulted in the massacre of two companies of the Spanish Corona Regiment (not to be confused with Nueva Espana's Corona Regiment) shipwrecked in 1782 while en route from Havana to Cartagena. Once peace was reached with Britain, Nueva Granada launched a ruthless military and colonisation campaign in 1785 which forced the Cuna to sue for peace in 1787. However, the extraordinary expense of the Darien garrison and colonies led the Crown, which required maximum revenues to be sent to Spain, to order a withdrawal in not only Darien but Riohacha in the early 1790s leaving the Cuna and Guajiro largely independent. However, the frontier forces were kept intact. PERU The Viceroyalty of Peru was primarily interested in the silver producing areas of highland Bolivia and did very little to secure the lowland jungles of the Amazon basin that were technically part of its territory due to the expense involved. By the mid-eighteenth century the Portuguese had penetrated up the Amazon river system to the point where the Spanish perceived them as a serious threat to their silver mines. In 1762-3, during the Seven Years War, Peru launched an offensive into the Mattogroso using local militia and Chiquitos Indian allies but disease and the well established Portuguese foiled their plans. In 1765 a second expedition of 767 highland militia and 4,000 Chiquitos Indian auxiliaries lost 1,200 dead, mostly to disease, and was outfought by the Portuguese. The Spanish concluded that Andean highland troops could not adapt well to the steamy lowland jungle and later transferred responsibility for the area to the new Viceroyalty of La Plata. It remained passive after 1777. Bolivia was to relearn the lesson that highland troops did not adapt well to lowland jungle at enormous cost in the Chaco War a century and a half later. Following the British Admiral Anson's expedition into the Pacific in the early 1740s the Spanish had become increasingly nervous about their vulnerability in the area. Peru not only occupied the island of Juan Fernandez but even sent an expedition to Tahiti in 1773 in search of a suspected British base. None was found and so no permanent Spanish garrison was established. PARAGUAY In 1787 the Jesuits were expelled from Paraguay and the territory later became a Captaincy General subordinate to the Viceroyalty of La Plata. It was continuously engaged in repelling raids by the Indians of the Chaco from the west, notably in 1789-90, and the slave-taking Portuguese-Brazilian Bandeirantes from the east who had to be dislodged from Ygatimi in 1777. In the populated areas along the Paraguay and Parana rivers a series of twelve small wooden forts manned by militia were built below Asuncion and eight above. In 1806 their total garrison was 235 men. In order to prevent Portuguese expansion beyond the frontier defined by the 1777 peace treaty in the virtually unsettled north of Paraguay Fort San Carlos was founded in that year and Fort Borbon in 1792. These were stone constructions with garrisons of 57 and 70 men in 1803 and 1796 respectively. These may have been regular troops but their exact status is unclear. Paraguay also boasted a unique form of artillery constructed of large, reinforced bamboo tubes. Although not very powerful, they were extremely light to transport and appropriate to local jungle conditions. The whole Paraguayan defence network was dependent on river transport, mostly pirogues, although vessels up to frigate size could reach Asuncion from the small squadron in the Plate estuary. LA PLATA The early eighteenth century saw the previously largely sedentary Araucanian Indians of Chile also come to dominate the Pampas Indians of southern Argentina and there 'adopt a nomadic lifestyle dependent to a large degree on the theft of cattle and horses from the Spanish colony to their north. They were thus the main obstacle to the colony's growth and it is probably not mere chance that the arrival of this more sophisticated people coincided with the foundation of the first standing Blandengue unit in 1726. It also coincided with the discovery of salt deposits, vital to the health of cattle, in the heart of Indian territory which led to huge annual Spanish expeditions to exploit it. The biggest, that of 1778, was to include 465 troops (the colony had just been heavily reinforced by the Cevallos expedition), 2,100 civilians and 580 carts. Mutual conflict was thus assured and the frontier became such a running sore that in 1760 three companies of Blandengues had to formed. Nevertheless it finally took a severe drought in 1770-71 to force most Indians to sue for peace. The Spanish conditions included that each pacified tribe should receive preferential treatment but was to be responsible for preventing others from launching raids from its territory. This led to conflict within the tribes and joint Spanish-Indian expeditions against the hold-outs which enjoyed more success than the previously largely Spanish forays which had usually been abortive. In 1780/81 the Blandengues were expanded by a further three companies and the existing line of forts was reinforced, eventually extending to the Andes where it met the Chilean defence system. This finally contained the Indians whose last major hostile coalition of the colonial period mounted an attack by over 1,000 men on the fort at Lujan in 1780. Energetic Spanish retaliation over the succeeding years led most of the Indians to conclude a peace in 1784 which still held at the end of the colonial period. They conspicuously did not attack the frontier when it was denuded of troops to face the British invasion of 1806/7. The eight companies of Blandengues de la Frontera de Montevideo, put on a regular footing in 1796, were deployed in a line of forts to define the inland frontier for that city against the Portuguese and Indians and linked with the lower Paraguayan defences. After agreeing with the British to withdraw both their small garrisons from the Falkland/Malvinas Islands in the early 1770s the Spanish began to found small forts down the Patagonian coast from 1778 in order to forestall possible British settlement on the mainland. The Blandengues were drawn from the emerging mixed race Gaucho population and until the early 1780s, when they were put on a fully regular basis, were more like a standing militia responsible for supplying their own clothing, horses, equipment and weaponry out of their pay. Although subsequently issued with a uniform and a carbine, sword and two pistols they tended to wear a poncho and preferred their traditional lance, bolas and lasso. The name Blandengue may well be derived from the way they brandished these weapons (blandir = to brandish) . The lance, bolas and lasso were also their Indian cousin's main weapons and they gave Pampas warfare a unique character. The Blandengues made few alterations to their individualistic Gaucho lifestyle to accommodate military discipline and tended to pursue their own tactics almost regardless of their officers. The Blandengues' forts, manned in the 1790s by 85-man companies, were rudimentary but adequate constructions from which they daily patrolled in pairs to meet similar patrols from neighbouring forts. If an Indian penetration was spotted all the local gaucho militia were mobilised to defeat it. In 1778 a local form of horse artillery was developed to accompany the Blandengues but from 1796 this was superceded by conventional European horse guns. Pampas warfare was possibly the most brutal of all as no male prisoners were normally taken by either side. CHILE The relatively sophisticated Araucanian Indians were the most successful in resisting the initial Conquista and might have destroyed the poor Spanish colony in Chile in the early 1600s had the Crown not created a precedent by paying for a standing army. They not only adopted the horse and lance very quickly but also had pike-armed infantry, some captured artillery and proved capable of both building and taking fortifications and winning conventional battles against the Spanish. Their last major uprising had been in 1723 and by the late eighteenth century they were a largely sedentary people with a vested interest in maintaining stable trading relations with the Spanish colony and were thus more pacific. However, they remained a threat that was not to be fully defeated until the 1880s. The Army of Chile was a hybrid. Its regiments, the senior field units in the Americas, were organised and regarded as conventional regulars but were expected to perform essentially frontier duties in a line of small company outposts on the southern border of the colony. By 1792 the rank and file of the Dragones de la Frontera were 99% Chilean born, thus conforming to the general rule that frontier forces were raised locally. However, they were Criollos like most conventional regular troops and not of mixed race like most frontier forces. They are probably best regarded as something of a cross between the Dragoons and Blandengues of Buenos Aires. CONCLUSION Frontier defence imposed a little recorded but continuous strain on its limited colonial military resources even when Spain was formally at peace in Europe. The need to maintain extended linear frontier defences forced a widespread dispersal of colonial forces which was incompatible with the concentration of defences about the main ports needed to counter British ambitions. Furthermore, because of the inadequacy of conventional European troop types for operations on Indian frontiers, it also led to the development of distinctive, usually non-Spanish, frontier troop types unique to their colonies but ill equipped to oppose a major British landing. More Spanish Defense Part 6 Part 7 Back to Table of Contents -- El Dorado Vol V No. 2 Back to El Dorado List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1992 by The South and Central American Military Historians Society This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com