Abstract
Covering land settlement for much of the nineteenth century, the chapter starts with the era of cheap land leases in the late 1820s. A partly British landed class played a part in developing a new cattle and sheep farming economy. Substantial Irish migration during the Irish Famine of the late 1840s led to expansion of an Argentine wool economy; the Scots and Welsh communities, smaller than the Irish, are also discussed. The chapter addresses several major figures: Antony Fahy, a priest who became an Irish ethnic leader, Cecilia Grierson, of Scottish and Irish descent, who became the country’s first female medical practitioner and W.H. Hudson, famous for his tales of the pampas and the Argentine gauchos.
The Pampa was a Sleeping Beauty, waiting in her inaccessible retreat for an obliging prince to wake her.
Philip Guedalla
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Notes
- 1.
W.H. Hudson. Far Away and Long Ago. Foreword by John Galsworthy. London: T.M. Dent and Sons, 1945, 46.
- 2.
J.V. Martin de Moussy. Description Géographique et Statistique de la Confédération Argentine. Vol.3. Paris: Didot, 1873, 5.
- 3.
Cimarrones, a term also applied to wild cattle, are noted in Herbert Gibson. The History and Present State of the Sheep-Breeding Industry in the Argentine Republic. Buenos Aires: Ravenscroft and Mills, 1893, 21.
- 4.
Walker, Cunninghame Graham, 23.
- 5.
Hodgson to Slatter 8 Dec. 1856. GHR 5/1/9.
- 6.
Mention of slaves recurred into the 1860s, as in the case of a young man purchased in Brazil for “half a crown” and brought to Argentina. See Richard Arthur Seymour, Pioneering in the Pampas; Or, The First Four Years of a Settler’s Experience in the La Plata Camps. London: Longman, Green, 1869, 168.
- 7.
Juan Bautista Alberdi. Bases y puntos de partida para la organización de la República Argentina. 5th edition. Buenos Aires: Rosso, 1969. Quoted from an unpublished English translation by David J. Mas.
- 8.
Azara, Del Paraguay y del Rio de la Plata, 4.
- 9.
Rumbold, Silver River, 91–92.
- 10.
Head, Rough Notes, 10, 16, 27–32.
- 11.
Graham, “A Vanishing Race,” in Walker, Cunninghame Graham, 42.
- 12.
The early purchases near Quilmes are noted in Guillermo Banzato. La expansion de la frontera bonaerense: posesión y propiedad en Chascomús, Ranchos y Monte, 1780–1880. Quilmes: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2005, 146–147.
- 13.
Details concerning this estate, once known as Los Portugueses and originally sold by the Spanish Crown in 1774, are noted in Thomas Gibson to Herbert Gibson, 1890. In Gibson Archive. Various Documents and Letters. Old Publications 1774–1842. Vol. 2. National Library of Scotland (NLS) 10,326; also Banzato, Frontera, 58.
- 14.
Richard Newton to John Gibson, in Gibson Archive. Various Documents and Letters. Vol. 3, Sept. 1825. John Gibson’s activities are described in Ian A.D. Stewart, “Living with Dictator Rosas,” 25–27. See also Standard 8 Dec. 1903 for an obituary of Thomas Gibson, the last of thirteen siblings in this family of whom John Gibson was the eldest. The article outlines the family’s early business dealings in Buenos Aires.
- 15.
For leaseholds, see María Infesta de Güerci. La pampa criolla: usufructo y apropriación privada de tierras públicas en Buenos Aires, 1820–1850. La Plata: Archivo Histórico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, 2003, 103. In later periods too, lengthy credits were commonly available and loans repayable in depreciated treasury bonds. See Gibsons, Various Documents and Letters, Vol. 2.
- 16.
Hide exports from Buenos Aires in 1810–1823 totalling 7.2 million are detailed in the Ponsonby papers GRE/E/22/13, of which around half were exported to Britain. Exports rose from a yearly average of 600,000 hides in the 1820s to 1 million in the 1840s and climbed to 2.6 million in 1851. Among many studies, see Tulio Halperín Donghi. “La expansión ganadera.en la campaña de Buenos Aires (1810–1852).” Desarrollo Económico Vol. 1, Nos. 1–2 (Apr.-Sept. 1963):57–110; Roberto Cortés Conde. “La expansión territorial en la Argentina.” Desarrollo Económico, Vol. 8, No. 29 (Apr.-June 1968):3–30; Maria Alejandra Irigoin. “La expansión ganadera en la campaña de Buenos Aires, 1820s–1860s: ¿Una consecuencia de la financiación inflacionaria del déficit fiscal?” In Raúl Fradkin and Juan Carlos Garavaglia. En busca de tiempo perdido. La economía de Buenos Aires en el país de la abundancia, 1750–1865. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2004, 7–34; María Elena Infesta. “La enfiteusis en Buenos Aires, 1820–1850,” 93–120. In Marta Bonaudo and Alfredo R. Pucciarelle. La problemática agraria. Nuevas aproximaciones. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1993. On the estancias of Buenos Aires, see Carlos A. Mayo. Estancia y sociedad en la pampa, 1740–1820. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1995; Samuel Amaral. The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas. The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Juan Carlos Garavaglia. “Un siglo de estancias en la campaña de Buenos Aires: 1751–1853.” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 4 (1999), 703–734. Brown, Argentina, provides informed commentary.
- 17.
Duguid to Parish 31 Dec. 1827 FO 118/18. Amaral estimates that in 1820 land totaled only 11 per cent of the cost of setting up an estancia and cattle 66 per cent, a ratio reversed in later times as land values climbed. Amaral, Capitalism on the Pampas, 73.
- 18.
Barsky and Djenderedijan, Expansion ganadera hasta 1895, I:123–124.
- 19.
Tribunales: Sucesiones, 6811 (Juan Miller), 1854. Archivo General de la Nación.
- 20.
Merino sheep included French Rambouillets and German Saxons, later followed by Lincoln Longwools. Breeds are discussed in Barsky and Djenderedijan, Expansión Ganadera, I:175, 302–315. A summary of new breeding practices appears in Matthew E.S. Butler. “The British Role in Argentine Ranching Modernisation and Livestock Technology, 1830–1950.” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 2010, 32–47.
- 21.
Tribunales: Sucesiones 8178 (Pedro Sheridan), 1845. Archivo General de la Nación. Testamentary documents relating to Sheridan were exceptionally detailed and written up in English in impeccable calligraphy likely on behalf of heirs in Ireland.
- 22.
Tribunales: Sucesiones 7217 (Ricardo Newton), 1868. Archivo General de la Nación. Newton died with stated assets of 14.7 million pesos, about one third of Edward Lumb’s bequest totaling 43 million pesos.
- 23.
Banzato, Frontera, 61; Eduardo Míguez. Las tierras de los ingleses en la Argentina, 1870–1914. Buenos Aires: Belgrano, 1985, 46; Gibson, Sheep Breeding, 216. Fair’s obituary described the size of the estancia at 62 square miles. Standard 26 Dec. 1899; also, Butler, British Role, 107.
- 24.
Gibsons, Various Documents and Letters, Vol. 2.
- 25.
Jorge Gelman. Rosas bajo fuego. Lavalle y la rebelión de los estancieros. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2009, 74–79.
- 26.
Thomas Gibson’s obituary in Standard 8 Dec. 1904.
- 27.
Christie to FO 28 April 1858 FO 118/88; Parish to FO 29 Dec. 1858. FO 6/211; also the discussion in María Alejandra Irigoin. “Del dominio autocrático al de la negociación. Las razones económicas del nacimiento de la política en la década de 1850.” Anuario del Instituto de Estudios Histórico-Sociales, 14. Tandil, 1999, 17–20. All these cases illustrated the way by the late 1850s land grew more valuable and competition to own it increased.
- 28.
Carmen Sesto. La vanguardia ganadera bonaerense (1865–1900), Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2005, 78 noting Ricardo Newton’s contributions to building herds of Aberdeen Angus, Herefords and Shorthorns on dispersed estancias.
- 29.
See Buenos Aires Scotch Church Magazine, 1914.
- 30.
Quoted in an archivist’s introduction to the Green/Hodgson/Robinson Archive.
- 31.
Hodgson to Green GHR/5/2/1, Letters 1831–1846, vol. 4.
- 32.
For correspondence with Fragueiro concerning the Córdoba estate, see Letter Book 1825–1829 GHR 5/1/3.
- 33.
Hodgson to Charles Stewart 12 Oct. 1839. GHR/5/2/1, Letters 1831–46, vol. 4.
- 34.
GHR/5/2/1. Letters of 1 March, 1 June and 7 July 1829 to Yates and Co, sellers of nails.
- 35.
Eduardo Coghlan. El aporte de los irlandeses a la formación de la Nación Argentina. Buenos Aires: El Vuelo de Fénix, 1982. Coghlan based his estimates on the Libros de Entradas de Pasajeros, 1822–1880. They revealed 5300 incoming Irish of both sexes throughout the period to a maximum of 708 in 1849. Coghlan believed the figure understated the number of migrants by as much as half. An informative source with a strong Irish nationalist bent is Thomas Murray. The Story of the Irish in Argentina. New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1919.
- 36.
T.J. Horan, “The Irish in Argentina.” Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, 1958. File 313/248.
- 37.
MacCann, Argentine Provinces, I:70.
- 38.
Statistics on emigration at the intra-county level based on Coghlan appear in Edmundo Murray, Devenir Irlandés: narrativas íntimas de la emigración irlandesa (1844–1912). Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 2004, 29–34.
- 39.
Westmeath Guardian and Longford News-Letter 18 Apr. 1844.
- 40.
See Healy, Migration from Ireland, 299.
- 41.
Quoted in British Packet 17 Jan. 1857.
- 42.
On the famine in Westmeath, see Seamus O’Brien. Famine and Community in Mullingar Poor Law Union, 1845–1849: Mud Cabins and Fat Bullocks. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999.
- 43.
Juan Carlos Korol and Hilda Sabato use the expression “driven by hunger” to characterise Irish migration, terminology perhaps figuratively but not literally correct. See ¿Cómo fué la inmigración irlandesa en la Argentina? Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1981, 7. Figures on shipping rates appear in O’Brien, Mullingar, 55.
- 44.
Murray, Devenir Irlandés, 57.
- 45.
Westmeath Guardian 11 May 1847. (Quoting the Westmeath Independent.)
- 46.
The general principle stated that “Irish property has to pay for Irish poverty.” See James S. Donnelly, Jr. “The Administration of Relief, 1846–7,” and “The Administration of Relief, 1847–51,” In W.E. Vaughan, New History of Ireland, Vol. 5. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Ireland under the Union. Vol. 1, 1807–1870, 294–306 and 315–331.
- 47.
Westmeath Guardian 30 Nov. 1848. The newspaper later cited a local landlord, whose own tenants formerly cost him £50 a year to support in the workhouse now became liable for £600 in poor rates under the rules of the new Poor Law. Westmeath Guardian 20 Dec. 1849. See also O’Brien. Famine and Community in Mullingar, 55, noting how Buenos Aires became a targeted migrant destination.
- 48.
The figure of 40 per cent females is based on a select survey of Irish migrants of the famine period, 1846–1851 (surnames Hoare to Mooney). The proportion fell to less than 25 per cent during the wool boom of the early 1860s. Data from “Irish Emigrant Ships to Argentina.” See http://www.irishargentine.org/passenger.htm#top.
- 49.
Kathleen Nevins. You’ll Never Look Back. Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc. 1946, 22, 135. The book is fiction based on a personal memoir. On its author, see Edmundo Murray. Becoming Gauchos Ingleses: Diasporic Models in Irish-Argentine Literature. Palo Alto: Academic Press, 2009, 70. Irish women were known for independent decisions to migrate even before the Irish famine. See Richards, Britannia’s Children, 299.
- 50.
In the late 1860s, Mulhall estimated the Irish community of Buenos Aires, including locally born children, at 30,000, a near fourfold overstatement. See Mulhall, Handbook, 15. Using the 1869 census, Korol and Sabato submit the more plausible estimate of around 8500. See Inmigración Irlandesa, 49.
- 51.
Quoted in British Packet 17 Jan. 1857. Migrants in general tended to be better off people as noted in migration literature. See Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 26–28.
- 52.
For an overview, see Hilda Sabato. Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market. Buenos Aires in the Pastoral Age, 1840–1890. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990, 107–108.
- 53.
Hanon, Diccionario, 344.
- 54.
On Duggan, see Martín Parola. “Los estancieros irlandeses.” In The Southern Cross, 1875–2000. Ciento veinte cinco años latiendo, uniendo e informando con la Comunidad Argentina Irlandesa. Buenos Aires: Southern Cross, 2000, 15. By this account, Thomas Duggan was an Irish nationalist who entertained Sir Roger Casement, the former British diplomat executed during World War I.
- 55.
See Sesto, Ganadera, 64.
- 56.
Tribunales: Sucesiones 5542 (Daniel Duggan), 1896. Archivo General de la Nación.
- 57.
Mulhall, Handbook, 3.
- 58.
Details in MacCann, Argentine Provinces, 1:99.
- 59.
Eduardo Coghlan. Hace cien años. Disertación pronunciada en la Asociación Irlandesa de Mercedes (Pcia. de Buenos Aires) el 31 de mayo de 1969. Mercedes: Asociación Irlandesa de Mercedes, 1969; Korol and Sabato, Inmigración Irlandesa, 90 assess the size and distribution of the Irish population based on cadastral maps. Rumbold claimed the Irish-owned “entire districts” in the province of Buenos Aires. Silver River, 112.
- 60.
William Bulfin. Tales of the Pampas. Cuentos de la pampa. Buenos Aires: L.O.L.A, 1997, 135. (From “The Course of True Love.”)
- 61.
Eduardo A. Coghlan, Andanzas de un irlandés en el campo porteño (1845–1864). Buenos Aires: Ediciones Culturales Argentinas, 1981, 88, 104, 113. The English original of the Brabazon diary is reportedly held at the Embassy of the Republic of Ireland in Buenos Aires.
- 62.
Coghlan, Andanzas, 110. Incidents included the murder of the Southams, an old man and his granddaughter, near Rosario in 1873 and the assault on Michael Lenihan and his wife in 1874 following the uprising that year led by Bartolomé Mitre. On these incidents, see Joel to FO 13 Aug. 1873 FO 118/149 and Cowper to FO 26 Jan. 1875 FO 6/330. Joel to FO 12 Dec. 1875 FO 118/154 reports the execution of the culprit in the Southam murders.
- 63.
The Tata Dios insurrection is explored in John Lynch. Massacre in the Pampas, 1872. Britain and Argentina in the Age of Migration. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998; Richard W. Slatta. Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993, 169–174.
- 64.
On the necessary attributes of ethnic leaders, see María M. Bjerg. “The Danes in the Argentine Pampa: The Role of Ethnic Leaders in the Creation of an Ethnic Community, 1848–1930,” in Samuel L. Baily and Eduardo José Míguez. Mass Migration to Modern Latin America. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 2003, 151.
- 65.
Macdonell to FO Enclosure in Despatch 32, 16 May 1872. FO 118/136.
- 66.
Fahy to Wilfrid Latham 27 Aug. 1845 FO 6/104. Latham, a Catholic, became an intermediary in Fahy’s contacts with the Foreign Office.
- 67.
Fahy to Palmerston 20 Oct. 1846. FO 118/126.
- 68.
Fahy to Palmerston 20 March 1847. FO 118/135. Fahy was aware the British government occasionally subsidised Roman Catholic priests in Caribbean colonies and hoped it would do the same in Buenos Aires. Some discussion appears in Dermot Keogh, “Argentina and the Falkland Islands: The Irish Connection,” in C.A.M. Hennessy and John King. The Land that England Lost: Argentina and Britain: A Special Relationship. London: British Academic Press, 1992, 130.
- 69.
Fahy to Dublin Review, in British Packet 10 Nov. 1849. Supporting Rosas led Fahy into disputes with his superiors in Dublin. See Helen Kelly. Irish “Ingleses.” The Irish Experience in Argentina 1840–1920. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009, 106–108; Letter of the Rev. Anthony D. Fahey (sic). London: Alfred Boot, 1850. The controversy is reported FO 118/155.
- 70.
The two men originated in different parts of Ireland, the priest in western ultramontane Galway and the merchant in eastern King’s County, (now County Offaly). Born a Protestant, Armstrong married into a Catholic family in Buenos Aires likely removing any sectarian obstacles to his relationship with Fahy.
- 71.
Fahy to Primate of Ireland June 1847, in British Packet 1 Jan. 1848.
- 72.
Tribunales, Sucesiones 5756 (Antonio Fahy), 1871. Archivo General de la Nación. On Fahy’s posthumous stature, see James Martin Ussher. Padre Fahy. Biografía de Antonio Domingo Fahy, O.H. Buenos Aires, 1952.
- 73.
Southern Cross 25 Mar. 1875.
- 74.
A Patrick’s Day celebration in Buenos Aires in 1837 included toasts to Daniel O’Connell with others to the British Royal Family and to Rosas. British Packet 1 April 1837.
- 75.
On the weakness of Fenianism in Argentina, see Rumbold, Silver River, 172.
- 76.
On the Irish partidos in the elections of 1880, see Standard 6 Feb. 1880 recording the support of Irish estancieros for Irigoyen’s candidacy. Also, Hilda Sabato. Buenos Aires en armas. La revolución de 1880. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2008, 59, 93.
- 77.
Southern Cross 28 Jan. 1875.
- 78.
Southern Cross 5 June 1878. Stories of rich Irishmen going home to Westmeath are recounted in Darbyshire. Argentine Republic, 20.
- 79.
For advertising by steamship companies, see Westmeath Guardian 4 Feb. 1864.
- 80.
See “Anglicus” in Standard 17 Mar. 1876.
- 81.
John Dillon in Standard 8 Jan. 1882.
- 82.
On Casey and Venado Tuerto, see Eduardo A. Coghlan. Los irlandeses. Apuntes para la historia y la genealogía de las familias irlandesas establecidas en la República Argentina en el siglo xix. Buenos Aires: Editorial Irlandesa, S.A. The Southern Cross, 1970, 9–10. Casey’s career is traced in Roberto Landaburu. Irlandeses. Eduardo Casey. Vida y obra. Venado Tuerto: Asociación Venado Tuerto, 1995. The land acquisition is narrated in Standard Jan-Feb. 1881, and its distribution to settlers in Standard March 1883.
- 83.
Bulfin quoted in Kelly, Irish Experience, 182. His approach included biological racial theories and anti-Semitism. See Che Buono (Bulfin’s pseudonym). Rambles in Eirinn. London: Sphere Books, 1981, 213–214, (a reference pointed out to me by Roy Foster).
- 84.
For the Irish surnames in local organisations of the Radical Party (UCR), see David Rock. Politics in Argentina, 1890–1930. The Rise and Fall of Radicalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, 57–59.
- 85.
See W.H. Hudson. The Purple Land; being the Narrative of One Richard Lamb’s Adventures in the Banda Oriental, in South America, as Told by Himself. New York: Three Sirens Press, 1904, 49, 61. Hudson was not alone in such criticism. A former sheep farmer noted that “Drunkenness, our national vice…is taken note in this country much to our discredit…Many Englishmen out here do drink to a dreadful extent, and give just cause to the natives to despise them for their intemperance.” Dillon, Brazil and the River Plate, 45.
- 86.
Rumbold, Silver River, 112, 115. Englishmen who turned to crime are noted in Thompson to FO 16 July 1867. FO 118–130. A similar type of British emigrant is discussed in Patrick A. Dunae. Gentlemen Emigrants. From the British Public School to the Canadian Frontier. Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1981, 58–59, 71, relating the issue to “the younger son question” and to the emigration of young men educated in second tier British public schools. Benjamin Disraeli’s “Crystal Palace” speech of 1873 promised an imperialist policy partly to meet the employment needs of upper class youth. George Chesney, a prominent commentator of the 1870s, saw the main value of imperial India to Britain in its capacity to absorb “a portion of that supply of English youth which seems always to be tending to exceed the supply for it.” “The Value of India to England.” Quoted in P.J. Cain. Empire and Imperialism. The Debate of the 1870s. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999, 288.
- 87.
[The] River Plate (South America) as a field for emigration, its geography, climate, agricultural capabilities, and the facilities afforded for a permanent settlement. London: Bates, Hendry and Co. 1866, 21.
- 88.
Ross-Johnson, Long Vacation, 6. Hans Fugl, considered the founder of Danish rural settlements in Argentina, provided an analogous case. He discovered the Rio de la Plata reading the Berlingske Tidende in Copenhagen. See Juan Fugl. Abriendo surcos. Memorias de Juan Fugl. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Altamira, 1959, 23.
- 89.
Latham, William. States of the River Plate. London: Longmans, Green, 1868, 177–193. Failure to foretell the post-war recession explained Latham’s error. In 1863, Thomas Hutchinson, the British consul in Rosario, estimated that renting one square league in Entre Rios at £60–£100 would support 8 puestos and 10,000 sheep; he claimed sheep numbers could be expected to double every three years, and more than quadruple in 5 years. He predicted possible profits of £8000 over 5 years, but his projections too extended into the period of recession and falling prices after 1864. See Thomas J. Hutchinson. Buenos Ayres and Argentine Gleanings, With Extracts of a Diary of Salado Exploration, 1862 and 1863. London: E. Stanford, 1865, 238–242.
- 90.
Ross-Johnson, Long Vacation, 38–41.
- 91.
The details of this land purchase are explored Juan D. Delius, with José S. Lloret. “History of the Camps around the Ancient Estancia Monte Molina, Southeastern Córdoba Province, Argentina.” (http://www.pampa-cordobesa.de). Míguez reports the size of the estancia as 4 square leagues (more than 26,000 acres). Míguez, Tierras Inglesas, 26–28.
- 92.
Latham’s stated price of £1600 per square league in Buenos Aires in 1866 yields the price of £4.14 an acre. (See States of the River Plate note 102).
- 93.
Seymour, Pioneering, 71. Foreign Office archives contain several petitions from settlers at Fraile Muerto, one signed by Seymour, demanding protection against attacks by Native Americans. See Hutchinson to FO 31 Oct. 1866 and petition of 10 Nov. 1866. FO 118/117; also Buckley to Reardon 26 Oct. 1866; British settlers to Buckley 10 Nov. 1866. FO 118/121. In 1867, the settlers blamed marauding gauchos assisted by Native Americans for the attacks.
- 94.
Seymour, Pioneering, 158.
- 95.
Seymour, Pioneering, 146. Sabato, Agrarian Capitalism, 28, notes the peaking of wool prices in 1864, which fell to a low point in 1869. Seymour listed other problems such as the absence of timber for fencing and the poor location of his estancia.
- 96.
“Seymour who wrote ‘Pioneering’ has married an heiress in England, and hung up his hat.” George Reid. South American Adventure: Letters from George Reid. London: V. Boyle, 1999, 169.
- 97.
As recorded in Delius, Monte Molina.
- 98.
Reid was advised to rent and “on no account to buy, titles are uncertain and even if they were not it does not pay so well to invest in land as in stock.” Quoted in Andrew Graham-Yooll. Uruguay: A Travel and Literary Companion. Buenos Aires: L.O.L.A. 2008, 102–104.
- 99.
Reid, South American Adventure, 27, 47.
- 100.
Reid, South American Adventure, 43, 188.
- 101.
A list of the “Lincolnshire Farmers” shows a large proportion of settlers from boroughs of central and east London; a group of Germans appeared on the list and scarcely a dozen people from Lincolnshire. The entire group included numerous women and children. See Jeremy Howat and Mary Godward. “The Lincolnshire Farmers—a Disastrous Emigration Scheme. http://www.argbrit.org/Lincolnshire-Farmers. The website includes the names and origins of settlers and details about their later lives.
- 102.
The extrication of the settlers from Paraguay is narrated in the British minister’s memoir. See Frederick St. John. Reminiscences of a Retired Diplomat. London: Chapman and Hall, 1905, 165–168.
- 103.
Kossuth’s influence on Jones is mentioned in Bill Jones. “Gales, la Patagonia y la emigración.” In Una tierra lejana. La colonización galesa del Chubut. Fotografías de John Murray Thomas, Henry E. Bowman, Carlos Forester y otros. Buenos Aires: Fundación Antorchas, 2003, 13.
- 104.
Other settlers originated in coal and slate mining communities, and from among Welsh residents of Liverpool. See Susan Wilkinson. Mimosa. The Life and Times of the Ship that Sailed to Patagonia. Talybout: Y Lolfa, 2007, 149.
- 105.
Undated petition (1866) FO 118/121.
- 106.
George Chaworth Musters. At Home with the Patagonians. A Year’s Wanderings over Untrodden Ground from the Straits of Magellan to the Rio Negro. London: John Murray, 1871, 315.
- 107.
Letter of 14 July 1866. FO 118/120. “The Cacique offers friendship to the Welsh settlers and proposes to enter into trading relations with them.”
- 108.
Captain Kennedy to Admiralty 18 Mar. 1888. CO 78/78.
- 109.
An assessment of the Welsh colony appears in Shaw, Argentine Republic, 180–1. Jones, Gales, displays nineteenth-century photographs. See Geraint Dyfnallt Owen. Crisis in Chubut. A chapter in the history of the Welsh colony of Patagonia. Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1977, 36–50, on friction with the Argentine government in the late 1890s. Resistance to Spanish in Welsh schools is discussed in Lilia Bertoni. “Nacionalidad o cosmopolitanismo. La cuestión de las escuelas de las colectividades extranjeras a fines del siglo xix.” Anuario, IEHS, Tandil, 1996, 179–202. Proposing legislation to make Spanish compulsory in the schools, Congressman Indalecio Gómez described the Welsh as a group more resistant to integration than any other foreign community in Argentina.
- 110.
Standard 23 Sept. 1902. Complaints focused on the inability to obtain land titles and corporal punishment inflicted on Welsh-Argentine conscripts.
- 111.
Report by Consul Spencer Dickson 15 Apr. 1915. FO 118/326. Animosity persisted between the Welsh and the Argentine government. In 1915 the British Minister Sir Reginald Tower overheard a government minister calling the Welsh “ignorant…mentally and physically degenerate.” See Sir Reginald Tower. Annual Report for 1915. FO 371–2601. Leading works tracing twentieth-century issues are Glynn Williams. The Welsh in Patagonia. The State and Ethnic Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991, and Lublin, Memoir and Identity, continuing the story into the twenty-first century.
- 112.
Enclosure in Ouseley to FO 30 May 1845 FO 6/123. The anonymous memorandum is reproduced in Wilbur Devereux Jones. “The Argentine British Colony in the Time of Rosas.” Hispanic American Historical Review. Vol. 40, No. 1, Feb. 1960, 90–97.
- 113.
Dodds, Scottish Settlers, 230.
- 114.
Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 211.
- 115.
Quoted in British Packet 10 March 1855.
- 116.
On George Bell in Chascomús, see Marta Valencia. Tierras públicas, tierras privadas. Buenos Aires, 1852–1876. La Plata: Editorial de la Universidad de La Plata, 2005, 321.
- 117.
On Drysdale’s land acquisitions, see Valencia, Tierras Públicas, 195. The author refers to the land purchaser as Juan Drysdale; possibly the figure of 320,000 hectares refers to family holdings, not Thomas Drysdale’s alone. Sesto, Ganadera, 78, shows the Drysdale holdings as only 104,995 hectares in the late 1890s after Thomas Drysdale’s death, to suggest the landholdings diminished sharply during the depression of the 1890s. The data suggest high velocity of land holding.
- 118.
On his Sunday school see Standard 1 Apr. 1880.
- 119.
Standard 6 Apr. and 3 May 1893.
- 120.
The Scots farther south are listed in Mulhall, Handbook, 133–134. On James Smith, see Hanon, Diccionario, 756; also “Padre Smith. A 1908 report by James Begg.” Standard 20 Apr. 1940. Smith had an easier life than pastors of other small Protestant groups. In early twentieth century Tres Arroyos, the Danish pastor in the community worked part time as a labourer. See María Bjerg. Historias de la inmigración en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Edheza, 2009, 139. See also Monacci, Colectividad Británica en Bahía Blanca, 15; Lynch, Massacre, 31.
- 121.
See Buenos Aires Scotch Church Magazine, 1914.
- 122.
R.M. Merchant. St. Andrew’s Scots Presbyterian Church. Chascomús 1857–1957. Buenos Aires: Talleres Gráficos MacCorquodale, 1957, 32.
- 123.
Dodds, Scottish Settlers, 292–295.
- 124.
Hudson. Far Away and Long Ago, 28.
- 125.
Buenos Aires Scotch Church Magazine, 1914.
- 126.
Tribunales. Testimonios 7820, (Diego Rodgers), 1849. Archivo General de la Nación.
- 127.
Hugh Robson is shown as the purchaser of 111 hectares under the provincial land law of 1867. See Valencia, Tierras Públicas, 341.
- 128.
As described in Sabato, Agrarian Capitalism.
- 129.
The Robson estancia fell short of the nineteenth-century standard measurement known as the suerte de estancia of 1875 hectares. For her memoir, see Jane Robson, “Faith Tried Hard” in Stewart. From Caledonia to the Pampas. The document reads like an oral history translated from Spanish, to suggest that by old age Robson’s English had lapsed. A photograph of Jane Robson as one of the last survivors of the Monte Grande colony appears in Standard 24 Nov. 1906.
- 130.
Bruce. “Reminiscences.” Mimeo. See also G.A. Bridger. Britain and the Making of Argentina. Southampton and Boston: WIT Press, 2013, 113.
- 131.
MacCann, Argentine Provinces, I:93. Bernard Porter argues that “settlers were most ‘racist’ because they needed native labour and land…and traders (like MacCann) the most relaxed, because they treated with the natives equally.” See The Absent-Minded Imperialists. Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 23.
- 132.
Robson, “Faith Tried Hard,” in Stewart, Caledonia to the Pampas, 32.
- 133.
Arnold E. Dodds. “James Dodds (1823–1896). Berwickshire’s Grand Old Man. A Record of his Descendant.” Mimeo, refers to a daughter “who married against her father’s wish a certain Señor Alejandro Moreno…Grandfather never forgave her.”
- 134.
Standard 11 Oct. 1893. On nationality issues, see also Consul to FO, 17 Apr. 1906 FO 369/1. Other anomalies adversely affected women: those who married Argentines had to petition for Argentine citizenship, and a woman therefore risked becoming stateless if she married in this way. British nationality could be transmitted only by paternal descent in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. All Anglo-Argentines therefore bore British or Irish surnames.
- 135.
Standard 27 Apr. 1907. On Fleming’s treatment of widows who married outside the community, see J. Monteith Drysdale. One hundred Years Old, 1838–1938. A Record of the First Century of St. Andrew’s Scotch School, Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: English Printery, 1938, 220.
- 136.
Standard 16 July 1922.
- 137.
See Keith S. MacInnes, Visit to the Allen Gardiner Home. FO 118/876 (1963).
- 138.
Bulfin. Tales of the Pampas, 136.
- 139.
C.B. Mansfield. Paraguay, Brazil, and the Plate. Letters Written in 1852–1853. 2nd ed. New York: Ams, 1971, 156.
- 140.
Dodds, Scottish Settlers, 291.
- 141.
Walter Larden. Argentine Plains and Andean Glaciers: Life on an Estancia, and an Expedition into the Andes. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911, 114.
- 142.
W.H. Koebel. British Exploits in South America. A History of British Activities in Exploration, Military Adventure, Diplomacy, Science, and Trade, in Latin America. New York: The Century Company, 1917, 479. The subject is complex. For discussion, see Andrew Wallace-Hadrill. Rome’s Cultural Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, ix, 5–39. Literature on the topic expresses no consensus on categories and terminology. “Creolisation,” for example, is sometimes expressive of a new linguistic form and sometimes of only partial appropriation or “contamination” by another culture.
- 143.
Grierson claimed she lived in Entre Rios throughout her childhood, although she is listed as living in Buenos Aires in 1869 with her mother’s family, named Duffy. See González Bonarino, Buenos Aires, 117.
- 144.
While training as a teacher in her adolescent years, she reported she “took the examination while retaining a command of three languages, Spanish being the one I knew least well.” Liceo Nacional de Señoritas de la Capital Dra. Cecilia Grierson. Su obra. Su vida: Homenaje a la Dra Cecilia Grierson. Buenos Aires: Tragant, 1916, 47.
- 145.
Quoted in Asunción Taboada. Vida y obra de Cecilia Grierson. Primera médica argentina. Buenos Aires: Triada, 1983, 83.
- 146.
As listed in the curriculum vitae she prepared on her retirement in 1916 when she was denied the state pension she requested. See Grierson’s papers at the Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires.
- 147.
Anon. Cecilia Grierson: Homenaje póstumo, Buenos Aires: López, 1937, 9, 42, 38.
- 148.
Grierson, Obra, 59.
- 149.
She spoke on “The Education of Women and her Influence (sic).” See Standard 11 Oct. 1894.
- 150.
The speech is published verbatim in Standard 6 June 1900.
- 151.
Anon, Grierson, 9.
- 152.
Grierson, Colonia de Monte Grande.
- 153.
Hanon places Los Veinte Cinco Ombúes on land owned by John Davidson, a Scots immigrant who arrived in 1832. See Hanon, Diccionario, 256. Davidson’s descendants included Viscount Davidson, a chairman of the British Conservative Party. The link is noted in Standard 3 April 1942.
- 154.
The 1869 national census shows about 1100 norteamericanos in urban and rural Buenos Aires and almost 11,000 ingleses.
- 155.
For anti-urbanism, see David Rock. “Intellectual Precursors of Conservative Nationalism in Argentina, 1900–1927.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 67, No. 2, May 1987, 271–300.
- 156.
Ruth Tomalin. W.H. Hudson. A biography. London: Faber and Faber, 1982, 239–242.
- 157.
Dennis Shrubsall and Pierre Coustillas. W.H. Hudson. The First Literary Environmentalist: 1841–1922. A Critical Survey. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 2007.
- 158.
Felipe Arocena. William Henry Hudson: Life, Literature, and Science. Translated by Richard Manning. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 2003, 8 aptly refers to Hudson as living on “cultural frontiers.”
- 159.
Richard Curle, ed. W.H. Hudson’s Letters to R.B. Cunninghame Graham. London: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1941.
- 160.
Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 112, 126. Hudson also wrote warmly about Bartolomé Mitre, one of Rosas’s main opponents. “I remember well…how we all loved and reverenced [sic] him after an interview we had with him.” Curle, Hudson, 109. (Letter of 7 August 1921.)
- 161.
Jason Wilson. Living in the Sound of the Wind. A Personal Quest for W.H. Hudson. Naturalist and Writer from the River Plate. London: Constable, 2015, 209.
- 162.
Quoted in David Miller. W. H. Hudson and the Elusive Paradise. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990, 108. Expressions typical of platense Spanish are “no caste or class difference divides them” and “warm current of sympathy.” The notions of classlessness and easily bridged social divisions became pervasive ideals in liberal Argentina. Jason Wilson has argued Hudson proposed Argentina as a classless society, a country in this respect far superior to class-ridden Britain. See “Charles Darwin and W.H. Hudson,” in Hennessy and King, Argentina and Britain, 173–189. Wilson has also noted the gaucho influences on Hudson. See Wilson, Personal Quest, 53–61: “Scattered through his writings are fragments of gaucho oral lore… [Hudson became a] a translator of the vanishing gaucho way of life for the English.” (p. 61). “The whole novel The Purple Land is a translation.” (p. 125).
- 163.
As noted in Jennifer L. French, “‘Literature Can Be Our Teacher?’ Reading Informal Empire in El inglés de los güesos.” 187–208, in Matthew Brown ed. Informal Empire in Latin America. Culture, Commerce and Capital. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, 78.
- 164.
Hudson, Purple Land, 244. As noted by Tomalin, Hudson, 228, the book became a favourite text of T.E. Lawrence, (“Lawrence of Arabia”), a link that evokes the commonly made nineteenth-century analogy between the gauchos and the Bedouin.
- 165.
The close contact between Hudson’s family and the Hispanic rural people is exemplified in the story of his mother breast feeding the orphan child of a gaucho. Alicia Jurado. Vida y obra de W.H. Hudson. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1989, 26. The incident is mentioned in Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 275.
- 166.
Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, 178 (on snakes); 194 (on animism, also defined as “the tendency or impulse or instinct, in which all myth originates, to animate all things; the projection of ourselves into nature; the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all visible things”). The definition recurs in W.H. Hudson. Idle Days in Patagonia. London: Chapman and Hall, 1893, 119.
- 167.
Miller, Hudson, 92–93, noting Hudson’s fascination for the subject. Miller argues that bird symbolism implies an emphasis on the supernatural and on metamorphosis from woman to bird as a means to convey renewal and continuity of life.
- 168.
“British Explorers in the South,” in Standard 29 Nov. 1923. Moreno spoke in 1905.
- 169.
Musters, Patagonians, 184–185.
- 170.
See Captain Allen F. Gardiner. A Visit to the Indians on the Frontiers of Chile. London: R.B. Seeley, 1841. Citations of his unpublished journals appear in Anon. The Martyrs of the South: A Brief Sketch of the Late Captain Allen F. Gardiner, RN: His Missions, His Companions, and the Death of the Party in Tierra del Fuego. New York: Carlton and Porter, 1852; John Marsh and Waite H. Stirling. The Story of Commander Allen Gardiner, R.N., with Sketches of Missionary Work in South America. 4th edition. London: James Nisbet, 1877. An informative narrative is Arnoldo Canclini. Allen Gardiner. Marinero, misionero, mártir. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Marymar, 1979.
- 171.
Cited in Marsh and Stirling, Gardiner, 23.
- 172.
A narrative of Gardiner’s mission, including publications of his journals, appears in George Pakenham Despard. Hope Deferred, not Lost: A Narrative of Missionary Effort in South America, in Connexion with the Patagonian Missionary Society. London: Seeley’s, n.d. (1854?) “[Gardiner’s] fate should not end [missionary] endeavours. We hope to see Christians of all denominations endeavouring to obtain a footing on those inhospitable shores.” Scottish Guardian 7 May 1852, (reproduced on pp. 458–459).
- 173.
Thomas Bridges. Los indios del ultimo confín: sus escritos para la South American Missionary Society. Ushuaia: Zagier and Urruty, 2001.
- 174.
E. Lucas Bridges. Uttermost Part of the Earth. A History of Tierra del Fuego and the Fuegians. New York: Rookery Press, 2007, (first published in 1948).
- 175.
Later chroniclers reported “dark tales of brutality and rapine…committed by men of British birth and extraction…The estancieros paid ₤1 a head for every macho, or Indian male, killed…An ear had to be cut off and shown.” See Reginald Lloyd, ed. Twentieth Century Impressions of Argentina. London: Lloyd’s Bank, 1911, 827. Quoted in Andrew Graham-Youll. Imperial Skirmishes: War and Gunboat Diplomacy in Latin America. Oxford: Signal Books, 2002, 126.
- 176.
W. Barbooke Grubb. The Paraguayan Chaco and its Possible Future. London: Royal Geographical Society, 1919, 169. The Anglican missions in the Chaco survived until 1948 when Catholic opposition forced their abandonment.
- 177.
See Standard 23 Aug. 1892, 2 Nov. 1895 and 2 June 1901 on the movement of population from the Falkland Islands to Rio Gallegos. On sheep farming around San Julián, see John Locke Blake. A Story of Patagonia. Lewes: Book Guild, 2003.
- 178.
On sheep drives in Patagonia, see Lucía Gálvez. Historias de inmigración. Testimonios de pasión, amor y arraigo en tierra argentina (1850–1950). Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Morma, 2003, 104–107.
- 179.
See cables and petitions from Patagonia 25 Nov., 2 and 10 Dec. 1921. FO 118/543.
- 180.
Standard 23 Sept. 1923.
- 181.
The standard work hostile to the British estancieros, is Osvaldo Bayer. La Patagonia rebelde. 3 vols. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1972–1974.
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Rock, D. (2019). Ranchers and Shepherds. In: The British in Argentina. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97855-0_4
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