by Clare Dudman
Each time Gallatt had gone close to the Chubut valley she had begged for news, but he would tell her nothing – except long tales about the things that men care about but women do not: the roads, the crowds of people, the way the ground was changing colour: from grey mud to great yellow glistening plants that rattled in the wind. Wheat to make bread, she’d said smugly, and Gallatt had opened his mouth a little at her knowledge. They have a mill now, he tells her. They make flour but they put it in bags for the Cristianos in Buenos Aires.
‘The Gallenses give the Cristianos their wheat?’ she’d asked Gallatt, checking to make sure she had understood correctly, and when he had nodded had thought again about the things she thought she knew.
Gallatt has gone now too. A single shot and he had flown backwards. A good way to die, she’d thought, but wished that Yeluc had been there to tell her what to do for his soul.
‘They are taking our land, Seannu,’ Gallatt had told her once. ‘They’re stealing it from us. They want us to stay in one place, not hunt, not speak our own tongue. We have to fight.’
She rocks on the floor and thinks about the forest in the hills and Yeluc’s tree.
‘Un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump,’ she counts in Welsh, and waits for his approval.
‘Chuche, houke, aäs, carge, ktsin,’ he replies in their own tongue.
‘No one speaks our words any more,’ she tells him.
The tree sighs, bends down and touches her head with its lowest branches. ‘Just words, Seannu, that’s all they are. There’s no need to fight over words. It’s what they mean that’s important – and anyway, ysher, in heaven I have found, there is no need to speak at all.’
No need to speak at all. She nods and rocks, nods and then rocks again.
WELSH TERMS
WELSH ENGLISH
ar frys immediately
bach dear
bachgen boy
bara bread
bechgyn boys
brawd brother
brodyr brothers
cacen cake
cach shit
cariad love
cawl soup
chwaer sister
chwiorydd sisters
diolch yn fawr thank you very much
ffrind friend
ffrindiau friends
fy my
gwrach witch
gwraig wife
heddiw today
hiraeth homesickness
iawn diolch fine, thanks
llaca mud
mab son
meistr master
mêl honey
merch daughter
moch pigs
on’d yw hi? isn’t it?
taid grandfather (northern Welsh)
Y Wladfa colony
wrth gwrs of course
y tylwyth teg the fairies
ych-a-fi expression of disgust
TEHUELCHE TERMS
(from ‘At Home With The Patagonians’ by George Chaworth Musters, 1871)
TEHUELCHE ENGLISH
ááskren stars
aix council
bola ball (usually of stone) threaded onto a lead and used as a weapon
cacique chief
calafate Berberis heterophylla Jussieu. A common plant similar to a mulberry. (It is said that if you eat a calafate berry in Patagonia you will always return).
chume two-bola weapon
charcao The Yuyo moro (Senecio filaginoides de Candolle). A common species of shrub in Patagonia
coquetra children
Cristiano Argentine Christian
háchish Christian man
hogel piebald
ketz good
kow expression of triumph on catching game
mara type of long-legged rabbit related to the guinea pig
mikkeoush ostrich (or rhea)
molle Schinus johnstonii Barkley – a small tree or shrub native to Patagonia and used by the Tehuelches for medicine
pespesh sit down
rou guanaco, relative of the lama
showan moon
tchonik Indian people
toldo awning or dwelling of the Tehuelches (Spanish)
wati, wati, wati expression of surprise
wéen march
zorrino skunk (spanish)
zorro fox
Author’s Note
A Place of Meadows and Tall Trees is a work of fiction. I have taken the bare bones of the lives of various people that were part of that first, courageous settlement, and invented their flesh. Silas James is based on a man called Aaron Jenkins (Jenkins was my maiden name). Records from the colony showed that he lost his son, James, and a fortnight later gained a daughter, Rachel, on that dreadful voyage on the Mimosa. Rachel died in Patagonia a few months after they arrived, and a year or so later another child arrived, who also died a month later. The mother, also called Rachel Jenkins, was the woman who was truly a saviour of the colony since she suggested irrigation to her husband. She died a month after her last daughter died – of dropsy. I have invented her depression. Aaron Jenkins then married a seventeen-year-old girl, Margaret Jones, and had several more children. This was usual in the early colonists; the girls were married young, and men with children remarried quickly since children needed a mother, as much as a man needed a wife. That is all I found out about Aaron Jenkins, except I read that he had not been happy in Patagonia, and one other important detail: the end of his life was heroic. In 1878 several bandits escaped from a penal colony near Tierra del Fuego in the frozen south and one was captured near Gaiman. Aaron Jenkins volunteered to take the captive, alone, to Rawson but he was overpowered by the bandit who had managed to hide a knife. He cut out Jenkins’ tongue and ‘left his body to the birds’. Jenkins was buried on his farm, and the bandit later recaptured and killed. All the colonists fired bullets into the convict’s body so none – or all – would be accused of his murder. I met one of the descendents of Aaron and Margaret Jenkins in Patagonia. She told me there had been a family interest in medicine sustained throughout the generations – initiated by Margaret (Miriam in the book) who had learnt a lot about local medical plants from the Tehuelches.
Edwyn Lloyd is based, extremely loosely, on the leader of the expedition, Lewis Jones. Again I have used the merest basic details of his life and have not attempted to base ‘the flesh’ on any accounts of the man himself. I know that his mother was persecuted by the English and evicted from her cottage. I know he was a publisher of a satirical magazine, and that he was instrumental in persuading the colonists to come to Patagonia. He and Sir Love Jones-Parry made a reconnoitre of the area before the colonists came and he did his best to prepare for them (with his wife Ellen and an American colonist, Edwyn Cynrig Roberts – Selwyn Williams in the book). Lewis Jones, by some accounts, exaggerated the fertility of the area. He was later sent to Buenos Aires by the colonists to negotiate with Dr Guillermo Rawson, the Argentine minister for internal affairs. His wife then returned to Wales, but a couple of years later Jones went back to Wales to perhaps encourage more settlers, and Ellen returned to Patagonia with him, giving birth to a daughter on the voyage over. This daughter, Eluned Morgan, wrote an account of her travels in Patagonia which is till in print today: Dringo’r Andes a Gwymon y Mor.
Three ministers accompanied the colony to Patagonia, but the characters of Jacob Griffiths and Caradoc Llewellyn are made up and not based on any one of them.
The encounters with the Tehuelches are, as far as I could glean, pretty much as they happened. Their first contact was with an old chief, who helped them and saved them from starvation, and later they were surrounded by the members of three other tribes. They traded successfully, and the two peoples lived harmoniously with each other, even inventing a Welsh-Tehuelche hybrid language. Although I researched the Tehuelche culture as much as I could – including the folk-lore, myths and lifestyle – the character of Yeluc is my invention.
The incident with the dog bringing game is recorded, although this may be myth. The natural di
sasters – flooding, storms on the Maria Theresa, the loss of livestock, the drought and the eventual irrigation – are all recorded.
The main part of the book ends in approximately 1869. In subsequent years the Welsh obtained a bumper harvest, and they were soon winning prizes for their wheat. The colony grew, spread west to the Andes and today there are five towns with a significant Welsh character and population – Trevelin and Esquel in the Andes, and Gaiman, Trelew and Rawson towards the Atlantic coast. On satellite pictures from space the eastern towns are green patches in a yellow-brown landscape. They still hold Eisteddfodau and are proud of their Welsh heritage. The Welsh language spoken in Patagonia is a unique blend of both north and south Welsh. Their other language is Spanish, and they consider themselves to be Welsh-Argentines. Gaiman is the most Welsh-looking of the towns, but the eastern valley is littered with Welsh chapels and tea rooms, only differing from their counterparts in Wales in that the roofs tend to be corrugated iron rather than slate, offering greater resistance to the strong and frequent winds.
Thanks to a campaign by the Argentines started in the 1870s to rid Patagonia of its indigenous nomadic population (‘The Conquest of the Desert’) there are few Tehuelches left in South America, and the Tehuelche language is now an endangered one.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the North West Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation for grants which enabled me to go to Patagonia in 2004 and interview the descendants of the colonists.
Thank you also to the many people of Patagonia I interviewed, especially Luned Gonzales de Roberts (descendant of Michael D Jones), her sister Tegai Roberts (curator of the museum at Gaiman) and Erie James (Aaron Jenkins’ descendant) and also Albina de Zampini, Rachel Davies-Butrick, Rhiannon Gough, Dougie Berwyn and Lizzie Lloyd. Many thanks also to Gwyn and Mónica Jones who arranged my trip to Patagonia, Susan Wilkinson, author of Mimosa, for useful discussions, Elvey MacDonald, author of Yr Hirdaith, who was most helpful in giving me a list of people to see and places to visit, Harold W. Carr-Rollitt and Rini Griffiths, my guides in Patagonia, Fernando Coronato of the Centro Nacional Patagónico, and Robert Owen Jones (professor of Welsh at the university of Cardiff). I would also like to thank Morina Lloyd who taught me Welsh at Lampeter University, Howard and Elsa Malpas who gave me some shamanic training and the staff of the National Library of Wales, the British Library and the British Museum. Thank you also to the authors of the following books which I recommend for further reading: Mimosa by Susan Wilkinson, The Desert and the Dream by Glyn Williams, Hope and Heartbreak by Russell Davies, Shamanism by Mircia Eliade, The Language of the Blue Books by Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Epic of South America by John A Crow, Yr Hirdaith by Elvey MacDonald, Crónica de la Colonia Galesa de la Patagonia by Abraham Matthews, Patagonia Un Jardín Natural by María Elena Arce and Silvia Adriana-Gonzales, La Patagonia que Canta by William C Rhys and Una Frontera Lejana by Bill Jones et al and The Great Adventure by Aled Lloyd Davies, At Home with the Patagonians by George Musters.
The following people read this work in its various drafts and I am grateful to them for support and advice: my editor at Seren, Penny Thomas; Stuart Clark; Natasha Fairweather and her assistants Naomi Leon and Judy-Meg Kennedy at A.P. Watt; Carole Welch; Helen Garnons-Williams; my mother Nancy Jenkins; and my husband Christopher Dudman.
Thank you also to my friends in Chester and on-line for your support and encouragement.
