The Purple Land/Volume 1/Preamble
THE
PURPLE LAND THAT ENGLAND LOST.
A FLIGHT TO THE EAST.
With considerable hesitation I head this preamble with the above title, and fearing that it might be a misleading one, I hasten to inform the reader that it is not the author's intention to drag him away to that gorgeous East he knows. England may have lost some Purple Land there, for all I know to the contrary, since it is of her gains and not of her losses she keeps count; that, however, would not be the land about which this book is written. It need be a lively graceful pen that can shed fresh glamour on that old worn-out beaten track, leading, by the way of Egypt with its Nile and Pyramids, to the realms of palms and pagodas and of huge idols, sitting cross-legged, moon-faced, inscrutable. Those who follow my author's wanderings will hunt no tigers and partake of no miraculous curries made with all the ingredients fresh, and eaten with rice boiled as it never can be boiled in England. They will be fanned by no punkahs, and will sip no mysterious early chota-haziri from a tea-cup, but must be satisfied to imbibe maté-amargo through a silver tube from the carved calabash. Far from the land of the magnificent Rajah, the learned Baboo, the humble Ryot, lies our modest East, on the eastern shores of that sea-like river called La Plata; for to the nation dwelling on its western bank—the Argentines, to wit—it is ever the Oriental country, or Banda—the land where the sun rises.
Not on this account, however, is it here called the purple land. Though of all the sisterhood of republics in the green continent, she first catches the auroral hues on her shining hair and pale face, turned towards the Atlantic, the dark stains on her feet, washed ever with her children's blood, give her a better title to that sad epithet.
Magellan discovered the country in the year 1500, and called the mountain, which now gives its name to the capital, Monte Vidi. He describes it as a hat-shaped mountain, but the hats of those days were doubtless peculiar in shape. The tall conical tile still sometimes seen in Wales is the only head-covering I am acquainted with resembling in form the great Oriental hill, standing solitary by the shore. In due time settlements were formed, but the colonists of those days loved gold and adventure beyond everything, and not finding either in the Banda, it was not much esteemed. For two centuries it was neglected by its human possessors, while the cattle they had imported multiplied greatly, and returning to a feral life overrun the country in amazing numbers.
The heroic period in South American history then passed away. El Dorado, the Spanish explorer's New Jerusalem, had changed into a bank of malarious mist and a cloud of mosquitoes. Amazons, giants, pigmies, "the anthropophagi, and men that wear their heads beneath their arms," when closely looked for, turned out to be only Botacudas and other degraded savage tribes. Wanderers from the Old World grew weary of seeking the tropics only to sink into flowery graves. They turned away sick at heart from the great desolation where the splendid empire of the children of the sun had so recently flourished. The accumulated treasures of gold and silver and precious stones had all been squandered. The cruel crusades of the Paulists against the Jesuit missions had ceased, for the inhuman slave-hunters had utterly destroyed the smiling gardens in the great wilderness. An escaped remnant of the Indian converts had gone back to their wild life in the woods, while the Fathers, who had done their Master's work so well, drifted away to mingle in other scenes or die of broken hearts. Then, in the sober eighteenth century, when the disillusion was complete, Spain awoke to the fact that in the temperate portion of the continent, shared by her with Portugal, she possessed a new bright little Spain worth cultivating. About the same time Portugal discovered that the acquisition of this pretty country, with its bright Lusitanian climate, would nicely round off her vast territory on the south side. Then the two great colonizing powers of those days fell to fighting over the long-despised Banda, where there were no temples of beaten gold, or mythical races of men, or fountains of everlasting youth. The quarrel might have continued forever, so languidly was it conducted by both parties, had not great events come to swallow up the little ones.
At the beginning of the present century the English invasion burst like a terrible thunderstorm on the country. Though it did not last very long, it had the effect of precipitating the revolution, which presently ended in the loss to Spain of all her vast possessions. These great changes brought only fresh wars and calamities to the long-suffering Banda: the ancient feud between Spain and Portugal descended to the new Brazilian Empire and the Argentine Confederation, and these two claimants contended for the little country till 1828, when they finally agreed to withdraw all claims and allow it to govern itself in its own fashion. It is scarcely necessary to state that this solemn treaty of '28 has since then been broken scores of times, but still the little Belgium of the New World exists free. After thus acquiring its independence, it cast off the pretty but hated appellation of Cisplatina, bestowed on it by the Brazilian conqueror, resuming its old joyous name of Banda Oriental. With light hearts the people then proceeded to divide themselves into two political parties—Whites and Reds. Endless struggles for mastery ensued, about which it is useless to say anything. Fifty years of the sanguinary contests between these two factions would make a truly gigantic work— a monument in every sense of the word.
Nothing more need be said concerning the history of my East. The flight thither was taken by a young Englishman named Richard Lamb, the real author of this narrative, and a few words about him and his object in flying eastwards are perhaps necessary.
Richard was a young man of a type familiar to every one in England. He had a lively temper and pleasant manner; a straight nose, brown hair, clear red and white skin, very fair by contrast with swarthy southern skins, and a pair of frank hazel eyes. His father was a sheep-farmer on the Argentine pampas and rented land from a Señor Aveleyra, a native gentleman of wealth and position. Richard fell in love with this gentleman's daughter, a lovely charming girl named Romola. She returned the feeling with all her heart; but her father, not considering the alliance a suitable one for his daughter to make, placed his veto on it. Richard, always impetuous and careless of consequences, prevailed on the girl to elope with him; and, after a secret marriage in Buenos Ayres, they prudently escaped from a country where the laws against such clandestine unions are very severe, and crossed over to Montevideo, that city of refuge for all Argentines who commit offences at home.
Now, had all this happened only last year, or even three or four years ago, then, I confess, there would have been little in this narrative to interest the reader; for just now that country, hitherto shy of progress, is in the transitional brick-field condition, full of emigrants from over the sea, who make use of strange oaths and are busy breaking up the soil and the ancient usages of the country. These rambles take us back a quarter of a century, and to a time when all things were very much in the condition in which they had remained since the colonial days; when the people one met were of those who had taken part in the immortal ten years' siege of Montevideo; when strife and misgovernment —like bad weather in England—appeared to be the normal condition of the country. Then, in spite of fierce passions and dark crimes, poetry and heroic virtues, with that sweet archaic simplicity of life and conversation which has vanished from the old world to return no more, still flourished. Now, alas! the iron-shod monster named Progress is fast. treading out all these things, like delicate wild flowers of rare fragrance that only blossom in nature's waste places amidst barren thorns and nettles.
It was wrong and foolish of Richard to run away with a sweet unsophisticated girl—an act which subsequently caused untold suffering; but all that is an ancient affair, and he, poor fellow, was punished only too severely in the end for what he did; only with that domestic part of his history we have here nothing to do.