Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/173



TO THE COLONIA AND BUENOS AIRES. 143

chronology of my journey^ and will here introduce a short description of the most modern Colonia, which I visited later, in 1868.

The Department of La Colonia, rich in pastoral English- men, has generally a steamer from Buenos Aires, which makes her passage in three to four hours. I went in the Beauly^ a little red and black yacht-built thing, commanded by a rough and ready German. The Colony, like Monte Video, oc- cupies a long narrow-necked land-tongue, with a fine slope for drainage, and forming the port which is emphatically not, as Southey states, a " very commodious harbour ." The point, composed mostly of gneiss, trends from north- east to south-west, and therefore the roads, for such they are, lie open to the Pampero, that intolerably heaps up the sand. Westward of the point is a scatter of islets : the old Hydrographic chart^ names them,beginning from the south- west, I. Farallon, S. Gabriel, del Inglez, and de Hornos. The native pilots divide del Inglez into two â€” viz., " Lopez East '^ and '^ Lopez West,^" with its outliers. They also assign three islets to the group of Hornos, the smallest of the little Archipelago, lying opposite the Arroyo de S. Pedro. Here, in some twenty-one feet of water, 1 saw a single hulk : it lay north of S. Gabriel, the largest feature, where Salcedo mounted his batteries ; here also a ship was wrecked carrying a certain missionary â€”

We land at the little mole, leaving to the right a dwarf dock and a slip for schooner building. Our destination is the Hotel Oriental, the best, but bad and therefore dear, with prices rivalling Paris and New York. The houses, whitewashed against cholera, and rising abrupt from the
 * And Dobrizhoffer was the good man's honoured name."

by C. H. Dillon, Master R.N., 1847, with additions by Lieut. Sidney, 1856.
 * The names are correctly given by the new Hydrographic Office map,