Trusting the defence of the Bolivian frontier to a few line soldiers and the gauchos of Salta, San Martin solicited and obtained an appointment as Governor of Cuyo. This province was directly east of the populous central part of Chile, and was the refuge of the patriot Chileans who had been compelled to flee into exile after quarrels among themselves had delivered their country to the Spaniards. His authority was purely military and derived only from the dictum of the revolutionary government at Buenos Aires, but San Martin was not a man to hesitate on account of scruples over constitutional questions. He laid the province under contribution and started to create an army capable of crossing the Andes and coping with the Spanish regulars in Chile. The inhabitants of Cuyo were determinedly anti-Spanish, brave, enduring, and enthusiastic. It was a good recruiting ground in itself; the Chilean exiles were numerous and all anxious to join in an effort to redeem their country. The government at Buenos Aires sent him a valuable addition in a corps of manumitted negro slaves, but his nucleus was the regiments which he himself had drilled at Buenos Aires. Though civil wars went on in the coast provinces, he was not to be diverted from his purpose. He kept aloof from them, and for three years laboured steadily, building his great war machine--recruiting, drilling, instructing officers, taxing his province, gathering provisions, building portable bridges, making powder, casting guns, organising his transport and commissariat. Meanwhile, Alvear, his old colleague in the Spanish army, had assumed the leading position in the oligarchy that ruled at Buenos Aires. He suppressed the triumvirate and placed his relative, Posadas, at the head of the government. The patriot armies were besieging Montevideo from the land side, but it was not until a fighting demon of an Irish merchant captain, William Brown, had been placed in command of a few ships which the Buenos Aireans had gathered, that there was any hope of reducing the place. This remarkable man was nearly as important a factor as San Martin himself in the war against Spain. With incredible audacity he attacked the Spanish ships wherever he found them. Numbers and odds made no difference, and he was never so dangerous as just after an apparent reverse. His victory of the 14th of June put the Spanish fleet out of commission; the reduction of Montevideo followed, as a matter of course; and the destruction of the Spanish sea power on the Atlantic side made San Martin's campaign on the Pacific coast possible.