The name of the River Plate, or the Rio de la Plata, is one which falls familiarly on English ears, or at least upon the hearing of those whose interests in finance, stock and share, and bank and railway of the South American shore, finds material of activity in the South American "market" in the city of London. They may not know the origin of its name, nor whence it comes or whither it flows. It is the "Silver River," named from the plata, or silver, which from the Inca Empire adventurers brought that way, and to-day it carries a stream of treasure to the pocket of the modern shareholder.
As to the Pampas—a word we also owe to the Inca tongue, this name must carry memories to many a Briton and inspiration to many another.
Here, then, we are bound for the Plate, towards whose mighty estuary a fleet of England's steamships constantly directs its course, together with craft from other European lands, bearing traveller, emigrants or merchandise; returning thence with the foods of half a hemisphere.
This mighty stream of the Plate, with its tributaries, is second only in size to the great Amazon in this continent. But how different is its destiny from that of the dark river of the Equator! If it rises amid the savage wildernesses, at least it flows through fruitful plains and waters the abodes of a great civilization.
Let us pay the small homage to the River Plate of first laying out the map upon our table, and so mark its winding curves and mazy courses. They come from mountain, from forest, from savage jungle; they sweep from north and west, pour over the cascades of Brazil, from the slopes of the far-off Andes, from the dim forests of Paraguay; they filter through the swamps of the Pilcomayo, a perilous and savage stream, all in the heart of a continent; the Paraná, the "Mother of the Sea," as the old Guarani Indians termed it, the Uruguay, the Paraguay, giving their names to those lands these full-flowing rivers caressingly encircle, all sweeping down to east and south, perilous or gentle, by foaming rapid or gentle current, past fertile fields and many a handsome town, pouring onwards for many a thousand mile, to empty into that remarkable vent of the South American waters and activity, the Plata Estuary.
A little over four hundred years ago, in 1516, the Spanish navigator, Juan de Solis, the chief pilot of Spain, bent upon that insistent search for a strait—that elusive strait which in the minds of the geographers of that time showed a way to the real Indies and the East, but which none found, for the reason that Nature had not afforded one there—found the great estuary of what is now La Plata, a hundred and fifty miles wide. Back to Spain with the news he went, returning with a further mandate to explore, when he sailed up the great waters for three hundred miles.
Here he thought to capture some of the Indians of the "Mother of Waters," and to take them with him to Spain. But they, resenting the pretension, ambushed the explorer's party, and de Solis was killed. Four years later Magellan essayed the passage.
But the name of La Plata did not result from these voyages. It was Sebastian Cabot, the Englishman in the service of Spain, who, later, ascending the great estuary then known as the Mar Dulce, or fresh-water sea, discovered the Paraná, and, following it and the Paraguay River upstream, and landing where the city of Asuncion now stands, found the Guaranis wearing silver ornaments, and from these baubles—which, however, came in reality not from the district itself but from across the Andes, from the still unknown Inca Empire of Peru—gave the name of the Plate or Plata River.
Its wealth to-day comes not from precious metals, but from the bounties of Nature in the vegetable and animal world: the wealth of corn and cattle.
