Jones · 1865
Michael D. Jones and Welsh Patagonia
On the twenty-eighth of July 1865, the converted tea-clipper *Mimosa* dropped anchor in the open bay of Puerto Madryn on the Atlantic coast of Patagonia, in the southern Argentine territory of Chubut, after a fifty-eight-day voyage from Liverpool. On board were one hundred and fifty-three Welsh-speaking emigrants, principally from Carnarvon, Bala, and the south-Wales mining valleys, together with a Patagonian-Spanish navigator and a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist minister. The expedition was the founding settlement of *Y Wladfa*, the colony, the deliberate establishment of a Welsh-speaking polity outside Britain in a country where the Welsh language and the Welsh chapel might be free of English administrative pressure. The architect of the project was the Reverend Michael Daniel Jones (1822–1898), Principal of the Calvinistic Methodist seminary at Bala, son of the *Mary Jones* minister Thomas Charles's successor, who had spent eight years (1858–1865) lecturing, fundraising and negotiating with the Argentine government to secure the colonisation grant. The colony was a precarious near-failure for a decade, then took root, and by the early twentieth century was a thriving bilingual community of about ten thousand. By the early twenty-first century, Welsh remains a language of about five thousand inhabitants of the lower Chubut valley, the small towns of Trelew, Gaiman, Trevelin, and the Andean foothills around Esquel.
It is a quarter past four on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of July 1865, on the open beach at Puerto Madryn on the Atlantic coast of Patagonia, in dry winter cold. The Mimosa, the converted tea-clipper that has carried the company for fifty-eight days from Liverpool, is at anchor a quarter of a mile out, in the windbreak of the headland. The first launch is at the surf with thirty of the emigrants, mostly the older men and women, the navigator Captain Lewis Jones at the tiller. The Reverend Michael Daniel Jones is not on the launch; he is in Bala, in north Wales, having stayed in Britain to organise the next sailing. The minister on the Mimosa, the Reverend Lewis Humphreys, has read the form of land-thanksgiving on the deck before the launch went over the side.
On the launch, in the cold wind, Captain Lewis Jones is forty-eight years old. He is the principal organiser of the colony in the field, second only to the absent Michael D. He has, at his belt, the deed of the colonisation grant of the Argentine government of 1862, in Spanish, signed by President Bartolomé Mitre. The grant gives the Welsh company the country between the rivers Negro and Chubut, sixteen thousand square miles, on condition that the company establish a viable agricultural settlement at the lower Chubut within five years.
Lewis Jones thinks, as the launch closes the surf: the country we are looking at from the launch is treeless and dry, and the river is twenty-eight miles inland and we have not seen it. The grant we are holding is for a country we have, this afternoon, no reason to suppose can be farmed.
He thinks: Michael D. is in Bala. Michael D. has been writing to me for six months that the company will be sailing again in March of next year. Michael D. has written that the colony has to hold the lower Chubut for the next year on the strength of one hundred and fifty-three of us.
He thinks: we have, on the Mimosa, six months of food and six bags of seed. We have one Patagonian-Welsh fluent speaker (myself), one minister, and seventeen children under five. The eldest emigrant is sixty-three.
He thinks: the country is ours by the grant. The grant is on paper. The country is here. The two have to be brought together by the work of the next year, and there are not yet enough hands.
He thinks: Michael D. is right. The Welsh language has to live somewhere it cannot be taught out of children. The lower Chubut is the somewhere.
The launch grounds at twenty past four. The thirty emigrants step out into water that is, by Lewis Jones's later memoir, ankle-deep and bitter cold. They walk up the dry beach. The first child to land, by the tradition of the colony, is the four-year-old Ellis Williams of Carnarvon, carried up the beach on the shoulder of the cooper Edmund Jones. The minister, Lewis Humphreys, kneels on the sand and reads the form of the Welsh-language thanksgiving. The company sing a verse of Ymadawiad Arthur, by Goronwy Owen. There are, on the headland behind the beach, no signs of human habitation in any direction.
The colony's first three years were brutal. The walking party that crossed the dry country between Madryn and the lower Chubut River lost three children to dehydration on the way. The first crops failed. The Tehuelche people of the Patagonian interior, who came down to the river in the second winter, brought meat and supplies and the knowledge of the country, and the Welsh-Tehuelche peace held until the Argentine state's Conquest of the Desert of 1879–84 broke the Tehuelche themselves. The second wave of Welsh emigration, in March 1866, brought a further two hundred and forty settlers; by 1880 the colony had reached two thousand, by 1914 about ten thousand. The lower Chubut Valley today (Trelew, Gaiman, Dolavon) and the Andean foothills (Esquel, Trevelin) are bilingual Welsh-Spanish in their public signage, the Welsh-medium primary schools were re-established with the support of the Wales-Argentina partnership programmes from the 1990s, and the eisteddfodau (Welsh literary-musical competitions) of Patagonia have been held continuously since 1875. The Welsh-Argentine community produced, by 2020, around five thousand active Welsh-speakers in Argentina, the largest community of Welsh-speakers outside Britain. Michael Daniel Jones never visited the colony. He died at Bala in 1898, seventy-five years old. His grave is in the Bala parish churchyard. The first land deed of the colony, signed by Lewis Jones in 1865, is in the archive of the National Library of Wales.