cooped up within the flimsy walls of their new settlements, surrounded
by fierce and vindictive enemies, who charged on them from time to time
with bewildering fury, choosing as often as not for the purpose the hour
just before dawn, which they would make horrid with their warlike cries
and shrill yells. 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. As has been said, the
natural topographical advantages of Southern Chile made the wars here
the grimmest and fiercest of all those waged throughout the Continent.
The mere names of Caupolican and Lautaro suffice to recall a galaxy of
Homeric feats. The deeds of the two deserve a passing word of
explanation.

It was the Chief Caupolican who organized the first resistance to the
invaders on a large scale, and who led his armies with a marvellous
intrepidity against the Spaniards. He initiated a new species of attack,
which proved very trying to the white troops. He would divide his men
into a number of companies, and send one after another to engage the
Spanish forces. Thus the first company would charge, and would engage
for awhile, fighting desperately. Then they would retire at their
leisure, to be succeeded without pause by the second, and so on.