J. P. Robertson, an English chronicler of the period, gives an interesting account of a meeting with Artigas. Assaulted and robbed by a band of the noted chief's adherents, he boldly set out for Purificacion to claim redress. His words deserve quotation at some length. "I came to the Protector's headquarters," he says, "of the so-called town of Purificacion. And there (I pray you do not turn sceptic on my hands) what do you think I saw? Why, the most excellent Protector of half the New World, seated on a bullock's skull, at a fire kindled on the mud floor of his hut, eating beef off a spit, and drinking gin out of a cow horn! He was surrounded by a dozen officers in weather beaten attire, in similar positions, and similarly occupied with their chief. All were smoking, all gabbling. The Protector was dictating to two secretaries, who occupied, at one deal table, the only two dilapidated rush bottom chairs in the hovel. To complete the singular incongruity of the scene, the floor of the one apartment of the mud hut (to be sure it was a pretty large one) in which the general, his staff, and secretaries, were assembled, was strewn with pompous envelopes from all the Provinces (some of them distant some 1,500 miles from that centre of operations) addressed to 'His Excellency the Protector.' At the door stood the reeking horses of couriers arriving every half hour, and the fresh ones of those departing as often.... His Excellency the Protector, seated on his bullock's skull, smoking, eating, drinking, dictating, talking, dispatched in succession the various matters brought under his notice with that calm, or deliberate, but uninterrupted nonchalance, which brought most practically home to me the truth of the axiom, 'Stop a little that we may get on the faster.'... He received me, not only with cordiality, but with what surprised me more, comparatively gentlemanlike manners, and really good breeding.... The Protector's business was prolonged from morning till evening, and so were his meals; for, as one courier arrived another was dispatched, and as one officer rose up from the fire at which the meat was spitted another took his place."