Argentina Part 1

Argentina.

by W. A. Hirst.

PREFACE

In establishing the commercial and industrial greatness of Argentina my countrymen have co-operated with her people for a longer time and more efficiently than any other foreign nation. The land and the people are therefore a subject of lively interest to Englishmen, and it is hoped that this sketch, however inadequate, will help towards a closer knowledge of Argentina. I have received much valuable a.s.sistance from many sources, but I do not indicate them, because I do not wish to shift the blame for any inaccuracies that may be found in these pages. For all such mistakes I am solely responsible.

_April 22, 1910._

INTRODUCTION

The most stupendous achievement ever attained by a nation in so short a time was the discovery, conquest, and settlement of Mexico and South America by Spain within the compa.s.s of a century. To fix indelibly and for ever upon the peoples of a vast continent the language, religion, customs, polity, and laws of a nation on the other side of the globe called for qualities which could only be temporarily evoked by an irresistible common sentiment. The sentiment which gave to Spain for a time the potency to carry through simultaneously the tasks of imposing religious orthodoxy upon Christendom and founding her great colonial empire was pride: pride of religion, race, and person, deliberately fostered by rulers for political ends. This origin of the delusive strength that carried the Conquistadores through an untracked continent regardless of perils and sufferings, and made South America Spanish, rendered inevitable that the rewards, national and individual, should disappoint the recipients. For pride and its concomitant covetousness are never satisfied; and the frenzied thirst for rapid riches and distinction that spurred the Spanish explorers and conquerors onward rarely ended in the idle luxurious dignity that was their goal, and it ultimately brought to the mother country nought but penury and degradation.

It was ignorance of economic truth that led Spaniards in the sixteenth century to regard the possession of the precious metals as wealth, regardless of circ.u.mstances: and the error coloured the whole domination of Spain in the New World. That the nation and the individual should hope to become permanently powerful and rich by obtaining vast stores of the metallic medium whilst discouraging productive industry appears to modern ideas ridiculous, but to the discoverers of America it was regarded as quite the natural course of events. The effect is seen in the rapid subjection and development of the regions believed to be rich in the precious metals, and the comparative neglect of the vast territories where patience and the labour of man were needed to win nature's abundant bounty from the fertile soil.

The west side of the South American Continent, though furthest from Europe, therefore took precedence of the eastern coast in the efforts and regards of the conquerors. When the piled-up riches of the Incas and the inexhaustible mines of the Peruvian Andes beckoned to the greedy adventurers from the mother country, the endless alluvial pampas and dense primeval forests of the east might call in vain. From Panama down the Pacific Coast, therefore, the main tide of conquest and empire flowed, drawn by the magnet gold; and on the northern continent a similar course was taken. The Aztec empire with its acc.u.mulated treasures absorbed an ever-increasing stream of Spaniards, whilst the more northern territories now included in the United States were left later to English settlers, whose hopes were not centred upon wringing yellow metal from the earth, but upon founding a free new agricultural England across the sea.

Thus it happened that to navigators in search of the short cut to Asia rather than to the typical Conquistador was left the first exploration of what we now know is the coming emporium of the South American Continent and its permanent centre of productive prosperity. Domingo de Solis, chief pilot of Spain, was sent by Charles V. to South America not as a settler, or primarily as a gold-seeker, but as an explorer; and when in 1508 he entered the n.o.ble Bay of Rio Janeiro it seemed at last that the object of his quest was gained, and that here was the coveted waterway to the East. But he soon found out his mistake, and when, sailing further south, he crossed the wide estuary of the River Plate, his hopes again rose that this tremendous volume of water, a hundred and fifty miles wide at the mouth, was not a river merely, but the ocean channel to the Pacific. Returning home with his hopes still high Solis, was authorised by his sovereign to explore his important discovery, and in 1516 he sailed into the delta of the great network of streams that have brought down upon their bosoms from the far Andes in the course of ages a large portion of the continent as we now know it.

To the Spaniard's eyes the land was not inviting. Far stretching plains of waving gra.s.ses, great expanses of marsh and swamp, league after league. No palaces and temples of hewn stone, like those of Peru and Mexico, met the eye here; no promise of gold in the fat alluvial soil; no cities where the arts were practised and treasure acc.u.mulated. Such Indians as there were differed vastly from the mild serfs of the Incas.

Nomad savages were these; robust, stout, and hardy, elusive of pursuit and impossible of subjection in their wandering disunity. For three hundred miles through the endless pampa-country Solis sailed onward up the stream, his hopes that this way led to the Indies gradually fading as he progressed, until he and his men fell into a trap laid for them by the pampa Indians and were slaughtered.

Four years afterwards Magellan on his epoch-making voyage sailed up the great river; but he too fell a victim to the perils of the way in the Asiatic seas, and never returned to Spain to tell of his discoveries in the heart of South America. Then Sebastian Cabot, the Englishman in the service of Spain, was sent to explore, and if possible to take possession of the land for Charles V.; for the Portuguese claimed indefinite territory in this direction under the convention of Tordesillas, and it behoved Spain to a.s.sert ownership before it was too late. High up the river Paraguay Cabot found a country with different features and peopled by another race. Silver ornaments, too, he found in plenty amongst these Guaranies, to whom distant echoes of Inca influence had reached across the wastes and mountains to the west. But here, many hundreds of miles from the ocean and far from any base of supplies, it was impracticable for Cabot with the resources at his disposal to effect a settlement, and he also returned to Spain with his story of silver as an incentive for further expeditions.

This was in 1527, and in the following year the first attempt to establish a permanent footing on the Plate was made by the building of a fort at Rosario, but this was soon abandoned for a site on the sea coast of what is now a part of Brazil to the north of the river. In the meantime the Portuguese were busy advancing their posts to the north of the delta in order to a.s.sert their claims; and in face of this, rather than because remunerative metallic treasure from the new territory was to be expected, Charles V. authorised an extensive colonising experiment to be made and the great waterway and its banks claimed for Spain. The stirring history of Mendoza's attempts to found a settlement on the Parana, the establishment of Buenos Aires and its abandonment again and again, the fateful colonisation of Asuncion, far up the river in the heart of the continent, the heroic adventures of Irala, Ayolas, and Cabeza de Vaca, and the reconquest of the river territories down to the sea from the isolated Spanish post of Asuncion eight hundred miles up stream, is adequately told in Mr. Hirst's pages, and need not be related here.

The permanent fixing of the flag of Spain on the territory east of the Andes was not less heroic an achievement than the more showy conquests of Peru and Mexico; for in the former case the incentive of easily won gold was absent, and the object was more purely national than was the case elsewhere. But, though it was necessary for Spain to a.s.sert her ownership over these endless pampas and the unexplored wastes beyond, the new territory was always subordinated to the gold-producing viceroyalty of Peru across the Andes. A glance at the map will show the almost incredible obstacles wilfully interposed by the home authorities upon the River Plate colonies in forcing the latter not only to be subject in government to the Viceroy of Peru, but to carry on most of their commercial communications with the mother country across the wide continent from the Pacific coast by way of Panama and Peru. The law was, of course, extensively evaded, and the luxuriant fertility of the pampa both for agriculture and grazing made the River Plate colonies prosperous in spite of Government restrictions.

The English slave-traders and adventurers made no scruple of braving the King of Spain's edicts; and the estuary of the Plate, within a few weeks' sail of Europe, saw many a cargo welcomed upon a mere pretence of force by the colonists whose lives were rendered doubly hard by the obstacles placed in their way by their own Government. In 1586 the Earl of c.u.mberland's ships on a privateering expedition to capture every Spanish and Portuguese vessel they encountered sailed into the River Plate and learnt some interesting particulars of the settlements from one of the unfortunate shipmasters they had plundered. These give a good idea of the difficulties under which traffic was then carried on. "He told me that the town of Buenos Aires is from the Green island about seventy leagues' standing on the south side of the river, and from thence to Santa Fe is one hundred leagues, standing on the same side also. At which town their ships do discharge all their goods into small barks, which row and tow up the river to another town called Asuncion, which is from Santa Fe a hundred and fifty leagues, where the boats discharge on sh.o.r.e, and so pa.s.s all their goods by carts and horses to Tuc.u.man, which is in Peru." The commerce here referred to was probably the contraband trade done in spite of the Spanish regulations, for it was found that even to the far distant towns in the interior, like Tuc.u.man and Mendoza, it was easier and cheaper thus to convey goods from Europe by the eastern coast than from the Pacific across the almost impa.s.sable Andes.

The Earl of c.u.mberland's factor gives also an account of the Spanish settlements then (1586) existing on the River Plate.[1] "There are in the river five towns, some of seventy households, some of more. The first town was about fifty leagues up the river and called Buenos Aires, the rest some forty or fifty leagues from one another, so that the uppermost town, called Tuc.u.man, is two hundred and thirty leagues from the entrance to the river.[2] In these towns is great store of corn, cattle, wine and sundry fruits, but no money of gold or silver.

They make a certain kind of slight cloth, which they give in truck for sugar, rice, marmalade, and sucket, which were the commodities this ship (_i.e._, the prize) had."

Thus with everything against it except its irrepressible natural advantages of soil and climate and its lack of mineral wealth, the colony grew in prosperity in spite of man's shortsightedness. There was no temptation here, even if it had been possible, for the Spaniards to exterminate the aborigines by forced work in unhealthy mines. The innumerable herds of cattle and horses that in a very few years peopled the pampa from the few animals brought from Europe and abandoned by the first settlers provided sustenance, even wealth, with comparatively easy labour to the mixed race of Indians and Spaniards, which took kindly to the half-wild pastoral life in harmony with the nomadic traditions of the natives; and thus with much less hardship and cruelty than in other South American regions the Argentines gradually grew into a h.o.m.ogeneous people, whose pastoral and agricultural pursuits brought them to a higher level of general well-being than populations elsewhere in South America.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INDIAN CHILD.]

But great as is the actual and potential wealth of the Argentine from its favoured soil, it is not that alone that has made its capital the greatest in South America, and has brought to the development of the Republic citizens and resources from all the progressive nations of the world. It is also as the main highway to the remote recesses of the vast continent that the Argentine region has appealed to the imaginations of men. The n.o.ble waterways, navigable far into the interior, provide cheap and easy transport for the products of distant provinces possessing infinite possibilities as yet hardly known. The unbroken plains, extending from the Atlantic sea-board to the foot of the Andes eight hundred miles away, offer unrivalled facilities for the construction of railways to convey to the ports food supplies for the Old World from this, the greatest undeveloped grain and pasture region in temperate climes. It is this character of a thoroughfare offering easy access to the coming continent that ensures for Buenos Aires its future position as a world emporium, and to the States of the Argentine Republic readily accessible markets for their abundant and varied natural products. And to add to this advantage the opening of the Transandine tunnel, now at last an accomplished fact, makes the Argentine the natural highway for pa.s.sengers and fine goods to the cities of Chile and the Pacific Coast, saving the tedious and costly voyage round Cape Horn or through the Straits of Magellan.

The greatest admirers of the old Spanish colonial system will hardly deny that the prodigious development effected since the declaration of Argentine independence, of the resources of the country, thanks largely to the influx of foreign immigrants and capital, would have been impossible under the Spanish domination. That a new people, unaccustomed to, and perhaps as yet unprepared for, self-government and political emanc.i.p.ation should have had to work out its own problems during a period of turbulence was inevitable. It is no reproach to the Argentine people that this natural process, necessary to fit them for a stable political existence, has in the past caused violence and lawlessness. The constant introduction of men of other races into the Argentine is giving to the population new features and qualities which will render the racial stock of the future one of the most interesting ethnological problems in the world; and this abundant admixture of foreign blood, readily a.s.similated as it is by the native stock, certainly makes for increasing stability.

The same may be said of the large amount of foreign capital invested in Argentine enterprises. Argentine statesmen, taught by experience as they have been, and keenly awake to the need for foreign aid in developing their country, are not in the least likely in future to frighten away capital by dishonest finance or revolutionary methods.

Responsibility has already brought sobriety into Argentine politics, and although the official procedure and Governmental ethics of the Spanish races vary from those usually prevalent in Anglo-Saxon countries, they are in most cases better suited to the character of the people than those that commend themselves to us. When we for our own purposes go to a foreign country, it is unreasonable to expect, as many Englishmen do, that we can carry with us and impose upon our hosts our own traditions and standards.

No country known to me impresses upon a visitor from Europe so forcibly as the Argentine the unlimited possibilities of its soil.

Travelling hour after hour by a railway straight as a line over gently undulating or perfectly flat plains, stretching on all sides as far as the eye can reach, the observer is struck by the regular ripple of the rich gra.s.s, like the waves of the sea, as the breeze blows over it.

Here and there little clumps of eucalyptus slightly break the monotony of the landscape, and a gleam of a bright green alfalfa field occasionally relieves the eye. Far away at rare intervals gleaming white walls and turrets surrounded by eucalyptus groves mark the position of an estancia, and innumerable herds of cattle, sheep, and almost wild troops of horses everywhere testify to the richness of the pasture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SHEEP RUN.]

From Buenos Aires to Mendoza, almost at the foot of the Andes, some six hundred miles away, the scene hardly changes. Far to the south the pampa is poorer and more spa.r.s.e, but still splendid pasture for certain sorts of cattle, whilst in Entre Rios, the great tract between the rivers Parana and Uruguay, the country is wilder and more broken, especially towards the north. Scattered amongst the vast flocks of sheep upon the open veldt are many ostriches, now a profitable investment, whilst great numbers of running partridges seek cover in the pampa gra.s.s from the dreaded hawks that hover above them. The native gra.s.s is flesh-forming but not fattening, and, to an English grazier, looks poor food enough for the millions of head of cattle that thrive upon it. It does not, as does the best English pasture, entirely cover the surface, but grows in distinct tufts. The native gra.s.s, however, is now rapidly being supplanted in the rich plains of Central Argentina by new forms of pasture, mostly English, infinitely richer, perennial in its luxuriance, and forming upon this favoured soil the best cattle-grazing in the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN OSTRICH.]

Of late years, as Mr. Hirst shows in his book, enormous tracts of land, especially to the south of Buenos Aires and high up the Parana, are being broken up for wheat-growing, and Bahia Blanca, the ambitious port south of Buenos Aires, bids fair soon to become a great centre of grain export. Vast quant.i.ties of maize are also raised in the country on the banks of the Parana, and are mainly exported from Rosario.

Whichever way one turns fresh evidences of fertility are forced upon the attention. Cattle standing knee-deep in pasture, sheep growing fat at fifty to the acre, leagues of ripening corn, equal to any on earth, growing upon virgin soil; flowers to which we are accustomed in England as tender shrubs developing here into robust blossoming trees; and fruit orchards flourishing, solid miles of them, prolific beyond belief, within a short distance of Buenos Aires, where only a few years ago nothing but wild scrub and tangled forest existed.

The extension of railways in every direction has now to a great extent destroyed or modified the old free life upon the pampas of Argentina. The estancias, except in remote districts, are often large establishments where all the comforts and some of the luxuries of life are to be found, instead of the walled semi-fortresses of olden times. The white-domed well, with its shady ombu-tree, still stands near the princ.i.p.al entrance to the courtyard, and the high palenque, the hitching-post for horses, still flanks the gateway, but the picturesque gaucho who goes loping over the plain, his la.s.so at his saddle-bow, his naked feet thrust into his big leather horseskin brogues, and his poncho fluttering in the breeze, is no longer the monarch of the pampa as he once was, for civilisation has touched even him. The silver ornaments that once covered his accoutrements are less abundant than they used to be; he is fortunately less free with his knife, for he was never much of a hand with a gun, loving the bolas better; and the rural railway station in which he likes to dawdle about in the intervals of his life in the saddle is the symbol of his discipline and decline.

The great waterways that characterise Argentina, although they are now less used for pa.s.senger traffic into the hinterland than formerly, must still in the future be a great, if not the princ.i.p.al, highway for the produce of the distant interior. Rosario, some two hundred miles above Buenos Aires on the Parana, is a progressive and improving port, serving the rich maize and grain-growing expanses of the province of Santa Fe; and far up the stream, almost to the Paraguayan border at Corrientes, river ports are rapidly growing into importance as centres of export as the surrounding country is developed.

But wonderful as is the apparently boundless promise of this country of favoured plains, Argentina is not only pampa. The Gran Chaco, a great country still for the most part a wilderness, is a region of dim tropical forest, where the parrots, birds of paradise, and brilliant b.u.t.terflies vie with those of the Amazon; a hot, moist region, where the monkey and the land crab flourish exceedingly, and where savage Indians still hunt down with primitive weapons the jaguar and the puma. From this sultry country of forest and flood to the almost treeless, arid steppes of Patagonia is a change rather to another world than to another province of the same Republic, and hardly less difference exists between the rolling plains of the pampa country and the magnificent regions of towering peaks, stern uplands, and vast lakes that form the Andine portions of Argentina.

The change is noticed as the road approaches Mendoza, where the pampa gradually gives way to a country strongly resembling parts of Southern Spain; a land of poplars, willows, and acacias shading endless lines of irrigation channels; for rain falls but seldom on this eastern side of the Sierra, and on all hands, climbing the lower laps of the hills and lining the valleys, are miles of vineyards, which provide a stout red wine for the rest of the Republic. Further west still the land becomes more broken and barren as the hills rise higher and higher, until the ruddy sides, white glaciers, and snow-crested mountains of the Sierra appear, the giant Aconcagua monarch of them all. Further south than this the wonderful series of lakes that are almost inland seas high up in the Andes exist, as yet only partially explored to decide the frontier dispute between the Argentine and Chile, the remote valleys and austere uplands where the giant sloth is still believed by many to linger, a sole survival of the world before the great flood that destroyed life upon the nascent continent unrecorded ages ago.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ACONCAGUA.]

This marvellous country of Argentina is destined to be one of the great nations of the world. Nature is just, and in giving it a prodigious extent of flat fertile soil has more than compensated it for withholding the gift of abundant gold that has made the history of other portions of South America. With a climate that varies, as does that of Chile, from the tropical to the antarctic, with pasture and arable land unsurpa.s.sed in the world, and with facilities for transport by land and water enabling the fruits of the soil to be conveyed easily from remote districts to eager markets for them, no bounds can be set to the wealth that awaits enterprise in the country.

As a highway, too, the possibilities of Argentina are immense. The connection of Buenos Aires by rail with Santiago and Valparaiso opens up a new and shorter route to New Zealand and Australia; whilst the rapidly progressing extension of the railway into Bolivia--another link, it is intended, of the line to run eventually from New York to Buenos Aires--will provide a new and welcome outlet for the treasures of her mines to Bolivia, a vast country without a port of its own.

The possession of a temperate climate has made the Argentine and Chile the two South American nations of most promise for the future, owing to the fact that both countries have attracted and a.s.similated a great admixture of the robust peoples of Europe. The immigrants have been to a large extent drawn from the countries where life is hard and the fare frugal; from North Italy, from Galicia and Russia; whilst in stern Patagonia the Scotsman and the Welshman find an environment after their own hearts. In the second generation the immigrants of all nations usually become st.u.r.dy Argentines, and this easy a.s.similation of new ethnological elements is one of the most striking signs of the energy of the nation as a whole, and the most promising fact as regards the future political stability of the country. That a composite race will result from this admixture, possessing much of the patient laboriousness of the Ligurian and the practical hardheadedness of the Teuton, to temper the keen vehemence of the Ibero-American, may be confidently hoped: and if such be the case the advantages that nature has showered upon the Argentine will be complete, and a splendid future for the country secure.

MARTIN HUME.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Hakluyt.

[2] It need hardly be mentioned that Tuc.u.man, which had been founded by the Spaniards from the Peru side some twenty years before, is not on the river at all, but nearly five hundred miles distant across the still almost unknown Gran Chaco. Tuc.u.man is now reached by railway from the south by way of Cordoba.

ARGENTINA

CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRY--ITS FOUR DIVISIONS--THE RIVERS--THE CLIMATE