The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

While we suffered from no lack of noise, as the reader will have discovered, during our stay, I do not remember ever to have heard the whistle of a railway train. Trains come and go at the station of the Central Railway, which is some considerable distance from the older part of the city, but although our wanderings took us several times to that model of a railway station, we never even heard the hiss of steam, nor saw any sign of life therein. It possesses an excellent restaurant, and its exterior is decorated with large stucco statues of George Stephenson and James Watt and two foreign celebrities whose names have escaped my memory, but as railways are still in their infancy in Uruguay, and trains go only every second day to the principal provincial cities, and not always so frequently as that, it will be understood why the Montevideo station is more often as quiet as a museum than animated as a railway terminus. It is quicker, for instance, to reach Paysandu, the important commercial city of the northwestern Uruguayan province of that name, by taking the boat to Buenos Ayres and thence by train and boat, than by travelling all the way on Uruguayan railways.

This lack of speedy train service prevented me from becoming acquainted with the provinces of Uruguay, as none of my plains could accommodate themselves to the leisurely methods of travel, and so my excursions were confined to the immediate surroundings of the city. My favourite outing was a trip across the bay in a little steam launch, which in less than twenty minutes landed me on the rickety old wooden pier near the Villa de Cerro and thence a long exhilarating ramble uphill took me to the old Spanish fortress on the top of the Cerro, still used as a fortification by the Uruguayans. From the walls of this, splendid prospects seaward and landward may be had, while the fortress itself—with its rather slatternly garrison, the officer on duty looking heroically seaward while he sips his mate, and the horses cropping the grass on the slopes below—is by no means uninteresting. What pleased me most was to look landward over the rolling plains, grassy and undulating, as far as eye could reach, and at no great distance from the fort, alive with herds of cattle on the part known as la Tablada, so important to the life and prosperity of Montevideo. For in these herds, brought here chiefly to be converted into extract of meat for a great English firm, is the principal wealth of the country, and its history that is not concerned with wars and revolutions is bound up with the herding of cattle. Such as we see the country from the Cerro, it is, I am told, throughout its length and breadth—a land of ideal pasturage, full of gentle valleys, and with no hill that rises more than 2,000 feet above sea level. A pleasant land, with endless possibilities for the agriculturist. Yes, all my memories of Montevideo seem to be agreeable, for even its cemetery, beautifully situated on high ground by the sea, was in keeping with the general impression and had an air of peacefulness and rest which Recoleta so much lacked.

CHAPTER XXI
URUGUAY: SOME NOTES AND IMPRESSIONS

Little countries, like little people, have a knack of making themselves interesting. The simile might be further pursued—especially among the Republics of South America—in that the smaller they are, the more noisy and obstreperous shall we find their histories have been. But there is a certain dignity and much to admire in the little Republic of Uruguay, and its country is one of the most attractive.

After the impression of vastness left on the wanderer in the Argentine, Uruguay seemed a very small affair indeed; no more than an Argentine province. It was a corrective to this impression of littleness and consequent impotence to remember that even little Uruguay was larger than England and Wales, and not so much smaller than the whole of Great Britain. It covers 72,210 square miles, against the 88,729 of Great Britain. We know, however, that mere area does not matter greatly in national importance, compared with population, and the total population of Uruguay is only two-thirds that of the city of Philadelphia.

It may be a small country and a smaller people, but the spirit of great things flames in the breast of Uruguay. Here is how one of its authors, Señor Ambrosio L. Ramasso, in his well-known work El Estadista, begins his chapter on the warrior spirit of his race:

The production of the soil, exuberant; fresh food for nourishment, in abundance; a frugal people, sustaining themselves chiefly upon beef, flour, and mate; the land undulating and extremely fertile, the climate without excessive rigours, and the need for clothing moderate; the horse always at hand; hospitality unlimited, and the host who gives it generous; nature luxuriant, beautiful, full of tones and superb changes, inviting to admiration, and the enjoyment of that drowsiness and indolence which the benignity of the climate carries with it; the lack of the habit of work, due to the facility with which the physical necessities may be satisfied; the war that continues with the animals; all these factors had two decisive results in the making of the child of this country. On the one hand, they made him full of passion, with no manner of brake thereon; and on the other, they did not suppress the fighting instincts of his ancestors, but rather encouraged their growth. His chief tendency had to be inevitably towards war, either as the outcome of his natural heritage, or as an escape valve for activities not otherwise employed, or yet again by giving expansion to that passionate and vehement nature of the Latin race in a climate where vitality is such that all things tend to expand and overflow. A further condition which favoured the bellicose tendency in the Uruguayan was his excessive power of imagination; a faculty which then, as now, he had in richest measure....

And in this manner Señor Ramasso goes on for several pages, showing how nature had marked out the Uruguayan for a warrior and fighting as the master passion of his life. The history of the country is certainly sufficient proof of this spirit, and it still exists in high degree, though it would seem that the bad old days of the sword and the gun have now given place to an era of political strife, in which the tongue and the pen are the more favoured weapons.