Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
made frequent stops to take on food and pay social calls. By now the
lone yachtsman's fame was going before him. At Montevideo he:
was greeted by steam-whistles till I felt embarrassed and wished
that I had arrived unobserved. The voyage so far along may have
seemed to the Uruguayans a feat worthy of some recognition; but
there was so much of it yet ahead, and of such an arduous nature, that
any demonstration at this point seemed, somehow, like boasting pre-
maturely.
14
However, fame had its compensations. A local shipping agency
insisted on paying for any repairs
Spray
needed and on giving
Slocum twenty pounds towards his expenses. At Buenos Aires,
where he arrived on New Year's Day 1896, the
Spray
was given free
berthing and her captain was entertained at the home of Mr Mulhall,
'the warmest heart, I think, outside of Ireland'.
But the elements were not so hospitable. The seas off the Plate
estuary are notorious. Thomas Chaloner, three hundred years earli-
er, had encountered there 'the fury of storms which, indeed, I think
from Buenos Aires on 26 January was deceptively peaceful. He had
to be towed out of harbour in a flat calm, the water's surface looking
'like a silver disk'. But the mood rapidly changed:
a gale came up soon after, and caused an ugly sea, and instead of
being all silver, as before, the river was now all mud. . . . I cast anchor
before dark in the best lee I could find near the land, but was tossed
miserably all night, heartsore of choppy seas.
16
Soon he was off the desolate coast of Patagonia, which those
who have seen it know to be the bleakest and most cheerless stretch
of coastline on the face of the earth. Even Slocum, the seasoned mar-
