Brazil and La Plata: The personal record of a cruise

by C. S. Stewart

We left Montevideo on the evening of the 18th inst. The run is usually made in a night, but the wind being light, the current strong, and the St. Louis not in sailing trim, we did not reach the outer roadstead here till the morning of the 20th. The passage was pleasant. Though it is midsummer, the temperature is cool and bracing, with clear skies and a brilliant atmosphere, remarkable for the magnificence of its coloring along the horizon, at sunrise and sunset. There is, too, a full moon at present; and though the river from mid-channel is often seemingly shoreless, and its waters of the veritable mud-puddle hue, the scene from the deck of the St. Louis, both by night and by day, was not without attractions: especially in the companionship of the Bainbridge. This is a beautiful little craft; and was as buoyant and graceful on the waters as a bird in the air, as with greatly reduced sail, to avoid passing us by her superior speed, she at times fell far behind, and then again, with newly spread wings, rushed forward closely in our wake. Various other sail were in sight, at greater or less distances, some ascending and some descending the river, with no little display of nautical evolution, in making the best of their way.

Early yesterday morning, Buenos Ayres was in sight, at a distance of ten or twelve miles; gleaming showily in the sun, from the whiteness of the general architecture, and the number of its lofty and finely proportioned domes and church towers. It is situated on a bluff, which extends along the river a couple of miles, and rises at the highest point eighty or a hundred feet above its level. At the distance, however, from which we first saw the city, this formation of the shore was scarcely perceptible: it seemed to be resting, like Venice, upon the water, while a tufting of tree-tops, in long stretches on either side, showed the general flatness of the surrounding country. The river is here twenty-five miles wide, and its northern shores, equally low as the southern, are not ordinarily visible. But for the smoothness of the water, and its muddy hue, we might have thought ourselves still upon the open sea.

A first surprise is the very great distance from the city—five, six, and nine miles—at which vessels of moderate tonnage even, are obliged, in the midst of such an expanse of waters, to come to anchor. A long shoal stretches out thus far in front of the city, preventing nearer approach, except by vessels of light draught. When the water is high, such can cross the shoal, and, at other times, find a channel by a circuitous route to an inner roadstead, where there is anchorage for vessels of different draught, respectively, one, two, and three miles from the landing. In the outer roadstead, for a distance of miles, tall masts rose above the waters like steeples on a populous plain, while quite a fleet of small vessels was lying three miles within. The St. Louis came to, six miles or more from the city; and, after an exchange of salutes with the flag of Buenos Ayres, and those of France and Sardinia, borne by ships-of-war of these respective nations near us, we left her in a procession of small boats.

The formation of the shore in front of the city, and for a considerable distance above and below it, is a flat tufa rock which extends irregularly, far out upon the sands. Its surface is fretted and broken, and, when the water is low, boats cannot approach the landing nearer than from a quarter to a half mile. At such times the intermediate distance is made in strongly-constructed, high-wheeled carts, drawn by two horses, one of which is mounted by a wild-looking postilion. These carts, like hacks at home, are in attendance in great numbers, for the transportation of passengers and freight from the boats to the shore; and often present a scene of strife and rivalry in the water, between the drivers, similar to those witnessed in the rush of carriages, the brandishing of whips, and the exercise of lungs at a pier in New York, on the arrival of a steamer. It seemed now to be high water, and we were apprehensive that we should miss this novel mode of debarkation, and thus lose, for the time, a spectacle characteristic of the place. Our fears were unfounded, however; for soon, a cocked hat of portentous dimensions, with other insignia of official and military dignity in the wearer—himself of no ordinary dimensions in height or rotundity—was seen rising above the water. It was that of Don Pedro Ximenes, the captain of the port, who had been deputized by his imperious master to receive the commodore; and was patiently waiting in a cart, far out in the stream, the approach of the barge. Mr. Graham of Ohio, the American Consul, was also in attendance. The floor of the clumsy, high-sided vehicle, was scarcely above the surface of the water, as we rowed ‘handsomely’ alongside its open back, and stepping aboard, were transferred from the protecting shadow of the broad pennant, to that of Don Pedro’s cocked hat. In this novel reception-room, the ceremonies of an official introduction took place; and we were soon plunging and tumbling through the splashing waters—a wheel on either side rolling, first up and then down, over the rough tufa bottom—with an artistic lashing of whip and vociferation by the postilion, till, backed up, according to custom, in coal-cart style, we were dumped on an inclined plane descending ten or twelve feet from the Alameda, or public walk in front of the city, to the water.

A large crowd had gathered to witness the arrival—foreign merchants and native citizens, soldiers, sailors, porters, peons and boatmen. In the number, were many in the demi-savage dress of gauchos—the peasants of the country. This is picturesque and showy; and, with many other things which met the sight, gave promise of a more novel field for observation than we had yet lighted on. A glaring red coach, something of the dimension and style of those employed by hotels in New York, in conveying guests to and from the steamboats and railroad stations, was in waiting, by order of the government, and quickly conveyed the commodore to the Hotel de Provence, in an adjoining street. Rooms had been secured for us there, and a hospitable welcome was extended to the party, including Captain Cock, to the mess-table of a private club, consisting of Mr. Harris of Virginia, American chargé d’affaires to the Argentine Confederation; Mr. Graham, American Consul, Count Frolich, Swedish Consul-general; and two or three American gentlemen, connected here with the principal mercantile houses engaged in the South American trade.

Every thing in the general aspect of the city is Spanish: with the addition to the universal whitewash on all that is stone, of an equally universal display of red on all that is wood or iron. This color of blood has been for twenty years the prescribed signs of adhesion to the remarkable man who maintains here an undisputed reign of terror: hence the red waistcoats, red hatbands, red breast-knots, universally seen—the red doors, red window-frames, red bases to the houses, red lamp-posts, red carts, red railings, and red fixtures on every thing.

The place is subject, at all seasons of the year, to occasional high winds of two or three days’ continuance. Then the tumultuous seas which roll over the shallow bed of the river cut off all communication between the shipping and the shore; and the city and its suburbs are filled with driving dust. Weather of this character set in yesterday, shortly after we landed, and has kept us housed much of the time since, principally at the reading rooms of a club, where we were introduced, and where we found files of the American and European papers, and the latest magazines.

This evening, notwithstanding the wind, Mr. D—— of New York, one of the mess at the Provence, took me a drive in his tilbury. Our route was westward, along the course of the river, in the direction of Palermo de San Benito, the quinta, or country seat of Rosas. Policy—by such demonstration of courtly attention to the supreme chief—as well as pleasure, leads all who drive or ride, to take that direction; and as we descended from the heights of the town, through the Alameda fronting the river, to the road along its banks, the whirl of carriages and gigs, and the prancing and galloping of gay riders on horseback, was quite metropolitan. The speed of all was very much that of Gilpin—the females being mounted in the in-door costume of short dresses, bare arms, bare necks and bare heads: with the exception, in some cases, of the partial covering of a silk handkerchief on the head, tied under the chin. I saw none in the hat and habit worn in England and America, though doubtless in a city where foreign fashions are so extensively introduced, these have been adopted, to some extent at least, by the higher classes.

On gaining the level of the beach, the road passes over a flat and marshy common, without any enclosure of fence or hedge on either side. Here, by the river’s side on the right, was presented, for a mile and more, a striking spectacle, in hundreds after hundreds—I had almost said thousands of negro washerwomen, indescribable in their costumes—scrubbing, beating, slapping, rinsing, and bleaching ten thousand articles of clothing. It is a natural laundry, to which the soiled linen of the whole city is brought for cleansing. The soft rock of the shores is filled with holes, some natural and others artificial, which, on every flow of the tide, are filled with fresh water. These are converted into wash-tubs, and, after being used, are left to be emptied of the suds by the next flood, and to be refilled with clean water by its ebb. Each washerwoman has her own little reservoir of this kind, to which she gains the exclusive right, by the payment of a small fee to the government. The wind was blowing a half gale, lashing the river into foam, and dashing the spray far on the shore; while clouds of dust on the land were driven before it, like drifting snow in a winter’s storm at home. When on our way back the whole company, spread along the banks for a mile or more, were preparing to return to the city; and such a Babel, in the varied intonations and chatter, the laugh and the wrangle, the shout and the jeer, I scarcely recollect to have heard; while the oddity of the packages and bundles, the trays and baskets, borne on their heads, the endless form and color of the rags and tatters they wore—their old hats and old shoes, presented a scene grotesque beyond description.

Another novel scene was vast numbers of the lofty, cumbrous, reed-sided and hide-roofed carts of the pampas, arranged in a kind of camp on either side of the road. They are “the ships of the desert” here, by which the whole produce of the interior, for hundreds of miles, is brought to the market, and by which the returns of foreign import are carried to the remotest districts of the Confederation. They constitute the only habitations and homes of their owners and their families: bear with them all the household furniture and worldly goods of these; and, in addition, often have lashed to their tops or under their axles the trunk and branches of a tree, for wood with which to prepare, whenever a halt is made, the indispensable maté, or native tea. Their wheels are from six to eight feet in diameter, and their covered tops rise fifteen feet from the ground. They are long and narrow, of most heavy and clumsy construction, with tongues of rough-hewn timber, each in itself a load for a beast. They are drawn by oxen, attached by ropes of hide, in any number of pairs requisite for the draught. As means of transportation, they correspond well in their massive clumsiness and ponderous weight with the elephant of India, or the burden-bearing camel of Egypt and Turkey: and as they move in long lines over pampas of almost unlimited extent, form a feature not less striking, and not less in harmony with the surrounding scene, than the caravan in the deserts of Arabia, or the elephant on the plains of Bengal.