Murky Waters all the way from Rio de La Plata

Day 21, Friday, November 25, 2016,  St. Jocunda, 33 ° 52 S, 52 ° 04 W.

The waters are murky, the Sarmiento de Gamboa ‘s desalination plant produced 30% more water than yesterday and the probes have detected a marked  change in the salinity levels. Even at two hundred miles from Buenos Aires, we still get Río de la Plata’s brown waters here. This river which is considered the widest river in the world, forms an estuary with two other rivers, the Parana and the Uruguay . The river’s mouth, which is 219 kms wide, and whose sweet and herbal breath, opens into the Atlantic, is loaded with nutrients, silt and clay. It is like a moving continent: 160 million tons of sediment each year. This South American Nile is watched over by two mythical cities, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, which unfortunately I will not visit during this trip, but I will dream about them.

Darwin visited these two cities back in 1833, while his ship the Beagle explored the coast, and he was entranced by the Spanish women. He wrote to his sisters: “It would do you well to come to Buenos Aires, but I sorry you can’t” . During an excursion to Santa Fe in search of fossils (which is 480 kms. away), Darwin became ill with fevers, possibly malaria, and Moorehead his biographer wrote: “Strange remedies were applied to him, such as a compress full of chopped beans and placed twisted on his head and other remedies too disgusting to mention here”.

On that voyage, Darwin witnessed the extermination of the Indians, who were executed by general Rosas. “It was horrible specially because they killed in cold blood all the young women that appear ed to be over twenty years old!” And when I protested in the name of humanity, they replied: “What can we do?” These savage young women have so many children! ” Darwin wrote in his diary.

I am sad not to be able to set foot in Montevideo Bay and spend two or three months looking for fossils in the Paraná. As the Sarmiento de Gamboa continues sailing southwards, on board the crew carries on with their daily tasks of maintenance, and only the presence of some seabirds reveal our proximity to the Río de la Plata delta.