FOOTNOTES:

[13] By a return for 1836, it appears that in the City in that year,

The Marriages were412
Baptisms3211
Deaths2785 exclusive of those in the hospitals. I have no return from the Country.

[14] The same list will give some idea of the general distribution of the trades for 1836; it was as follows:—

358Wholesale stores.
348Retail shops.
323Tailors, shoemakers, milliners, and all handicrafts.
6Booksellers.
598Pulperias, or drinking shops.
26Billiard-tables.
44Hotels, taverns, and eating-houses.
48Confectioners and liqueur-shops.
29Chemists and apothecaries.
76Flour-shops and bakeries.
44Baracas, or hide-warehouses.
33Timber-yards.
13Livery-stables.
6Coachmakers.
874Carts and carriages paid duties.

CHAPTER V.
CITY OF BUENOS AYRES.

Great extent of the City. Public Buildings. Inconvenient Arrangement and want of Comfort in the Dwellings of the Natives a few years ago. Prejudice against Chimneys. Subsequent Improvements introduced by Foreigners. Iron gratings at the windows necessary. Water scarce and dear. That of the River Plata excellent, and capable of being kept a very long time. Pavement of Buenos Ayres.

Buenos Ayres, like all other cities in Spanish America, is built upon the uniform plan[15] prescribed I believe by the Council of the Indies, consisting of straight streets, intersecting each other at right angles every 150 yards; and, from the peculiar construction of the houses, covers at least twice the ground which would be required for any European city of the same population.

With the exception of the churches, which, though unfinished externally, exhibit in their interior all the gaudy richness of the religion to which they belong, and will be lasting memorials of the pious zeal of the Jesuits, who built the greater part of them, there is nothing remarkable in the style of the public buildings. The old government considered money laid out in beautifying the city as so much thrown away upon the colonists, and the new government has been as yet too poor to do more than has been absolutely necessary; what has been done, however, has been well done, and does credit to the republican authorities.

In their private dwellings there was a wretched want of every comfort, when I first went to the country. With but few exceptions, they were confined to a ground floor; the apartments built en suite, without passages, round two or three successive quadrangular courts, called patios, opening into each other; and the whole distribution about as primitive and inconvenient as can be imagined.

The floors of the best rooms were of bricks or tiles, the rafters of the roof seldom hid by a ceiling, the walls as cold as whitewash could make them; whilst the furniture was of the most gaudy, tawdry, North American manufacture: a few highly-coloured French prints, serving, perhaps, to mark the state of the fine arts in South America.

Nothing could be more anti-comfortable to English eyes. In cold weather these cold-looking rooms were heated by braziers, at the risk of choking the inmates with the fumes of charcoal; chimneys, so far from being looked upon as wholesome ventilators, were regarded as certain conductors of wet and cold; and it was not till long after the introduction of them by the European residents had practically proved their safety and superiority over the old Spanish warming-pans, that the natives could be induced to try them. The apprehension that they increased the risk of fire was even without foundation, for never were the habitations of man built of such incombustible materials. The roofs and floors, I have already said, are all of brick, and the few beams which are necessary for supporting the former are of a wood from Paraguay, as hard as teak, and almost as incombustible as the bricks themselves.

Of the prejudices of the natives about chimneys I may perhaps have rather a sensitive feeling, from a practical experience I had myself upon the subject soon after my landing amongst them. There was but one in all the apartments I occupied with my family, and that one my Spanish landlord, to my no small dismay and astonishment, ordered a bricklayer to stop up one afternoon over our heads, because he had had a dispute with my servants about the necessity of occasionally sweeping it, which he chose to take this summary way of putting an end to. The weather was wet and bad enough, and I never was more in want of the comfort of a good fire; but no entreaty or remonstrance could shake the obstinate determination of the old Don. He had the advantage of us by living over head, in the upper apartments of the building; and he was determined to make us fully sensible of the de facto superiority of his authority. He required no chimney himself, and he could not be made to understand that a Spanish brazier would not answer all our English wants just as well as it did his.

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 whitewashed 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 comfort 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 houses, 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 economising their ground by constructing upper stories to their houses in the European fashion, the obvious advantage whereof will no doubt ere many years make the plan general, and greatly add to the embellishment of the city.

Some peculiarities will probably long be preserved, such amongst other as 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-idéal of republican liberty and public 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 but 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.

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 rainwater 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 principal streets are now tolerably paved with granite brought from the islands above Buenos Ayres, especially from Martin Garcia. How the people got about before they were paved it is difficult to understand, for the streets must have been at times one continued slough; at least if one may judge from the state of those which are still unfinished, and which, after any continuance of wet weather, are nearly, if not entirely, impassable, even for people on horseback, much more so for carriages. I have seen in some of them the mire so deep that the oxen could not drag the country carts through it; and it not unfrequently happens, in such a case, that the animals themselves are unable to get out, and are left to die and rot in the swamp in the middle of the street.

It was a fair sample of the miserable economy and wretched policy of the colonial authorities, that a commercial city of such importance, and in which the traffic was daily increasing, should have been allowed so long to remain in such a state, with an inexhaustible supply of the best paving materials in the world within twenty or thirty miles of it, and of such easy water-carriage. The people however, were led to believe that the difficulties and impediments to such an improvement as the general paving of the city were next to insurmountable.

The Viceroy himself, the Marquis of Loreto, when the first notion of such a plan was started, gravely gave, amongst other reasons against it, the danger of the houses falling down from the shaking of their foundations, by the driving of heavy carts over a stone pavement so close to them, whilst another and still more weighty objection in his opinion was, the necessity it would entail upon the people to put iron tires to their cart-wheels, and to shoe their horses, which, he reminded them, would cost them more than the animals themselves. Fortunately, his immediate successors, Aredondo and Aviles, were not deterred by similar alarms. The former commenced the work with activity about the year 1795, with the aid of a subscription voluntarily raised by the inhabitants; and the latter carried it on to a much greater extent, levying a trifling duty upon the city for the purpose, which was readily submitted to, when, as the work advanced, the improvement became manifest. In later times, especially during the government of 1822-24, much more was done, and there are few of the principal streets which are not now more or less completed.

The granite is excellent, and was carefully examined in situ by Mr. Bevans, an English engineer, a few years ago, who reported that it was easy to be worked, and the supply inexhaustible. When the working of it is better understood by the natives, it will probably be brought into much more general use.