It has been said that the Spaniards are massive builders, the most massive since the Romans, and they have left their mark with many a huge stone structure in the southern part of the New World. What Montevideo cost the kings of Spain no one has ever known, and, although they probably paid twice for every stick and stone in it, Peru and Mexico were still pouring forth their floods of treasure, and there was the fortress, honey colored, lofty, undeniably majestic and powerful.
When Mexico displaced Spain, she added to the defenses of Montevideo, and now, on this spring day in 1847, it lowered, dark and sinister, over the road. It was occupied by a strong garrison under that alert and valiant soldier, Captain Pedro de Armijo, raised recently to that rank, but still stinging with the memories of Buena Vista, he was anxious that the Americans should come and attack him in Montevideo. He stood on the rampart at a point where it was seventy feet wide, and he looked with pride and satisfaction at the row of eighty guns. Pedro de Armijo, swelling with pride, felt that he could hold the castle of Montevideo against twenty thousand men. Time had made no impression upon those massive walls, and the moat was filled with water. The castle, mediæval, but grim and formidable, sat in its narrow mountain valley with the Cofre de Montevideo (Trunk of Montevideo) behind it on the north. This peak was frequently covered with snow and at all times was gloomy and forbidding. Even on bright days the sun reached it for only a few hours.
While Pedro de Armijo walked on the parapet, looking out at the range of mountain and valley and enjoying the sunlight, which would soon be gone, a young man stood at the window of cell No. 87, also looking out at the mountain, although no sunlight reached him there. He gazed through a slit four inches wide and twelve inches high, and the solid wall of masonry through which this slit was cut was twelve feet thick. The young man's ankles were tied together with a chain which, although long enough to allow him to walk, weighed twenty-five pounds. Once he had been chained with another man. Formerly the prisoners who had been brought with him to the Castle of Montevideo had been chained in pairs, the chain in no case weighing less than twenty pounds, but, since only John Bedford was left, Pedro de Armijo concluded that it was his duty to carry the chain alone.