Category: Travel Writing

Working North from Patagonia Being the Narrative of a Journey, Earned on the Way, Through Southern and Eastern South America

In Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious friend of long standing; his overworked staff was sadly in need of an American assistant familiar with Spanish, the one sent down fro...

Chapters

1. CHAPTER I

In Buenos Aires I became what a local newspaper called “office boy” to the American consul general. The latter had turned out to be a vicarious friend of long standing; his over...

2. CHAPTER II

In my daily rounds as “errand boy” I soon discovered that the _Porteño_ is not a particularly pleasant man with whom to do business. To begin with, he is overwhelmed with a sens...

3. CHAPTER III

The traveler who visits only Buenos Aires will almost certainly carry away a mistaken notion of the Argentine. There is perhaps no national capital in the world so far in advanc...

4. CHAPTER IV

It was with keen regret that I cut myself off from Uncle Sam’s modest bounty when the time came to set out on a journey that was to carry me outside the Argentine and beyond the...

5. CHAPTER V

Santiago rises late. I had wandered a long hour before I found a café open, and when I dropped in for coffee the man who spent half an hour preparing it grumbled, “Eight-thirty...

6. CHAPTER VI

One cold June evening, with more than a hundred days and eight hundred miles of travel in Chile and the Argentine behind me, I took final leave of Buenos Aires—not without regre...

7. CHAPTER VII

Upon the thirty-first parallel of south latitude, three hundred and sixty miles north of Montevideo, there is a town of divided allegiance, situated in both the smallest and the...

8. CHAPTER VIII

I awoke at dawn just as we were entering the harbor of Rio de Janeiro. On the extreme points of land on either side crouched two old-fashioned fortresses; back of one of them, s...

9. CHAPTER IX

The Spaniard Pinzón had already sighted what is to-day Brazil when, in 1500, Pedro Alves Cabral, whom Portugal had sent out to get her share of this new world, accidentally disc...

10. CHAPTER X

The mixture of races gives Rio a society very different from that of Buenos Aires; its elements are more distinct, more complex, more primitive, much less European. Probably it...

11. CHAPTER XI

I had long expected far-famed Rio to be the climax and end of my South American wanderings. Portuguese civilization had never aroused any great interest within me; a glimpse of...

12. CHAPTER XII

Summer was beginning to seethe in earnest when, early on the first morning of October, I sped from the Praia do Flamengo to the miserable old station of the Central Railway of B...

13. CHAPTER XIII

We steamed for hours out of the vast coffee-lined basin of Riberão Preto on the train which left at dawn and took all day to get to the next town of any size. Coffee-fields at l...

14. CHAPTER XIV

On December 13th our alarm-clock having gone astray and being evidently unreplaceable in Brazil, where time means so little, I sat up all night in order to rout “Tut” out at fou...

15. CHAPTER XV

More than five months had passed since my first arrival in Rio when, in the first days of the new year, I actually started on my homeward way again. The train from Nictheroy nor...

16. CHAPTER XVI

The new contract with “Colonel” Ruben permitted me to absent myself from the show and travel when and where I saw fit, he to pay my transportation only by the most direct routes...

17. CHAPTER XVII

It was four in the afternoon when we sighted Parahyba, capital of the state of the same name, on its ridge beside a river of similar designation which we had been following for...

18. CHAPTER XVIII

When he was quite a young man Edison failed to get to Brazil for the same reason that I had failed to get home from Rio—his ship did not sail. He had journeyed as far as New Orl...

19. CHAPTER XIX

It would have been foolish to have sailed directly home from Pará, now that there remained only one unexplored corner of South America. Besides, it was fourteen months since I h...

20. CHAPTER XX

Ben Hart lived about forty yards back in British Guiana. Having passed the frontier without sinking, we scrambled up the steep, sandy bank of a river that had changed its name f...

21. CHAPTER XXI

The white steamers of the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique” take two leisurely days from Georgetown to Cayenne, which I spent in furbishing up my long unused French. I had no...

22. CHAPTER XXII

Men have been known to make their way directly from British Guiana to Venezuela; but the effects of the World War were widespread and only by taking an ocean liner to Trinidad a...