I shot several pink spoonbills, one of which in a glass case is not far from me as I write, but I simply longed to get a scarlet flamingo. Owing to the spoonbills' habit of flitting from lagoon to lagoon, they are not difficult to shoot, but a flamingo is a very wary bird. Perched on one leg, they stand in the very middle of a lagoon, and allow no one within gunshot. The officious "téro-téros" effectually notify them of the approach of man, and possibly the flamingoes have learnt from "Alice in Wonderland" that the Queen of Hearts is in the habit of utilising them as croquet-mallets. The natural anxiety to escape so ignominious a fate would tend to make them additionally cautious. Anyhow, I found it impossible to approach them. The idea occurred to me of trying to shoot one with a rifle. So I crawled prostrate on my anatomy up to the lagoon. I failed at least six times, but finally succeeded in killing a flamingo. Wading into the lagoon, I triumphantly retrieved my scarlet victim, and took him by train to Buenos Ayres, intending to hand him over to a taxidermist next day. When I awoke next morning, the blue satin bower in which I slept (originally fitted up, as I have explained, as the bedroom of a minor light of the operatic stage) was filled with a pestilential smell of decayed fish. I inquired the reason of my English servant, who informed me that the cook was afraid that there was something wrong about "the queer duck" I had brought home last night, as its odour was not agreeable. (The real expression he used was "smelling something cruel.") Full of horrible forebodings, I jumped out of bed and ran down to the kitchen, to find a little heap of brilliant scarlet feathers reposing on the table, and Paquita, our fat Andalusian cook, regarding with doubtful eyes a carcase slowly roasting before the fire, and filling the place with unbelievably poisonous effluvia. And that was the end of the only flamingo I ever succeeded in shooting.
A London financial house had, by foreclosing a mortgage, come into possession of a great tract of land in the unsurveyed and uncharted Indian Reserve, the Gran Chaco. Anxious to ascertain whether their newly-acquired property was suited for white settlers, the financial house sent out two representatives to Buenos Ayres with orders to fit out a little expedition to survey and explore it. I was invited to join this expedition, and as work was slack at the time, Sir Edward did not require my services and gave me leave to go. I had been warned that conditions would be very rough indeed, but the opportunity seemed one of those that only occur once in a lifetime, and too good to be lost. I do not think the invitation was quite a disinterested one. The leaders of the expedition probably thought that the presence of a member of the British Legation might be useful in case of difficulties with the Argentine authorities. I travelled by steamer six hundred miles up the mighty Paraná, and joined the other members of the expedition at the Alexandra Colony, a little English settlement belonging to the London firm hundreds of miles from anywhere, and surrounded by vast swamps. The Alexandra Colony was a most prosperous little community, but was unfortunately infested with snakes and every imaginable noxious stinging insect. As we should have to cross deep swamps perpetually, we took no wagons with us, but our baggage was loaded on pack-horses. For provisions we took jerked sun-dried beef (very similar to the South African "biltong"), hard biscuit, flour, coffee, sugar, and salt, as well as several bottles of rum, guns, rifles, plenty of ammunition, and two blankets apiece. We had some thirty horses in all; the loose horses trotting obediently behind a bell-mare, according to their convenient Argentine custom. In Argentina mares are never ridden, and a bell-mare serves the same purpose in keeping the "tropilla" of horses together as does a bellwether in keeping sheep together with us. At night only the bell-mare need be securely picketed; the horses will not stray far from the sound of her tinkling bell. Should the bell-mare break loose, there is the very devil to pay; all the others will follow her. It will thus be seen that the bell-mare plays a very important part. In French families the belle-mère fills an equally important position. We were four Englishmen in all; the two leaders, the doctor, and myself. The doctor was quite a youngster, taking a final outing before settling down to serious practice in Bristol. A nice, cheery youth! The first night I discovered how very hard the ground is to sleep upon, but our troubles did not begin till the second day. We were close up to the tropics, and got into great swamps where millions and millions of mosquitoes attacked us day and night, giving us no rest. Our hands got so swollen with bites that we could hardly hold our reins, and sleep outside our blankets was impossible with these humming, buzzing tormentors devouring us. If one attempted to baffle them by putting one's head under the blanket, the stifling heat made sleep equally difficult. In four days we reached a waterless land; that is to say, there were clear streams in abundance, but they were all of salt, bitter, alkaline water, undrinkable by man or beast. Oddly enough, all the clear streams were of bitter water, whereas the few muddy ones were of excellent drinking water. I think these alkaline streams are peculiar to the interior of South America. Our horses suffered terribly; so did we. We had three Argentine gauchos with us, to look after the horses and baggage, besides two pure Indians. One of these Indians, known by the pretty name of Chinche, or "The Bug," could usually find water-holes by watching the flight of the birds. The water in these holes was often black and fetid, yet we drank it greedily. Chinche could also get a little water out of some kinds of aloes by cutting the heart out of the plant. In the resulting cavity about half a glassful of water, very bitter to the taste, but acceptable all the same, collected in time. Prolonged thirst under a hot sun is very difficult to bear. We nearly murdered the doctor, for he insisted on recalling the memories of great cool tankards of shandy-gaff in Thames-side hostelries, and at our worst times of drought had a maddening trick of imitating (exceedingly well too) the tinkling of ice against the sides of a long tumbler.
In spite of thirst and the accursed mosquitoes it was an interesting trip. We were where few, if any, white men had been before us; the scenery was pretty; and game was very plentiful. The open rolling, down-like country, with its little copses and single trees, was like a gigantic edition of some English park in the southern counties. In the early morning certain trees, belonging to the cactus family, I imagine, were covered with brilliant clusters of flowers, crimson, pink, and white. As the sun increased in heat all these flowers closed up like sea anemones, to reopen again after sunset. The place crawled with deer, and so tame and unsophisticated were they that it seemed cruel to take advantage of them and to shoot them. We had to do so for food, for we lived almost entirely on venison, and venison is a meat I absolutely detest. When food is unpalatable, one is surprised to find how very little is necessary to sustain life; an experience most of us have repeated during these last two years, not entirely voluntarily. Chinche, the Indian, could see the tracks of any beasts in the dew at dawn, where my eyes could detect nothing whatever. In this way I was enabled to shoot a fine jaguar, whose skin has reposed for thirty years in my dining-room. One night, too, an ant-eater blundered into our camp, and by some extraordinary fluke I shot him in the dark. His skin now keeps his compatriot company. An ant-eating bear is a very shy and wary animal, and as he is nocturnal in his habits, he is but rarely met with, so this was a wonderful bit of luck. We encountered large herds of peccaries, the South American wild boar. These little beasts are very fierce and extremely pugnacious, and the horses seemed frightened of them. The flesh of the peccary is excellent and formed a most welcome variation to the eternal venison. I never could learn to shoot from the saddle as Argentines do, but had to slip off my horse to fire. I was told afterwards that it was very dangerous to do this with these savage little peccaries.
There are always compensations to be found everywhere. Had not the abominable mosquitoes prevented sleep, one would not have gazed up for hours at the glorious constellations of the Southern sky, including that arch-impostor the Southern Cross, glittering in the dark-blue bowl of the clear tropical night sky. Had we not suffered so from thirst, we should have appreciated less the unlimited foaming beer we found awaiting us on our return to the Alexandra Colony. By the way, all South Americans believe firmly in moon-strokes, and will never let the moon's rays fall on their faces whilst sleeping.
I judged the country we traversed quite unfitted for white settlers, owing to the lack of good water, and the evil-smelling swamps that cut the land up so. That exploring trip was doubtless pleasanter in retrospect than in actual experience. I would not have missed it, though, for anything, for it gave one an idea of stern realities.
On returning to the Alexandra Colony, both I and the doctor, a remarkably fair-skinned young man, found, after copious ablutions, that our faces and hands had been burnt so black by the sun that we could easily have taken our places with the now defunct Moore and Burgess minstrels in the vanished St. James's Hall in Piccadilly without having to use any burnt-cork whatever.
On the evening of our arrival at Alexandra, I was reading in the sitting-room in an armchair against the wall. The doctor called out to me to keep perfectly still, and not to move on any account until he returned. He came back with a pickle-jar and a bottle. I smelt the unmistakable odour of chloroform, and next minute the doctor triumphantly exhibited an immense tarantula spider in the pickle-jar. He had cleverly chloroformed the venomous insect within half an inch of my head, otherwise I should certainly have been bitten. The bite of these great spiders, though not necessarily fatal, is intensely painful.
The doctor had brought out with him a complete anti-snake-bite equipment, and was always longing for an occasion to use it. He was constantly imploring us to go and get bitten by some highly venomous snake, in order to give him an opportunity of testing the efficacy of his drugs, hypodermic syringes, and lancets. At Alexandra a dog did get bitten by a dangerous snake, and was at once brought to the doctor, who injected his snake-bite antidote, with the result that the dog died on the spot.
A river ran through Alexandra which was simply alive with fish, also with alligators. In the upper reaches of the Paraná and its tributaries, bathing is dangerous not only because of the alligators, but on account of an abominable little biting-fish. These biting-fish, which go about in shoals, are not unlike a flounder in appearance and size. They have very sharp teeth and attack voraciously everything that ventures into the water. In that climate their bites are very liable to bring on lockjaw. The doctor and I spent most of our time along this river with fishing lines and rifles, for alligators had still the charm of novelty to us both, and we both delighted in shooting these revolting saurians. I advise no one to try to skin a dead alligator. There are thousands of sinews to be cut through, and the pestilential smell of the brute would sicken a Chinaman. We caught some extraordinary-looking fish on hand lines, including a great golden carp of over 50 lb. ("dorado" in Spanish). It took us nearly an hour to land this big fellow, who proved truly excellent when cooked.
When I first reached the Argentine, travel was complicated by the fact that each province issued its own notes, which were only current within the province itself except at a heavy discount. The value of the dollar fluctuated enormously in the different provinces. In Buenos Ayres the dollar was depreciated to four cents, or twopence, and was treated as such, the ordinary tram fare being one depreciated dollar. In other provinces the dollar stood as high as three shillings. In passing from one province to another all paper money had to be changed, and this entailed the most intricate calculations. It is unnecessary to add that the stranger was fleeced quite mercilessly. The currency has since been placed on a more rational basis. National notes, issued against a gold reserve, have superseded the provincial currency, and pass from one end of the Republic to the other.