Argentine Republic.

Northland Age, Volume 1, Issue 16, 29 November 1904, Page 3

Argentine Republic.

Australasia’s Chief Competitor. (Continued from last issue.) Before concluding this brief report on my investigations in the Argentine, I am fully convinced that a report touching on the possibilities of agriculture would not be complete unless some information or particulars were given of the vast rivers of that great republic. Although I have seen the majority of the most important rivers in the Argentine, and was very much impressed with their vastness, I am nevertheless not an expert on the subject of great rivers. I, therefore, bog to quote from the work of perhaps one of the greatest living investigators of the enormous rivers of South America, Elmer E. Corthell, D.R.S.C. I may also point out that Elmer E. Corthell has for years studied and investigated nearly all the large rivers of North America, and his comparisons of them with the rivers of South America must prove interesting to New Zealand people. In the year 1899 the Argentine Government conceived a very extensive project of river and harbour improvements, and at that time asked the United States Government for an expert engineer to execute the plans. The result was that Elmer E. Corthell, D.R.S.C., was selected, and the extracts quoted are from the work on his two years’ labour in the Argentine.

My object in bringing this question of rivers before the agriculturists of New Zealand is with a view to pointing out the advantages this great republic holds over many other agricultural exporting countries. In the first place it must be remembered that where a country has so many marvellously large rivers penetrating the agricultural districts, in some cases to the extent of four hundred miles, they afford an easy and ready means of conveying the farmers’ products to the sea-coast at a much lower cost than by railways. That is not all. In many of the best agricultural districts these great rivers act as a valuable source of irrigation for the land. Even the smaller rivers assist in this direction, for the reason that when slight floods take place a valuable amount of plant-food is left on the land, which naturally tends to add to the general fertility of the soil. Dealing with this subject, Mr. Corthell says : “ First, a deep shore-line of the Gulf of Mexico, in the United States, when the site of Galveston was far out in the waters and the coast was a hundred miles inland from the site of New Orleans—a wide and deep estuary a thousand miles long, reaching into the heart of the continent to between St. Louis and Cairo, where, at Cape Girardeau, it met the ridge of the Ozark Mountains stretching across the valley and holding back the ancient great, lake, which covered Chicago 200 ft. deep and spread over all the great prairie States, and received and distributed over its bed the immense sediments of the Missouri and other great rivers in the north. Then came the cyclic change, lifting Florida out of the water and turning continental drainage north, cutting its way through the alluvion to Hudson’s Bay. Then the breaking-down of the Ozark barrier, the draining of the submerged area, the subsequent filling of the estuary, and the advance of the alluvial lands into the »ulf to their present line, 110 miles jeyond New Orleans. A great and wonderful beneficence for the use and convenience of man by the Great Architect of the universe.

“ Had not my engineering experience upon the Mississippi River and its delta drawn my attention t 6 this extremely interesting ancient history of the great river of North America, I might not have been so deeply impressed by its remarkable similarity to that of the Parana River in South America; and for both industries I am indebted to engineering investigators, General Warren in the first instance, and Colonel George Earl Church, an American engineer, in the second instance, the latter probably better acquainted by personal contact with the geography and hydraulics of South America than any living man. I am indebted to him and to the Royal Geographical Society, of which he is a director and a correspondent, for most of what follows in relation to this ancient history of the great rivers of Argentine and Central South America. “There are four great breaks in the mountain-fringed continent, which we call its great commercial doorways—the Orinoco, the Amazon, the La Plata, and the deep indentation of Bahia Blanca—one in Venezuela, one in Brazil, and two in Argentine. The three river-basins occupy two-thirds of the entire area of South America.

“ The two with which we are most interested are the La Plata and Amazon, which have areas respectively of about 1,200,000 and 2,722,000 square miles. But if we deduct from the latter the valley of the Tocantins, which has no direct connection with it, the valley of the Amazon is 2,368,000 square miles; its principal branch, the Maderia, has a volume of discharge nearly equal to the Amazon itself, and at the falls, which I shall refer to later, it carries annually a volume equal to that of the La Plata, which has a minimum flow of about 534,000 cubic feet per second and a maximum of over 2,000,000 —a river 80 per cent, larger than the Mississippi, the Father of Waters, if we compare their mean annual discharges, the former being about 288 cubic miles and the latter 156 cubic miles. The Parana (the ‘Mother of the Sea ’ in Indian language), the principal affluent of the La Plata, is itself 46 per cent, larger than the Mississippi, its mean annual discharge being about 230 cubic miles. “ What a river the La Plata must have been in ancient times, when it had a maximum discharge of 4,000,000 cubic feet per second, well up towards the modern Amazon, estimated to be 5,297,000, and greater than the ancient Amazon!” (To be Continued.J