OUR VOYAGE TO THE RIVER PLATE
We had laughed at the story of some Englishmen in Lisbon, told us by a
friend there. He overheard a group of typical John Bull tourists, who had
been “doing” a fortnight in Portugal, discussing their experiences on
their way to the boat. The weather had been superb all the time; they had
been steeped in sunshine; yet the reflection which seemed to find most
favour was the remark of a burly Yorkshireman: “Thank ’eaven, boys, no
more of this damned glare for a while!”
But we were seekers of sunshine, prepared to accept all that came our
way, so it was with light hearts we heard the engines throb and felt the
vessel resume her voyage. The Franco-Portuguese couple with the little
girl and ourselves were all who came aboard at Lisbon, which looked a
veritable city of dream as we steamed out through the wide waters of
the Tagus. Seen from the river, there are few finer prospects than the
long and diversified coast line of Lisbon, culminating in the castled
height of Cintra. A soft haze of heat blurred the outlines of the hills
and touched them much in the manner of those feathery old landscape
engravings that used to adorn the art books of fifty years ago.
There was a fairly large number of passengers aboard, but we soon
discovered that the majority were only bound for Las Palmas, excluding
the second class and some three hundred Spanish and Portuguese emigrants
herded like cattle in the steerage. The dinner bell rang soon after we
had settled in our new quarters, and for two weeks or so our days now
slipped away, punctuated by the ship’s bells. This orderly division of
time speedily produces a mental condition that makes for calm and good
health. With nothing to do but engage in an occasional game of deck golf,
or lounge in your canvas chair reading a novel, and be prompt to answer
the summons of the bells that ring you to your meals, the days fade into
each other, like the old-fashioned dissolving views, and with never a
suggestion of weariness. Indeed, I often wondered if it might not be that
a term of imprisonment would be almost as efficacious in bringing calm
to the troubled spirit and health to the wearied body. Certainly a spell
of monastic life would be as good a “rest cure.” But, on the whole, I
felt the steamer chair had its advantages and although I had taken with
me the notes for a book I had had in hand for years, intent on advancing
that in my days of idleness, it was with a great content that I found it
impossible to fix my mind on any thought of work in those serene days
of sailing over sunny seas. Nothing seemed to matter, even the frequent
ticking of the “wireless” was somewhat of an intrusion on our ocean peace.
In a voyage of so little incident, when the chief excitement is contrived
by arranging sweepstakes on the day’s mileage of the vessel, there
is plenty of time to study one’s fellow passengers, and for this a
small company, such as we were after leaving Las Palmas, is probably
more interesting than a large one. There were only some thirty saloon
passengers and naturally there was much interchange of gossip, the
ship’s officers proving especially companionable. A small company has
the disadvantage, however, that the chronicler cannot well describe
his companion voyagers with that easy frankness he may safely bestow
upon a crowd. The possibilities of mutual identification are enormously
increased.
Yet in the little handful of voyagers with whom we sailed there was a
remarkable mingling of character: potentialities of tragedy and comedy, a
microcosm of the social world. One could find much to say of them. I must
content myself, however, with a few vague touches.
I found that one of the passengers who had made himself most eminent
in the companionship of the saloon was an intimate of one of my oldest
friends in a far-distant city—so tiny is this great world of ours. He
was a gentleman in whom there survived something of the spirit of Mr.
Pleydell in his Saturday evening “high jinks,” and maintained that
character in the smoking room (where every night was Saturday) with a
small but admiring audience whom he addressed as “my loyal subjects.”
“Tell me,” he would say, “what thou would that we, of our royal will,
might do this evening for our own and thy diversion.” And with varying
qualities of the lamely jocular they would give their suggestions. It was
all very pathetic to an onlooker: the frank and insatiable egotism of
“Uncle” (as we dubbed this worthy of the ruddy visage), his determination
to hear the beloved sound of his own voice in hoary anecdote and
threadbare jest. I was very patient with him, as I shall ever be with
one who has passed many years of his life in South America—he should
be allowed a large charter of liberty for all that he has suffered of
social hunger and intellectual thirst. At first I resented somewhat the
obtrusive nature of this worthy Scot’s companionship, but, somehow,
before the journey’s end we were good friends. I think a voyage of this
kind teaches one tolerance, and it is surprising how the most apparently
incompatible units may draw together by the practice of even a little
toleration. As “Uncle” observed in his soft Scots voice: “Mun, I was
even beginning to like Brixton,” naming a young man who joined us at
Pernambuco, and who, by reason of a most pronounced tendency to “swank,”
made a bad first impression.
Mention of this passenger, by the way, reminds me that his unfortunate
habit of capping every story, going one better than everybody else, kept
most of us at arm’s length for a day or two. If one said he had yellow
fever, Brixton had had it twice; if another had made two voyages to
Africa, Brixton had made five or six; if a third had shot a hare, Brixton
had shot an elephant. Everywhere he had been he had met with hair-raising
adventures. In Pernambuco, he had to use his revolver every night to
scare away the burglars. How many had he killed? “I winged one of the
devils anyhow!” And in proof he passed round his revolver. Yellow Jack
was raging in the town when he left, he assured us; but somehow he had
been allowed to come on board quietly and make us shiver with recital
of the horrors he had escaped. Of course, we doubted every word that
Brixton said and yet on many points I have since had occasion to test his
statements and never once have I found that he lied. He told the truth as
he saw it, and he was an entertaining and good-hearted Englishman, who
had forgot in growing up to cast off certain habits of thought and talk
which are delightful in Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns, but are apt to convey
wrong impressions of handsome, well-groomed Mr. Brixtons!
Perhaps our quaintest voyager was an ugly Frenchman, who had been
christened “Dr. Crippen,” before the ship had reached Lisbon. He
certainly bore some resemblance to that misguided gentleman who stood so
eminently in the world’s eye for a time, and the humour of the situation
was that he had never heard of Crippen, and rather thought it was some
sort of dimly conceived English compliment to him. He spoke no word of
our barbaric tongue, and when “Uncle” presided at a mock trial of “Dr.
Crippen” the prisoner was vastly amused, until he found himself condemned
to an hour’s solitary confinement in a bathroom. He was much given to
patronising the bar and passed the most of his days in a state of happy
fuddle; yet I afterwards learned that his was one of the clearest brains
that control a great and world-famous organisation in France and when
he left us, it was a new and extremely sober “Dr. Crippen” who stepped
ashore to carry out a very delicate and difficult business mission.
There was no American or English lady among the saloon passengers, but
we had Scots, Irish, Danish, French, Spanish, and Peruvian. Of none that
were ladies shall I speak, but two who were something else deserve
a note. ’Tis ever thus; virtue is so lacking in the picturesque. As
a connoisseur of dancing, I was interested to discover that we had
aboard a famous _danseuse_, most charming of all the pupils of the
great Loïe Fuller, who was on her way to the Casino at Buenos Ayres—a
resort of dubious fame, according to current belief among our music-hall
performers. But as I had many a time been charmed by the exquisite art of
the said pupil of Loïe Fuller (whose name is as widely known as that of
her teacher) I had no difficulty in deciding that the plain and vulgar
Spanish contortionist who was going to stamp her heavy feet and twist her
decidedly shapely body before the _jovenes distinguidos_ of the Casino
was merely trading in the name of a celebrity. Her luggage bore the
famous name in huge letters, and I afterwards saw it “billed” widely in
Buenos Ayres.
On the whole, the conduct of this Spanish dancer during the voyage was
so openly without sense of shame that there was little one could object
to! Sometimes she appeared in gorgeous raiment and an enormous “picture
hat,” ready for the Bois or the Alameda; even, on one occasion, sporting
a huge muff in the tropics! Again she would pass the day in bedroom
slippers, her corsets put aside, her lithe body draped only in a dressing
gown, and her golden hair of yesterday, completely doffed, leaving only
a shabby little nob of faded brown. She entangled at least one of the
male passengers, a Chilian who later found another flame in an attractive
_demi-mondaine_ of the second class, and it afforded us some amusement to
watch the rivalry which now ensued, but there was little sympathy when
the gay Lothario came to the end of his cash and attempted to borrow.
[Illustration: THE FIRST FAMILIAR LANDMARK FOR THE VISITOR TO BUENOS
AYRES.
Part of the Paseo Colón, with the Government House on the right, and the
tallest of the new commercial buildings on the left.]
The other “interesting lady” of the saloon was of quite a different type.
A French _chanteuse_ of the smaller café concerts, she was extremely
plain by nature’s wish, but the art of make-up and some potent hair-dye
effected a magical change the day she left us. She behaved herself
modestly enough and passed most of her time with her crochet needle,
sitting side by side with the honest women aboard, yet I was told that
her songs would have brought a blush to the cheeks of a stevedore!
She sang to us several dainty and harmless little French and Spanish
verses in the familiar _café chantant_ manner, and altogether left
the impression of a poor woman laying out her small gifts to the best
advantage.
There was little or no intercourse between the saloon passengers and
those of the second class, although it seemed to me that among the
latter were many worthy people and a good-hearted companionship. They
certainly showed to advantage in the diverting ceremony observed when
Father Neptune held court on crossing the line. Included among them were
a number of minor “artistes” bound for the music-halls of Buenos Ayres,
not to mention several young women with a still less attractive journey’s
end in view.
We heard much from the old South Atlantic voyagers on board about the
doings on other and more popular lines than that to which our vessel
belonged. The “muck-raking” magazines might work up a spicy stew of
scandal about life on the South American liners if they gave themselves
to the task. Wealthy Argentines and Brazilians travelling with their
wives in the saloon and two or three concubines in the second class,
offer quite attractive material for the journalist in search of the
spicy, while the traffic in “white slaves” has long provided a certain
percentage of the passengers for these very profitable lines, in which,
perchance, some dear old christian ladies have their investments. How
difficult it is to keep one’s hands clean in this soiled world!
From all that I have been told, and also from personal observation,
the perils of the deep may have a curious resemblance to the perils of
“the Great White Way.” And even those who ought to be the protectors of
innocence may prove to be its assailants. A young married lady, lately
arrived from England, was under the pain of having to travel alone from
Buenos Ayres to a Brazilian port where her husband was lying in hospital
with typhoid, and her plain story of how the purser, under cloak of
sympathy for her in her distress, first ingratiated himself by talking
sentimental slop about his wife and bairns at home, getting her to go
into his cabin to look at the treasured photographs of his “dear ones,”
and there, without more ado, attempted to assail the honour of the young
wife, whose mental sufferings at the time were, to my knowledge, almost
beyond endurance, is one of the ugliest I have heard. This was an English
officer, note you: none of your sensual Italians.
It is to be feared that much co-mingling with pimps and procurers may
have tended somewhat to blunt the native honour of the Englishman in
these southern latitudes, for, up to a day so recent that it seems but
yesterday, nothing had been done to dam the foul stream that has flowed
so long from the human sewers of Europe into the still more noisome
_mares stagnantes_ of Buenos Ayres. Now, there is at least some pretence
of stemming it, and from time to time one reads in the Buenos Ayres
papers about the latest raid on the “apaches,” who are deported, with
much pomp and circumstance, or about the rejected of Paris, in the shape
of womankind, who are refused admission to the city of good airs.
But to return to a pleasanter, if less piquant subject, our voyage
deserves at least a few words of description. We seemed to be lying off
Las Palmas before the beautiful picture of Lisbon in sunshine had quite
faded from our vision, and at this distance of time I would not undertake
to say whether it was two or three days that had passed between the two
ports, so dreamy was our progress. The sight of Las Palmas, with its
grateful greenness of hill and valley, and far southward, cloud-high in
a gorgeous flood of sunshine, the mighty mass of Teneriffe, thrusting
itself boldly into the sky from the heaving wilderness of water, gave to
the beholder one of those rare moments of spiritual exaltation which a
first sight of such natural grandeur must always awaken in the thinking
mind.
St. Vincent was a different story. Fully two days more steaming brought
us thither to that vile haunt of malaria and all things unlovely. The
Cape Verde Islands, of which St. Vincent is the principal, dishonour the
name they bear, as there is scarce a speck of verdure to be seen upon
them. Presumably there must be some natural reason for the naming of the
Cape itself on the African coast, off which, nearly five hundred miles
northwestward, these scabby isles show their horrid heads above the blue
Atlantic. They are of a dirty red colour, and at a distance resemble
some humpy monsters of the deep wallowing in the sunshine. The port is
useful as a coaling and cable station. A town of shanties, it swarms
with negroes, and ships’ pedlars. Here a small colony of young Britons
are marooned in the cable service. At first the young cable operator is
no doubt delighted to find how much more picturesque he has become than
he was at home. To _have_ to wear white duck suits and a pith helmet,
and look like Stanley on his way to discover Livingstone, is extremely
attractive to the eye of youth! Even the gentleman who sells coals to the
liners comes on board looking for all the world like a colonial governor,
or the leader of a mission to Abyssinia. Then there is much card-playing
and a good deal of hard-drinking among “the boys,” who talk of “the
service and all that sort of thing, dontcher know,” to feed youth’s
fondness for swagger. But when the debilitating effects of the climate
and the life make themselves felt, when the novelty has gone, what a husk
remains! Lucky are the young men who escape from these rusty isles before
the rot of the place has eaten too deeply into their natures. The harbour
swarms with sharks, but the negro boys who dive for the amusement of the
passengers on the ships that put in there make light of the sharks for a
sixpence, or even for a humble penny thrown into the water.
St. Vincent gave us our last glimpse of the Old World. Its very ugliness
sent our thoughts zestfully forward to the undiscovered beauties of
the New, then so full of promise, now—but that’s a later story. It was
pleasant to hear again the long soft swish of the water running past the
vessel’s sides as she resumed her tranquil voyage into the sunset. Now
succeeded many days of idle lolling in the deck chair, watching through
the binoculars the swarms of flying fish skimming over the surface of the
ocean like tiniest aeroplanes.
Bird life in these ocean solitudes is rare, yet we not only saw several
journeying on confident wing several hundred miles from land, but for
two or three days we were forcibly reminded of “Nature red in tooth and
claw,” by witnessing a little drama in feathers. One day out from St.
Vincent a bird, about the size of a pigeon, gorgeously coloured and
sporting a plume of orange-red, alighted on the rigging of the ship,
pursued by a larger hawk-like bird. Evidently the pursuit had lasted for
a long time, as both were land birds and seemed very exhausted, for we
were now some hundreds of miles from the African coast, whence hunter and
hunted had no doubt flown. For two or three days a strange game of cross
purposes ensued, the hunted, with the skill of desperation, cleverly
selecting different positions in the rigging or on the smoke-stacks,
which offered no opportunity to the hunter to swoop down on him from
above. There were violent chasings at times around the ship, when the
essential cruelty of the Spanish emigrants was displayed in their efforts
to strike the pursued bird with all sorts of objects hurled at it as it
swept past the bows. Eventually the hawk gave up and disappeared and soon
afterward the bird of brilliant plumage took wing away.
Seldom did we sight another vessel; now and again we signalled a tramp or
a collier heading south with its cargo from Wales to be sold eventually
in Buenos Ayres at some $20 or $25 per ton—it was during the time of the
coal strike. One only of the old “wind-jammers” did we pass. In full
sail, she looked, in the blue immensity of the tranquil sea, no bigger
than a toy boat, and an object of such appropriate grace and beauty that
it was sad to think a day would come when no ship that goes by spread of
glistening sail would cross those far waters again.
Early on the sixth day out from St. Vincent, on going on deck before
breakfast we were not a little surprised to find that we were steaming
close to a long and narrow green island on which many signs of careful
cultivation were evident. In a cove the white houses of a township showed
clear and inviting in the morning air, the blue smoke curling from some
of the chimneys giving one an intense pang of home hunger. With the
binoculars it was easy to make out people going about their tasks in the
fields, others walking towards what seemed to be a signalling station.
The surprise at this sudden coming upon a bit of the habitated globe in
what, for all we had supposed the night before, was still mid-ocean, sent
us questioning to the officers of the ship. The island turned out to be
Fernando de Noroña, notable chiefly as a Brazilian penal settlement. A
Brazilian—the only one among our company—told me a story about Fernando
de Noroña which, speaking in Spanish, he considered _muy graciosa_. An
Englishman in Pernambuco killed a native in a quarrel and was sent to
the penal isle, but in the course of a year or less he was granted his
liberty, that being a matter of simple negotiation: a little influence
and a modicum of money can always save a criminal in that happy clime.
But, the Englishman, having long suffered a shrewish wife, found so much
peace in prison that he refused to quit the island and there remains.
Fernando de Noroña lies some two hundred miles off the north eastern
shoulder of Brazil, and by that token we were soon to be touching at
Pernambuco and hugging the Brazilian coast for the rest of our voyage.
One felt almost sorry that the sunny days of serene steaming over
shoreless seas were coming to an end and that presently we would be
picking up the coast of the new world. By now we had grown so used to the
companionship of the boat that we began to look forward to leaving it
with something of regret.
At Pernambuco we had our first sight of a South American town and I
should be departing widely from the truth were I to say that the “Venice
of Brazil” tugged at my heart-strings. It is a town of evil-smelling
waterways, half-finished streets, at their best no better than a London
byway, with cut-throat quarters that harbour all uncleanness. The task
of going ashore, first being lowered into a bobbing dingy by means of
a rope and basket, is attended with a sensation of nausea which the
merry assurance of the old skipper by your side as to the water being a
favourite haunt of sharks does little to counteract, especially when
his trained eye enables him, a moment or two later, to point out several
of these hunting for garbage around the ship. It is fair to say of
Pernambuco that it is undergoing transformation: the “avenida” craze has
taken root and at the time of our visit innumerable shanties were being
demolished to make way for wide avenues and new buildings.
The first sensation of crossing a great sea and making land on its
farther shore, once experienced—and it is a “thrill” that never comes
again—we sank back into the half-indifferent contemplation of the long,
indented coast line of this prodigious land of Brazil. For hundreds of
miles it is unchanging in its character of palm-fringed shores, with
great dim mountain masses inland, a soft blur of heat overhanging all.
There is plenty to suggest mystery and romance, and yet somehow beauty
is lacking. I mean the wild beauty of peak and crag which we find along
the coasts of Scotland, where the conformation is continually changing.
These mountains of Brazil have that volcanic sameness which only becomes
magnificent when you can ascend to some commanding pinnacle and look down
upon a veritable wilderness of mighty earth mounds, such as it was my
good fortune once to look upon from the tower of the ancient castle of
Polignac in the volcanic heart of France.
For many nights the tropical skies had been a revelation of stellar
glory, and often though I have gazed at the friendly skies of home on
“a beautiful clear night of stars” (to quote the haunting phrase of “R.
L. S.”), little had I imagined the glories that awaited the beholder of
the heavens in a clear tropical night. The stars appear much larger and
incomparably more brilliant than I have ever seen them in our northern
latitudes, nor do they “stud” the sky so much as hang dependent from the
dense dark blue. I had many starlight talks with the old skipper who was
travelling to a “shore job” (the dream of every sailor!) on the Pacific,
and who spoke of the stars which had guided him so long on his voyages
with that familiarity of the worthy old Scots minister “who, ye micht hae
thought, had been born and brocht up among them.” Yet I have failed on
many occasions since to rediscover the interesting relationships of the
constellations which he so clearly explained to me. I confess, however,
to a keen sense of disappointment in the much vaunted Southern Cross. It
is a lop-sided and unimpressive group of four stars.
The sight of Bahía, about one day’s steam from Pernambuco, was peculiarly
pleasing. It might have been a bit of the French or Italian Riviera, with
its rich verdure and bosky hills, while the residential suburbs looked
quite European as seen from the ship. We made no closer acquaintance than
a stay of some three hours in the beautiful bay, but I could well believe
that much that looked most alluring in the picturesque sea-front of the
town did not bear too close inspection.
Two more days brought us to Rio de Janeiro, full of expectation and
curiosity for the pearl of South America. The bay of Rio has been so
often photographed, so fully described, that any one who has read much
must have a good mental picture of the place, which fortunately squares
very neatly with the actuality. The fantastic islands of volcanic origin
which peep up through the broad waters of the bay, or impudently flaunt
their grassy cones high above sea level, in the most unexpected places,
give to Rio, as seen from the bay, an aspect that is unique. The town
spreads itself out with picturesque irregularity among the gentle valleys
that lie between the many hills, trending swiftly upward some little way
inland from the shore, the noble height of Corcovado crowning the whole
lively and diversified scene. These hills being mostly tropical in the
richness and character of their vegetation, the art of man had no great
task to transform the situation into one of the world’s most beautiful
cities.
On the whole, man has here done his work well, although it has to be
confessed that much of the architecture is paltry and all of the plaster
variety. The marine drive will match almost anything of the kind in
Europe, and the Avenida Central is admirably devised at once to beautify
the town and drain the pressing traffic of the narrower side streets. The
suburbs are also spacious and well planned, so that one could imagine
life being very pleasant here—when the weather is a little cooler than
the norm. Although the summer was supposed to be over at the time of our
visit, the atmosphere was enervating in the extreme, and even on the
breezy heights of Corcovado, to which we ascended by the funicular, and
whence one of the grandest prospects man may look upon rewarded us, we
perspired at every step. Everywhere there was the moist, oppressive smell
of the hot-house, so that one could guess what it meant to be afoot in
Rio in the summer time, if this were autumn.
[Illustration: THE NARROW STREETS OF BUENOS AYRES.
The left illustration shows Calle Florida, the busiest thoroughfare of
Buenos Ayres; the right is a bird’s-eye view of Calle San Martín, looking
towards the Plaza Hotel. These are typical main streets.]
As for living here: when we were charged twelve _milreis_ ($6.50) for
a dish of fruit that might have cost a dollar in New York, at a very
ordinary hotel, where all other charges were proportionately appalling,
we had our doubts, even granted a change of weather. One of our party
paid the equivalent of four dollars for a tooth-brush, a cake of soap, a
small tube of lanoline, and some shaving powder!
Paying an uniformed madman, who was plying for hire with a motor car, a
few thousand _reis_ (a _milreis_ or one thousand _reis_ go to 54 cents,
so that you part with them in tens of thousands in a forenoon), we drove
all around the city and the Marina at fully thirty miles an hour, turning
busy corners at that speed. I myself can claim some dexterity at the
wheel; but I confess that I sat in terror in that maniac’s car as we
sped wildly through the highways and byways of Rio. Yet he was perfectly
sane as motorists are accounted sane in that town; his performance
evoking no remark. The speed limit is, I believe, eight or ten miles an
hour, but, like all the laws of Latin America, that is laid down merely
to be ignored. The municipal authorities, however, use the bylaw as a
supplementary tax, and regularly fine all the motorists of the town, in
succession, for exceeding the limit. A well-known English resident who
owns a speedy car told me he had been fined a month before for exceeding
the limit on a certain date, when he had been on the high seas returning
from Europe. He protested, lodged his plea, and was fined all the same,
on the ground that if he did not exceed the limit that day, he had done
so in all certainty before or after.
Altogether our impressions of Rio were favourable. Every prospect pleased
us; only man was vile, and none viler than the scum that haunt the
sea-front to plunder visitors by getting them aboard their small boats
for conveyance to the liners in the bay, then, with sundry sinister
threats, endeavour (too often successfully) to make their victims
disgorge a payment large enough to purchase the boat. The gentry who ply
this trade at Naples are mild and benevolent by comparison.
About noon of the day following our stop at Rio, we were steaming up the
picturesque estuary of Santos. A Frenchman on board had promised me that
here I should see something _tout à fait original_, and much though I
had been charmed with the actual sight of Rio, so long familiar to me in
picture, the approach to Santos proved even more interesting, due perhaps
in some degree to the charm of the unknown and unexpected. There is also
a touch of romance in slowly approaching a town that lies up a river,
instead of coming upon it suddenly from the sea. A negro pilot took
command of the ship up to Santos, somewhat to the disgust of our captain,
who had never before stood by a “nigger” on the bridge and seemed none
too sure of his pilot, for he never let go the telegraph handle until his
vessel was berthed.
The country through which the river runs (it is more an arm of the sea
than a river) is undoubtedly “original,” abounding in low volcanic hills,
with abundance of verdure, broken now and then by palm groves, and swampy
flats. Here one is conscious of being in a strange land, and it is easy
to imagine with what tense interest and straining eyes the first bold
adventurers sailed up this narrow and beautiful water-way to found the
city that has become the second port of Brazil. The city itself stretches
by the riverside around the foot of a great green hill, disfigured by a
monstrous advertisement announcing to adventurers of a different kind and
a later day that somebody’s biscuits are the best! A considerable part of
the town lies on land that still looks suspiciously swampy and used to be
an ideal haunt of Yellow Jack, though I was told that to-day it would be
difficult to find a healthier spot. That may be so, but I think I could
succeed if I tried very hard. As for the town itself, a short ramble
revealed one of the deadest and most uninteresting cities it has been my
lot to see, and I gladly returned to the friendly shelter of the ship
and the livelier locality of the quayside, where were congregated many
vessels from British, American, and Continental ports.
Two days more and we found ourselves at anchor in the roads outside
Montevideo, which presents a most engaging picture from the sea, the town
covering a lumpy tongue of land that juts seaward with a rocky short,
rambling inland in many directions and along the bay, which culminates in
the conical mass known as the Cerro, crowned by an antique fortress and
a modern light-house. At night, when the myriad electric lamps are lit,
the light-house on the Cerro throwing its broad and regular beams athwart
the bay, innumerable red and green lights blinking on the buoys in the
harbour, much flitting of motor launches and brightly illuminated liners
lying at anchor, there is no scene I know that better suggests one’s
juvenile fancies of Fairyland.
The town itself delighted us, seen in generous sunshine, with refreshing
breezes blowing from the sea, which at first sight, as we pass along the
streets, seems completely to enclose it. But as I shall have something to
say of my later stay in the Uruguayan capital, I shall not occupy myself
with it further at the moment.
We bade good-bye to the ship that had been our most pleasant abode for
so many days and made our first acquaintance with things Argentine by
transferring ourselves to a musty, ill-managed river-steamer, on which
the crudest elements of courtesy had still to be acquired by officials
and stewards, who were all too conscious of being employed by a firm
which then monopolised the river trade.
Still, although we realised what a change for the worse we had made in
transhipping, we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that to-morrow
we should awaken in the port of Buenos Ayres; in that genial land of
sunshine to which we had so long looked forward with eager anticipation.
The passage up the river—which, seaward of Montevideo, is some 150
miles in width, narrowing suddenly to sixty opposite the city, and to
the eye has no farther shore, so that only the discolouration of the
water distinguishes river from sea—was made in the roughest weather we
had experienced, the steamer tossing like a cork and its paddle wheels
beating the waves with feeble irregularity.
It was an early autumn morning when we walked off the gangway at the
Dársena Sud to endure the pain of getting our belongings through the
customs, an operation apparently regulated by the shipping authorities
after studying all the worst methods in vogue, selecting the worst
features of each, and combining these into a system that is the acme of
inefficiency. Moreover, the wind bit as shrewdly this autumn morning as
on a midwinter’s day in New York, and, believing in this land of sunshine
with a simple faith that had yet to suffer rudest shocks, we stood there
an hour or more, clothed for summer, chattering with cold.
But we were actually in Buenos Ayres, and soon all the marvels of that
wonderful city, that “Paris of South America,” as Argentines who have
never been to Europe are fond of describing it, were to reveal themselves
to us starveling voyagers who knew nothing better than the Paris of
France.
_Vamos a ver_, as they say in Buenos Ayres.