Lyn

Wales has a colony in Patagonia because a people who sailed there to grow wheat were kept alive by hunters who brought them meat. In 1865, 153 Welsh men, women and children left Liverpool on a converted tea clipper called the Mimosa. They had been promised a new Wales across the Atlantic, beyond the reach of English landlords and the English language, and the men who scouted it had come home describing green country by a river. They were going to plough it and sow wheat. They landed on 28 July. It was winter. In front of them was gravel, dry scrub and a wind off the steppe that did not stop. There was almost no fresh water near the bay, and the river they had been promised was a long walk south. Some of the first arrivals sheltered in caves dug into the cliffs. They reached the river valley and planted. The first harvests failed. They were people from chapel valleys who knew how to farm Welsh weather, set down where it barely rained. Within months they were rationing, and then they were starving. Then the Tehuelche came. The Tehuelche were the hunters of that steppe. They lived on guanaco, the wild cousin of the llama, and on rhea, the big flightless bird of the plains, run down on horseback and brought down with bolas, stones on cords whirled and thrown at the legs. They had no reason to help a camp of strangers in black coats, and they helped anyway. They traded. Meat and hides for whatever the Welsh could spare, and the Welsh could spare a little bread. They taught the young men to ride after guanaco and throw the bolas. The colony began to eat. The Tehuelche liked Welsh bread so much they took the Welsh word for it home. They came to farmhouse doors asking for bara, and the word passed into the talk of the steppe. In 1867 a woman called Rachel Jenkins watched the river rise and suggested its water could be led out across the dry ground. Her husband Aaron dug the first channel. Irrigation came. The wheat came after it, eventually, and the colony stuck. Gaiman, in Chubut, still serves Welsh tea and bara brith to tourists, and Welsh is still spoken there. The guidebooks tell it as a story of irrigation and chapels and stubbornness, and it was. It was also a story of the years when the wheat failed, and the only food in that desert was running about on four legs and two, and the people who knew how to catch it decided to share.