CHAPTER XIV
THE RIVER PLATE AND THE PAMPAS
ARGENTINA, URUGUAY AND PARAGUAY
Of comparatively recent times there has arisen, in the temperate zone of South America, facing upon the Atlantic seaboard, a city which has rapidly become a centre of great wealth and an emporium of world trade, with a population greater than that of any other metropolis of Latin America, and with an ebb and flow of modern life and activity such as we have been prone to associate with the Anglo-Saxon rather than the Spanish development of American civilization.
Such is this city of Buenos Ayres, which we now approach; the capital of the huge territory of the Republic of Argentina, which, having its northern boundary above the Tropic of Capricorn, extends for two thousand miles towards the frigid region above Cape Horn.
It is with no feelings of envy that we call to mind the fact that this enormous and potential region might have formed part of the British Empire; a Canada in South America. For such might have been its destiny if General Beresford, in 1806, had not been forced to surrender, after obtaining possession of Buenos Ayres, and if General Whitelocke, later, had not been forced to capitulate before the organized opposition of the colonists, when Spain and France were pitted against Great Britain.
The Republic of Argentina is a country so enormous and diversified that to attempt here to give anything but the merest descriptive outlines would be futile. But let us endeavour to obtain at least a slight idea of its form and configuration.
We shall bear in mind that the country consists broadly of four topographical divisions. First is the land of the Pampas, at which we have already glanced. Second we may speak of the great plains and broken, and in part forested, deserts, of what is termed the Gran Chaco, forming that curious northern, undeveloped part of Argentina, bounded by Paraguay on the one hand and the Bolivian Andes on the other. Third we have the broken Andine region, abutting upon Bolivia and running south to the frontiers of Chile. Fourth is the vast territory of Patagonia, with the Chilean Andes on its west; a region occupying all the great narrowing part of the continent to the frigid south.
Argentina, as it is known to travel, commerce and history, is the Argentina of the Pampa. Herein lies its civilization, its great towns, its railway network, the things by which it lives.
The Pampa is a vast storehouse of food, and in some respects it does not lack beauty. Much of it is a dead level, but it has its elevations (both materially and metaphorically). It has, too, its great scourges of Nature, in the droughts which at times have ruined its industries, and which must inevitably have their periods of visitation; in the other plagues, as of the devastating locust, for which doubtless science will produce remedy or extirpation. The tempestuous winds which blow across it are at times another scourge, and the dust storms may often cause the dweller to ask whether the plagues of Egypt shall still be visited upon it! As to the droughts, we do not know if these are not extending, just as it may be that the snowfields of the Andes are diminishing, as if threatening some slow drying-up of the fountains of heaven here.
The early folk of these great plains were not of a meek and humble character, such as the Spaniards so often encountered. They were Indios bravos; fighters and stubborn savages, implacably hostile. Nevertheless, they gave way in time, as destiny had decreed they should.