Initially a commercial and critical failure, it was reissued in 1904 with the full title The Purple Land, Being One Richard Lamb's Adventures in the Banda Orientál, in South America, as told by Himself.
The novel tells the story of Richard Lamb, a young Englishman who marries a teenage Argentinian girl, Paquita, without asking her father's permission, and is forced to flee to Montevideo, Uruguay with his bride.
To begin with, Lamb looks down on the Uruguayans, with their disorganised political system and lack of law and order and civilised amenities, thinking it would have been better for Uruguay to become part of the British Empire.
According to Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, who is quoted by Borges, the final pages of the novel contain "the supreme justification of America compared with Western civilisation."
Hudson writes:I cannot believe that if this country had been conquered and recolonised by England, and all that is crooked in it made straight according to our notions, my intercourse with the people would have had the wild, delightful flavour I have found in it.
How refreshing it is to meet with this perfect freedom of intercourse, tempered only by that innate courtesy and native grace of manner peculiar to Spanish Americans!