Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/169



TO THE eOLONIA AND BUENOS AIRES. 139

months^ whilst during the rest of the year southerly gales raise it to three and sometimes to five feet_, caused the world since 1798 to believe that the Red Sea is 32^ feet above the Mediterranean. Here we shall find the same phe- nomenon regularly repeated. The Plate heaped up by eastern and south-eastern winds, gains even when not at flood an elevation of four to eight feet : the western and northern gales depress it by driving the current. When the Pampero, that Euroclydon of the Austral hemi- sphere, ceases to course over the Pampas, the accumulated discharge rushes out like a sluice, especially round the Point S. Jose. And everywhere on the Lower Plate the weather, like the water, depends not upon seasons, but upon the force and direction of the wind.

Thus much " de Argenteo flumine quod vulgo Rio de la Plata nuncupatur.^^ Wars, it has been said, teach the na- tions their geography. Lord Palmerston, when reproached about the Affghan afi'air, told the House of Commons that it had introduced to public knowledge Central Asia. " Admiralty seamanship,^" it is true, still telegrams to iron- clads that they must run for refuge into Dover Harbour, whose poor ten feet of water are fit only for the fishing- smack. But we, the instructed public, no longer recognise the old facetiae of a fleet being sent up to Frankfort on the Maine, or of a frigate being moored, as Sir Charles Napier was reproved for not doing, off Sindian Hyderabad, in the Indus five feet deep.

And the British Admiral â€” who shall teach him ? What shall modify his omniscient ignorance ? The last specimen (let us hope) of the '^ Commodore Trunnions," a fossilized remnant of the days of grog and double damns, one who heartily hates the civilian, and who thinks the blue blood of Europe to run through veins descended from a Scotch cattle-lifter, hearing that one of his squadron had lost an