TAMPICO.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 228, 26 September 1929, Page 8

TAMPICO.

A ROMANTIC NAME. BUT RATHER A DULL PORT. "STINK AND MOSQUITOES." THE DECLINE OF THE OIL FIELDS. Some places are blest with names that fairly throb with the music of romance. Penang, Zamboanga, Valparaiso, Zanzibar, Santiago—they vibrate with the same exotic melody that is captured in Ketelby's piece, "In. a Persian Market." Anything could happens in a port so seductively named. On the shores of all the seven seas there is no port with a more alluring name than Tampico. A poetic name! One wonders why Masefield has not made something of it. It's three syllables fall staccato, vibrantly reminiscent of lizard skin drums throbbing in the depths of dark tropic forests, when cannibals dance round the Stone of Sacrifice. Tampico, Tampico, the stamp and shuffle of. bare feet, the naked warriors whirling and writhing in swift circles round their stone idols, and the lizard skin drums | booming, booming, booming . . . Sad Disillusionment. All very romantic, quite thrilling, in lact; but it is a sad disillusionment to listen to the officers of the Weir Line motor ship Oakbank, which arrived at Auckland this week with a cargo of asphalt from that very port of Tampico. "Tampico? Pah! There's nothing to it. All stink and mosquitoes," is the opinion of the second officer, who favours the Yankee idiom in his speech, and does not care a cuss for visionary romance. Eio-ht days in Tampico was a week waste.d,°he declares. "Of all the ports which are a haven of joy to sea-weary sailormen Tampico is the most delightful—we don't think."

Tampico is one of the chief ports of Mexico. It lies on the ilio Panuco, nine miles from where the river runs into the Gulf of Mexico. The big Laguna di Tampico spreads out for miles about, a hideous steaming morass of oily water mud and mangroves. Every objectionable form of animal life swarms there ranging in size from 30ft anacondas and 20ft alligators down to bird-eating spiders and the..tiny mosquitoes thatl

breed by the million and inject the germs of yellow fever into their victims. But there is cargo there, and wharves at which to load it, so the reluctant skippers of tramp vessels read their orders, fill the medicine eliest with quinine, and lay their course for Tampico with little more than the ordinary cuss words. Mexico Civilised. Everything that romantic authors havo written about Mexico, from the doubtful history of Rider Haggard's Montezuma's Daughter" to the revolutionary heroics of Peter B. Ivyne's "Webster, Man's Man," is utterly lack-: , iug in Tampico. There has not been a revolutionary battle there for years; the revolutions are all over before Tampico knows that they are on. The people are certainly a little "foreign looking," ranging in colour from the creamy yellow of the pure Spanish type to the jet black of the Indian-Negro hybrid. According to tradition they should all go armed to the. teeth with knives and guns and lariats, but the fact is that the men of the Oak bank never saw a single corpse during the whole of their eight day's stay. Even when the second mate, ever responsive to a pair of sparkling eyes, went gallivanting in the dark lanes of the city, no one tried to slip a stiletto under his left shoulder-blade, though, according to his brother officers, he thoroughly earned that fate. Prolonged contact with Americans and Britishers have quite civilised the "dago" population of Tampico. They do not even drink wine. Beer, German lager for preference, is the popular thirst-quencher, an incoupiuous beverage with which to wash I down a meal of frijoles and tamales. It seems to work all right, though," says the chief officer. "Xo 'vino' for me when there is plenty of good Pilzener about." Export of Oil. Oil is the chief , reason for Tampico's being. Up in the low hills back of the town a forest of frame derricks has replaced the ancient jungle. In the first , clays of the oil discovery Tampico boomed. No method of utilising crude oil had then been invented, and millions of tons of it was poured into the lagoon. Only the petrol was exported. Now the 'field is declining. The wells have been : driven so deep that salt water, seepage from the lagoon, comes up with the petroleum, and has to be extracted by a 1 machine similar to a cream separator, s Through this much of the product of the : wells runs to waste. The river and the ( lagoon are covered inches deep with black oil, so that one forgets the water under- : neath. It seems all oil. "The porpoises is have Diesel engines in them, and. the [I

flowers have a scent like a motor,car exhaust," says the chief officer of the Oakbauk. „ In part the decline of the Tampico oil field is due to the super-patriotic legislation of the Mexican Government. An excessively heavy export duty on petrol is strangling the industry. Only;, one company is now working there, and it survives by utilising practically everything that conies out of the wells. Petrol and crude oil are obtained by various stages of distillation, and the residuum becomes the asphalt which the Oakbauk has brought to make smooth our Neff Zealand roads.