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Updated: May 13, 2025
It was not that kind of beauty so common in these countries, which bursts upon you like the sudden south-west wind called pampero, almost knocking the breath out of your body, then passing as suddenly away, leaving you with hair ruffled up and mouth full of dust.
"Then go and take a look at the barometer," he grunted, as he turned on his heel and swung away from me. In the chart-room was Captain West, pulling on his long sea-boots. That would have told me had there been no barometer, though the barometer was eloquent enough of itself. The night before it had stood at 30.10. It was now 28.64. Even in the pampero it had not been so low as that.
Last night's was a real pampero though a mild one. To-day's promised to be a far worse one, and then laughed at us as a proper cosmic joke. The wind, during the night, had so eased that by nine in the morning we had all our topgallant-sails set. By ten we were rolling in a dead calm. By eleven the stuff began making up ominously in the south'ard. The overcast sky closed down.
In a pampero off the River Plate we speculate, if we are disabled, of running in to Buenos Ayres, the "Paris of America," and I have visions of bright congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses, and of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices.
No longer was it a stubborn, loggy fight against pressures. The Elsinore moved. I could feel her slip, and slide, and send, and soar. Whereas before she had been flung continually down to port, she now rolled as far to one side as to the other. I knew what had taken place. Instead of remaining hove-to on the pampero, Captain West had turned tail and was running before it.
In Patagonia, where the phenomenon of dragon-fly storms is also known, an Englishman residing at the Rio Negro related to me the following occurrence which he witnessed there. A race meeting was being held near the town of El Carmen, on a high exposed piece of ground, when, shortly before sunset, a violent pampero wind came up, laden with dense dust-clouds.
At 2 P.M. it came with a roar and a rush, "butt-end foremost," as the saying is, preceded by a few huge drops of scurrying rain. "When the rain before the wind, Topsail sheets and halyards mind;" but that was for other conditions than ours. A pampero at its ordinary level is no joke; but this was the charge of a wild elephant, which would exhaust itself soon, but for the nonce was terrific.
During December and January when this desert world of thistles dead and dry as tinder continued standing, a menace and danger, the one desire and hope of every one was for the pampero the south-west wind, which in hot weather is apt to come with startling suddenness, and to blow with extraordinary violence.
Souley I found in a sad plight; Buck was snoring like great guns; O'Sullivan I thought had either been dreaming of the Pampero expedition, or taken too much whiskey during the delivery of Monsieur Souley's speech; Belmont had made a pillow of his Dutch bonds indeed the only specimen of humanity up and moving was Corporal Noggs, who expressed his anxiety to know what Marcy would say were he an eye-witness to the preliminaries.
Very early in the morning of the 3d of August a steamer called the Pampero departed from New Orleans for Cuba, having on board upward of 400 armed men with evident intentions to make war upon the authorities of the island. This expedition was set on foot in palpable violation of the laws of the United States.
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