Spanish America, Its Romance, Reality and Future, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by C. Reginald Enock

BUENOS AYRES.

Vol. II. To face p. 160.

Cabot established a settlement at San Espiritu. The rumours of a great, rich, unknown empire fired his imagination. Then he returned to Spain for means to open up communication with the lands beyond the Andes. But in his absence the garrison was massacred by the Indians. A chief of the Timbus became enamoured of a certain Spanish lady among the few colonists, and he, striving to gain possession of her, caused the treacherous murder of the garrison. Two years after Cabot's return to Europe, the astounding news of Pizarro's conquest of Peru arrived, in 1532, and adventurous spirits were fired with the desire themselves to set forth on similar quests of gold and fortune. Among these spirits of the times was the Marquis of Mendoza, and the story of how he failed in reaching Peru forms one of the interesting pages of history in this picturesque period. Mendoza, on February 2, 1534, founded Buenos Ayres, which has grown to the vast and wealthy Argentine capital[32] of to-day. Some of Mendoza's people, who had survived the dangers to which many fell victims, founded Asuncion, the first Spanish American interior capital, to-day the capital of the Republic of Paraguay.

But let us turn to our map.

The Paraná River, rising in Goyaz, in Southern Brazil, flows for 1,600 miles to its confluence with the Paraguay, and thence 600 miles to the Plate. Its main branch, the Paranahyba, drains a region but little known on the southern watershed of Brazil; and there are many other tributaries which, although obstructed in places by rapids, may be navigated in canoes, carrying the venturesome traveller into regions wild and remote, amid the rocky valleys and dense forests beyond the Tropic of Capricorn. There are magnificent cascades on these rivers, and dreadful rapids and profound gorges, cut out by the river in the rocks, through which the torrent plunges with frightful velocity, its roar awakening the echoes of the woods and the broken wilderness.

By the main stream of the Paraná our steamer, of not more than twelve feet draught, reaches the city of Paraná, and here we are 300 miles above Buenos Ayres. Rosario, which we shall have passed on the voyage upstream, is 185 miles from Buenos Ayres, and may be reached by larger vessels of fifteen feet draught.

To proceed now onwards upstream to Asuncion, our steamer must not draw more than ten feet of water, or it will strand on the shallows, but here we are little short of a thousand miles from the Plate, in the very heart of the continent. To reach Asuncion, after five days' steaming up this full-flowing river, we have entered a region of gorgeous forests and beautiful backwaters, the home of the Victoria regia lily and of bright plumaged kingfishers and of the alligator. Away to the west lies the great Chaco plain or desert, and the Pilcomayo River. The elevation of the town is about 250 feet above sea-level, and thus we have ascended to that altitude on the current.

To ascend the Pilcomayo River, the western affluent of the Plata, will demand more effort than the easy passage of Paraná. It is a stream tortuous and of great length, but of little volume in comparison with those great streams which irrigate the lands we have described.

Unexplored in part, this wild waterway has a sinister reputation by reason of the disasters which have befallen the early attempts to navigate its waters. Its headwaters are in the Andes of Bolivia, in the region of Sucre and Potosi, and from thence to the edge of the Chaco the river falls 8,000 feet in 350 miles. It filters through a vast and dismal swamp a hundred miles across, and traverses numerous lagoons. Racing down the mountain slopes the Pilcomayo crosses the great plain of the Chaco and pours into the Paraguay River not far from the town of Asuncion. Many tributaries, many bifurcations, divide and lessen its current on its winding course, which at times wanders about in search of new channels, eroding and washing away the soil of the Pampas; a desolate and capricious stream. But one valuable asset of this and kindred waterways in the future, we may reflect, will be in the hydraulic power it is capable of furnishing, an asset indeed of value, to be developed some day, in a region where Nature has omitted to furnish motive power in the more accessible form of coalfields. Moreover, as this part of the continent becomes more settled under the growing exigencies of civilization, there is the valuable function of irrigation to be developed.

A waterway of a very different character is the Uruguay River. We may trace its course for a thousand miles, from where its many headstreams flow down the slope of the Brazilian Serra do Mar, or maritime range, leaving which the river runs through beautiful country, open and hilly, for a long distance. Great cataracts interrupt the course, and, in places, contracted in width between deep, thickly wooded banks, the stream is of great depth, and its waters, flowing over a sandstone bottom, are generally clear, with little silt. It is subject to heavy floods by reason of the rains in its upper basin, which at times submerge the rocks which obstruct its current. But, apart from its upper reaches, broad and full-flowing, the Uruguay encircles the Republic whose name it bears on its western side, and, falling into the Plate, affords, in conjunction with the sea, a water-frontage on three sides of the State, and is navigable for 200 miles from its mouth as far as the towns of Salta and Paysandu. Many hundreds of miles of the river are navigable in smaller craft, affording valuable waterways for the inhabitants on its banks.