PIONEERING IN THE PAMPAS.*
Mx. SEYMOUR tells us that he is Aell aware the only apology that is worth anything for the publication of a book must be found in its contents, and judged by this test, we think he is more than justified. His little volume is not only full of information, but contains just the facts people, interested in the subject at all, want to know.
As competition becomes daily fiercer, and the struggle for life more difficult, the question once so easy of solution becomes terribly imperative and hard to answer ; where are the younger men of the upper middle-class to find room ? They are too often the true poor, men with capacity, education, energy, but with no niche into which to fit, who find all paths at home crowded up. Vague reports come up from time to time of a land not yet replenished or subdued, of a land somewhere in the far south of another hemisphere, where land may be had for the asking, and beef is twopence a pound ; but what the life " out there " actually is ; whether the land when had will yield fruits of increase with or without the usual quantity of spade and ploughshare ; whether the beef when bought is eatable, and what the chance of cooking it ; if any of tlfe amenities of civilization can be imported into the wilderness, or if savagery be a condition of success; these and many like questions but too generally meet only vague answers. This little book supplies the deficiency, and whereas one sees only
• Pioneering in the Pampas_ By Richard Arthur Seymour. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1869.
forests of thistle, another only groves of peach trees, the writer here gives simply, and with evident truthfulness, the record of his four years' experience of life in the La Plata Camps ; the term " camp " signifying country, "out in the camp" answering a good deal to the Australian expression " out in the bush." He started in January, 1865, to join a friend who had preceded him in the Argentine Republic, and fulfils his purpose of giving " a slight sketch of the difficulties, disappointments, and successes of a settler's life." His first view of Rio de Janeiro seems to have given him an impression of the beauty of the country which a nearer acquaintance did not diminish. " The Italians," he writes, " say, ' Vedi Napoli, e poi mori,' but the inventor of that proverb had certainly not seen Rio." Doubtless, after a long, monotonous voyage, travellers are likely to look on tropical scenery with feelings of exaggerated delight ; yet the bay, sixty miles round, with its blue waters, and " magnificent background of mountains, lit up with every imagin- able tint of purple and gold, while all around grew the most luxuriant vegetation in the world; orange trees, bananas, palms, and tree ferns,. the ground carpeted with flowers of every colour, some of them extremely sweet, the air full of humming-birds and butterflies of brilliant colours," must have made a scene very difficult to con- ceive or describe; but our traveller hastened on to Buenos Ayres, from whence he had to proceed up country to meet his friend, and at this point he calls attention to the different descriptions of the country through which he had to pass south of Buenos Ayres which are likely to be given by the traveller out for a few months' pleasure, hospitably entertained by well-established and prosper- ous estancieros delighted to give him his fill of amusement, and by the settler about to choose his locality, with every possible dis- advantage to contend against, want of protection from the Indians, want of timber, want of fuel, want of servants, and last of all, the great want which originally led him to fix his residence in a foreign country, want of money. But it is just the new settler's opinion that is wanted,—description from men who are climbing the hill, with many a tumble, not from those to whom difficulties are already minified as seen through the glasses of success. Mr. Seymour and his friend were literally pioneers ; owing probably to the cheapness of the land and other considerations, they were tempted to pitch their tents a little beyond the limits of civilization. The steamers between Buenos Ayres and Rosario seem fairly good, as the entire voyage of 250 miles was performed in 24 hours. Rosario itself is a flourishing town, with some sixty thousand inhabitants, and as its port is an extremely good one, it seems likely to attain greater importance. It is about, Mr. Seymour tells us, to be lighted with gas, and has a railway to Cordoba, already open as far as Villanueva, and shortly to be finished; but land here was too expensive for our travellers, and they pressed on to Frayle Muerto, in the province of Cordoba, one of the largest provinces in the Republic, and the southern part of which forms part of the frontier of the Republic. Mr. Seymour apologizes for the minuteness of his geographical disqUisition by observing that it is rendered necessary by his finding on his return to England that South American geography is not very clearly underitood by those who have no special interest in the subject. He says various intelligent people with whom he conversed evidently considered him as residing in the Southern States, and constantly inquired how the civil war affected him. They were really stationed in the south-east of Cordoba, about twenty leagues from the frontier supposed to divide the Republic from the Indian territory. It is to incursions from these Indians that the settler finds his most terrible liability. Like the rest of his country- men, Mr. Seymour and his fellow-settlers were disposed at first to hold these men very cheap ; the dread of natives is not indigenous in the English mind, but they soon found, when their carefully accumulated flocks and herds were driven off without a moment's warning, or some prosperous estancia was burnt to the ground and the fruits of the labour of years destroyed in an hour, with what a formidable foe they had to deal. But the hour of the Indians' doom had strack when the first Anglo-Saxon settler pitched his tent : they disappear beforil the Saxon race like prairie-grass beneath the ploughshare. Driven further and further back, the towns are even now comparatively safe ; and Mr. Seymour says, as the country round Fray le Muerto becomes more inhabited, it will probably be equally free from these invaders. He hopes much from the Government of the present President, Seflor Sarmiento, who is, it appears, a wise and en- lightened man ; and it has only been owing to the wretched management of Government that the depredations of the Indians have not long ago been stopped and the settlers secured from their attacks,—at least, so thinks our author ; and it would be a curious study could we analyze the exact relation in which the Indian and the Anglo-Saxon ever stand to one another. We speak much of Spanish cruelty; but Indians remained to tell the tale of Spanish conquest. They simply melt away before English colonization. Mr. Seymour, apparently one of the kindliest of men, can pause in his narrative to regret the fate of a kitten, but,—the Indians are not kittens, one perceives, but foxes. Our settlers purchased four square leagues of land, with a beautiful soil and six miles of river frontage, on the banks of the Saladillo, for sixpence an acre. Of course, their first idea was to become sheep farmers, but the fall in the price of wool consequent on the cessation of civil war in the United States, and the renewal of the transmission of cotton to England, made them speedily turn their attention to agriculture. And Mr. Seymour says at the time they first did this, the price of wheat in the River Plate was quite as high as in England, but that it requires no artificial stimulus to make corn-growing one of the most paying speculations in the country. From the abund- ance of rich pasture, and constant supply of water on their estate, they would have found, and still hope to find, cattle- breeding a richly profitable concern ; but hitherto fear of the Indians, who in a night might drive off the largest herds, has prevented their engaging very largely in what would undoubtedly prove a source of wealth. There seems little doubt that, once given security from the Indians, there is no degree of wealth, comfort, or civilization which may not be combined in the home- steads of industrious settlers. Our author visited estancias some eighteen leagues south of Buenos Ayres, which, he says, were as safe from the Indians as a villa at Richmond, and where the house was large and comfortable, built round a half-square, the inside surrounded by a verandah, over which beautiful creepers hung in the greatest profusion ; there was a delightful garden, and the whole place surrounded by trees of every description ; and where the party assembled in the house spent their time, as in any country house in England, between riding, croquet, and dancing. This, however, for those who bad climbed the ladder ; very different was the life of our friends at Monte Molino in those early years, when to cook, make bricks, hedge, ditch, and fence were the incessant labours of the day. Before, however, Mr. Seymour returned for what appears to be but a temporary visit to England, they had built their house and established in it many of the usages of civilized life, dining at sun- set, and spending their evenings mostly, after the labours of the day, in reading the books supplied from time to time from home. About a thousand peach-trees had been planted near the house, and the beauty of a grove of peaches when in blossom may be readily imagined ; round their newly ploughed land they have planted hedges of a kind of acacia called " sino-sino ;" it has a thick foliage, and bunches of yellow blossoms, grows rapidly, and has, Mr. Seymour says, thorns of a most formidable description, so that in a few years it forms a hedge impervious to any animal with which he is acquainted. Their agricultural pursuits could not be carried on without more efficient aid than could be obtained from the natives, and they sent home to Warwickshire for more men. A gardener and a cook had previously arrived, and the letter of one of these men to his friends at home is so characteristic, we cannot refrain from giving it in full :-
"' This is a fine country for living ; plenty of beef and mutton, and fowls, ducks, and turkeys ; beef and mutton from one penny to two pence per pound. I often think of the poor people in England when I see the meat being kicked about the streets, or a great dog dragging a piece of beef or mutton about enough to dine twenty people.' This is a very nice place, about 25,000 acres of most beautiful soil, very level ground, and six miles of river frontage. The river, I must tell you, is quite covered over with birds,—swans, geese, dacka, and other beautiful birds too numerone to mention. Thousands and thousands of each sort ; when you frighten them up they make such a noise you can scarcely hear one another speak, and out in the camp there are hundreds of wild deer.' ' The soil is beautiful ; I can dig as much before breakfast here as in a whole day in England.' You would like to see us sometimes picking ducks, geese, swans, and snipe ; you would think it was not much like starving to see ten or fifteen ducks cooked at once : and I can assure you they are beautiful ones too, some as large as the English tame ones, and as fat as they can be. I am sorry to tell you the swans have done laying now ; and we shall get no more eggs for a fortnight, until the ducks and geese and other water fowls begin, then we shall get thousands. It is a strange thing, the swans' eggs are no stronger-tasted than the English hens' eggs.' I only wish I had been here years before ; it is a fine country for working-men to come to, there are so many good things to be had. We can get any quantity of eggs, &c. I went the other day to get a few for breakfast, and brought a peck basketful. There is one thing I cannot quite manage, and that is to eat one whole ostrich egg ; it is too much for me, although I am so fond of them. They are beautiful eggs ; we have about one hundred a week of them, this last four or five weeks.' 'I must tell you about my horse-dealing. I have bought three. The three cost me £2 128. ; one is three years old, another four, and the other aged ; one turned out to be a stolen one, and after I had had it about a month the man who owned it came for it.' We have a nice bed of melons, cucumbers, and vegetable marrows. I dare say it will
surprise you when I say we are going to plant twenty or thirty acres of vegetable marrow this year for the pigs ; I must not forget to tell you that we have some radishes in the garden eighteen inches long and twenty inches round. I never saw such monsters in my life before ; they are from some of the seed I had from DAy's at Alcester.' "
Mr. Seymour tells us in one part of his narrative they were not specially fortunate in the native labourers they came across, as. being supposed to be beyond the limits of all law or order, " their household was rather like King David's army, to which every man who was broken or who had run away from his master joined himself" ; but as we read the above account, we cannot help wishing that some of the " natives " at home who, with able hands and hungry appetites, find work so impossible to get, would think it.
worth while to follow the Warwickshire gardener's example.
It is to his own class, however, Mr. Seymour addresses himself, and tells them that after four years' trial, notwithstanding losses and discouragements, he sees no reason to despair of success ; that provided the Government will defend their frontier from the Indians, he can still encourage others to come and settle in their
neighbourhood, —a neighbourhood, be it remembered, though apparently beyond the confines of civilization, yet within thirty miles of a railway and within five weeks of London.
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