I saw the cart fairly before the horse:- in Europe we laugh at the idea; in South America nothing is more common than the reality. The wild and savage appearance of the tawny drivers of these carts, half naked, shouting and screaming and jostling one another, and flogging their miserable jaded beasts through the water, as if to show the little value attached to the brute creation in these countries, is enough to startle a stranger on his first arrival, and induce him for a moment to doubt whether he be really landing in a Christian country. It is a new and a strange specimen of human kind, little calculated to create a favourable first impression." The capital itself of the now nominally united provinces which form the subject of Sir Woodbine's work, was, twenty years ago, an anomaly among towns and cities inhabited by Christians, if we except those founded, dwelt in, and governed by Spaniards and their offspring. There was nothing like what is understood in England by the term comfort in the streets or in and about the houses. Even convenience was strangely overlooked. The houses were without chimneys; for the people looked upon them as certain conductors of wet and cold, and therefore had recourse to braziers and charcoal to warm the rooms. An account of some of the changes that have taken place comparatively lately, and at whose instigation, will appear from our next extract : "I lived, however, long enough in Buenos Ayres to see great changes in these matters, and such innovations upon the old habits and fashions of the people as would make a stranger now doubt whether it really be the place he may have read of. In nothing is the alteration more striking than in the comparative comfort, if not luxury, which has found its way into the dwellings of the better classes: thanks to the English and French upholsterers, who have swarmed out to Buenos Ayres, the old white-washed walls have been covered with paper in all the varieties from Paris; and European furniture of every sort is to be met with in every house. English grates, supplied with coals carried out from Liverpool as ballast, and often sold at lower prices than in London, have been brought into very general use, and certainly have contributed to the health and coinfort of a city, the atmosphere of which is nine days out of ten affected by the damps from the river. Nor is the improvement confined to the internal arrangement of the house; a striking change has taken place in the whole style of building in Buenos Ayres. With the influx of strangers, the value of property, especially in the more central part of the city, has been greatly enhanced, and has led the natives to think of economizing their ground by constructing upper stories to their houses in the European fashion, the obvious advantage of which will no doubt ere many years make the plan general, and greatly add to the embellishment of the city." Some peculiarities, however, still remain, and are likely to be long preserved. Amongst these are "The iron gratings, or rather railings, which protect the windows, and which on more than one occasion have proved the best safeguards of the inhabitants: it requires some time for a European to become reconciled to their appearance, which ill accords with the beau ideal of republican liberty and republican safety; yet, when painted green, they are rather ornamental than otherwise, particularly when hung, as they frequently are, with festoons of the beautiful air-plants of Paraguay, which there live and blossom even on cold iron; and one does get reconciled to them, I believe, from a speedy conviction of their necessity in the present state of society in those countries: in the hot nights of summer, too, it is some comfort to be able to leave a window open without risk of intrusion; though some of the light-fingered gentry have made this not quite so safe as it used to be. I have known more than one instance of a clever thief running off with the clothes of the sleeping inmates, fished through the gratings by means of one of the long canes of the country with a hook at the end of it: in one well-known case, a gentleman's watch was thus hooked out of its pocket at his bed's head, and he was just roused by his frightened wife in time to catch a last glimpse of the chain and seals as they seemingly danced out of the window." But still, Buenos Ayres has made great progress in improvement and enlargement during the last fifty years. In 1767 the population was reckoned at 20,000; whereas in 1824 it was more than 81,000; while during its independence of Spain its commercial prosperity has still more advanced; and, should steam be extensively introduced upon the La Plata and its tributaries, its growth cannot be computed, unless indeed the French by their blocades put a stop to all trade and bring ruin upon the entire Argentine Republic. To be sure there have been other obstructions to its career, such as internal distractions, the ravages of the Indians, and wars with foreign enemies. The following account will afford some idea of how terribly and distressing must often have been the consequences of the assaults and the wiles of the aborigines, which the Buenos Ayreans, however, have several times awfully revenged, even to the total extermination almost of whole tribes. The author says "That the Buenos Ayreans had ample cause for these hostilities may be judged from the number of Christian slaves, whom they succeeded in rescuing from the hands of the savages; upwards of 1,500 women and children were retaken by General Rosa's troops, who had all been carried off in some or other of their marauding incursions, their husbands, sons, and brothers having been in most instances barbarously butchered before them. Many of these poor women had been in their hands for years; some taken in infancy could give little or no account to whom they belonged; others had become the wretched mothers of children brought up to follow the brutal life of these barbarians." But if Buenos Ayres was to be entirely dependent for its pro sperity and advancement on the acts and exertions of its Creole population, slow indeed would be its rise. Take the following as a proof: "It will hardly be credited that water is an expensive article within fifty yards of the Plata, but so it is; nothing can be worse than the ordinary supply of it. That obtained from the wells is brackish and bad, and there are no public cisterns or reservoirs, although the city is so slightly elevated above the river, that nothing would be easier than to keep it continually provided by the most ordinary artificial means. As it is, those who can afford it go to a great expense in constructing large tanks under the pavement of their court-yards, into which the rain water collected from the flat-terraced roofs of their houses is conducted by pipes; and in general a sufficiency may thus be secured for the ordinary purposes of the family; but the lower orders, who cannot afford to go to such an expense, depend for a more scanty supply upon the itinerant water-carriers, who, at a certain time of day, are to be seen lazily perambulating the streets with huge butts filled at the river, mounted on the monstrous cart-wheels of the country, and drawn by a yoke of oxen, -a clumsy and expensive contrivance altogether, which makes even water dear within a stone's throw of the largest river in the world. Taken at the very edge, it is seldom of the purest, and generally requires to stand twenty-four hours before it deposits its muddy sediment, and becomes sufficiently cleared to be drinkable; it is then excellent, and may be kept for any time. I have drunk it myself on board ship, after it had been two voyages to England and back, and never tasted better." The capital of the provinces has also to encounter at times the severities of a peculiar climate, and the effects and influence of the north wind at one time and of a south western at another, being the special and the most uniform causes of injury : "Europeans, though often sensible of its (north wind's) influence, are not in general so liable to be affected by this abominable wind as the natives, amongst whom the women appear to be the greatest sufferers, especially from the headache it occasions. Numbers of them may be seen at times in the streets, walking about with large split-beans stuck upon their temples, a sure sign which way the wind blows. The bean, which is applied raw, appears to act as a slight blister, and to counteract the relaxation caused by the state of the atmosphere. But it is not the human constitution alone that is afflicted; the discomforts of the day are generally increased by the derangement of most of the household preparations : -the meat turns putrid, the milk curdles, and even the bread which is baked whilst it lasts is frequently bad. Every one complains, and the only answer returned is Senor, es el viento norte.' All these miseries, however, are not without their remedy; when the sufferings of the natives are at their climax, the mercury will give the sure indication of a coming pampero, as the South-wester is called; on a sudden, a rustling breeze breaks through the stillness of the stagnant atmosphere, and in a few seconds sweeps away the incubus and all else before it; originating in the snows of 1 the Andes, the blast rushes with unbroken violence over the intermediate pampas, and, ere it reaches Buenos Ayres, becomes often a hurricane. A very different state of things then takes place, and, from the suddenness of such changes, the most ludicrous, though often serious, accidents occur, particularly in the river; whither, of an evening especially, a great part of the population will resort to cool themselves during the hot weather. There may be seen hundreds and hundreds of men, women, and children, sitting together up to their necks in the water, just like so many frogs in a marsh: if a pampero breaks, as it often does, unexpectedly upon such an assembly, the scramble and confusion which ensues is better imagined than told; fortunate are those who may have taken an attendant to watch their clothes, for otherwise, long ere they can get out of the river, every article of dress is flying before the gale. Not unfrequently the pampero is accompanied by clouds of dust from the parched pampas, so dense as to produce total darkness, in which I have known instances of bathers in the river being drowned ere they could find their way to the shore. I recollect on one of these occasions a gang of twenty convicts, who were working at the time in irons upon the beach, making their escape in the dark, not one of whom, I believe, was retaken. It is difficult to convey any idea of the strange effects of these dust-storms: day is changed to night, and nothing can exceed the temporary darkness produced by them, which I have known to last for a quarter of an hour in the middle of the day; very frequently they are laid by a heavy fall of rain, which, mingling with the clouds of dust as it pours down, forms literally a shower of mud. The sort of dirty pickle in which people appear after being caught in such a storm is indescribable. Sometimes the consequences are more serious, and the pampero is accompanied by the most terrific thunder and lightning; such, I believe, as is to be witnessed in no other part of the world, unless it be the Straits of Sunda. Nothing can be more appalling. In Azara may be read an account of nineteen persons killed by the lightning which fell in the city during one of these storms. But the atmosphere is effectually cleared; man breathes once more, and all nature seems to revive under the exhilarating freshness of the gale :the natives, good-humoured and thoughtless, laugh over the less serious consequences, and soon forget the worst; happy in the belief that, at any rate, they are free from the epidemical disorders of other regions. Still such variations from the ordinary courses of nature cannot but be productive of strange consequences; and, though the transient effects of an overcharged atmosphere may be quickly dispelled by a pampero, and the people be really free from the epidemics of other countries, there is every reason to believe that in this particular climate, the human system is in a high degree susceptible of affections which elsewhere would not be deemed worth a moment's consideration. Besides those I have already spoken of as arising from the north wind, old wounds are found to burst out afresh, new ones are very difficult to heal; an apparently trivial sprain will induce a weakness of the part, requiring years, perhaps, to recover from, as I know from my own experience; and lock-jaw from the most trifling accidents is so common as to constitute the cause of a very great portion of the deaths from hurts in the public hospitals.' Upon the bodily system the effect of the northerly winds, which are prevalent during the greater part of the year, bringing, as they do, much humidity imbibed from the exhalations over the expanse of the Plata, is a general lassitude and relaxation. But the sirocco of the Levant does not bring with it more disagreeable affections than this sultry viento norte upon the mind and the moral faculties; bloodshed, for example, being much more frequent during its influence than at any other time. Here is an illustration : "Not many years back, a man named Garcia was executed for murder. He was a person of some education, esteemed by those who knew him, and, in general, rather remarkable than otherwise for the civility and amenity of his manners; his countenance was open and handsome, and his disposition frank and generous; but when the north wind set in he appeared to lose all command of himself, and such was his extreme irritability, that during its continuance he could hardly speak to any one in the street without quarrelling. In a conversation with my informant a few hours before his execution, he admitted that it was the third murder he had been guilty of, besides having been engaged in more than twenty fights with knives, in which he had both given and received many serious wounds; but, he observed, it was the north wind, not he, that shed all this blood. When he rose from his bed in the morning, he said he was at once aware of its accursed influence upon him; a dull headache at first, and then a feeling of impatience at everything about him, would cause him to take umbrage even at the members of his own family on the most trivial occurrence. If he went abroad, his headache generally became worse, a heavy weight seemed to hang over his temples, he saw objects, as it were, through a cloud, and was hardly conscious where he went. He was fond of play, and if in such a mood a gambling house was in his way, he seldom resisted the temptation; once there, any turn of ill-luck would so irritate him, that the chances were he would insult some of the bystanders. Those who knew him, perhaps, would bear with his ill humours; but if unhappily he chanced to meet a stranger disposed to resent his abuse, they seldom parted without bloodshed. Such was the account the wretched man gave of himself, and it was corroborated afterwards by his relations and friends; who added, that no sooner had the cause of his excitement passed away, than he would deplore his weakness, and never rested till he had sought out and made his peace with those whom he had hurt or offended." The extent of territory belonging to the republic of Buenos Ayres, and the other federal provinces connected with it, is immense, extending to 726,000 square miles English. It embraces soils that produce spontaneously in wonderful plenty, almost every article of natural growth, in one region or another. The metallic ores of the Andes are also exceedingly rich; and by the numerous, vast, and intersecting rivers, the means of water-carriage afforded by nature, can nowhere else be equalled. Our author, therefore, says thatVOL. II. (1839). NO. IV. NN |