This week I went to Argentina, virtually, of course! Fortuitously, Antonia’s magazine does about the same virtual travel thing as I am doing, and its country for the month was also Argentina. They decided that Argentina’s distinctive features are: Buenos Aires, the tango, penguins, whales, glaciers, Ushuaia, football, gauchos in the pampas and barbecued meat and mate.
After doing a little bit of research and scraping my memory I decided to read two travel books that touch on Argentina if only in part: Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries.
Neither of these books deals exclusively with Argentina, in fact Guevara’s book only takes place in Argentina in the opening sections. For the rest, he does offer one Argentinian perspective on Latin America. It became clear that Argentina was rather admired throughout the region in the 1950’s, or so it seemed to Guevara and his friend.
Quite a large chunk of The Voyage of the Beagle takes place in Argentina, from Buenos Aires to the Pampas, down to Patagonia and Terra del Fuego. As I expected, Darwin talks a lot about natural history, though strangely, he hardly seems to mention whales or penguins. The Voyage precedes his theory of evolution through natural selection, but it’s interesting to see him trying to figure out cause and effect in what he encounters.
He’s a bit more of a dunce when it comes to people, with the Victorian English gentleman’s horrible attitude to everyone except other Victorian English gentlemen. Clearly, he intended to be objective and thought himself benevolent, but this might not appear sufficient excuse to modern readers. I’ve just reminded myself that he was barely an actor in the various circumstances described, so perhaps he should not be vilified more than those who were. He still gives an interesting slice of South American social and political life – strife between Spaniards and Indians, slavery, runaway seamen, Indian children removed from their families and taken to England then returned, gauchos in the pampas, revolution in Buenos Aires (one of them!) Throughout his time in Argentina he lived on a diet of freshly killed, barbecued meat and mate.
Turning to The Motorcycle Diaries, it was surprising in a way how little had changed. The same social issues were particularly recognisable in Chile. But this is about Argentina. Guevara and his friend still lived on barbecued meat and mate, they still dossed down in a mixture of estancias, inns and government posts, but they had substituted the motorbike for the horses of Darwin’s day. It doesn’t seem as if this was really the best idea, and the motorbike barely made it out of Argentina.
These two young men were utterly clueless about natural history and most other things, but they had their own speciality – medicine. Neither Guevara nor Darwin had reached the positions that made them famous when they wrote these travel books, but in both, you can see their positions emerging out of their specialised knowledge. In Guevara’s case this seems to come from a realisation of the link between social and political circumstances and people’s state of health. When he is discussing this, he suddenly emerges from puerility into detailed and systematic explanation.
Conrad Martens accompanied the Beagle as draughtsman, and some of his sketchbooks can be viewed here.
Next week, I’m going to the UK for real, so I guess I won’t need to do any virtual traveling and I’ll probably have limited Internet access anyway.