Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of the Rio de La Plata / Their Present State, Trade, and Debt

by Sir Woodbine Parish

3. The Mestizoes—offspring of the Spaniard and Indian.

4. The Mulattoes—offspring of the Spaniard and Negro.

5. The Negroes or Africans born.

Of these five castes, however, the Indians and their Mestizo offspring formed a very small and insignificant proportion, and can only be regarded as accidentally domiciliated at Buenos Ayres in consequence of its being at that time the principal channel of communication between Peru, their proper soil, and Spain.

The City of BUENOS AYRES, in 1767 (tinted thus ■) and in 1825, (blank).

The original Indians of Buenos Ayres were a hostile race, who would hold no intercourse with their conquerors. No mixture, therefore, of Spanish and native blood took place in that particular part of South America, which could produce a distinct caste, as in the Upper Provinces and in Peru, where the more peaceable and domesticated inhabitants continue to the present day to constitute the main stock of the population. In those parts we see a striking difference in the people; the further we advance into the interior, the more scarce become the white in proportion to the coloured inhabitants. The aboriginal Indian blood decidedly predominates in the Mestizo castes, whilst the negro and his Mulatto descendants, so common on the coast, are there almost unknown. The cause of this is easily explained; for a long period very few European women reached the interior of America: the Spaniards, therefore, who settled there, were under the necessity of mixing with the natives, from which connexion has arisen that numerous race, the Mestizoes, which forms so large a part of the present population of those countries. The same difficulty in transporting their women from Europe did not occur with respect to Buenos Ayres; there the European stock was easily kept up, though for a long period it increased but slowly; and, but for the adventitious circumstance of its having been for some years a depôt for the slave-trade, under the Asiento Treaties, the population of Buenos Ayres would have been nearly free from be seen that the Indian and Mestizo no longer appear: the division made is simply into the white and the coloured population; and, although the latter still at that time amounted to nearly a fourth part of the whole, it had ceased to increase. In the four years the births barely exceeded the deaths, and whilst the proportion of deaths amongst the coloured people increased, there was a striking falling off in the number of their marriages and births, even from 1822 to 1825. The slave-trade has in fact, been prohibited since 1813, by a decree of the Constituent Assembly, consequently any further supply from the Negro stock has ceased, and it cannot be very long ere all trace of its having ever existed must be merged in the rapid increase of the whites—a result which will be greatly accelerated by the introduction of fresh settlers from Europe, who are daily arriving and domiciliating themselves in the new republic. Of the extent of this some notion may be formed when I state that the number of foreigners, who, up to 1832, had fixed themselves in the city and province of Buenos Ayres, amounted, with their wives and children, to no less than from 15,000 to 20,000 persons. Of these, about two-thirds were British and French, in about equal proportions; the remainder was made up of Italians, Germans, and people of other countries, not the least numerous of whom were emigrants from the United States, and especially from New York.

As it may interest some of my readers to know what classes of our countrymen find employment at Buenos Ayres, I have given in the Appendix an account of them, as taken from a register which I established on my own arrival there, together with the marriages, births, and deaths amongst them, as far as they could be learned for the period stated: to these I have further added a copy of the Treaty I concluded with the Government of Buenos Ayres, in 1825, securing to His Majesty's subjects in that country many important privileges, and amongst the rest the free exercise of their own religion:—a great object to so numerous a community:—I had subsequently the satisfaction of seeing it fully carried out by the erection of an English church, capable of containing 1000 persons, towards which the Buenos Ayrean Government itself contributed, by giving a valuable plot of ground for the purpose:—His Majesty's Government appointed the chaplain, and regularly defrays one half of the annual expense, the British residents paying the remainder. A Presbyterian chapel has been since built in virtue of the same privilege by the Scotch part of the community; and for the Catholics, an Irish priest is allowed to do duty in one of the national churches.

In a population so intermixed, and in such daily communication with the people of other countries, it is not surprising that national peculiarities should have very nearly disappeared. Thus the men of the better classes in Buenos Ayres are hardly to be distinguished in their dress from the French and English merchants who have fixed themselves amongst them, whilst the ladies vie with each other in imitating the last fashions from Paris: it is only in their out-door costume that any difference is apparent; then the more becoming mantilla and shawl thrown over the head and shoulders supersede the European bonnet and pelisse. Some of them are very beautiful, and their polite and obliging manners, especially to strangers, render them doubly attractive. Our countrymen have formed many matrimonial connexions with them, which has contributed, no doubt, to the good feeling with which they are so generally regarded by the natives.