Welsh Journals

again about the history of movements which have experienced such violent changes. IEUAN GWYNEDD JONES. Swansea. Y WLADFA. By R. Bryn Williams. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1962. Pp. 334. 25s. The preface to this volume envisages a Spanish adaptation which is to appear later, but does not mention an English translation. It is, therefore, of some importance to draw the attention of English readers to this remarkable book, and to give some indication of its contents. For it constitutes what may well be the definitive account of the origin and fortunes of the Welsh settlement in Patagonia. The author certainly had unusual qualifications for the task which he has accomplished. At the age of seven he accompanied his family to Patagonia. He became bilingual, Welsh and Spanish. While working as a farm labourer, and later as an assistant in a co-operative store, he began to take an interest in the cultural life of the settlement, and so, at the age of 21, he returned to Wales to resume his education, eventually graduating in the University of Wales. He soon gave evidence of a distinct literary gift, and he has published four volumes dealing mainly with the literary history of the settlement. He therefore brought to the task of writing this last work a thorough acquaintance with the traditions of the Welsh in Patagonia, together with a mastery of the Welsh, Spanish, and English sources. With the aid of a Leverhulme grant he revisited the country some two years ago to complete the spade-work for this book. He writes with detachment, and is free from the romanticism which has generally coloured the views of Welsh people about this heroic, if misguided, attempt to plant a Welsh colony in the uttermost ends of the earth. There is a surprising amount of new material in the book. The reviewer can testify to the difficulty of finding information about the attempted settlement in Brazil which preceded Patagonia, but, far away in the Andes, Mr. Williams unearthed the papers of Thomas Benbow Phillips, its founder, and in some half-a-dozen pages he gives an all-too-brief account of the settlement, which he claims to have been much better planned than the one which followed. It turns out that Michael D. Jones was not the originator of the idea of a settlement in Patagonia. The idea originated in the United States, and the intention was, in the first place, to send to South America a number of settlers who were already acquainted with the problems of frontier life, and who would form a nucleus for a later community. But enthusiasm waned in the United States, with the coming of the Civil War and competition from the Welsh settlements in Missouri and Kansas. Michael D. Jones, also, lost interest for a time, but this was revived through the infectious advocacy of Lewis Jones. These are the two men who figure most prominently in the