Tierra del Fuego, which one had been wont to think of as a land of dense forests and wild mountains, is, as seen from Punta Arenas, and all along the eastern part of the Straits from this point to the Atlantic, a featureless level. Its northern part is flat, like the Patagonian mainland, which is itself the southernmost part of the great Argentine plain. Some parts are arid, but most of it is well grassed, excellent for sheep. Only in the far south are there mountains, the eastern prolongation of the range that runs (interrupted by channels between the isles) southeast from Cape Pilar. Neither along the shores of the Strait nor in those southern mountains are there any signs of volcanic action, but I was told that such evidences do exist at the extreme eastern end of the island, and there are in the Patagonian mainland, a little way north of the Straits, a large crater and a lava stream eighteen miles in length, the last manifestations to the south of those volcanic forces which are visible along the whole line of the Andes northward to Panama. Both in Tierra del Fuego and on the mainland there are left a few Patagonian aborigines. Those who dwell in the island are of the Ona tribe, tall men who, like the Tehuelches that roam over the mainland, answer to the description of the Patagonian giants given by the early Spanish and English navigators. Pigafetta relates that when Magellan's men had, near Port St. Julian, where he wintered, guilefully entrapped and fettered one of these giants, he cried out on Setebos to aid him, "that is," says Pigafetta, "the big devil" (il gran demonio). Shakespeare would seem to have taken from this account, through Eden's Decades of the New World, the Setebos whom Caliban names as "his dam's god" in the Tempest.73 The Onas who used to come down to Punta Arenas to sell guanaco skins and obtain ardent spirits, are now seldom seen. Strong liquor was too much for them, as it was for Caliban, and has reduced their numbers. It is curious that the far more abject Fuegians, who love tobacco, detest intoxicating liquors. But the chief calamity that befell this interesting tribe was the discovery that the more level parts of Tierra del Fuego are fit for sheep. The ranchmen drove off the Onas: the Onas retaliated by stealing the sheep and when they got a chance, shooting the ranchmen with arrows, for they have scarcely any firearms. The ranchmen then took to shooting the Onas at sight, so that now, out of three thousand who used to inhabit Tierra del Fuego, there are said to remain only three hundred, defending themselves in the recesses of the wooded mountains in the extreme south of the island. They are manly fellows of great strength and courage, and go about clothed only with a guanaco skin. Few guanacos are now left, for they also have had to make way for the sheep.74
After midnight the steamer left Punta Arenas for the Atlantic. Rising at daybreak I saw the eastern half of the Straits, than which nothing could be less like the western half. After traversing for some distance the wide basin between the mainland and Tierra del Fuego, on the west shore of which Punta Arenas stands, we reached the part of the Strait called the Second Narrows, where the passage, between low bluffs of hard earth on each side, is only a few miles wide, and then emerged from this into another large basin. Twenty miles further come the First Narrows, narrower than the Second, and then a wide bay, which in its turn opens into the Atlantic between two low capes, that on the north being Virgenes, and that on the south Espiritu Santo. Here it was that Magellan anchored while his two small ships went ahead to explore. The space between the capes, which is the eastern mouth of the Straits, is about ten miles wide. The coast here, as well as both shores of the Straits all the way from Punta Arenas, is perfectly flat, with a very slight rise of ground some miles back on the Patagonian side. Clear as was the air, no hills were visible in the distance, neither those in the south of Tierra del Fuego nor those westwards behind Cape Froward, where the Andes end. Over all this vast plain not a dwelling or sign of life could be discerned save the lighthouse on Cape Virgenes, where the boundary line between Chile and Argentina strikes the sea. The northeastern part of Tierra del Fuego belongs to the latter, the southwestern part to Chile. From below the cape, a low point runs out into the sea, to which British mariners have given the familiar name of Dungeness from its similarity to that curious shingle bank which the tides of the English Channel have piled up on the coast of Kent. It is, however, much shorter than our Dungeness and the pebbles of the shingle are smaller.
Before I close this account of the Straits, a few remarks may be added on their general physical character, which some of my readers may have pictured to themselves as very different from what one finds them to be. I had myself done this, fancying them to be a channel long and narrow all the way from ocean to ocean, a channel between steep, dark hills, covered with dense forests, with volcanoes, more or less extinct, rising behind. Nothing could be further from the reality.
Magellan's Straits are unlike any other straits in this respect, that the physical aspect of the two ends is entirely different. The character of the shores on each side is the same in each part of the channel, but both shores of the eastern half, from the Atlantic to Cape Froward, are unlike those of the western half from Cape Froward to the Pacific. The former has low banks, with smooth outlines, slopes of earth or sand dipping into shallow water, and a climate extremely dry. The latter half is enclosed between high, steep mountains which are drenched by incessant rains. The eastern half is a channel, narrow at two points only, leading through the southernmost part of the vast Argentine plain, which has apparently been raised from the sea bottom in comparatively recent times. The western half is a deep narrow cut through the extremity of a great mountain system that stretches north for thousands of miles, forming the western edge of South America, and the rocks on each side of it are ancient (palæozoic or earlier). The western half is grand and solemn, with its deep waters mirroring white crags and blue glaciers. The low eastern half has no beauty save that which belongs to vast open spaces of level land and smooth water over which broods the silence of a clear and lucent air. A more singular contrast, all within a few hours' steaming, it would be hard to find. Unlike, however, as these two halves of the Straits are, they are both impressive in the sense they give of remoteness and mystery, a passage between two oceans through a wilderness most of which is likely to be forever left to those overwhelming forces of nature, rain and wind and cold, which make it useless to man.
Magellan's discovery of the Straits and circumnavigation of the globe was an event of the highest geographical significance, for it finally proved not only that the earth was round, and that the western sea route to India, of which Columbus dreamed, really existed, but also that the earth was immensely larger than had been supposed. A few years after Magellan, Pizarro and his companions, sailing southward from Panama to northern Chile, proved that the "South Sea" discovered by Balboa stretched so far to the south that it must be continuous with that which Magellan had crossed to the Philippines. Thereafter, not much was done in the Southern Hemisphere until the discovery of New Zealand and Australia two centuries later. But no great importance, either commercial or political, belonged to a long and narrow strait which it was extremely difficult to navigate against the prevalent west winds, so when it was presently discovered that there was an open sea not much farther south, it was round Cape Horn and not through the Straits that most of the English and Dutch adventurers made their way to plunder the Spaniards on the Pacific coast; and when the trade restrictions Spain had imposed finally disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century, commerce also went round Cape Horn, tedious and dangerous as was the passage to those who had to face the prevailing westerly gales. Even in the days when Charles Darwin sailed in the Beagle under Captain Fitzroy, hardly any merchant vessels traversed the Straits. It was the application of steam to ocean-going vessels that gave to this route the importance it has since possessed.75 It is now threatened, as respects passenger traffic, with the competition of the Transandine railway; as respects goods traffic, with that of the Panama Canal, and it may possibly retain only so much of the latter as passes between Pacific ports south of Callao and Atlantic ports south of the Equator.
The morning was brilliant with blue wavelets sparkling under a light breeze as we passed out to the east and saw the low, flat bluff of Cape Virgenes sink below the horizon. But the wind rose steadily, and next morning the spray was dashing over the vessel when we caught sight, through drifting clouds, of the shores of the Falkland Isles. They were wild and dreary shores bordered by rocky islands and scattered reefs, no dwellings anywhere visible on land, nor any boats on sea. In the afternoon, having passed, without seeing it, the mouth of the channel which separates the East from the West Falkland, we anchored in the deep bay which forms the outer harbour of Port Stanley, the chief harbour and village of the islands. The wind was still so strong that our careful captain decided not to take his vessel through the very narrow passage which leads to the inner harbour, so we got into the tiny launch which had come out with the mails, and after a tumble in the waves and a run through the narrows found ourselves in a landlocked inlet, on the shore of which stands the capital city of this remote and lonely part of the British Empire, a place of a few hundred inhabitants. Here was Government House, a substantial villa of grey stone. Indoors we found a cheerful little drawing-room with a cheerful blaze in the grate, a welcome sight to those who had not seen a fire during three weeks of almost constant cold. There was a tree beside the house, the only tree in the islands, and a conservatory full of gay flowers, looking all the prettier in such a spot. And from the top of its tall staff the meteor flag of England was streaming straight out in the gale. The village – it seems to be the only village in the colony – consists of one street built mostly of wood and corrugated iron, with a few better houses of stone whitewashed, and reminded us faintly of the little seaside hamlets of Shetland or the Hebrides, though here there was neither a fishlike smell nor any signs of the industry which dominates those islands. All was plain and humble, but decent, and not without a suggestion of internal comfort. The only colour was given by some splendid bushes of yellow gorse in full flower, an evidence that though it is never warm here, the thermometer never falls very low. The climate is extremely healthy, but the winds are so strong and incessant that everybody goes about stooping forward.
The isles were uninhabited when discovered, a fact creditable to the aborigines of South America, for a more unpromising spot for a settlement of savages could not be imagined; no wood and no food either on the land or on the sea. At present there are about two thousand three hundred inhabitants, nearly all of British origin, including a good many Scots brought hither as shepherds, for the colony is now one enormous sheep-farm, probably the biggest in the world, and lives off the wool and skins it sends home and the living sheep it exports for breeding purposes to Punta Arenas. Wild cattle, descendants of a few brought long ago by the earlier settlers, were once numerous, but have now almost disappeared; and the tall tussock grass, which was such a feature in the days of Sir James Ross's Antarctic Expedition (1840), has vanished, except from some of the smaller isles. Poor is the prospect for an agriculturist, for the climate permits nothing to ripen except potatoes and turnips with a few gooseberries and currants. As in most oceanic islands, the native land fauna, especially of mammals, is extremely scanty, and, what is stranger, there are, so one is told, so few fish in the sea that it is not worth while to face the storms to catch them. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, meant to justify the laziness as timidity of those who won't go out. Certain it is that the sea is always rough, and there are no fishing boats about. Neither are there roads; the population is so thin that they would cost more than its needs justify, and locomotion, even on horseback, is hindered by the bogs and swamps that fill the hollows.
One naturally asks in the spirit which fills us all to-day, whether anything can be done to "develop the place," i. e. to find some resources for the people and help them to make something more of the islands. Well, there are the seals which frequent the coast. They belong to a species different from that of the North Pacific, but with an equally valuable fur. Some are now taken by the few whaling vessels which still resort to these tempestuous seas, but nothing is done to prevent their destruction within territorial waters or to preserve a land herd, and it would no doubt be difficult to exercise effective control on such a wild and thinly peopled coast. Yet what one heard on the spot seemed to suggest that steps might be taken by international agreement for the protection and utilization of these and other large marine mammals both here and in the other islands in this part of the ocean. Some of the rarer species are threatened with extinction.76 The arrangements recently made by a treaty between Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and Japan, for the benefit of the North Pacific sealing industry constitute a useful precedent.
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.