Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  ‘Todo Cymraeg!’ Rubén confirms.

  ‘But you were born here?’ I ask, confused.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘I grew up on my parents’ farm. We only spoke Welsh there. I didn’t learn Spanish till I went to school.’

  ‘My great-grandfather,’ Rubén says, not wanting to be left out; ‘came from Ynys Môn, Anglesey. John Thomas Evans was his name.’

  ‘He came over in 1874, nine years after the very first settlers,’ Mirna adds.

  ‘I have family in Anglesey still.’ Rubén again. ‘Although my uncle John Lasarus Williams died recently. He was a learned man – a teacher, a nationalist and an M.P. He would send us short letters in Welsh. I don’t really speak Welsh. But I sing in Welsh! The Welsh have got such beautiful, lively songs!’

  ‘Please, sing one!’

  ‘Oh no. I can’t really sing...’

  ‘Please...’

  He gives in. ‘But don’t tell anybody in the town!’

  I later find out that there are four choirs in Gaiman. Is he afraid that he will be press-ganged into one of them if people know that he can sing? I promise not to tell, and he bursts into a Welsh drinking song in a beautiful baritone.

  Somewhat dazed by this display of Welshness, I ask the two if they feel themselves to be Welsh or Argentinian.

  ‘We’re Argentinians!’ Rubén says strongly. ‘We were born here. Our children, our grandchildren were born here. Somos argentinos. We’re Argentinians. But we’re well aware of the history of our forebears. We know what life was like for them in Wales. We even have some Welsh customs here that have long died out in Wales. That makes us Argentinians of Welsh extraction. We don’t forget that – it’s something we’re proud of. Argentina is an immigrant country that hasn’t found its own identity yet. There’s no such thing as “the typical Argentinian”. We have instead our history: the wonderful history of the Welsh colony. A beautiful history!’he exclaims, suddenly in English.

  ‘Cymry yn y galon,’ says Mirna. We’re Welsh in our hearts. ‘¡En la sangre!’ Rubén proclaims passionately. In our blood! Mirna nods. ‘It’s in our blood, yes.’

  3

  WE HAVE ANOTHER CUP of tea, then I’m shown round the exhibition by Mirna. She points out the mantelpiece that her great-grandmother had sent over from Wales.

  ‘She didn’t bring this over on the Mimosa?’ I ask, incredulous. The Mimosa is the Patagonian Mayflower, the ship on which the first group of Welsh immigrants arrived in 1865.

  ‘No, no!’ Mirna laughs. ‘Later, a trading company was formed, the Compañía Mercantíl, and they shipped things between Wales and Argentina. These came over on the Mimosa though.’

  ‘These’ are a pair of china dogs.

  ‘They were a wedding present. My husband’s great-grandmother brought them over.’

  I try to imagine that. The first settlers who came over into the unknown, into a vast region many times the size of Britain, a region where no other Europeans lived, would have left Wales for good. Their only connection to all they had left behind – country, family, friends, sights and sounds and smells and tastes – would for many years be occasional letters, nothing else. It must have helped the young bride to take these two fragile reminders of home with her into the untamed, unknown wilderness.

  ‘I’ve seen those dogs somewhere before, I’m sure,’ I say and ponder. ‘Oh, I know: In Bruce Chatwin’s Patagonia book.’

  ‘Yes, that’s possible,’ agrees Mirna. ‘Bruce Chatwin. Yes, could be. But you know, you mustn’t believe everything in that book. Nofel ydy o! It’s a novel.’

  Several hours have passed when I finally get up to leave. Mirna steadfastly refuses to accept any money for cakes and tea.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she says. ‘We had such a lovely afternoon! You’ll pay next time. When you come back next year!’

  We spend half an hour standing in the doorway, saying goodbye. Finally I’m outside on the road again, in the dust, mosquitoes, shrill unknown bird calls, dogs barking and the drone and buzz of the cars and motorbikes of Gaiman.

  I arrived in Patagonia only a few hours ago, alone and rather lost in the unknown. Now, after just a few hours of conversation, I feel anchored; as if I had already spent days, weeks here. John Lasarus Williams on Anglesey; the ancestor John Thomas Evans, Caernarfon – they are from a world I know, stepping stones, links between there and here, then and now: and through these reference points I find that Gaiman, part Welsh and wholly Argentinian, is still just as strange, but suddenly not as foreign as before.

  I walk slowly back to my B&B, tired from exploring and speaking in tongues, and all those cakes.

  But my day is not yet over. In B&B Ar Lan yr Afon a party is just beginning. I enter the house through the back door, hoping to make it unobserved to my room, and bed, and a long rest.

  ‘Perfect timing!’ Jorge exclaims merrily as I tiptoe past the kitchen. He works as an IT consultant but sometimes helps out in the B&B as well. Just now, he is pouring wine into a trayful of glasses. ‘We’re just about to start. Come on through.’

  Oh, heck, I think. Not now. I’m tired and dusty and sunburnt and half eaten by mosquitoes. I’ve had a lovely afternoon, but I only arrived this morning. I’m jet-lagged and tired and cranky. I don’t want to meet more people. I’m not a people person.

  I wouldn’t admit it, but I’m a bit freaked out by being here. South America. Argentina. I’m much, much further away from home than I’ve ever been in my life. What I really want to do is crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.

  I open my mouth to tell Jorge that I have jet lag and a headache. Not now, I will say. Another day perhaps. Nos da. Good night.

  Then I change my mind. I’ve travelled all the way to South America in pursuit of a dream, and I’m damned if I am now going to hide behind my usual wall of shyness. I decide to give this party, and anything else that is new and alarming and unfamiliar, the benefit of the doubt.

  You might like this, I tell my unconvinced self, and follow Jorge and the wine glasses into the big living room.

  The first thing that strikes me is that I can understand what people are saying. That’s because everybody is speaking Welsh. A whole group of Welsh people have come to Gaiman for a wedding between a boy from Carmarthen and a Patagonian girl. Some of them have been staying in Ar Lan yr Afon, and tomorrow they are going to go back home to Wales. Hence the party. Hence the fact that they fan out across the living room, arrange themselves in formation, draw a collective deep breath and begin to sing. In harmony.

  First, a song about the wedding and the hospitality of the people of Gaiman at priodas Morgan ni, our Morgan’s wedding. Then some hymns and folk songs. And finally, as though all of that wasn’t enough, the Welsh national anthem: Hen Wlad fy Nhadau, Land of my Fathers.

  The singing gives way to chatter. The Argentinian wine isn’t bad at all. In fact, it’s downright good. I hadn’t known that I like red wine. I have another glass and some nibbles.

  When everybody goes out for a meal at eleven o’clock I don’t join them; I go to bed instead. But I am a lot more cheerful, and I sleep well with the murmurings of the river in my ears all night. Next morning I wake up to the sun streaming in through the window, and birds calling and trilling and screeching in the big blue sky, and I feel no longer lost as I go out to explore Patagonia.

  4

  LET ME TAKE YOU ON A detour for a moment. Back to the old country. Wales.

  Mountains and disused coal mines, sheep and slate and chapels. It has no great monuments apart from neolithic chambered cairns and mediaeval castles, no famous paintings, no outstanding architecture. The Welsh seem to have poured all their energies into three things: faith, language and music. The place is thick with saints and chapels. There is a huge body of mediaeval literature in Welsh. The earliest mentions of King Arthur occur in Welsh tales. The biggest festival in the country, the National Eisteddfod, is built around the celebration of song and poetry and poets in the Welsh language.

 
; These days, Welsh is a minority language, with some 500,000 native speakers. But once, an early form of it was spoken in the whole island of Britain. It’s a Celtic language, no more similar to English than Russian or Spanish. Welsh is related to Scottish and Irish Gaelic, to Breton, and to the almost extinct Celtic tongues Cornish and Manx, and, further back in time, Gaulish. At the time of the Roman conquest, almost two millennia ago, the Celtic tribes of Britain spoke a language that was the direct ancestor of the Welsh language of today. And unlike their Celtic brethren on the continent, the British held on to their language. (French, Spanish and Portuguese have developed from Latin while the Celtic languages once spoken in Gaul and Iberia died out.)

  When the Romans left in the fifth century and pagan, Germanic barbarians began to raid Britain, the Romano-Britons defended their island, their newly acquired Christian faith and their old tongue. As wave after wave of Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived in Britain, the Celts withdrew into the mountainous, the more easily defensible regions of Britain, into the North (Scotland) and the West (Wales and Cornwall). Over time, their kingdoms and their language melted away, until the only place where it was still spoken were two rocky peninsulas to the west of a bulwark which had been built by one of the new Anglo-Saxon rulers: Offa’s Dyke. Wales.

  All of this is ancient history, literally; but it’s very alive still in Wales. The Welsh language is as much an identity as a language: it’s a whole country in words. In the Middle Ages, King Edward I besieged Wales with a choking chain of castles; a few centuries later Henry VIII merged Wales with England in the Act of Union in 1536 in which he stated his intention ‘utterly to extirp all and singular the sinister Usages and Customs’1 of Wales. The language was pretty much all that people had to hold on to. And they held on to it with stubborn determination through the centuries.

  The Industrial Revolution, a couple of centuries after the Welsh Bible, cut great inroads of English into Wales. From then on, there were fewer speakers every year.

  The 1860s were not good years in Wales. Workers were being laid off in the slate mines in the North, the coal mines in the valleys of the south. Rain had caused bad harvests for the small tenant hill farmers, but the rents of the farms still had to be paid. The big landowners – English or Anglicised – could (and did) evict tenants with ease. They could dictate the way their tenants voted, worshipped, even what language they spoke. Or what language they were not allowed to speak. In their own country, Welsh people were forbidden to speak Welsh anywhere except at home. Emigration seemed a reasonable way out of hereditary poverty and bondage. Almost the only chance a tenant farmer had ever to be his own master and work his own land was to seek it somewhere far away across the ocean, in America or Australia.

  Ever since the 1846 report of the Royal Commission on the State of Education in Wales (today known throughout Wales as Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, ‘The Treason of the Blue Books’), a lot of English and some Welsh people had been calling for more ‘enlightenment’ to be brought to the Principality. As The Times put it in 1865, ‘The Welsh language is the curse of Wales.’2 English education and Anglicanism, it was widely felt – especially in England – would be the salvation of the backward Welsh. A movement had sprung up in the Principality to defend the Welsh way of things, but most people’s energy was poured into religious channels, the Chapels and the Nonconformist movements, not into direct politics.

  There were exceptions. Whilst The Times did the Welsh language down, in Bala the Reverend Michael D. Jones thundered: ‘The Welsh are a conquered people in their own country!’3

  But even he didn’t see much hope for a revolution in Wales. Instead, he proposed a New Wales somewhere else, a fresh start far away from England. This had been tried before, in several parts of the United States and once in Brazil, but both times without success.4 The Rev. Michael D. Jones thought he knew why: those other ventures had been founded on ideas of economic independence alone. What they lacked was soul, a moral dimension. He dreamed of a place where Welsh judges would administer Welsh law, where Welsh men and women could take pride in the Welsh language, in Welsh history and literature and Nonconformist Christianity.

  ‘There will be a chapel,’ he wrote, ‘a school and an assembly, and the Old Tongue will be the medium of worship, commerce, science, education and government. We will make a strong and self-sustaining nation grow within a Welsh colony.’5 What he really wanted was a free Welsh state, but all the available land on the globe had already been claimed by other countries. However, faraway Patagonia was not yet settled.

  There were people living there, of course, the nomadic Aoniken (Tehuelche) in the deep south, Günün A Künna (Pampas Indians) and Mapuche in the green plains south of Buenos Aires and further west in the fertile foothills of the Andes. But in European eyes, they did not own their own land. So the Rev. Jones’ searching gaze fell upon ‘empty’ Patagonia. ‘The land... is not owned by anybody except by some Indians,’ he wrote in 1856 when he first started considering Patagonia.6

  Now there was a reason why the ‘far south’ of the South American continent had not yet been settled. Most of Patagonia is desert and entirely unsuitable for agriculture. But perhaps that was just an added bonus for the Rev. M.D. Jones. It will not have escaped him how Biblical the whole thing was: the exodus of the oppressed Welsh led by a bearded patriarch (Lewis Jones) into the promised land of Y Wladfa (The Colony): a desert and a wilderness.

  The Argentine government in Buenos Aires was perplexed as to why anybody would wish to settle Patagonia, but the then Minister of the Interior, Dr Guillermo Rawson, fell in readily enough with the plans of Messrs. Jones and Jones. Argentina, just fifty years old as a nation, claimed all land south of Buenos Aires and east of the Andes mountain range as its own territory, but did not have much in the way of population to back this claim up. (Chile, on the other side of the Andes mountain range, claimed the same land as Chilean, with just the same lack of actual citizens on the ground.)

  A deal was made: the Welsh would be given land in the inhospitable south. They could administer their colony, if not as a state, as an autonomous province where they could govern themselves, teach whatever subjects in whichever language they pleased and worship in their own way. In return, they would declare the land Argentinian.

  It was a mad scheme, but the Rev. Jones was a convincing orator, and there were enough dreamers in Wales to fill a boat, several even. The first ship bound for Patagonia, the Mimosa, left Liverpool on 28 May 1865 with 153 Welsh men, women and children on board.

  Two months to the day after leaving Liverpool, the Mimosa dropped anchor in the New Bay.

  ‘There was the desolate and sandy beach,’ wrote in his memoir William Hughes. His boat arrived in Patagonia in 1881, sixteen years after the Mimosa, but the first view must have been much the same as it had been for those first settlers. ‘It was truly a pleasure to put my feet on the ground once more, be it on this sand or any other solid ground. There were no houses there in those days, only sand dunes and some clumps of tussock grass, whose bushy heads barely broke up the monotony of the sandy land.’

  The settlers on the Mimosa had arrived at the end of July, in the middle of the Patagonian winter. They disembarked by means of a rowing boat, in small groups, and stood shivering on the sands, looking around them at the land that was to be their new home. There was the beach and the dunes beyond it, and beyond them endless plains of greyish scrubland. In the cold mist, it would have looked like the moors they knew in Britain.

  ‘A strange sentiment took hold of us,’ Thomas Jones, one of the first settlers, wrote in his diary; ‘when the ship left us there like pilgrims on the deserted shores of Patagonia, without knowing what awaited us.’

  They looked out over the sea, and there was nothing but ten thousand miles of ocean between them and Wales.

  But there wouldn’t have been much time to think about that, and probably just as well. A child was born, right there in a crude little shelter on the beach of the New Bay, and
its bawling must have made a cheerful sound, reminding all that life went on, regardless.

  5

  EVERYBODY IN GAIMAN has been telling me about Eirlys Griffiths, founder and curator of Amgueddfa Gaiman, the local museum, and resident historian of Y Wladfa. Her museum is open every day except Sundays from 4pm to 8pm. It is housed in the old railway station. There’s no mistaking it: the building looks, bizarrely, like any small rural railway station in Britain, down to the lacy ornamental roof edge. Siaredur Cymraeg yma, a sticker in the window proclaims and Se habla galés. Welsh is spoken here.

  A little bell rings when I open the old-fashioned door to what must once have been the waiting room, and is now the entrance hall of the museum. The air is wonderfully cool after the dusty heat outside. Out of the dark interior appears a young man with a beard and glasses and a friendly smile.

  ‘P’nawn da,’ I say in Welsh. My Welsh, somewhat rusty at first, has been improving. It feels very strange to be in a place where I have to speak Cymraeg to make myself understood. In Wales, I speak it for political reasons and out of respect for the Cymry Cymraeg, the native Welsh speakers; secure in the knowledge that, when the going gets tough, I can always switch to English. Here, there is no such safety-net, it’s Welsh or nothing (or Spanish, which for me amounts to much the same thing). With that motivation, my Welsh has come on beautifully.

  I ask for Eirlys Griffiths. The young man looks crestfallen.

  ‘She’s not around, she’s gone to a tea in Trelew. Do you want to come back tomorrow? I don’t know anything, myself,’ he admits with engaging candour. ‘I only mind the place while she’s away.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘no problem, I’ll come back tomorrow.’ And then I end up staying anyway, for more than an hour. We talk about Y Wladfa – of course – and about languages. It turns out that as well as excellent Welsh, the young man – Miguel – also speaks excellent English, much to my delight.