The journey from the capital to Bahia Blanca is not interesting, for the greater part is over a dead level and the country is unrelieved by hedgerows or any of the picturesque landscapes which we in the Old World associate with the countryside. The journey is also rendered disagreeable by the dust which is the invariable concomitant of Argentine railway travelling. In the latter half the monotony is relieved by a low range of green mountains, the Sierra Tandil, which are practically the only break in the plain between Brazil and the extreme south. The town itself is not attractive on first view, for it is white and bare. The shore is low and fringed with lagoons and the glaring white roads are not restful to the eye. This feature is due to tosca, a kind of limestone with which all the roads in the neighbourhood are made. But much has been done by art to improve the tameness of nature.
TANDIL ROCKING-STONE.
There are two towns. Eastward is the Puerto Militar, the great naval harbour, and some miles to the west lies the Civil Port, Bahia Blanca proper, which will soon be as familiar a name as Liverpool or Rotterdam. The naval town is the work of the accomplished Italian engineer, Chevalier Luis Luiggi, who has constructed magnificent naval works. The graving dock is very fine and will receive battleships of the largest size, nor was the Italian neglectful of the artistic side of town planning, for he has transformed a desert into a garden, and Puerto Belgrano, as it is called, is likely to be in the future a fashionable watering-place, as well as a naval base. Gums, acacias, and tamarisks have been planted, and numerous gardens have been laid out. On the Civil Port immense sums have been spent, and it has been made thoroughly fit to deal with the portentous grain traffic, large already and which must very soon attain marvellous proportions. The competition of two powerful railways assures Bahia Blanca of being well served both in the matter of docks and transport.
Patagonia, which a generation ago was hardly known except by the reports of sailors, who had occasionally explored its coasts, and which was fabled as a land of giants, is now beginning to raise its veil of mystery and to be known as an important seat of the wool trade. But it is still imperfectly explored, and not long ago an expedition was despatched to search for the grypotherium, a strange beast which was rumoured to live in the inaccessible forests. It may be doubted whether it has more reality than the sea serpent.
As we saw in a previous chapter, Patagonia possesses extreme interest for the geologist. It is a recent formation, for at one period, not very far distant from a geological point of view, it formed the vast Pampean sea. The late Colonel Church[124] has treated the subject in an interesting paper of which the opening remarks are a summary: "I shall try to show that the Plata drainage area was, in a recent geological period, much more extensive than it is to-day; that its most northern limit was in 10° 44´ S. lat., and that nearly the entire waters which now unite to form the Madeira River, the main affluent of the Amazon, once flowed southward into a Pampean sea, which penetrated north over the plains of the present Argentine Republic, to about 19° S. lat." It was probably 1,400 miles in length with an average breadth of 400 miles, and perhaps two-thirds the size of the Mediterranean. The Pampean formation is estimated to have an age of seventy thousand years. Between the history of its geological formation and our own time the record of Patagonia, though picturesque, is not important. It was a no-man's land, abandoned as worthless to savages and only visited by the curious or by those who were making their way to more profitable regions. As is well known, the explorer Magellan was the first to set foot in this country, which he called Tierra de Pantagones from the large footprints which he found in the sand, and many of the places at which he touched still bear the names he gave them. Several Spanish navigators and also Drake visited it during the sixteenth century, but Sarmiento de Gamboa, who made useful surveys, was the only one to add much to our knowledge of Patagonia. He also attempted to settle the country, but without success, for Thomas Cavendish (who named Port Desire after his own ship) saw in 1586, twenty-three famished Spaniards, the only survivors of the city of King Philip, founded by Gamboa on the Straits. These poor creatures were trying to return to the Plate district. Cavendish, therefore, named the deserted settlement the Town of Famine, and it retains the name of Port Famine to this day.[125] In 1590 John Davys found a solitary straggler here, and the bold navigator thus describes his barren experiences[126]: "Here we made a boat of the boards of our chests, which, being finished, we sent seven armed men in the same on land on the north shore, being wafted on land by the savages with certain white skins; who, as soon as they came on shore, were presently killed by an hundred of the wild people in the sight of two of our men, which rowed them on shore, which two only escaped back again to us with the boat. After this traitorous slaughter of our men, we fell back again with our ship to the north-eastward of Port Famine to a certain road, where we refreshed ourselves with mussels, and took in water and wood." The country was long neglected, but in 1670 Sir John Narborough appeared off the coast with several men-of-war, when, after coasting round as far as Valdivia, he found that the Spaniards were too strong and returned to England.
Reference has already been made to the famous voyage of Anson. In his adventurous circumnavigation he spent but a comparatively short time on the Patagonian coast, and he gives little information about the natives, but his account of the country exactly tallies with that of other explorers. It was described as being entirely treeless. "But though this country be so destitute of wood, it abounds with pasture. For the land appears in general to me, made up of downs of a light dry gravelly soil, and produces great quantities of long coarse grass, which grows in tufts interspersed with large barren spots of gravel between them. This grass, in many places, feeds immense herds of cattle; for the Spaniards at Buenos Ayres, having brought over a few black cattle from Europe at their first settlement, they have thriven prodigiously by the plenty of herbage which they have found here, and now increased to that degree, and are extended so far into the country, that they are not considered as private property; but many thousands at a time are slaughtered every year by the hunters, only for their hides and tallow."[127]
In 1764 Byron visited the coast of Patagonia and made friends with the inhabitants, whose vast size greatly impressed him. His scribe calls the chief a "frightful Colossus," and thus describes the surprise which the giants created[128]: "Mr. Cumming came up with the tobacco, and I could not but smile at the astonishment which I saw expressed in his countenance upon perceiving himself, though six feet two inches high, become at once a pigmy among giants; for these people may indeed more properly be called giants than tall men; of the few among us who are six feet high, scarcely any are broad and muscular in proportion to their stature, but look rather like men of the common bulk, run up accidentally to an unusual height; and a man who should measure only six feet two inches, and equally exceed a stout well-set man of the common stature in breadth and muscle, would strike us rather as being of gigantic race, than as an individual accidentally anomalous; our sensations therefore, upon seeing five hundred people, the shortest of whom were at least four inches taller, and bulky in proportion, may be easily imagined." This is a point upon which testimony varies. Sir John Narborough's mate, Mr. Wood, declared that he saw no native who was taller than himself.
In the eighteenth century the Spaniards made several attempts to settle Patagonia, and the English Jesuit, Thomas Falkner, wrote a most valuable account of the country and people. He mentions a voyage of discovery made in 1746, in which, however, the captain neglected to explore the river Deseado. His reasons were "that his orders were only to discover if there was any port fit to make a settlement, near or not very far from the mouth of the Straits, that might afford supplies for ships in their passage to the South Seas; that he had surveyed all from Port Gallegos, without finding one place fit for forming a settlement upon, on account of the barrenness of the soil, and the want of the common necessaries of wood and water; that he had done what was sufficient to quiet the King of Spain, with respect to any jealousies he might have of a certain northern nation's being so foolish as to attempt a settlement in such a country, where as many as were left must perish; that the Bay Sans Fond was at too great a distance from Cape Horn, to come within the circle of his instructions; that his stock of fresh water was scarce sufficient to reach the river of Plata, and he was not certain whether he should be able to get any more at the mouth of the River of Sauces."[129]