Beyond the Pampas
Page 7
She rattles about in the cupboard and extracts a kettle, opens the gas supply and lights one ring. I am glad to see the modern white gas cooker. For a moment I was afraid that we’d have to boil our water on the cast-iron beast.
We drink our tea in the parlwr at the long table. Sunlight comes in through the opened curtains and the front door that Lisa has left open. We can hear the sighing of the wind in the trees from outside, the fluttering of their leaves, bird voices and an occasional moo from the cows.
Slowly, the house is drawing breath and reviving, filling with fresh air and light.
15
AFTER TEA, LISA AND I put the shroud back over table and chairs and go outside. We stow the canister in the car, then cross the track and walk towards the source of the wonderful smell of woodsmoke, the neighbouring chacra.
They are having an asado over there, an Argentinian barbecue: half a cow or sheep or goat on iron skewers over a large open fire. The smell is delicious, even to a vegetarian.
A bow-legged man, his face brown and wrinkly like a walnut under the broad brim of his black hat, comes out to meet us.
‘¡Hola!’ says Lisa to him, and to me, ‘This is David Evans – Cymro ydy o! He’s Welsh.’
This last seemed hard to believe. But the improbably named David Evans nods vigorously.
‘Mi abuelo era galés,’ he says in Spanish. Grandfather was Welsh.
He himself doesn’t speak the language any more. ‘But I’ve got the blood,’ he says proudly.
He and Lisa chat in rapid Spanish, about Treborth and the water pipes – the council haven’t got round to connecting the Evans farm to the water supply either – and the weather. We are invited to the asado, but Lisa declines. We’re off again.
‘I’m going to show you my sister’s farm,’ she explains in the car.
We drive along another gravel track past cows, sheep, tall green poplars swaying in the wind, pastures, wheat, more sheep. Lisa stops the car by a little stream.
I can make out the faint outlines of a house through a thick screen of tall bushes. We hop across the stream. A large, black-andwhite border collie comes running, barking energetically. I can guess without being told that its ancestors, too, came over from Wales. Lisa laughs and greets the dog by name. It stops barking and wags its tail. The kitchen door opens and a woman comes out.
I haven’t met Bethan yet, I only know her from imagining her childhood with Lisa in Treborth. I don’t realise that I am thinking of her as a little girl until I see a woman of sixty-odd with her hair in a grey bun walk towards us from the house, and hear Lisa greet her, in Welsh, as Bethan. Behind her comes a younger woman with straight black hair and Asian features.
Lisa performs the introductions. ‘Bethan, Nasako, this is Imogen. She is from Germany and she speaks Welsh and Spanish.
Es un bicho raro, ¿no?’ (She is a rare beast.)
Everybody laughs.
‘This is my sister Bethan, and this is Nasako, Jaime’s wife. Jaime is my nephew, Bethan’s son.’ She turns to Bethan. ‘I suppose he’s still out on the camp, or is he here?’
(Camp comes from Spanish campo, meaning the countryside.)
‘No, he’s in the kitchen,’ Bethan says. ‘There’s cake.’
I learn belatedly that today is Mothering Sunday in Argentina, a very important holiday. That’s why Bethan – who usually lives in Trelew – is out here on the farm that is now being run by Jaime and Nasako, having cake with her family. Lisa has skipped a similar celebration with her own son and his wife in Gaiman, in order to show me the chacras. I feel honoured, and touched.
‘Nasako is Japanese,’ Lisa continues. ‘As you can see.’
‘Japanese, or Japanese-Argentinian?’ I ask.
‘I was born here, in Argentina. Buenos Aires,’ Nasako explains. There is a very slight Japanese accent to her Spanish. ‘My parents came from Japan. I spent half a year there, studying; but I did the rest of my degree in Buenos Aires, like Jaime. That’s where we met. We’re both agricultural engineers.’
‘The children,’ Lisa adds as we go into the house, ‘are trilingual: they speak Japanese, Spanish – and Welsh, of course!’
Of course.
The kitchen is a wonderfully warm, welcoming, lived-in, cluttered space, and looks like farm-house kitchens everywhere in the world. On the tiled floor are cats and an elderly dog and pot plants and drying rubber boots. On the table books, newspapers, fruit, toys, a teapot and various cakes jostle for space.
Chairs scrape as Jaime and his father get up to greet us ladies.
‘Do have some cake!’ Nasako says hospitably.
I exchange smiles with her eldest daughter, a girl of thirteen or so who sits on a bench with a cat on her lap. We sit down and have more tea and cake. For a moment or two I’m not quite sure where I am, Argentina, Wales, Germany even. I feel at home and welcome. Somehow, I don’t get round to feeling shy or nervous.
Lisa and Bethan and Jaime have a chat about the farm while I talk to Bethan’s husband Gwylim. He speaks wonderful Welsh, round and fluent and full of flourishes. Many of the younger generation – that is, fifty and under – in Patagonia speak the language well enough, but a lot of them have a distinct Spanish accent on it, and they often leave out mutations and the more complicated and obscure grammatical rules. Gwylim Jones doesn’t, and although I find him harder to understand because of it, I bask in the beauty of his language.
16
IN THE MID NINETEENTH CENTURY, Captain George Chaworth Musters wanted to travel to the ends of the earth: somewhere wild, uncivilised, unexplored; to a grand wild empty country. So he went to Patagonia.
He arrived in 1869 and spent the best part of one year not – as one might expect from a British gentleman explorer – hunting, shooting and fishing with fellow officers. He went to live with the indigenous Patagonians, the Aoniken or Tehuelche, travelling with them through the desert and the tablelands. (He did manage to get quite a lot of hunting and shooting in, though.) His account, At Home with the Patagonians, makes a refreshing change from the travel writing perpetrated by many of his Victorian contemporaries. He displays great liking and respect for the Tehuelche and takes them pretty much as equals. He describes them as an independent, hospitable people, at ease with themselves and not overly curious about the outside world; and not at all worried – not yet – that people were coming to settle on their land.
The Patagonians spent their winters on the coast where the cold was less severe. In spring and summer, they followed and hunted the guanaco across the steppe to the foothills of the Andes. They covered vast distances, ranging all the way to the Strait of Magellan, 800 miles to the south. They lived in toldos, large tents made of guanaco hides strung over wooden poles, ‘strongly resembling those of our gipsies,’ Musters wrote. ‘The furniture of the toldos consists of one or two bolsters and a horse hide or two to each sleeping compartment, one to act as a curtain and the other as bedding.... As a rule all the inmates of the toldo sit upon Nature’s carpet, which has the advantage of being easily cleaned, for the Tehuelches are very particular about the cleanliness of the interior of their dwellings.’13
They fashioned intricate silver ornaments – belt buckles, earrings, spurs, necklaces – from silver dollars; squabbled amongst themselves like all small communities do; stole horses for a laugh and to show off their skill. Tehuelche ideas of personal property were different from European ones. ‘They believe that when they find something belonging to another person,’ William Hughes wrote in his memoir; ‘or when the rightful owner had not looked after it properly, he loses all right to it, and they appropriate the item with the greatest naturalness. They also believe that if a person has more possessions than he needs, he ought to share his belongings with those who own less. If that opinion is not favourably received by the proprietor, one who owns less will take it upon himself to redistribute the said belongings by abstracting the necessary – or frequently more than necessary, especially in the case of “Cristianos”,
Christians, as they call all Spaniards.’14
George Musters had a somewhat different take on the Tehuelche character. ‘Their natural bias is towards independence, and they have rather insubordinate ideas of “one man being as good as another”. Cuastro’s dying words, “I die as I have lived – no cacique (chief) orders me,” aptly express the prevalent feelings on this subject.’15
A number of different indigenous peoples once lived in the vast territory of Patagonia, of which the Chubut valley is only one small part. The three main groups were the Günün A Künna (the Pampas Indians), the Tehuelche (Aoniken in their own language), and Mapuche. They each spoke a different language, lived in different – but overlapping – territories and differed somewhat in their culture. But it would be wrong to imagine the three peoples as modern nation-states, keeping to themselves within their respective borders. Probably no more than 100,000 people shared that vast territory. (Even today, with 1.9 million people living in an area five times the size of Great Britain, Patagonia is extremely thinly populated.) They would have gone for months without meeting anyone. But when they did meet, they did not just pass as ships in the night. Every meeting was like a funfair, a marriage market, a party. There were squabbles, raids, battles and fights, trading, frequent intermarriages and cultural crossovers.
The Tehuelche, George Musters’ Patagonians, are generally described as gentle giants, tall and peaceful. (Charles Darwin in 1834, in the diary he kept during the voyage of the Beagle, found them ‘thoroughly good-humoured & unsuspecting’.)16
The hunting grounds of the Pampas Indians lay to the north of the river Chubut and stretched into the green and fruitful prairies of the pampas, where they lived by hunting and cattle-raiding. They were generally described as more mobile and more warlike than the Tehuelche. To the best of my knowledge, there are no Pampas Indians left today.
The last – and the biggest – major group are the Mapuche (the Araucanos or Chilenos of nineteenth-century accounts). They are described as short of stature and fiery of temperament; a proud, warrior people. Mapuche have been living on both sides of the Andes for almost a millennium17; originating, probably, on the western side of the mountains, the area they call Gülü Mapu, the Western Earth: today the country of Chile.
Mapuche make their first appearance in the accounts of Inca historians in the fifteenth century. The expansionist Inca had sent an army down the spine of the South American continent all the way to Patagonia, to incorporate its fertile valleys into Tawantinsuyu, the Land of Four Corners, their Empire: at the time the largest in the world. But they met with unexpected resistance. The Mapuche fought back and in the end the Inca army – although superior in numbers and technology – was forced to retreat. It was a story that would repeat itself when Mapuche armies resisted the Spanish, too, fiercely and successfully for several centuries. They fought off armies equipped with firearms and forced Spain to acknowledge in a binding treaty the sovereignty of the Mapuche Nation: a unique case in the history of South America.18 When the newly established Republic of Chile attained independence early in the nineteenth century, it inherited the treaty. And broke it a few decades later by sending more armies south. By the end of the century, the firepower of modern guns finally forced the Mapuche to give up armed struggle.
The situation was somewhat different in Argentine Patagonia. The Chilean Mapuche lived in rich, lush valleys attractive for agriculture. But the travellers to the Argentinian south had unanimously reported everlasting, flat, dry, horrible and empty desert. If the Indians wanted to live there, they were welcome to it. So they were left in peace.
17
BEFORE THEY SET OUT from Liverpool, the Welsh pioneers had been told that the native Patagonians were peaceful, and that they were happy to trade. Even so, the settlers still worried. Patagonia did not have the best of reputations. When Lady Florence Dixie, desirous of adventure and novelty, planned a trip there in 1879, her friends were aghast: ‘Who would ever think of going to such a place? Why, you will be eaten up by cannibals!’19 Welsh papers like the Herald Gymreig had predicted a bloody end to the colony at the hands of the Indians and condemned the irresponsibility of Michael D. Jones and Lewis Jones of luring unsuspecting Welsh men, women and children to their certain deaths on the Patagonian frontier.20 ‘Since you will not be dissuaded from expatriating yourselves to that wild outlandish desert,’ an uncle wrote in a letter to his emigrating nephew; ‘I write to wish you a safe and pleasant voyage and much success in your new country. If the Indians do eat you, I can only wish them a confounded bad digestion.’21
While the settlers did not exactly anticipate being eaten by Indians, they were certainly nervous about the possibility of attack. So nervous, in fact, that they brought with them, amongst the wheat and wooden boards, the Bibles and shovels and ploughs, a good number of guns. Once they had established themselves in Rawson, a militia of 30 men was organised and drilled to defend the settlement against attack.22
Only there was no sign of Indians. The first winter passed slowly, with rain and fog and cold winds, and finally turned to spring. It was time to move out to the farms, to build houses and clear the land for sowing. But what if they went out into that vast quiet land, and the Indians were to attack? At least in the village, in Rawson, they were all together. Out on the farm, each family would have to fend for itself.
They had never met an Indian. The Argentine government had negotiated on their behalf with a number of chiefs to whom it paid an annual tribute of flour, sugar, cattle and horses as a kind of rent on the land occupied by the Welsh. In return, the chiefs undertook to leave the Welsh colony in peace. However, a letter by cacique Antonio, which was brought to the fledgling village of Rawson at the end of 1865 half a year after the arrival of the Welsh, claimed that things were not quite so straightforward, and might well have alarmed the settlers.
Very distinguished Sir,
WITHOUT having the pleasure of knowing you personally, I know as a fact that you are peopling the Chupat with people from the other side of the sea. You, doubtless, do not know that in the country south of Buenos Ayres there exist three distinct sets of Indians.
Cacique Antonio does a nice line in diplomacy here, being bonhomous, welcoming and very courteous; while at the same time establishing his superior local knowledge and the fact that the Welsh are both newcomers and ignorant of the lie of the land.
It is also interesting to read his description of the three ‘distinct sets of Indians’. In the vast majority of literature and local lore about Y Wladfa, mention is only made of the Tehuelche as the only indigenous people in the vastness of Patagonia. In fact, as Antonio states, there were three:
To the north of the Río Negro (Patagones) and on the borders of the high mountains, which the Christians call Cordillera, lives a nation of Indians demoninated ‘Chilenos’ [Mapuche]. These Indians are of small stature, and they speak the language called Chilons.
Between the Río Negro and the Río Chupat lives another nation, who are of taller stature than the Chilenos, and who dress themselves in guanaco mantles, and speak a different language. This is the nation called ‘Pampa’, and speaking Pampa. I and my people belong to it.
To the south of the Chupat lies another nation called ‘Tehuelche’, a people still taller than we are, and who speak a distinct language.
Now, I say that the plains between the Chupat [today the River Chubut], the Afon Camwy of the Welsh and the Río Negro are ours, and that we never sold them. Our fathers sold the plains of Bahía Blanca and Patagones, but nothing more....
I have a Treaty of Peace with Patagones, but that does not touch on selling lands. I know very well that you have negotiated with the Government to colonize the Chupat; but you ought also to negotiate with us, who are the owners of these lands.
You can almost hear the Welsh gulp at this point of the letter, sitting in sorry little mud huts in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from the nearest town, surrounded by Indians and utterly defenceless.
Notwithstanding, if plenty of people come, we shall have to go to the plains, frightening the animals which are our property, that were given to us by our God, the God of the Indians, so that we might chase them for food.23
The Welsh, now thoroughly alarmed despite the overall friendly tone of this missive, sent out members of the militia as a search party further inland. The party went some twenty or thirty miles upstream where it encountered a large and impassable rock wall, through which the river had cut a narrow channel. It was an easily defendable bottleneck, and a place from which attack by a large group of Indians was unlikely.
They returned to Rawson relieved, believing themselves to live in a virtually isolated valley and thus safe. They duly went to live on their allocated land.24
There are two versions of the story of how the first contact finally came about. Both have been passed on orally and told as gospel, and it is impossible now to say what really happened.
The first one goes like this. On the very day of the first wedding feast to be held in Y Wladfa, a man on an outlying farm – who appears not to have been invited – saw a dust cloud on the horizon. Looking more closely, he observed a small group of Indians riding at a leisurely but determined pace towards the settlement. It was winter again, the June of 1866, almost a whole year after the settlers’ arrival. Perhaps the valley wasn’t quite as isolated as they had thought. He jumped on his horse and rode with all speed to warn the wedding party. Shortly afterwards, the Indians arrived, solemn and polite, and by means of some Spanish words and much sign language, both sides managed to inform each other that their motives were peaceful.
I like the other story better. A woman – nobody knows her name – was at home in her isolated farmstead in the valley, washing or cooking or baking or darning or hoeing the garden and looking after the children, while her husband was out in the fields. A small group of Indians on horseback appeared on the horizon and came solemnly riding towards her. Now at this time, apart from Antonio’s letter, there had been no contact whatever between Welsh and Indian.