Read Lynette Roberts: Collected Poems Online
Authors: Lynette Roberts
Pendine Sands, a few miles from Laugharne and Llansteffan.
This poem is not part of the manuscript of
The Fifth Pillar
, and seems to have been written later. It is typed up on a sheet of paper with various
fragments
of other, also unfinished, poems, and was probably written after the
Fifth Pillar
poems.
In 1948–9, Roberts moved to a caravan in Laugharne, adjacent to the
graveyard
. She divorced Rhys the following year.
El Dorado
This verse-play was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 1 and 5 February 1953
and repeated twice. The story is taken from an article, among Roberts’s papers, from
the
Buenos Aires Herald
, 28 July 1936. The article was sent to her by T. Hughes Cadvan, the son-in-law of
J.D. Evans, the sole survivor of the massacre of the Welsh colonists, and one of the
original
colonists who landed on the Patagonian shores in 1865. Cadvan Hughes had read Roberts’s
piece ‘Patagonia’ in
Wales
, and in his letter he tells her that the article is written by him from Evans’s own
account:
His version,
to me
, is stirring in its simplicity; a story told without any effort to colour or exalt
his own participation nor to justify his actions. His sole purpose, as he told me,
was to leave to posterity a true and exact account of what had happened. […] I have
no time to translate in all its detail the story as he dictated it in Welsh but I
am sending you a clipping from the B.A. Herald of July 28
th
1936 in which you will find the story almost complete as I wrote it at the time (Letter
of 14 January 1946).
Hughes ends the letter by adding a couple of
eglynion
from a friend of his in Chubut ‘to show that there are Welshmen with poetic leanings
living in Patagonia’.
There are also among Roberts’s papers two letters from a Geoffrey Parry
Rhys of Weston-Super-Mare, great-grandson of the Parry who was killed in the Kel Kein
confrontation (‘I have always been told he was scalped!’), asking for a copy of ‘El
Dorado’.
The broad outlines of the story are as follows: in late 1883, four young Welsh men
went prospecting for gold, following the Chubut river, on a journey to the interior
of the territory that would take three and a half months. When, at the end of February
1884, they reached the confluence of the Chubut and the Lepá rivers, they found no
gold, but met two Indians, who invited them back to their camp in Súnica. The Welsh
were
suspicious
, and decided to hurry back to the colony, a journey of over 300 miles. It was a dangerous
and difficult journey, and two of the men, Parry and Hughes, became so exhausted that
they had to be strapped to their saddles. By 4 March they had crossed the Chubut and
reached the Kel Kein valley. Evans rode off to hunt for food, and when he returned
the men were attacked by the Indians. Only Evans escaped, by riding his horse into
a steep gulley, gaining precious time over the Indians, who were forced to make a
detour to avoid the dangerous descent. According to the article, he looked behind
him and saw ‘his comrade Davies falling from his horse speared through, Parry with
a spear stuck in his side but still keeping his seat’. Evans eventually reached the
Iamacan river, and rejoined the Chubut. When he reached Gaiman, he was taken in by
another Welsh settler, and noticed for the first time a gash in his armpit where he
too had been speared. When told of the incident, the founder of the Welsh colony,
Lewis Jones, refused to believe that the Indians had done this, as relations between
the Welsh and the Indians had always been good, and Jones considered himself ‘a personal
friend of the Indian chiefs’. Jones himself led an expedition to verify Evans’s account
of the incident, and took Evans with him. According to the article, ‘The bodies of
the unfortunate young men lay where they had fallen mutilated in the most cruel and
savage manner, too revolting for description’. The bodies were buried there in a single
grave, and a short service held. A marble monument, paid for by subscription, was
later placed at the spot. Evans later farmed and started the first flour mill in the
area, and became known as ‘El Molinaro’. In the photograph accompanying the article,
Evans sits beside the monument to his horse, ‘El Malacara’.
L
YNETTE
R
OBERTS
was born in Buenos Aires of Welsh family in 1909 and died in West Wales in 1995.
She published two collections of poems in her lifetime, both from Faber and Faber:
Poems
(1944) and
Gods with Stainless Ears
(subtitled ‘A Heroic Poem’; 1951). She married the Welsh writer and editor Keidrych
Rhys.
P
ATRICK
M
C
G
UINNESS
is translator of Mallarmé’s
For Anatole’s Tomb
(2003) and author of a book of poems,
The Canals of Mars
(2004).
First published in Great Britain in 2005
by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ
This ebook edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
Works by Lynette Roberts copyright © Angharad and Prydein Rhys 2005
Preface copyright © Angharad Rhys 2005
Selection, introduction and editorial matter copyright © Patrick McGuinness 2005
The right of Patrick McGuinness to be identified as the editor of this work has been
asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of
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Epub ISBN 978–1–84777–564–1
Mobi ISBN 978–1–84777–565–8
The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England