WORKS AT TARTAGAL (EASTERN CHACO) FOR MAKING TANNIC ACID.

These works, built by powerful firms, are permanent centres, drawing timber from a great stretch of forest, while the saw-mills of the Central Chaco move about freely, to be near the felling sites.

Photograph by the Author.

Plate XII.

[Click to view larger image.]

Pastoral colonization has now spread over almost the entire surface of Patagonia. The parts that are not yet occupied are of slight extent; they consist only of the most desolate regions in the south of the Rio Negro district and north of Santa Cruz. The expansion of white colonization began only about 1880. Until then the interior was abandoned to the indigenous tribes and was almost entirely unknown. The Atlantic coast alone had been explored. The travels of Villarino along the Rio Negro and the Limay as far as Lake Nahuel Huapi had left only a faded memory.[56] North of the Rio Negro, Woodbine Parish (1859), making use of the notes left by Cruz, who had crossed the Andes and the Indian territory between Antuco and Melincue in 1806, was the first to publish definite information, to which no addition would be made during the next forty years.[57]

The settlements founded on the coast by the Spaniards at the close of the eighteenth century (S. José and P. Deseado) were ephemeral. Only one of them maintained an obscure existence, Carmen de Patagones, some miles above the mouth of the Rio Negro. One of its chief resources was the export of salt. Expeditions for this purpose began on the Patagonian coast about the middle of the eighteenth century (Journey from San Martin to Puerto San Julian about 1753, Coll. de Angelis, V). After the revolution, Buenos Aires finally abandoned these costly expeditions by land to the salt districts of the Pampa, and was supplied with salt by schooners from Carmen. During the war with Brazil and the blockade of the Rio de la Plata, Carmen, protected by the bar of the Rio Negro, and the Bay of San Blas were the harbours in which Argentine, English and French privateers concealed their prizes and did their repairs after the storms of the Gulf of Santa Catarina. D'Orbigny visited Carmen during this period of equivocal prosperity. One of the most curious effects of the hospitality offered to the privateers was the unloading upon the Patagonian coast of blacks, intended for Brazil, who were taken from the slave-traders. Thus an unforeseen eddy brought to the south of the Pampean region part of the current of the slave-trade intended for the sugar-cane plantations in tropical America. A number of the Carmen ranches had coloured workers at this time.