Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/465



EX-CAPITAL OF PARAGUAY. 435

fine brick, cased at the corners with the red porphyritic rock, here coarse and micaceous, there fine as gneiss, which crops out of the Tacumbii hill. The building, inscribed R.P. (my friends read " Rip '^), is well provided with a dry dock, with a floating dock, with slips for shipbuilding, with boiler-houses, and with machinery, of which few vestiges remain. Even in 1857 this dockyard was building two steamers of 500 tons : it had furnaces, steam-hammers, and portable engines, for working wood and iron. In 1863 it had built six of the eleven steamers which composed the Republican fleet. Mr. M. Mulhall remarked of it, " When the new offices are completed, this will be a grand arsenal, and the fire-eaters of Buenos Aires, who may be suffered to pass Humaita, can learn an instructive lesson in this 'retrograde country'" (page 88). Many English employes have served in this arsenal. Six years ago it was managed by Mr. Marshall, with Mr. Grant as foreman. They were stabbed by a native, and the latter was shot. The medical officer was Dr. Barton, who was allowed to leave the country some two years before my visit. The next superintendent was Mr. Whytehead, a mechanical inventor not unknown in England : he is said to have suicided himself; and his successor is Mr. Nesbitt, who, I told you, volunteered to remain in the country.

Between the landing-place and the arsenal is the Pro- veduria or Commissariat, a large rambling barn of brick and tile. It fronts the comercio, now laid out in streets ; the booths, which sell everything, and over which wave all manner of flags, the English included, are mostly double-poled canvas tents upon wooden foundations, raised some four feet high. They are composed in due succession of stolen doors, windows, and other furniture, then of cask staves, and lastly of lumber brought up by the ships. Foul with offal^ these pest-houses are fit to lodge

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