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W.H. Hudson
American-English Naturalist
1841-1922 A selection from
THE NATURALIST IN LA PLATA
Narrated by Michael Kramer
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running time is 13 minutes
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THE DESERT PAMPAS
During recent years we have heard much about the great and rapid changes
now going on in the plants and animals of all the temperate regions of
the globe colonized by Europeans. These changes, if taken merely as
evidence of material progress, must be a matter of rejoicing to those
who are satisfied, and more than satisfied, with our system of
civilization, or method of outwitting Nature by the removal of all
checks on the undue increase of our own species. To one who finds a
charm in things as they exist in the unconquered provinces of Nature's
dominions, and who, not being over-anxious to reach the end of his
journey, is content to perform it on horseback, or in a waggon drawn by
bullocks, it is permissible to lament the altered aspect of the earth's
surface, together with the disappearance of numberless noble and
beautiful forms, both of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. For he
cannot find it in his heart to love the forms by which they are
replaced; these are cultivated and domesticated, and have only become
useful to man at the cost of that grace and spirit which freedom and
wildness give. In numbers they are many—twenty-five millions of sheep
in this district, fifty millions in that, a hundred millions in a
third—but how few are the species in place of those destroyed? and when
the owner of many sheep and much wheat desires variety—for he possesses
this instinctive desire, albeit in conflict with and overborne by the
perverted instinct of destruction—what is there left to him, beyond his
very own, except the weeds that spring up in his fields under all skies,
ringing him round with old-world monotonous forms, as tenacious of their
undesired union with him as the rats and cockroaches that inhabit his
house?
We hear most frequently of North America, New Zealand, and Australia in
this connection; but nowhere on the globe has civilization "written
strange defeatures" more markedly than on that great area of level
country called by English writers the pampas, but by the Spanish more
appropriately La Pampa—from the Quichua word signifying open space or
country—since it forms in most part one continuous plain, extending on
its eastern border from the river Parana, in latitude 32 degrees, to the
Patagonian formation on the river Colorado, and comprising about two
hundred thousand square miles of humid, grassy country.
This district has been colonized by Europeans since the middle of the
sixteenth century; but down to within a very few years ago immigration
was on too limited a scale to make any very great change; and, speaking
only of the pampean country, the conquered territory was a long,
thinly-settled strip, purely pastoral, and the Indians, with their
primitive mode of warfare, were able to keep back the invaders from the
greater portion of their ancestral hunting-grounds. Not twenty years
ago a ride of two hundred miles, starting from the capital city,
Buenos Ayres, was enough to place one well beyond the furthest
south-western frontier outpost. In 1879 the Argentine Government
determined to rid the country of the aborigines, or, at all events, to
break their hostile and predatory spirit once for all; with the result
that the entire area of the grassy pampas, with a great portion of
the sterile pampas and Patagonia, has been made available to the
emigrant. There is no longer anything to deter the starvelings
of the Old World from possessing themselves of this new land of
promise, flowing, like Australia, with milk and tallow, if not with
honey; any emasculated migrant from a Genoese or Neapolitan
slum is now competent to "fight the wilderness" out there, with his
eight-shilling fowling-piece and the implements of his trade. The
barbarians no longer exist to frighten his soul with dreadful war cries;
they have moved away to another more remote and shadowy region, called
in their own language Alhuemapu, and not known to geographers. For
the results so long and ardently wished for have swiftly followed on
General Roca's military expedition; and the changes witnessed during the
last decade on the pampas exceed in magnitude those which had been
previously effected by three centuries of occupation.
In view of this wave of change now rapidly sweeping away the old
order, with whatever beauty and grace it possessed, it might not seem
inopportune at the present moment to give a rapid sketch, from the field
naturalist's point of view, of the great plain, as it existed before the
agencies introduced by European colonists had done their work, and as it
still exists in its remoter parts.
The humid, grassy, pampean country extends, roughly speaking, half-way
from the Atlantic Ocean and the Plata and Paraná rivers to the Andes,
and passes gradually into the "Monte Formation," or sterile pampa—a
sandy, more or less barren district, producing a dry, harsh, ligneous
vegetation, principally thorny bushes and low trees, of which the chañar
(Gurliaca decorticans) is the most common; hence the name of
"Chañar-steppe" used by some writers: and this formation extends
southwards down into Patagonia. Scientists have not yet been able to
explain why the pampas, with a humid climate, and a soil exceedingly
rich, have produced nothing but grass, while the dry, sterile
territories on their north, west, and south borders have an arborescent
vegetation. Darwin's conjecture that the extreme violence of the
pampero, or south-west wind, prevented trees from growing, is now
proved to have been ill-founded since the introduction of the Eucalyptus
globulus; for this noble tree attains to an extraordinary height on the
pampas, and exhibits there a luxuriance of foliage never seen in
Australia.
To this level area—my "parish of Selborne," or, at all events, a goodly
portion of it—with the sea on one hand, and on the other the
practically infinite expanse of grassy desert—another sea, not "in vast
fluctuations fixed," but in comparative calm—I should like to conduct
the reader in imagination: a country all the easier to be imagined on
account of the absence of mountains, woods, lakes, and rivers. There is,
indeed, little to be imagined—not even a sense of vastness; and Darwin,
touching on this point, in the Journal of a Naturalist, aptly
says:—"At sea, a person's eye being six feet above the surface of the
water, his horizon is two miles and four-fifths distant. In like manner,
the more level the plain, the more nearly does the horizon approach
within these narrow limits; and this, in my opinion, entirely destroys
the grandeur which one would have imagined that a vast plain would have
possessed."
I remember my first experience of a hill, after having been always shut
within "these narrow limits." It was one of the range of sierras near
Cape Corrientes, and not above eight hundred feet high; yet, when I had
gained the summit, I was amazed at the vastness of the earth, as it
appeared to me from that modest elevation. Persons born and bred on the
pampas, when they first visit a mountainous district, frequently
experience a sensation as of "a ball in the throat" which seems to
prevent free respiration.
In most places the rich, dry soil is occupied by a coarse grass, three
or four feet high, growing in large tussocks, and all the year round of
a deep green; a few slender herbs and trefoils, with long, twining
stems, maintain a frail existence among the tussocks; but the strong
grass crowds out most plants, and scarcely a flower relieves its uniform
everlasting verdure. There are patches, sometimes large areas, where it
does not grow, and these are carpeted by small creeping herbs of a
livelier green, and are gay in spring with flowers, chiefly of the
composite and papilionaceous kinds; and verbenas, scarlet, purple, rose,
and white. On moist or marshy grounds there are also several lilies,
yellow, white, and red, two or three flags, and various other small
flowers; but altogether the flora of the pampas is the poorest in
species of any fertile district on the globe. On moist clayey ground
flourishes the stately pampa grass, Gynerium argenteum, the spears of
which often attain a height of eight or nine feet. I have ridden through
many leagues of this grass with the feathery spikes high as my head, and
often higher. It would be impossible for me to give anything like an
adequate idea of the exquisite loveliness, at certain times and seasons,
of this queen of grasses, the chief glory of the solitary pampa.
Everyone is familiar with it in cultivation; but the garden-plant has a
sadly decaying, draggled look at all times, and to my mind, is often
positively ugly with its dense withering mass of coarse leaves, drooping
on the ground, and bundle of spikes, always of the same dead white or
dirty cream-colour. Now colour—the various ethereal tints that give a
blush to its cloud-like purity—is one of the chief beauties of this
grass on its native soil; and travellers who have galloped across the
pampas at a season of the year when the spikes are dead, and white as
paper or parchment, have certainly missed its greatest charm. The plant
is social, and in some places where scarcely any other kind exists it
covers large areas with a sea of fleecy-white plumes; in late summer,
and in autumn, the tints are seen, varying from the most delicate rose,
tender and illusive as the blush on the white under-plumage of some
gulls, to purple and violaceous. At no time does it look so perfect as
in the evening, before and after sunset, when the softened light imparts
a mistiness to the crowding plumes, and the traveller cannot help
fancying that the tints, which then seem richest, are caught from the
level rays of the sun, or reflected from the coloured vapours of the
afterglow.
The last occasion on which I saw the pampa grass in its full beauty was
at the close of a bright day in March, ending in one of those perfect
sunsets seen only in the wilderness, where no lines of house or hedge
mar the enchanting disorder of nature, and the earth and sky tints are
in harmony. I had been travelling all day with one companion, and for
two hours we had ridden through the matchless grass, which spread away
for miles on every side, the myriads of white spears, touched with
varied colour, blending in the distance and appearing almost like the
surface of a cloud. Hearing a swishing sound behind us, we turned
sharply round, and saw, not forty yards away in our rear, a party of
five mounted Indians, coming swiftly towards us: but at the very moment
we saw them their animals came to a dead halt, and at the same instant
the five riders leaped up, and stood erect on their horses' backs.
Satisfied that they had no intention of attacking us, and were only
looking out for strayed horses, we continued watching them for some
time, as they stood gazing away over the plain in different directions,
motionless and silent, like bronze men on strange horse-shaped pedestals
of dark stone; so dark in their copper skins and long black hair,
against the far-off ethereal sky, flushed with amber light; and at their
feet, and all around, the cloud of white and faintly-blushing plumes.
That farewell scene was printed very vividly on my memory, but cannot be
shown to another, nor could it be even if a Ruskin's pen or a Turner's
pencil were mine; for the flight of the sea-mew is not more impossible
to us than the power to picture forth the image of Nature in our souls,
when she reveals herself in one of those "special moments" which have
"special grace" in situations where her wild beauty has never been
spoiled by man. More information about W.H. Hudson from Wikipedia
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