Michael D. Jones and Welsh Patagonia

A nation is sometimes preserved not on the ground it was born on, but on a coastline eight thousand miles away, by men who calculate that the only way to keep a language alive is to put an ocean between it and the schoolroom that would beat it out of children. The instrument of such a calculation is rarely a soldier or a prince. More often it is a chapel principal with a quiet voice, a ledger, and the patience to spend eight years writing letters in three languages to a government on another continent.

THE PRINCIPAL AT BALA

Michael Daniel Jones was born at Llanuwchllyn in 1822, son of the Calvinistic Methodist minister who had succeeded Thomas Charles in the Bala chapel, and by the late 1850s he was Principal of the seminary there. He had spent two years in Cincinnati in the 1840s and had watched what happened to the Welsh of the Ohio valley: by the second generation the chapel was English, by the third the surnames were the only Welsh thing left. He came home convinced that scattering Welsh-speakers into an English-speaking polity was a slow form of erasure, whether the polity was Ohio or Merthyr or the new board schools that the Westminster parliament was preparing to impose on the parishes of north Wales. The remedy, he wrote in Y Cylchgrawn, was gwladfa: a colony, a place where the language was the language of the magistrate, the schoolroom, the deed of sale, and the hymn. Australia was English. Canada was English. The United States was English. The map of the world was being narrowed to one tongue, and somewhere on it there had to be a corner that was not.

THE GRANT

He chose Patagonia by elimination. The Argentine republic, ten years after the fall of Rosas, was actively recruiting European settlers into the empty country south of the Río Negro, and was prepared to legislate in the settlers' favour. Through 1862 and 1863 Jones corresponded with Buenos Aires through the agent Lewis Jones, no relation, a Caernarfon printer who spoke serviceable Spanish. The grant came back signed by President Bartolomé Mitre: sixteen thousand square miles between the Negro and the Chubut, on the condition that the company plant a working agricultural settlement at the lower Chubut within five years. Michael D. raised the passage money by lecture tours through the chapels of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, mortgaged his own seminary salary against the charter of the Mimosa, and on the twenty-eighth of May 1865 watched her clear the Mersey from the quayside at Liverpool. He did not sail. The next company would need a man in Wales to organise it, and he was that man.

THE BEACH AT MADRYN

It is a quarter past four on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of July 1865, on the open beach at New Bay, in the dry winter cold of the Patagonian coast. The Mimosa lies a quarter of a mile off, in the windbreak of the headland, fifty-eight days out of Liverpool. The first launch is at the surf with thirty of the emigrants, the older men and women, the navigator Lewis Jones at the tiller. The Reverend Lewis Humphreys has read the form of land-thanksgiving from the deck before the launch went over the side. The headland behind the beach shows no sign of human habitation in any direction. The river that the grant speaks of is twenty-eight miles inland, and not one man on the launch has seen it.

A SECOND OF TIME ON THE WATER

Lewis Jones is forty-eight, and he has at his belt the deed of 1862, in Spanish, signed by Mitre. He is the principal organiser in the field, second only to the absent Michael D., and as the launch closes the surf the arithmetic of the colony arranges itself in his head with the cold clarity of a balance sheet. One hundred and fifty-three souls. Six months of food. Six bags of seed. Seventeen children under five. One Patagonian-Welsh fluent speaker, himself. One minister. The eldest emigrant sixty-three years old. The country ahead of them treeless, the river out of sight, the next ship not due until March. The grant is paper; the country is here; the work of the next year has to bring the two together, and there are not yet enough hands. He has read Michael D.'s last letter four times on the voyage. The Welsh language has to live somewhere it cannot be taught out of children; the lower Chubut is the somewhere. The sentence is, on this beach, a sentence that has to be made true by men who are about to step into ankle-deep water with no second opinion. The launch grounds at twenty past four. The four-year-old Ellis Williams of Carnarvon is carried up the beach on the shoulder of the cooper Edmund Jones. Humphreys kneels on the sand and reads the Welsh thanksgiving. The company sing a verse of Goronwy Owen's Cywydd y Farn Fawr, and the wind takes most of it.

THE FIRST WINTER

The walking party that crossed the dry country between New Bay and the lower Chubut lost three children to thirst on the way. The first crops failed. The wells were brackish, the wheat rotted, the cattle strayed. In the second winter the Tehuelche came down to the river out of the interior, brought guanaco meat and the knowledge of where the freshwater was, and showed the Welsh how to ride down rhea on the open pampas. A Welsh-Tehuelche peace was made, in a country where almost no other settler peace held, and it lasted as long as the Tehuelche themselves lasted, which was until the Argentine army's Conquista del Desierto of 1879 to 1884 broke them. The second sailing in March 1866 brought a further two hundred and forty settlers, as Michael D. had promised in his letter. Irrigation channels were cut from the Chubut in 1867. The first wheat that took stood in 1868. By 1875 the colony had built a chapel and held its first eisteddfod on the river bank.

BALA, 1898

Michael Daniel Jones never crossed the Atlantic. He stayed at the seminary, lectured, raised the second and third companies, defended the colony in print against the English-language papers that called it a folly, and watched its returns come in by the post from Buenos Aires. He died at Bala on the second of December 1898, seventy-five years old. His grave is in the parish churchyard, half a mile from the chapel where he had read the first appeal for Y Wladfa forty years before. He had founded a country he never saw, in a language he had been told would be dead within two generations, on a coast he knew only from a chart on his study wall.

THE LANGUAGE ON THE CHUBUT

The lower Chubut Valley is bilingual on its public signage today, in Trelew and Gaiman and Dolavon, as are Esquel and Trevelin in the Andean foothills where a second wave of the colony pushed west in 1885. The eisteddfodau of Patagonia have been held without a break since 1875. The Welsh-medium primary schools were re-established from the 1990s under the Wales-Argentina partnership, and by 2020 around five thousand people in the province of Chubut spoke Welsh, the largest community of Welsh-speakers outside Britain. The schoolroom that Michael D. feared in north Wales did, in the end, take its toll on the language at home; the schoolroom on the Chubut, in his name and his calculation, did not. The first land deed of the colony, signed by Lewis Jones in the winter of 1865, is in the archive of the National Library of Wales.

A language survives by being needed somewhere. It is needed where the magistrate uses it, where the deed is written in it, where the child cannot avoid it in the playground. To engineer such a place from a study in north Wales, by correspondence in three tongues over eight years, and to never set foot on the ground one has engineered, is a kind of authorship that does not often appear in the histories of nations. In the Bala churchyard the headstone is plain. Eight thousand miles away, on the bank of the Chubut at Gaiman, the chapel bell still rings in Welsh on a Sunday morning.