130 PATAGONIA AND SHEEP-REARING 



only of the most desolate regions in the south of the 

 Rio Negro district and north of Santa Cruz. The 

 expansion of white colonization began only about 

 1880. Until then the interior was abandoned to the 

 indigenous tribes and was almost entirely unknown. 

 The Atlantic coast alone had been explored. The 

 travels of Villarino along the Rio Negro and the Limay 

 as far as Lake Nahuel Huapi had left only a faded 

 memory.^ North of the Rio Negro, Woodbine Parish 

 (1859), making use of the notes left by Cruz, who 

 had crossed the Andes and the Indian territory between 

 Antuco and Melincue in 1806, was the first to publish 

 definite information, to which no addition would be 

 made during the next forty years. ^ 



The settlements founded on the coast by the Spaniards 

 at the close of the eighteenth century (S. Jose and 

 P. Deseado) were ephemeral. Only one of them 

 maintained an obscure existence. Carmen de Patagones, 

 some miles above the mouth of the Rio Negro. One 

 of its chief resources was the export of salt. Expeditions 

 for this purpose began on the Patagonian coast about 

 the middle of the eighteenth century {Journey from 

 San Martin to Puerto San Julian about 1753, Coll. de 

 Angelis, V). After the revolution, Buenos Aires finally 

 abandoned these costly expeditions by land to the 

 salt districts of the Pampa, and was supplied with salt 

 by schooners from Carmen. During the war with 

 Brazil and the blockade of the Rio de la Plata, Carmen, 

 protected by the bar of the Rio Negro, and the Bay 

 of San Bias were the harbours in which Argentine, 

 English and French privateers concealed their prizes 

 and did their repairs after the storms of the Gulf of 

 Santa Catarina. D'Orbigny visited Carmen during 

 this period of equivocal prosperity. One of the most 



' Diario de D. Basilio Villarino del reconocimiento que hizo del Rio 

 Negro en el ana de 1782 (Coll. de Angelis, vi). 



» It is Woodbine Parish who corrects Villarino 's mistake in con- 

 fusing the Neuquen, at its confluence with the Limay, with the Rio 

 Diamante, known in the south of the Mendoza province. 



