The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia

by John Randolph Spears

THE WELSH IN PATAGONIA.

A most remarkable colony is that which the Welsh have made in Patagonia. Rarely, if ever, in the history of the Americas have emigrants from the old country been surrounded by conditions and circumstances so discouraging as those to be described in this story of that colony, and rarely, if ever, has a colonizing project originated as did this the Welch colony that is now flourishing on the banks of the Chubut River, 750 miles southwest of Buenos Ayres. Although one must really see the country to appreciate fully what the colonists endured and have achieved, yet I fancy that some of the facts are of sufficient human interest to make the story fully worth the telling.

The colony is known by the name of the river on which it is located—Chubut. It was formed by immigrants who left their homes, paradoxical as it may seem, because they were patriots. They were all Welshmen, who, because the laws of Great Britain have compelled the use of English in Welsh schools since the year 1282, when Prince Llewellyn fell, determined to found a colony in such an out-of-the-way part of the world that they could, unmolested, perpetuate the mother tongue of Wales. The prime mover in this matter was Dr. Michael Jones of Bala College, and he was assisted by Mr. Lewis Jones, who is now a resident of the colony.

These gentlemen looked the maps of the world over, and they read the descriptions of all the unsettled parts which travellers out of the way had written, the ultimate conclusion being that no habitable country in the world could offer such complete isolation as the Patagonia region of the Argentine Republic. There came a time afterward when they began to doubt whether the land they had chosen was really habitable, but it was then too late to turn back.

An appeal for a grant of land was made to the Argentine Government, and that is an appeal that is never made in vain by any colony acting in good faith to any Latin-American Government. It is true that efforts were made to dissuade the Welshmen from going to Patagonia, but those efforts were intended for the good of the colonists. They were asked to take the fertile lands of the north instead of the desert of the south. No one but the promoters of the colony believed that any settlement could exist in the desert, and never did promoters come nearer to losing heart and yet succeed.

It was on July 28, 1865, that the Welsh pilgrims first landed in the region they had chosen. At that time the whole of Patagonia, between Rio Negro and the Strait of Magellan, was in precisely the same condition that it was when Pedro Sarmiento's colony starved to death in the strait, when Cavendish discovered Port Desire, and when Darwin explored a part of the remarkable Santa Cruz River. Nor was that all. War was incessantly waged between the people of the republic (who were pleased to call themselves Christians) and the people of the desert plains, who were called savages by the self-styled Christians. And the savages, as has been told, had the best of the fights. The whites occupied one settlement on the Rio Negro, but only by favor of the red men. What could a handful of Welshmen, unused to plains life and wholly ignorant of savage warfare, do with such fierce warriors?

The time came, however, when the Welshmen were asking each other, "What would we have done without the Indians?"

As said, it was in the last week of July, 1865, when the Welshmen first saw the land where they intended to perpetuate their mother tongue in its purity. July in Patagonia is the mid-winter month. A sailing ship took them to the southeast corner of New Gulf, a nearly circular bay in the coast, seven hundred miles southwest of Buenos Ayres. Here it put them out on the gravelly beach, gave them some food and water, and then sailed away. There were 150 souls all told. How utterly alone they were, and how far away from civilization can be better appreciated when we remember that in those days no merchant steamers had yet gone down the coast to pass the Strait of Magellan, and that the only white men living south of the struggling settlement on the Rio Negro were a disconsolate gang of convicts, guarded by an equally forlorn squad of soldiers in a stockade on the strait just mentioned. The Welshmen were separated from all civilization, even the Argentine kind—a kind to which they were not accustomed—by the stormy sea on one hand and by hundreds of miles of desert on the other, a desert that was utterly impassable save by the Indians, who alone, in those days, knew where the widely-separated springs of fresh water were to be found.

Nor were their immediate surroundings any more cheerful than a contemplation of the region that lay between them and the far-away settlement on the Rio Negro.