Spain had restored Colonia under protest and without prejudice, explicitly reiterating her own claim to exclusive proprietorship of the north bank of the Plate. The diplomatists agreed that the question of right should remain open for determination at some future day, but all Spanish subjects considered the existence of Colonia as a violation of Spanish soil, and whenever a war broke out in Europe between the mother countries, the Buenos Aireans were in the habit of promptly sending an expedition across the river to capture the Portuguese town. Three times was it wrenched from the Portuguese, and three times was it restored on the conclusion of peace. In 1705, Spain and Portugal being engaged in war, the governor of Buenos Aires dislodged the Portuguese garrison from Colonia and the place remained in Spanish possession until after the conclusion of the Peace of Utrecht. Their eleven years' possession at last convinced the Spaniards that the settlement of the north bank was feasible. By 1708 the Charrua raids had so far lost their terrors that the Jesuit mission at Soriano was safely removed from the island in the Uruguay River to the mainland opposite. The trade in Uruguayan hides and horsehair increased, and private expeditions henceforth frequently crossed the estuary. It had long been known that the best harbours on the Uruguayan coast were at Montevideo and Maldonado, where partially sheltered bays, with water deep enough for the vessels of the eighteenth century, were overlooked by beautiful and defensible town sites. Montevideo is a hundred miles east of Colonia, and Maldonado another hundred miles farther on toward the Atlantic. The advisability of seizing and fortifying one or both of these places was frequently mooted in Buenos Aires, after the restoration of Colonia in 1716. Nothing, however, was done until 1723, when word came that the Portuguese had again anticipated the Spanish authorities and had occupied and begun to fortify Montevideo for themselves. The governor of Buenos Aires immediately sent an overwhelming force which compelled the Portuguese to retire. This time neither dilatory diplomacy nor official ineptitude prevented his doing the right thing to save Uruguay to the Spanish Crown, and the following year he finished the Portuguese walls at Montevideo, and in 1726 the ground plan of a town was laid out and a few families were brought from Buenos Aires and the Canary Islands. Within a few years there were a thousand people in the place, and it had been surrounded with walls and defended by artillery. Four years later, Maldonado was established. No serious trouble was experienced with the Indians at either place, and the Spaniards began to spread their ranches over the neighbouring south-eastern part of Uruguay. [Illustration: MONTEVIDEO. [From an old print.]]