From La Candelaria roads branched off to every portion of the territory, most of them fit for carts, and all superior to those tracks which were the only thoroughfares but twenty years ago. Roads ran to Corrientes, to Asuncion, others from Yapeyú to the Salto Grande, on the Paraná. Upon the Upper Uruguay were about eighty posts, all guarded, and with horses ready to equip the messengers. But there were also roads in the district of the Upper Paraná, which I myself remember as a wilderness, uncrossed, uncrossable, where tigers roamed about and Indians shot at the rare traveller with poisoned arrows out of a blow-pipe, whilst they remained unseen in the recesses of the woods. In the districts of the Upper Uruguay and Paraná, besides the roads and relays of post-horses, they had a fleet both of canoes and boats in which they carried _yerba_[207] and the other products of the land. Thus, with their fleet of boats and of canoes, their highroads branching out on every side, and their relays of post-horses at intervals, most probably no State of America at the time had such interior means of communication with the seat of government. The Incas and the Aztecs certainly had posts who carried messages and brought up fish from the coast with great rapidity; but all the Spanish colonies contemporaneous with the Jesuits’ settlements in Paraguay had fallen into a state of lethargy and of interior decay. The roads the Incas used in Peru were falling fast into disuse, and it took several weeks to send a letter from Buenos Ayres to the Pacific coast.