Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
unrest in the region and resumed in greater measure following each
naval blockade.
Even while the civil strife continued in the interior, foreign trade at
the port rose. Around 100 foreign ships put in at Buenos Aires each year
in the 1810s. By the 1820s and 1830s, the average yearly numbers had
increased to 280 vessels. Ship arrivals at Buenos Aires amounted to 452
per year in the 1840s and to 674 in the 1850s. River shipping to and
from Buenos Aires also increased up to mid-century, despite the civil
wars, river blockades, and foreign entanglements.
Markets for hides and cattle by-products flourished, and so did the
cattle production of Buenos Aires. To meet the growing demands, a
new processing industry began to develop at the port.
Saladeros,
hide
and meat-salting plants, were established in the southern suburbs of
Buenos Aires. From the countryside, cowboys drove herds of cattle to
these processing factories. By 1825, more than two score
saladeros
were
slaughtering approximately 70,000 head of cattle a year at Buenos Aires.
As trade expanded through the 1830s and 1840s, so did the industry.
Saladeros
at mid-century were processing more than 300,000 head of
cattle, and horses, too, per year. These salting plants turned the slaugh-
ter of cattle into an efficient manufacturing process, but without dis-
pensing with the traditional “technology” of cowboy, horse, lasso, and
facón,
as the long knife common to Argentina was called. “The whole
sight [of the
saladero
] is horrible and revolting,” observed Charles
Darwin in the 1830s. “[T]he ground is almost made of bones; and the
horses and riders are drenched with gore” (Darwin 1858, 104).
Expansion of the Cattle
Estancia
When finally blessed with a modicum of peace in the early 19th cen-
tury, the colonial cattle ranch, or
estancia,
developed into a complex
business enterprise. Production and marketing of pastoral products, in
fact, supported the development of a diversified rural society. Farming,
far from being squeezed off the land, actually expanded in relation to
growth of the urban market of Buenos Aires. Commercial growth cre-
ated some truly great estates in the countryside, but the large landed
units, which initially pushed back the frontiers toward the south, were
reduced in size and their ownership diffused as the demand for effi-
ciency required the application of more capital and management than
land. Improvements in Argentina's economy in the first half of the 19th
century spawned a rural society on the Pampas surrounding Buenos
