FOOTNOTES:
[15] Mr. Scarlet has given the best possible description of this plan, in comparing it to a chess-board:—the relative proportions are as nearly as possible four English acres to each square.
CHAPTER VI.
CLIMATE OF BUENOS AYRES, AND ITS EFFECTS.
Climate of Buenos Ayres, liable to sudden changes. Influence of the North Wind. Case of Garcia. Effects of a Pampero. Dust-Storms and Showers of Mud. The Natives free from Epidemics, but liable to peculiar affections from the state of the atmosphere. Lockjaw of very common occurrence. The Smallpox stopped by Vaccination. Introduced in 1805, and preserved by an individual. Its first introduction amongst the Native Indians by General Rosas. Cases of Longevity, of frequent occurrence.
Azara, the best of all writers upon the country, has with much truth observed that the climate of Buenos Ayres is governed not so much by its latitude as by the wind, a change of which will continually produce an alteration of from 20 to 30 degrees in the thermometer[16]?
I have been often asked whether the heats in summer are not almost intolerable. On some days they are so; the glass perhaps above 90° in the shade, and all nature gasping for air; but on those very days the most experienced of the natives will be clothed in warm woollens instead of linen jackets and trousers, for fear of catching cold.
During the greater part of the year the prevailing winds are northerly, which, passing over the marshy lands of Entre Rios, and then over the wide expanse of the Plata, imbibe their exhalations, and, by the time they reach the southern shores of the river, have a great influence upon the climate. Everything is damp: the mould stands upon the boots cleaned but yesterday; books become mildewed, and the keys rust in one's pocket. Good fires are the best preservatives, and I found them, if not absolutely necessary, at least very comfortable, during quite as many months as I should have had them in England; and yet I never, during nine years, saw snow, or ice thicker than a dollar, and the latter only once. Upon the bodily system the effect produced by this prevailing humidity is a general lassitude and relaxation; opening the pores of the skin, and inducing great liability to colds, sore throats, rheumatic affections, and all the consequences of checked perspiration; one of the best safeguards against which is doubtless the woollen clothing of the natives, of which I have already spoken; though they require it, perhaps, the more especially, because they seldom stir out of their houses in the extreme heat of the day; and it is at the time they do go out, when the sun has lost its power and the damps of evening are setting in, that such precautions are doubly necessary. Europeans, at first, are loth to take the same care of themselves, but sooner or later they discover that the natives are right, and insensibly fall into their ways.
The evil effects of all this humidity, so far as they are dangerous, appear to be confined to the immediate vicinity of the river, and to the inhabitants of the city; for in the pampas the gauchos sleep upon the ground during the greater part of the year in the open air without risk. Their skins, however, like those of the cattle they watch, are probably impervious to the wet.
Before I went to Buenos Ayres I had suffered much from malaria fever, caught in Greece; and when I saw, for the first time, the low, flat, marshy appearance of the whole country, I expected nothing less than a return of my old ague. Everything around seemed to bespeak it: but Buenos Ayres is free from such disorders, and cases of intermittent fever, such as that I speak of, are rarely known there.
Still, though free from the malaria of the Mediterranean coasts, the sirocco of the Levant does not bring with it more disagreeable affections than the viento norte, or north wind of Buenos Ayres; indeed, the irritability and ill-humours it excites in some people amount to little less than a temporary derangement of their moral faculties: it is a common thing to see men amongst the better classes shut themselves up in their houses during its continuance, and lay aside all business till it has passed; whilst amongst the lower orders it is a fact well known to the police that cases of quarrelling and bloodshed are infinitely more frequent during the north wind than at any other time. In illustration of this, I shall quote a case in point, the account of which I received from one of the most eminent medical men in the country, who had paid particular attention during a practice of more than thirty years to its influence upon the human system.
In the year —— 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 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 by-standers. Those who knew him, perhaps, would bear with his ill-humours, but, if unhappily he chanced to meet with 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.
Europeans, though often sensible of its 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 affected; 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—"Señor, 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 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 they 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[17]. 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. A cut thumb, a nail run into the hand or foot, a lacerated muscle, will generally terminate in it; and our own medical men well know how great a proportion of our wounded in the attack of 1806 and 1807 died from this dreadful cause. The native practitioners attribute its frequent occurrence to some peculiarity in the atmosphere acting upon the system in a manner they are as yet unable to explain. Under the name of the "mal de siete dias" (the seven days' sickness), a vast number of children are carried off by it in the first week of their existence; but, as this mortality is principally limited to the lower orders, it may perhaps in most cases be traced to mismanagement and neglect. With us, the long confinement of the mother ensures the same care of the infant in the first weeks of its life; but, in a country where the mother leaves her bed in two or three days to return to her work, the child must often be neglected. Many a Buenos Ayrean washerwoman may be seen at her usual work at the riverside three or four days after her delivery, with her infant lying for the greater part of the day upon a piece of cold hide, beside her on the damp ground. Can any one wonder that it takes cold and dies? There was a time, and but few years ago, when it was gravely asserted that the mortality amongst infants arose from their being baptized with cold water, and the authorities, concurring in the notion, actually issued a decree that none but warm water should be used for such purposes in the churches. I believe, however, that the deaths were not found to diminish, and that the priests are again permitted to use cold water as before, though I doubt the enactment to the contrary having ever been repealed; but why should these cases so generally terminate in lock-jaw[18]?
The dreadful ravages occasioned formerly by the small-pox have latterly been in a great measure arrested amongst the civilised portion of the inhabitants by the general use of vaccination: accidentally conveyed to Buenos Ayres in 1805 by the owner of a cargo of slaves, it was preserved by the patriotic zeal of an enlightened priest, Dr. Segurola, who, deeply impressed with its immense importance, voluntarily devoted himself to the task of propagating it amongst his countrymen, especially the poor, whose ignorant prejudices he had often to combat, and whom he was not unfrequently obliged to bribe to submit to the operation. For sixteen years he laboured incessantly in this vocation, at the expiration of which, he had the satisfaction of finding his single exertions no longer adequate to satisfy the general demand for it. The Government then (in 1822) relieved him of his charge, and instituted a proper establishment for the express purpose of propagating vaccination gratis, not only in the city of Buenos Ayres, but throughout the republic; others were afterwards added in the several country districts, from which the lymph is now distributed to all who apply for it, and has been sent into every province of the interior. The authorities make it compulsory, as far as they can, on parents to carry their children to these establishments; and the parochial priests are charged to see that they do so.
By a report published in 1829 upon this subject, it appeared that in the city alone, in the previous nine months, as many as 4160 children had been vaccinated; a large proportion to the births, which are estimated at little more than 6000 yearly. I was more than once applied to for it from Rio de Janeiro, whither it was always most readily forwarded by the Buenos Ayrean administrators.
But the destruction created by the small-pox amongst the Spaniards was nothing when compared to its dreadful consequences amongst the native Indians. Whole tribes have been swept away by it: I believe, nations—whose languages have been lost. The plague is not more a frightful scourge than this disorder, when it attacks the miserable inhabitants of the pampas: they themselves believe it to be incurable, a feeling which adds to its lamentable consequences, for no sooner does it appear than their tents are raised, and the whole tribe takes to flight, abandoning the unfortunate sufferers to the certainty of perishing of hunger and thirst, if the virulence of the disorder itself does not first carry them off.
An opportunity, however, offered during the time I was at Buenos Ayres of making known to these poor people, also, the effects of vaccination, under circumstances which it is to be hoped may eventually lead to its diffusion amongst them, as well as their more civilised neighbours.
A large party of some of the friendly tribes, with their wives and children, repaired to the city on a visit of duty to the Governor, General Rosas, and had not been there long when some of them were attacked with small-pox, amongst the rest, one of their principal Caciques. As usual, the sufferers were immediately abandoned by their own relatives, and might have died like dogs, had not their more civilised friends taken charge of them, for which the poor wretches were abundantly grateful; but their surprise was without bounds, when the Governor himself, who had a regard for the old Chief, went in person to visit him. General Rosas did not fail to remark the strong impression created by his visit, and saw at once the advantage to which it might be turned. Ordering the astonished Indians to be brought before him, he showed them the mark upon his own arm, and fully explained to them the nature of the secret which had enabled him to visit their dying Cacique with impunity. The result was, that nearly 150 of them, including some of their Caciques, Catrieu, Cachul, Tetrué, Quindulé, Callinao, Toriano, and Venancio, with their wives and children, were vaccinated on the spot at their own earnest solicitation; and great was their childish delight on finding, in due time, the appearance of the disorder upon their arms, which they were fully satisfied would prove an infallible charm against the worst powers of the Evil one.
The impression created by this interesting occurrence will not be easily effaced, and, although subsequent events may have unfortunately delayed for a time the further propagation of this inestimable blessing amongst the Indians, I have little doubt that it will again be sought for; and who can say that, with good management, it may not be converted into a means of domiciliating and reducing to Christianity the remnants of a race, who, in their turn, might repay with productive labour their benefactors a hundred fold?
I must not close this chapter without adding that, notwithstanding what I have said as to the effects of the climate upon some constitutions, the people in general live to a good old age in perfect enjoyment of their mental as well as bodily faculties; and that instances of longevity are common, the following extracts from the several population returns will sufficiently prove:—
"In the census of 1778, 33 cases are quoted of individuals then living in the city, aged from 90 to 100; and 17 of from 100 to 112."
In the tables of mortality for 1823 and 1824, 58 persons are said to have died between the ages of 90 and 100; 6 between 100 and 110; 3 between 112 and 116; 1 of 128, and another of 130. The two last were females.