A revival of Argentina's Thoreau
The rediscovery of the work and influence of William Henry Hudson fans the flame of romantic naturalism.
from the April 24, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
His observations from The Naturalist in La Plata" have been with me for decades, non-sequiturs to glaze the eyes of my friends: The puma will never attack a human being, not even to defend itself. Birds in some flocks tend their injured or exhausted members, while cattle who are ill are often attacked by the herd. Guanaco in Patagonia have a place where they go to die. Nobody knows why.
One of his more famous books, a memoir of his youth, "Far Away and Long Ago," is rich with tales of Homeric gaucho knife-fighters, bandits, the cleverness of armadillos, the olfactory intelligence of horses, and the behaviors of spiders and serpents. The book reveals the preoccupation of Hudson's life: birds above all, birds during the time when they had no fear of men and darkened the skies in uncountable numbers.
Hudson began his memoir with a recollection of his natal house, the very building we were heading for: "The house of the Twenty-five Ombu trees ... gigantic in size and standing wide apart in a row about four hundred yards long."
The museum house blazes with white-washed brilliance as we approach through a forest. Only two 400-year-old ombus remain. "Hudson predicted it would disappear," Ravera said of the species which is actually a giant herb, "because it has no use for man." But it won't, if the park staff has its way: in the past two decades they've planted 25 ombus and thousands of other indigenous trees.
Hudson artifacts are displayed in the three-room house: his watch; a sketch for the William Rothenstein portrait of Hudson that hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery; and rustic touches that recall his naturalist activities: ostrich eggs, a puma skull, the skeleton of an armadillo, the clay nest of the peculiar oven bird.
A painting of a bird, donated by the Japanese city of Yokohama, recalls Hudson's link to Japan, established by the marriage of his grandniece, Laura Denholm Hudson, to Yoshi Shinya, the first Japanese immigrant to Buenos Aires. Their child, Violeta Shinya, became the first director of the museum, in 1964. Hudson's books reached Japan late in the 19th century, and were included in the curriculum when the study of English was instituted in the schools.
"The Japanese," a local historian wrote, "found in Hudson a defender of nature, an attitude close to the pantheistic spiritualism of Shinto, the traditional veneration of the natural world."
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