South America Observations and Impressions

There are ports enough to furnish all the west coast of South America with harbours of refuge, but no use for them, for few ships come this way, and, as has been said, nobody goes fishing. Yet far out of the world's highways as they lie, and slight as is their economic or political value, the Falkland Isles have had a long and chequered history. An English navigator, Davis, discovered them in A.D. 1592, and they were afterwards explored by a French voyager from the port of St. Malo, whence the name of Iles Malouines, by which the French still call them. In 1764 Bougainville, one of those famous seamen who adorned the annals of France in that century, and whose name is now preserved from oblivion by the pretty, mauve-coloured flower which grows over all the bungalows and railway stations of India, planted a little colony here, with the view, fantastic as it seems to us now, of making this remote corner of the earth a central point from which to establish a transoceanic dominion of France in the Southern Hemisphere to replace that which had been lost at Quebec in 1759. The Spaniards, desiring no neighbours in that hemisphere, dispossessed these settlers. An English colony planted shortly afterwards, presently driven out by the Spaniards, and then re-established, was withdrawn in 1774. Finally, in 1832, the British government resumed possession of the islands, then practically uninhabited, for the sake of the whale fishery, and in 1843 a government was organized. In its present form, it is of the type usual in small British colonies, viz. a governor with an executive and a legislative council, the two bodies nominated, and consisting almost entirely of the same persons.

These political vicissitudes have left no abiding mark, except in a few remains at the station of Port Louis which the French made their capital, for there never was any population to speak of till sheep-farming began. The Pacific liners call once a month on their outward and inland voyages, and steamers go now and then to Punta Arenas, but there are no British possessions nearer than Cape Colony to the northeast and Pitcairn Island to the northwest, thousands of miles away.

We walked with the Acting Governor to the top of a hill behind Port Stanley to get some impressions of nature. There were as yet only two or three flowers in bloom, and what chiefly struck us was the resemblance of the thick, low mats and cushions of the plants to some species that grow on the upper parts of the Scottish Highland mountains. Among these, there was one producing a sweet berry, the dillydilly, from which excellent jam is made, the only edible wild product of the country. The prevailing strata are quartzose schists and sandstones, which rise in two mountains to heights exceeding two thousand three hundred feet, and as there is no trace of volcanic action anywhere, the islands are evidently not a link between the great Antarctic volcanoes and those of the Andean system, but perhaps a detached part of the older rocks through which those volcanoes have risen.

From the hilltop we looked over a wide stretch of rolling hills covered with short grass, which in the wet hollows was yellowish or brown. Ridges or peaklets of bare white or blue rock rose here and there into miniature mountains, and there were runs of loose stones on the slopes below the ridges, – altogether a wild landscape, with no woods, no fields, no signs of human life except in the village beneath, yet redeemed from dreariness by the emerald brilliance of the air and the variety of lights and shadows falling on the far-off slopes. The evening tints were mirrored in the landlocked inlet below, and beyond the outer bay the cold, grey, ever-troubled sea stretched away towards the South Pole. We felt as if quite near the South Pole, yet were no nearer to it than the North Pole is to Liverpool. One seemed to have reached the very end of the world. Though one might be reminded a little of the Hebrides, – all windswept islands have points of resemblance, – still the scenery was not really like any part of our Northern Hemisphere, but had a character of its own. I have seen many wild islands in many stormy seas, and some of them more bare and forbidding than this, but never any inhabited spot that seemed so entirely desolate and solitary and featureless. There was nothing for the eye to dwell upon, no lake, no river, no mountain, – only scattered and shapeless hills, – a land without form or expression, yet with a certain simple and primitive beauty in the colours of the yellow grass and grey-blue rocks, shining through clear air, with the sea-wind singing over them. No spot could better have met the wishes of the hermits who, in early Christian centuries, planted themselves on rocky islets and lonely mountain tops on the coasts of Ireland, for here there is nothing, even in Nature herself, to distract a pious soul from meditation. Any one who to-day desires seclusion to think out a new philosophy might find this a fitting place of peace, if only he could learn to endure the perpetual drive of the wind.

The last flush of sunset was reddening on the inlet when we re-joined our steamer and sailed down past the lighthouse out into the ocean, a fresh flock of sea-birds appearing to bear us company. Three more stormy days and stormy nights northward to Montevideo!

CHAPTER IX

ARGENTINA

The interest which Argentina arouses is entirely unlike that which appeals to the traveller's eye and mind in Peru or Bolivia or Chile. In each of these three countries there is scenery grand in scale and different in type from what any other part of the world has to shew. In Peru and Bolivia there are also the remains of a primitive civilization, scanty, no doubt, but all the more attractive because they stimulate rather than satisfy our curiosity. They speak of antiquity, and indeed all three countries have a flavour of antiquity, though Chile has scarcely any relics coming down from it. But in the River Plate regions there is (except along the Andes and in the far north) little natural beauty, and nothing that recalls the past. All is modern and new; all belongs to the prosperous present and betokens a still more prosperous future. Argentina is like western North America. The swift and steady increase in its agricultural production, with an increase correspondingly large in means of internal transportation, is what gives its importance to the country and shews that it will have a great part to play in the world. It is the United States of the Southern Hemisphere.

Not even the approach by sea to Alexandria or to the mouth of the Hooghly below Calcutta, is duller than that to Buenos Aires. Before land is seen, the vessel enters a muddy, reddish brown sea, and presently the winding channel, marked for a long way by buoys, shews how shallow is the water on either side. This is the estuary, two hundred miles long and at this point about thirty miles broad, of the Rio de la Plata, formed by the union of the great river Uruguay with the still greater Paraná, streams which between them drain nearly one-fourth part of the South American continent. Approaching the Argentine shore, one sees a few masts and many funnels rising above the tall hulls of steamships, docked in lines alongside huge wharves. Beyond the open space of the wharf runs a row of offices and warehouses, but nothing else is seen, nor can one tell, except from the size of the docks and the crowd of vessels, that a great city lies behind. Nothing can be seen, because Buenos Aires stands only some thirty feet above high-water mark in a perfectly flat alluvial plain, with scarcely any rise in the ground for hundreds of miles, and not a rock anywhere. On entering the city one is surprised to find that with a boundless prairie all around, the streets should be so narrow that in most of them wheeled traffic is allowed to move only one way. One great thoroughfare, the Avenida de Mayo, traverses the centre of the city from the large plaza in which the government buildings stand to the still larger and very handsome plaza which is adorned by the palace of the legislature. Fortunately it is wide, and being well planted with trees is altogether a noble street, statelier than Piccadilly in London, or Unter den Linden in Berlin, or Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. In the newer parts of the city more width is now being given to streets as they are from time to time laid out, but the congestion of the nucleus is a serious obstacle to rapid locomotion, which is otherwise well provided for by numerous electric car lines. No North American city has a better car service. Though skyscrapers have scarcely yet made their appearance, the houses are much higher than in the west coast cities, because earthquakes are not feared; and many mansions in the residential quarters, built in the modern French style, have architectural merit. So, too, the numerous small plazas, usually planted with trees or shrubs and furnished with seats, partly atone for the want of space in the streets. It must be added that the statues which adorn these plazas do not tempt the passer-by to linger in æsthetic enjoyment. One is too acutely reminded of the bronze equestrian warriors so numerous in Washington. The cities of the western world, having a short history, seem to run to the commemoration of heroes whose names, little known to other nations, will soon be forgotten in their own, whereas the old countries, except Italy, seem forgetful of those whom the western stranger would like to have seen held up to reverence.

Buenos Aires deserves its name, for its air is clear as well as keen, there being no large manufacturing works to pollute it with coal smoke. The streets are well kept; everything is fresh and bright. The most striking buildings besides those of the new Legislative Chambers, with their tall and handsome dome, are the Opera-house, the interior of which equals any in Europe, and the Jockey Club, whose scale and elaborate appointments surpass even the club-houses of New York.

Buenos Aires is something between Paris and New York. It has the business rush and the luxury of the one, the gaiety and pleasure-loving aspect of the other. Everybody seems to have money, and to like spending it, and to like letting everybody else know that it is being spent. Betting on horses is the favourite amusement, and the races the greatest occasion for social display. An immense concourse gathers at the racing enclosure and fills the grand-stand. The highest officials of state and city are there, as well as the world of wealth and fashion. The ladies are decked out with all the Parisian finery and jewels that money can buy; and although nature has given to many of them good features and to most of them fine eyes, custom seems to prescribe that nature shall not be left to herself. On fine afternoons, there is a wonderful turnout of carriages drawn by handsome horses, and still more of costly motor cars, in the principal avenues of the Park; they press so thick that vehicles are often jammed together for fifteen or twenty minutes, unable to move on. Nowhere in the world does one get a stronger impression of exuberant wealth and extravagance. The Park itself, called Palermo, lies on the edge of the city towards the river, and is approached by a well-designed and well-planted avenue. It suffers from the absolute flatness of the ground in which there is no point high enough to give a good view over the estuary, and also from the newness of the trees, for all this region was till lately a bare pampa. But what with its great extent and the money and skill that are being expended on it, this park will in thirty years be a glory to the city. The Botanical Garden, though all too small, is extremely well arranged and of the highest interest to a naturalist, who finds in it an excellent collection of South American trees and shrubs.

As the Opera-house and the races and the Park shew one side of the activities of this sanguine community, so the docks and port shew another. Twenty years ago sea-going vessels had to lie two or three miles off Buenos Aires, discharging their cargo by lighters and their passengers partly by small launches and partly by high-wheeled carts which carried people from the launches ashore through the shallow water. Now a long, deep channel has been dug, and is kept open by dredging, up which large steamers find their way to the very edge of the city. Docks many miles in length have been constructed to receive the shipping, and large stretches of land reclaimed, and huge warehouses erected and railway lines laid down alongside the wharves. Not Glasgow when she deepened her river to admit the largest ships, nor Manchester when she made her ship canal, hardly even Chicago when she planned a new park and lagoons in the lake that washes her front, shewed greater enterprise and bolder conceptions than did the men of Buenos Aires when on this exposed and shallow coast they made alongside their city a great ocean harbour. They are a type of our time, in their equal devotion to business and pleasure, the two and only deities of this latest phase of humanity.

If the best parts of Buenos Aires are as tasteful as those of Paris, there is plenty of ugliness in the worst suburbs. On its land side, the city dies out into a waste of scattered shanties, or "shacks" (as they are called in the United States), dirty and squalid, with corrugated iron roofs, their wooden boards gaping like rents in tattered clothes. These are inhabited by the newest and poorest of the immigrants from southern Italy and southern Spain, a large and not very desirable element among whom anarchism is rife. This district which, if it can hardly be called city, can still less be called country, stretches far out over the Pampa. Thus, although the central parts are built closely, these suburbs are built so sparsely that the town as a whole covers an immense space of ground. Further out and after passing for some miles between market gardens and fields divided by wire fences, with never a hedge, one reaches real country, an outer zone in which some of the wealthy landowners have laid out their estates and erected pleasant country houses. We were invited to one such, and admired the art with which the ground had been planted, various kinds of trees having been selected with so much taste that even on this unpromising level picturesqueness and beauty had been attained. Everything that does not need much moisture grows luxuriantly. We saw rosebushes forty feet high, pouring down a cataract of blossoms. The hospitable owner had spent, as rich estancieros often do, large sums upon his live stock, purchasing in Great Britain valuable pedigree bulls and cows, and by crossing the best European breeds with the Argentine stock (originally Spanish) had succeeded in getting together a herd comparable to the best in England. To have first-rate animals is here a matter of pride, even more than a matter of business. It is the only interest that competes with horse-racing. Our friend had a number of Gauchos as stockmen, and they shewed us feats of riding and lassoing which recalled the old days of the open Pampas, before high stock-breeding was dreamt of, when the Gaucho horsemen disputed the control of these regions with the now vanished Indian.

Though Buenos Aires is often described as a cosmopolitan place, its population has far fewer elements than would be found in any of the great cities of the United States. There are English and German colonies, both composed almost wholly of business and railway men, and each keeping, for social purposes, pretty closely to itself. There is a French colony, its upper section including men of intellectual mark, while the humbler members serve pleasure rather than business. From the United States not many persons have come to settle as merchants or ranch owners, but the great meat companies are already at work. Of the so-called "Latin" element in the inhabitants, half or a little more is Argentine born, less than a quarter Spanish or Basque, more than a quarter Italian, largely from Sicily and Calabria. Those Slavonic parts of central and eastern Europe which have recently flooded the United States with immigrants have sent very few to South America. Thus the mass of the population in Buenos Aires is entirely Spanish or Italian in speech, and the two languages are so similar that the Italians easily learn Spanish while also modifying it by their own words and idioms. A mixed, not to say corrupt, Spanish is the result. That there should be an endless diversity of types of face is not surprising, when one remembers how great are the diversities as well in Spain as in Italy among the natives of the various provinces in both those kingdoms.

The growth of a few great cities at a rate more rapid than that of the countries to which they belong is one of the most remarkable facts of recent years and fraught with many consequences. It is especially visible in the newest countries. In New South Wales the population of Sydney is nearly two-fifths that of the whole state, in Victoria that of Melbourne more than two-fifths. In California two great cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles, have one-third of the whole population.77 The same tendency is apparently in South America. Of the whole population of Argentina, with its immense area of 1,135,000 square miles, one-fifth dwell in the city of Buenos Aires.78 It is probable that this ratio may be maintained so that when, thirty years hence, Argentina counts twenty millions of inhabitants, Buenos Aires will count four millions. There are other large cities, and one of them, Cordova, has an ancient university and a society of cultivated men. But business life and political life, as well as literary and intellectual life, are so concentrated in Buenos Aires as to make it to dwarf all the other cities and give to it an influence comparable to that of Paris in France. The history of the republic was for many years a history of the struggles between the capital – already pre-eminent in revolutionary days – and the provinces. So the people of Buenos Aires divide the Argentine nation into two classes, themselves, who are called the Porteños (men of the Port), and all the rest, the dwellers in the Campo or open country.79 And though the wonderful development of the railway system has accelerated the settlement of the interior and brought the comforts of civilization to its towns, Buenos Aires has continued to maintain its supremacy by constantly drawing people from the interior. It is, moreover, the gateway through which all must pass to and from Europe. Thus the Porteño is the type and flower of Argentina, – the type of its character, the flower of its civilization. When we try to understand and appraise the Argentine nation, which for Argentina is the most interesting and indeed (apart from statistics of production) the only subject of study, it is on him that the eye must be fixed. Nevertheless he is far from being the only factor. The nation is spread over a vast space. To conjecture its future we must think of the physical and economic conditions under which it will develop. These, therefore, I will try to sketch briefly, admitting that my own personal knowledge is confined to Buenos Aires and its neighbourhood, and to the region round Mendoza, mentioned in Chapter VII. I shall speak first of the natural features of the country, and then of the natives and of the colonists who came among them, before describing the Argentina of our own time.

The northwestern part of the republic, lying east of northern Chile and south of western Bolivia, is a tableland, sometimes rugged, sometimes undulating, the higher parts of it much like the adjoining plateau of Bolivia. But the rest of the country, nine-tenths of the whole, is an immense plain more than two thousand miles long from Magellan's Straits to the frontiers of eastern Bolivia and Paraguay. It is interrupted in a few points by low ranges, but, speaking generally, is a prairie like that which in North America lies between the hills of southern Oklahoma and the Canadian border, though more level, for it wants the undulating swells and ridges of Kansas and Iowa, and is less seamed by river beds. The climate varies with the latitude. It is severe in the Patagonian south, and almost tropical in the north. But in the region called the Pampas, that is to say, a sort of square, six hundred miles wide from the estuary of the Rio de la Plata to the outlying foothills of the Andes and about as long from north to south, it resembles that of west central Europe, for the heat is great only during the middle of summer and the winter cold is moderate. Except in the far north, which has a wet summer season with a heavy precipitation, the rainfall is scanty and diminishes as one goes from east to west, so that much of the western belt, lying under the Andes, is too dry to be cultivated except by irrigation. Fortunately, the streams that descend from the snows provide irrigation along their banks. Many of them lose themselves in the arid ground on their course further eastward, but as this ground has a slight uniform fall towards the east, they supply a certain amount of subterranean moisture, so that in many districts where there are no superficial streams, water can be had by digging.

All this level Pampa, except that subtropical northern section I have referred to, is bare and open prairie, covered, as were the former prairies of North America, with grass and flowers, the grass sometimes six or seven feet high; but with no trees save here and there along the beds of the few and feeble streams. The native fauna, especially in the families to which the larger mammals belong, was poorer than that of western North America and far scantier than that of the southern parts of Africa in the same latitude. There were no buffaloes or elk, and few horned creatures corresponding to the elands and hartebeests and antelopes of South Africa. So remarkable a contrast is doubtless explicable by the different geological histories of the two continents.

When the Spaniards arrived, this vast region was occupied only by a few wandering Indian tribes, most of them low in the scale of civilization. They did not cultivate the soil, they had no milk-giving animals, and indeed hardly any animals to feed upon except the guanaco and the small South American ostrich. As the chase furnished but little food to these nomads, their numbers did not increase. Only in the hilly regions of the northwest were there settled tribes which had learnt some of the arts of life from their Peruvian neighbours. The rest of the country was a vast open wilderness like the lands beyond the Missouri, but the tribes were fewer and less formidable than the Sioux or Pawnees or Comanches.

For three centuries after their arrival the Spaniards did little to explore or settle the western or southern parts of the country. They founded small posts from Buenos Aires northwards along the Paraná and Paraguay rivers, and through them kept up communication with Potosi and Lima across the vast Andean plateau. As the government forbade the Argentines to trade with Europe direct, Spanish merchandise had to be brought to them by a long and difficult land route via Panama and the ports of Peru, and thence over the Andes. The inconveniences of this monstrous system, devised in the interests of a group of Spanish traders, were mitigated by the smuggling into Buenos Aires, which was carried on by means of English and Dutch ships. Life was not secure, for the Indian tribes sometimes raided up to the gates of the little towns, such as Cordova and Tucuman, but as the savages had no firearms and no discipline, it was generally easy to repulse them. Meanwhile some cattle and horses which had been turned loose in the Pampas after the middle of the sixteenth century began to multiply, till by the beginning of the eighteenth there were vast herds of both all over the plains, wherever grass grew, as far south as Patagonia.

When the development of the country had received an impetus by the creation in 1776 of a viceroyalty at Buenos Aires, and by the permission given to the Atlantic ports to trade with Europe, the cattle and horses became a source of wealth, men took to ranching, and colonization spread out into the wilderness. Then, in 1810, came the revolution which freed Argentina from Spain, and gave her people the opportunity of making their own prosperity. Unfortunately a period of civil wars followed, and it was not till the fall of the dictator Rosas in 1852 that the era of real progress began.

All this time the native Indians had been disappearing, partly by war, partly from the causes which usually break down aborigines in contact with white men. A campaign organized against them in 1879 practically blotted out the last of those who had roved over the central Pampas. The more civilized Indians of the northwestern plateau are quiet and industrious. A few nomads, now quite harmless, survive in Patagonia, and some fiercer tribes maintain a virtual independence in the forest and swamp country of the Gran Chaco in the far north. Otherwise the aborigines have vanished, leaving no trace, and having poured only a very slight infusion of native blood into the veins of the modern Argentine. Meanwhile the strife with the Indians and the long civil wars which followed independence, as well as the occupation first of catching wild cattle and horses and then of herding tame ones, had produced a type of frontiersman and cattleman not unlike that of western North America between 1800 and 1880 and more distantly resembling the Cossack of southern Russia a century and a half ago. This was the Gaucho, a word said to be drawn from one of the native languages, in which it means "stranger." He was above all things a horseman, never dismounting from his animal except to sleep beside it. His weapons against cattle and men were the lasso and the boletas, balls of metal (or stone) fastened together by a thong, and so hurled as to coil round the legs of the creature at which they were aimed. Such missiles were used in war by some of the Andean tribes. His dress was the poncho, a square piece of woollen cloth with a hole cut for the head to go through, and a pair of drawers. He could live on next to nothing and knew no fatigue. Round him clings all the romance of the Pampas, for he was taken as the embodiment of the primitive virtues of daring, endurance, and loyalty. Now he, too, is gone, as North American frontiersmen like Daniel Boone went eighty or ninety years ago, and as the cow-boy of Texas and Wyoming is now fast going.