About noon of the day following our stop at Rio, we were steaming up the picturesque estuary of Santos. A Frenchman on board had promised me that here I should see something tout à fait original, and much though I had been charmed with the actual sight of Rio, so long familiar to me in picture, the approach to Santos proved even more interesting, due perhaps in some degree to the charm of the unknown and unexpected. There is also a touch of romance in slowly approaching a town that lies up a river, instead of coming upon it suddenly from the sea. A negro pilot took command of the ship up to Santos, somewhat to the disgust of our captain, who had never before stood by a “nigger” on the bridge and seemed none too sure of his pilot, for he never let go the telegraph handle until his vessel was berthed.
The country through which the river runs (it is more an arm of the sea than a river) is undoubtedly “original,” abounding in low volcanic hills, with abundance of verdure, broken now and then by palm groves, and swampy flats. Here one is conscious of being in a strange land, and it is easy to imagine with what tense interest and straining eyes the first bold adventurers sailed up this narrow and beautiful water-way to found the city that has become the second port of Brazil. The city itself stretches by the riverside around the foot of a great green hill, disfigured by a monstrous advertisement announcing to adventurers of a different kind and a later day that somebody’s biscuits are the best! A considerable part of the town lies on land that still looks suspiciously swampy and used to be an ideal haunt of Yellow Jack, though I was told that to-day it would be difficult to find a healthier spot. That may be so, but I think I could succeed if I tried very hard. As for the town itself, a short ramble revealed one of the deadest and most uninteresting cities it has been my lot to see, and I gladly returned to the friendly shelter of the ship and the livelier locality of the quayside, where were congregated many vessels from British, American, and Continental ports.
Two days more and we found ourselves at anchor in the roads outside Montevideo, which presents a most engaging picture from the sea, the town covering a lumpy tongue of land that juts seaward with a rocky short, rambling inland in many directions and along the bay, which culminates in the conical mass known as the Cerro, crowned by an antique fortress and a modern light-house. At night, when the myriad electric lamps are lit, the light-house on the Cerro throwing its broad and regular beams athwart the bay, innumerable red and green lights blinking on the buoys in the harbour, much flitting of motor launches and brightly illuminated liners lying at anchor, there is no scene I know that better suggests one’s juvenile fancies of Fairyland.
The town itself delighted us, seen in generous sunshine, with refreshing breezes blowing from the sea, which at first sight, as we pass along the streets, seems completely to enclose it. But as I shall have something to say of my later stay in the Uruguayan capital, I shall not occupy myself with it further at the moment.
We bade good-bye to the ship that had been our most pleasant abode for so many days and made our first acquaintance with things Argentine by transferring ourselves to a musty, ill-managed river-steamer, on which the crudest elements of courtesy had still to be acquired by officials and stewards, who were all too conscious of being employed by a firm which then monopolised the river trade.
Still, although we realised what a change for the worse we had made in transhipping, we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that to-morrow we should awaken in the port of Buenos Ayres; in that genial land of sunshine to which we had so long looked forward with eager anticipation. The passage up the river—which, seaward of Montevideo, is some 150 miles in width, narrowing suddenly to sixty opposite the city, and to the eye has no farther shore, so that only the discolouration of the water distinguishes river from sea—was made in the roughest weather we had experienced, the steamer tossing like a cork and its paddle wheels beating the waves with feeble irregularity.
It was an early autumn morning when we walked off the gangway at the Dársena Sud to endure the pain of getting our belongings through the customs, an operation apparently regulated by the shipping authorities after studying all the worst methods in vogue, selecting the worst features of each, and combining these into a system that is the acme of inefficiency. Moreover, the wind bit as shrewdly this autumn morning as on a midwinter’s day in New York, and, believing in this land of sunshine with a simple faith that had yet to suffer rudest shocks, we stood there an hour or more, clothed for summer, chattering with cold.
But we were actually in Buenos Ayres, and soon all the marvels of that wonderful city, that “Paris of South America,” as Argentines who have never been to Europe are fond of describing it, were to reveal themselves to us starveling voyagers who knew nothing better than the Paris of France.
Vamos a ver, as they say in Buenos Ayres.