The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn Part 21

There were soft and smooth murmurs, hoa.r.s.e boomings, fair altos, and singing sopranos, alternately and combined in a way to interest and distract every unaccustomed listener.

The dinner was, in itself, a most interesting novelty. We had beef roasted in a fas.h.i.+on which the natives call "meat with skin." The ribs of a steer had been wrapped in the skin of the animal, and then impaled on a long iron rod, which was thrust into the ground so that the wrapped-up meat leaned directly above a small open fire. Here it had remained for about three hours, while a patient native fed the flames with brush, and occasionally turned the bundle of meat. It was then removed, the skin was stripped off, and it was brought, dripping with hot juice, in a big pan to the table, where the hungry pa.s.sengers awaited it, knives in hand.

The knives were of a cla.s.s novel to an American, and, in fact, so was everything about the table. Each knife blade was a triangle, an inch broad at the handle, and tapered to an acute point, four and a half inches away. This was a good shape for the usual purpose for which it was designed--the skinning of animals, but it was not a good table knife. Even at that the ranchman had not enough to go round, and three of us had to use the knives we had carried, in antic.i.p.ation of such a lack. Shallow tins served as plates. And yet, in spite of so great poverty in table furniture, we had an abundance of very good claret, served in gla.s.ses of a proper shape.

The food, too, was as surprisingly good as the wine. No better roast was ever carved than that, and it was flanked with baked armadillos, the most toothsome morsel I had ever seen. Both kinds of meat were seasoned with salt and pepper only. With these we had hard biscuit of the Buenos Ayres sort--an oblong, globular little loaf, say two by three inches large in its longest and shortest diameters. The absence of garlic and Italian sauces completed our pleasure, and black coffee, served in tin cups, ended the meal.

The next port at which we called was Santa Cruz. The great profits made by the sheep owners who brought their stock from the Falklands to the Strait of Magellan, induced many of the young men of the Falklands to come over and try their luck in Patagonia. The Argentine Government encouraged them by giving ten-year leases on pasture land at the rate of $60 national money per year per league, and at the average one league would hold 1200 sheep. The traveller will hear all about the increase in the flocks on the Santa Cruz River before he gets there, and the stories of the wool s.h.i.+pments will prepare him to see a small but bustling community when he arrives. I really expected to see a large as well as a bustling place.

When the steamer had anch.o.r.ed in the stream about ten miles above the mouth there were seen in the distance at the south bank, under what is known as Weddell's Bluff, several new frame shanties which the s.h.i.+p's officers called the presidio. I went up there in a boat, and found enough of the little shanties to house at least 3000 soldiers, while an old hulk moored at the beach would have accommodated 200 sailors easily enough. There were a dozen sailors with two officers on board the hulk as s.h.i.+pkeepers, while the barracks were in charge of two officers and a score of soldiers, some of whom were keeping house with their families.

The building of these barracks in that locality could have but one signification: The Argentine Government expects trouble, sooner or later, with Chili, and this is to be a base for operations against the Strait of Magellan possessions of the Western republic.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SANTA CRUZ, PATAGONIA.]

The buildings were not all completed, and some of the soldiers were at work as carpenters and painters. This show of business activity only added to my mental picture of the town itself, and it was with considerable pleasure that I returned down stream to land near the s.h.i.+p, and make my first visit there.

Climbing to the low table land that borders the stream, I looked back into a wedge-shaped valley between the hills, the Valley of the Missionaries, and saw Santa Cruz--in all nine buildings, of which two were unoccupied, and not a human being in sight anywhere, nor any other evidences of life than a small flock of sheep and a thin red mare grazing idly. The buildings stood on three sides of a surveyed plaza--that is, there was one house on each of two sides, one stood back up the valley a few hundred yards, and the rest were on a third side of the plaza. Among them was the inevitable long low iron structure built for the home and office of the Sub-Prefect. There was also a one-story adobe-walled house that was a combined hotel and general store, having four rooms, while another was a pink wooden building, one story and a quarter high, having five rooms that served the same useful purpose.

Among the buildings was an old adobe-walled structure, about ten by twenty feet large, with two places for doors, and the remains of a couple of glazed windows. The earth served as a floor, and the usual iron for a roof. In one corner was a depression that looked like a dry hog wallow, and a porker grunted about outside the building. They said this had been the church that missionaries preached in long ago.

In the pink hotel I found a well-dressed young man who was glad to see all strangers, and particularly one who wrote for a newspaper. He accepted an invitation to take a cup of coffee, and when I asked him if he was acquainted with the region he said he had been just at the point of asking me if I would be interested in hearing something about it.

Then the coffee came, and with it a Dutchess County, N. Y., brand of condensed milk, and a blue-print map. We combined the milk and coffee, and then spread out the map and weighted the corners with our cups, the coffee pot, and the milk can.

Being thus ready for business, the young man pointed at the map. It was the plan of a great city--a city with plazas connected by wide avenues and boulevards, with streets running at right angles between. Figures and letters scattered here and there on it showed sites for Government and other important buildings, while long broken lines showed the location of many street railways. The young man explained the peculiarities and advantages of the disposition of plazas and boulevards and street car lines, and eventually, from the lay of the land, I grasped the situation. This was the plan of the city of Santa Cruz, the great Patagonian metropolis that was to grow up right there in the valley, where now one could see nine houses all told, of which two were unoccupied. It would grow just as surely as the sun would set behind Weddell Bluff, to quote the words of the young man; and then he went on, in a way to make even a Kansas town-site boomer rub his eyes, to tell of the s.h.i.+pments of wool "aggregating 2,000,000 pounds last year," of the good pasture to be had "at 3 per square league annual rental," of the "traces of gold found on Lake Argentine, where good mineral developments will be made," of the "experiments in wheat culture to be made, which will doubtless succeed." All of this was said to show that I had arrived at just the right time to get in on the ground floor of a great real estate deal. I did not need to buy the lots. I could have all I would build on free of cost, save for the usual charges of making out and recording the papers.

I have frequently heard men who had done business with Spanish-American nations talk despairingly of the lack of enterprise to be found there.

They speak of the depreciated currency there as "adobe money," and call the nations "the land of _poco tiempo_" and "the manana country." As to many of these nations the terms are well applied, but the Argentine must be excepted. Neither in the suburbs of Brooklyn, nor on the plains of Oklahoma, nor among the orange groves of California have I seen a boomer who could tell his story in better form than the young man with a blue-print map of the future metropolis of Patagonia.

It is perhaps worth noting here that while the young man was talking I could see an ordinance on the wall above his head that prohibited the killing of either ostriches or guanacos "within the city limits," even with bolas, while the shooting of such game was prohibited in all the districts south of the river.

And yet I am not sure but a large town will grow there eventually, although Gallegos was made the capital town some time ago. The place certainly has some natural advantages. The Santa Cruz River is a wonder.

Being absolutely un.o.bstructed throughout its course, large, deep-draught river steamers could run easily to the source, Lake Argentine, and beyond. It is really likely that gold mines will be developed in the Andes there, and it is certain that a large lumber business will be done there sooner or later, for the forests produce cedars and other valuable saw timber of the best quality and great size. There are no trees immediately on Lake Argentine, but it is connected with other lakes by navigable channels where the timber is found. When I was in Santa Cruz a party of capitalists familiar with lumber had gone up to the lakes to look into the business. Driving the logs in rafts to the port of Santa Cruz would be so inexpensive that once a proper mill were established there the great markets of Buenos Ayres and Rio Janeiro, not to mention the smaller ports, would be supplied at prices to make serious inroads on the business of those who now supply them from the United States.

Of the value of the sheep and cattle ranches as a support for a town nothing need be said to readers in the United States, who have object lessons in the matter scattered over the prairie States, but the Patagonia ranches will scarcely make as good a support for a town as the Yankee ranches do, for the reason that the land system of the Argentine promotes great estates and discourages small owners. The capitalist in Argentine territory can buy all the land he wants. Gov. Mayer of Santa Cruz territory, for instance, owns thirty square leagues of land along the Santa Cruz and Chico rivers. In owning the water front, he controls all the range back of it, for no one will take up land that has no water. For all practical purposes, he controls say one hundred square leagues. The firm of Hamilton & Saunders of Gallegos, Scotchmen, own fifty-eight leagues, and so control three times as much. Of course, it would be much better for the country if fifty-eight families owned and lived on the land these two men have, nevertheless the country is filling up with shepherds, and a month after the two French merchants mentioned had landed in Santa Cruz with the wholesale stock of goods, they were doing a profitable business with their original packages.

There is but one drawback to the value of the valley in which Santa Cruz city is located that would operate against it seriously, and that is the lack of drinking water. The young boomer did not say a word about water.

There is a scant supply from wells even for the seven occupied houses with their stock, and that is brackish. Of course, should the place become a great city, the supply would be drawn from the swift Santa Cruz, but while the settlement is growing to a village of a few thousand people the cost of twenty odd miles of pipe line would prohibit tapping the river. The tide rises over forty feet every day in the river mouth, so there is salt water a long way up stream.

It is worth noting that the Santa Cruz people draw water from their wells as the people in the cowboy parts of the United States often do. A pulley is suspended over the well. When water is wanted a horse is saddled, and one end of a la.s.so fastened to the saddle. The other end of the la.s.so is pa.s.sed through the pulley and made fast to a pail, which is then lowered and filled. Then the water drawer mounts the horse, and rides away till the pail is up to the pulley. Next the rider dismounts, walks back to the well, takes the pail from the la.s.so and carries it to the house. Last of all he unsaddles the horse. I saw this done myself. I must admit that this description of the Patagonian way of drawing a pail of water reads like a traveller's untrue tale, but it is literally true.

Gallegos, the capital of Santa Cruz territory, the next port visited, stands on the south bank of the Gallegos River, several miles above the mouth. The Gallegos is a very interesting stream. Its head is in the Cordilleras, of course, and the head is made up of a number of small streams which unite in the foot hills to make a river never less than 180 feet wide and three feet deep in the dryest of seasons. The current is fair, and although there are three fording places along its route, large steamers drawing 2-1/2 feet of water could navigate it to the forks the year round. But that steamers will ever be found there is a matter of doubt, although the country is rapidly filling up with settlers. There are several reasons for this. All branches of the stream rise within a few miles of the Pacific Ocean, the south heads being almost within sight of Skyring Water, just northwest from Punta Arenas, while between the north and the south forks there is a complete and a wide break in the Andes through which one may drive a wagon as easily as one can drive over the mesa of Patagonia anywhere. By cutting a road five miles long through a belt of timber a highway to the bays of Chili will be formed, and so the traffic of at least half the length of the Gallegos River will go to the west instead of down stream to the Argentine town of Gallegos. I say at least half, but it is not unlikely that more than half will go west, for the reason that the entire population of the territory south of the Gallegos, and about all between Rio Gallegos and Rio Santa Cruz have a strong feeling of friends.h.i.+p for Chili.

"In Chili, if you have right, you can get justice every time," said a Frenchman owning 100,000 sheep on the border line between Argentine and Chili. "In the Argentine you must have the judge for your friend or you will be beaten, right or wrong."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GOVERNOR'S HOME AND A BUSINESS BLOCK IN GALLEGOS, THE CAPITAL OF PATAGONIA.]

As to the Rio Gallegos lands, the traveller finds lava beds and pasture lands alternating, but the pasture has the greater area, and it is simply perfect pasture. The low bottom lands are flooded in September and October when the Andes snow melts, but there is plenty of good upland pasture. Nearly all the land south of it is now taken up by shepherds, while the north side is being rapidly absorbed, the chief obstacle to rapid settlement being the lack of fuel. It is almost a bushless region.

On the whole, the town of Gallegos has a very good cattle country back of it. Along the sea-coast to the south it has some placer gold mines.

The layer of black sand carrying gold crops out richer in some places than others, and there are places where the lack of drinking water makes mining impossible, but quite a number of men--perhaps fifty--can be found working the beach for gold between Gallegos and Cape Virgins.

What the traveller sees in the territorial capital now is a score or less of corrugated iron buildings, with half a dozen houses of wood and three of adobe. One of the adobe-walled houses is the territorial prison. Any smart rascal could burrow out in an hour. About one-third of the houses are hotels and stores, the outer appearance of these buildings being like that of a Yankee mining camp. Every store carries a considerable stock of liquors and tobacco, a moderate stock of hardware and cutlery likely to attract ranchmen, a small stock of wool and cotton fabrics, and a few samples of groceries. The stocks were not arranged to make anything like an attractive display, and, because sand storms were likely to come at any time to dust over the interior of every building, n.o.body thought it worth while to sweep or in any way clean house.

As hotels (every store was a hotel) the places were most unattractive; worse, for instance, than any I saw when _The Sun_ sent me through the wilds of southern Mexico. In Mexico all of a party of travellers, men, women, children, and servants, would be lodged in a single room, with nothing but the tile floor or a bench to sleep on, but it was always a clean floor, while one could have a hammock under a veranda if he chose, and that was about the best kind of bed. Moreover, food was always abundant and good. At some Gallegos hotels one could not be certain of either quant.i.ty or quality of the food, while the blankets were neither washed nor aired nor changed.

However, there were exceptions to the rule, at least one exception. Dona Philomena, a rotund and jolly woman of middle age, with her son, a lad of about sixteen, kept a boarding-house in an adobe hut of one room, twelve by eighteen feet. She had a stove that smoked at every crevice on one side of the door, a rude table with benches at the other, a spare bed just beyond, and beyond this bed heaps and piles of boxes and bags and bundles, containing vegetables, groceries, clothing, Indian curios, saddles, and horse gear generally. There were three kinds of meat hanging from the rafters. There was but one tiny window, and that yielded light enough only for the table. In the extreme rear of the room all was concealed by impenetrable gloom. A Yankee wife would have said she never did see such a cluttered up place. Nevertheless, the mud walls had been whitewashed until they looked like the dried up bottom of a pool in an alkali desert. The mud floor was neatly swept. The spare bed had clean white sheets, and the blankets smelled sweet. The rude table was covered with a snowy cloth, and there was a stainless napkin at each plate. Dona Philomena wore a clean dress, with a bright-colored shawl over her shoulders. The picture of her as she worked over the stove in a thin halo of blue smoke, giving a stir to the potatoes frying in the pan or a peek at the mutton roasting in the oven, or cutting fresh bread, or opening Yankee condensed milk, while she smiled and joked and gossiped in a continuous flow of words, was something that the traveller would carry with him for a long time after. And when the meal was over and we all smoked and lingered over the coffee the boy got out an old guitar and played the tunes the Spanish lover plays to win a sweetheart--tunes that alternately swelled with importunate pa.s.sion and faded into murmurs of hopeless longing, so that everybody stopped talking to stare into s.p.a.ce and think of somebody else a long way off.

The Captain of the steamer introduced me to Gov. Edelmiro Mayer. The Governor lived in a large frame one-story building that had a gla.s.s-enclosed veranda overlooking the river. On the whole, this was a most remarkable home, considering the locality. Though like a mining-camp house, as the rest were in outward appearance, there were within Oriental rugs of great value on the floor; a grand piano of American make that cost $1500 in gold in New York stood in one corner of the parlor; a great organ such as professional musicians prefer was in another; a library of 5000 volumes, made up of standard works of science and literature, was in the gla.s.s-enclosed veranda, while the furniture and hangings and bric-a-brac were everything that a cultivated taste could ask for. So was the sideboard, with its old Kentucky whiskey.

Having very little governing to do, the Governor devoted himself to literature and music, occupations in which he was ably a.s.sisted by his wife, a charming Argentina.

Gov. Mayer's name is not unknown to American history. Just for the love of adventure and free republican inst.i.tutions he came to the United States to help during the war of the rebellion. He commanded a negro regiment with conspicuous success. Afterward, while down on the Rio Grande, he crossed over to help patriotic Mexicans overthrow Maximilian.

Although small in the number of its houses and its people, Gallegos is in full plumage as a territorial capital. A two-story frame building was in course of construction that will eventually be the White House of Santa Cruz territory. Besides the Governor, there was the usual list of other officials necessary for the dignity of such a place. As at Ushuaia, already described, no official had anything to do worth mention. Indeed, the Captain of Police, who in a United States territorial capital would need to be a man of nerve and muscle, was here a cripple who could neither sit on a horse nor walk unaided the length of the town's one street. Still, courts were held sometimes to decide conflicting claims of shepherds, and a gaucho who had slashed a comrade in a drunken brawl was arrested just before I arrived. Gallegos will be a favored stopping place for criminals when the country gets filled up, I guess, for it is very handy to the Chili line, and extradition treaties between two such countries as Chili and Argentine are of little value.

A peculiarity of the climate is the southwest wind of summer. It begins at 8 in the morning and increases in violence until after noon, when it occasionally blows hard enough to lift a man from the saddle. At 3 in the afternoon it moderates, and at 6 o'clock and thence on through the night there is usually a calm. This wind blows every day in spring and summer, and on many days it brings hail and sleet that no man can face.

The winter season, though colder, is by far the most pleasant of the year. But in spite of wind and cold, Patagonia is pre-eminently a healthful region now. Every human being that I saw there carried the glow of health in his face and the spring of youth in his muscles. But there are zymotic diseases just as there are in Yankee villages, because of the juxtaposition of wells and cesspools, and these diseases will prevail wherever settlements are made, because of the utter indifference of Spanish-Americans to the rules of hygiene as applied in such matters.

To sum it all up, the settlements on the coast of Patagonia are small, the buildings are of the temporary or mine-camp cla.s.s, and life in them is decidedly tranquil. The towns are new, and the bad name the country has borne in the matter of climate and sterility has kept foreigners away. "There has been no boom--just a slow, healthy growth," as the Kansas boomers' paper would put it, and in this case the statement is true. Santa Cruz territory now has 800,000 sheep. Its Governor expects to see 10,000,000 there in ten years more, besides some millions of horses and cattle. Settlements will very likely spring up in the interior, and the vast region over which the Tehuelche Indians held undisputed sway during the 350 years after the land was discovered by white men will become a peaceful, thinly populated pastoral land, whose people will grow comfortably rich supplying Europe and the United States with wool, hides, and tallow. But there are no indications worth mentioning that, as a whole, it will ever be anything else than this, and at present it is of interest to the Yankee nation chiefly as a region out of the way for tourists to visit.

After leaving Port Desire we had a variation in our meals on board s.h.i.+p.

The sailors had gone fis.h.i.+ng with a net, and with success. There were two kinds,--one rather like a Yankee smelt, only more slender, and the other somewhat like a Lake Erie pickerel. Both were excellent, but the little fellow boiled and made into a salad was particularly fine.

Then, too, a species of ducks had become very abundant. They were so dark above as to appear black, while the under parts were pure white.

Their curiosity led them to hover about the s.h.i.+p in twos and threes, sometimes flying along, say fifty feet above the weather rail. On such occasions Captain Chwaites brought out a light shotgun. On the day we entered Santa Cruz he knocked so many down on deck that the pa.s.sengers had roast duck for one course at dinner. In fact, for a citizen of South America, the captain was a remarkably fine sportsman. He never used a shotgun on a sitting bird. He could kill gulls at long range with a rifle when they were bobbing about on the waves. While we lay in Rio Gallegos he rode out on the table-land one day with a man living there and killed three guanacos, using the bolas Indian fas.h.i.+on to bring them down. The tourist who sails with Captain Chwaites can expect to have game at the table frequently during the voyage.

But it should not be inferred from what has been said so far that the table was beyond criticism during my voyage. For instance, the napkins were not changed at any time oftener than once a week, and at the last the interval increased to ten days. The table-cloth remained unchanged an equal period; this, too, during the home voyage, when the number of first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers had increased to twenty-five and the table had to be set twice.

The captain was not unaware of the condition of affairs. He stood beside me one day while the steward shook the table-cloth over the rail. It looked as one could expect a cloth to look after ten days' use at sea.

"Look at that cloth," said the bold skipper. "Did you ever see such a dirty lot of pa.s.sengers?"

I was eating in those days in the Captain's sitting-room, and his remark had no personal application. I replied:

"Looks vile, don't it? But why don't you order the steward to wash it?"

"I cannot. There is so little soap. Look at my hands. I have no soap to wash them with. The pa.s.sengers know we have no soap. They ought to be careful, like gentlemen."

His hands certainly showed the lack of soap. So did those of the steward. We got a cup of coffee with a handful of sweet crackers in lieu of the meal called breakfast in the United States. One did not want even that many if he happened to see the steward serving them with his unwashed hands.

Then the vegetables, which were abundant on leaving Buenos Ayres, dwindled away before we entered the Straits of Magellan. At Punta Arenas cabbages, turnips, potatoes, and some other roots are grown and sold at low prices, but we got such a scant supply that for the last three weeks of the voyage our food consisted chiefly of meat, dried peas and beans, and hard bread.

Worse yet, the bed linen was not changed during the entire voyage of nine and a half weeks. Complaints were of no avail, so I was at last glad to leave my bunk and roll up in a fur robe of Indian manufacture that I bought when in the Rio Gallegos. With a lounge in place of a bunk, I was as dry and comfortable as I had been damp and miserable in the bunk. Should any reader of this try the voyage he will need to take a large supply of woollen under- and night-wear, including socks. The proper changes of these will serve in place of changes of bedding.

Nor is the list of discomforts complete. When leaving the River Plate the air in the saloon and state-rooms was insufferably close. There was no ventilation for the state-rooms save through the doors into the saloon. The saloon was ventilated through the doors at the head of the companionway and through the skylight, but there was no sort of wind sail or device to force the air down. In the summer time in the River Plate, where the thermometer sometimes marks 110 in the shade, that saloon is to be compared only with a Turkish bath. In winter, while coasting along Tierra del Fuego, that same saloon becomes like the vault of a cold storage company. The air is saturated with moisture, and the temperature barely above the freezing point. The moisture gathered like dew on the walls of the saloon as well as of the state-rooms, and sometimes trickled down to form little pools in the bunks and on the floor. There was no device for heating or drying the cabin, neither stove nor steam-coil. We were dressed continually in the heaviest flannels, and wore heavy overcoats, but the chill air penetrated everything, even to the marrow of the bones.

I once pa.s.sed two weeks in Greenland in the month of October, and exactly two years later was digging away the snow in the Rocky Mountains nine thousand feet above the sea, that I might have bare ground for my blankets at night. My home is in the Adirondacks, where the snow lies four feet deep all winter long, but I have never suffered from the cold as I did during four weeks of this voyage.

And yet at times, when the conditions were such as to make us all most uncomfortable, we often enjoyed life rather better than at any others.