Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey

by John Masters

  'Babor cinco — así!'

  'Así, así, así!'

  This was what I had given up — my executive power and skill, the ability to cause masses of men and machinery to work efficiently together for an object higher than themselves, transcending themselves and their own desires or thoughts. The captain and crew of the Lautaro were more important to the world than I was, and a great deal less selfish, but when would any of their names appear in Who's Who, as mine already had? I wished I could exchange my small fame for that sense of doing a public work, and doing it well, which I had once had. I missed it. But it was gone, beyond recall, and I would have to live with nothing more than the memory.

  Now it was my turn to stand champagne all round, and we repaired to the ward-room. There Patricio pored over a chart, found our exact position, off the western shore of Deceit Island, and then picked out a small unnamed island nearby. He pointed it out through the porthole and formally named it on the chart ISLOTE MASTERS. We had another drink.

  The beat of the engines suddenly slowed, and a voice called, 'Captain, to the bridge!' — but Patricio was already there.

  Fierro on watch, pointed to the echo-sounder. It had been recording 30 fathoms under our keel. It was now down to 12, and as we watched it recorded 8. Fierro had the engines to slow and we inched forward. The echo-sounder gave 5 fathoms and Patricio had his hand ready to signal 'Full astern' on the telegraph, for we drew about 15 feet. We glided on... 5... 6... 5... 10... 15... 30... 30. After a quarter of an hour Patricio ordered speed resumed, while Fierro carefully plotted and recorded the position of the unmarked reef. Then we went back to our champagne.

  By mid afternoon we were approaching Navarino Island, and were surrounded by whales. All around us the choppy surface of the sea was marked by little puffs as though of steam, rising six to twenty feet above the water. The nearest was a quarter of a mile to port, but barely a hundred yards away I clearly saw three huge blue-black backs rolling along just below the surface.

  We entered the Beagle Channel, and puttered eastward, stopping off at a couple of two-house settlements, before reaching Puerto Williams. This was named after one of the Chilean admiral heroes, most of whom were of British descent. Here Chile was building a small naval base and colony, complete with a hospital and maternity ward, in competition with Ushuaia on the opposite, Argentine, shore.

  Until then women from the little estancias tucked into these bays and fiords would go to Ushuaia to have their babies, who were thus automatically born as Argentine citizens. Now they would be Chileans.

  A mile or so east of the new colony was the settlement of Mejillones, where the last of the Yahgans, about thirty in number, lived. It was a sad place, tenebrous with the blight that has stricken all American Indians since the white man came. I spoke with a wrinkled brown-skinned crone who was said to be over 100 — that last pure-blooded Yahgan of whom I had heard in Punta Arenas. Then I walked alone on the bleak shore, my mind full of the desolation which had come upon the Yahgan, the Ona, and the Alcaluf, all once, like the seals and the eagles, living parts of this savage southern world.

  It was raining next morning when I awoke, determined to climb the low mountain behind Puerto Williams. Germain and a Lieutenant Portilla, stationed at Williams, agreed to go with me, and soon we set off into the forest, armed with sandwiches, botas of wine and, in Germain's case, a new Spanish automatic. The drizzle continued, and we came to a wide stream. Germain fell in, but was no wetter than the rest of us. We left the edge of the sea and turned inland, among great fallen trees, moss swaying from the standing beeches, and began to climb on faint and sometimes confusing animal trails. The trees were dense at first but gradually grew smaller and more widely spaced as we climbed. Here, as everywhere in that wind-dominated region, some trees grew vertically while others had bowed to the constant force and grew almost as creepers or bushes.

  We reached the tree line about noon, some 11,800 feet above the Beagle Channel. Germain was indecently full of energy, singing songs, making funny noises, imitating his instructor at the naval school, and shooting off his automatic in all directions. He made me feel about eighty-five years old.

  Above the tree line the mountain went on up in shale, gravel, and thick springy moss, with occasional small streams. Soon the mist thickened and we could no longer see the crest above us. We decided to turn back. Back in the trees we sat on a fallen trunk for a rest. Germain suddenly gasped, and pointed. A large animal was staring at us from the forest thirty yards off. Germain and Portilla both cried 'Llama!' but it was a guanaco, for there are no llamas that far south. It wandered off, not very alarmed, making a harsh, strange cry, something like a parrot's. I ran after it and got a dubious photograph. For fifteen minutes afterwards we heard five or six guanacos calling down the hill, but never saw any more.

  Next day the Lautaro set off on a cruise whose main purpose was to establish, once more, Chile's claim to the three small islands at the east end of the Beagle Channel — Nueva, Picton, and Lenox. When asked to arbitrate the original boundary dispute between Argentina and Chile in this area, King Edward VII of England ruled that the Beagle Channel should be the frontier. That seemed clear, since the Channel runs almost dead straight, and due east and west, all the disputed islands lying well to the south of it, that is, on the Chilean side.

  Then Argentina claimed that the Channel did not go straight out to sea, but turned sharp south, narrowed from three miles to 500 yards, and passed between Navarino and Picton, leaving Picton and its two small companions on the Argentine side. Chile rejected this ridiculous claim, and kept a few retired sailors and marines living on the islands to confirm its ownership.

  It was a beautiful day, a strong west wind blowing us down the Beagle Channel, the mountains of Argentine Tierra del Fuego a wall of snow to the north, the small one we had climbed on Navarino yesterday now clear in purple and russet autumn colours to the south, the white cavalry of the sea cantering eastwards beside us, the sun shining. Looking down the Channel towards the sun there were times when I could not see the surface for the luminous curtain of spray, 300 feet high, hanging over it. Water devils, like tornadoes, were being formed continually, to pirouette off down wind, half obscured by whirling rainbows.

  We anchored in a tiny cove on Picton Island, and at once a dozen sailors went off in the whaleboat to look for erizos. These sea-urchins, together with the Alaskan king crab or sea-spider, are common in those cold waters, and that night we had erizos in scrambled eggs as well as the usual way, that is, cold with lemon, chopped raw onions, and brown bread on the side. The night was as lovely as the day, all the stars a-glitter and the Southern Cross directly overhead.

  Next day a smoke signal on Nueva drew us in to pick up a colonist who wanted to go to Punta Arenas. On Lenox we embarked a sergeant of marines and his wife, and the radio operator went ashore to examine another settler's radio transmitter, which was giving trouble. He came back an hour later and reported briefly to Patricio. 'It won't work now.'

  'Good,' Patricio said, dismissing the man.

  We were alone in the ward-room, and I raised an eyebrow. 'We suspect that settler of communicating secretly with the Argentine navy in Ushuaia,' Patricio said. 'It's difficult to prove... but easy to stop.'

  We made a night passage, steering by radar only for practice, across Orange Bay. After learning how to read and operate the radar scanner, I went to bed. I heard the anchor go down at midnight, awoke again at 4 a.m. to a fearful howling of wind, and went up to the bridge, where I found Patricio and Germain. Five minute squalls were hitting us from the west-south-west at Force 10. Patricio was putting out a starboard bow anchor and lengthening both anchor chains to 8 cables (120 fathoms, or 720 feet). Seeing that he was making the right decisions without me, I went back to sleep.

  Next day we visited a small settlement on Hoste, then passed through the Murray Channel and anchored in Yendegaia Bay, barely two miles from the Argentine border on Tierra del Fuego. It was a wild, grim place,
the water milky-green from the glacier whose snout lay just behind the estancia at the head of the bay. To the east a cathedral-like spire of rock was rapidly sinking into the evening dusk.

  The owner of the estancia, Rudolf Serka, invited the officers and myself ashore for dinner. The food was good, but the house bare, comfortless and cold, except for the small hallway where a little stove was kept burning. I learned something of what was needed to survive as a settler in these parts. Serka's father, a Serb, started the estancia in 1914 with 300 head of sheep. The next year he had 150 left. It took father and son forty years to build the herd up to 7,000, plus a few cattle. They lost an average of 10 per cent of their animals every winter, as there was really not enough food for them. In the very hard winter of 1930 they lost over half. The Serkas were now Chileans, but their natural communications were with Ushuaia, which was just behind the cathedral mountain and easily reachable, there and back, in a day, by boat or on horseback. The nearest Chilean town, Porvenir, was a severe and dangerous seven-day ride away over snow-covered mountains. There was no road anywhere, except about five miles on the estate, which Serka had built, and now maintained himself. Supplies came once a month by an incredibly old ex-German tramp steamer called the Micalvi. I saw her at Puerto Williams and wondered that she could survive waves more than two feet high or an adverse current greater than two knots. I asked Serka about a small sailing boat lying on its side in the mud by the jetty. He said it was a seven-ton cutter, with no auxiliary engine. A couple of his men owned it, and used it for sealing on the Diego Ramirez Islands. They go there in that?' I cried.

  Serka nodded. Patricio said, grinning, 'You see, we weren't being so brave out there in Lautaro, were we?'

  I shivered. The idea of facing those gigantic seas and vicious winds, not for heroics, but to make a few dollars, in a seven-tonner... Serka tanked us up high with pisco and vermouth, which made our return to the Lautaro quite an adventure. She was moored to the end of the jetty — which was broken down, planks missing, unrailed, unlighted, and 300 feet long.

  Next day we crossed the Beagle Channel to Canasacka, where a rancher was reputed to have oil and logs ready for us. The oil was, and we loaded it; but the logs were not. Patricio happily told him he'd have to wait for the next patrol ship, and we sailed. Our next task was to provision the crew of the Yamana Lighthouse on the north shore of the Beagle, but the weather turned dour, clouds sank low to the water, the mist thickened, wind and rain drove into the ship and Patricio decided to put off the provisioning till the next day. We steamed on westward. I used my binoculars to scan both sides of the channel, hoping to see a stranded whale. Serka had told us that he quite often found whales beached and dead or dying along the shore, well out of the water. They had been chased by packs of the giant black-and-white dolphins called killer whales (orca orca). Although the whale is ten times the size of the orca it has no protection except flight, and often hurls itself full speed ashore, where it cannot move or breathe, for its weight is too great for its own bones to support without the added lift of a water environment. The barrels of oil we had loaded at Canasacka were from two whales that the rancher had found, cut up, and rendered down.

  We anchored that night in Romanche Bay, a narrow and steep-sided fiord on the south side of the Beagle Channel. It was the most picturesque anchorage, in its severe way, of the whole trip. Snow clouds drifted and flurried over the Channel, whose water was a palish inky green. Opposite, the Romanche Glacier hung down the mountain like a frozen river of ice, to the edge of the sea. A few minutes earlier we had passed the mighty Italia glacier, where a wide torrent of ice three hundred feet thick hangs blue and streaked over the northern shore of the Channel. A great piece of this ice, breaking off, made waves which nearly wrecked the Beagle's whaleboat in 1833.

  Full darkness came and we gathered in the ward-room to play solo whist. I had Grand Abundance once and Misère twice, in successive hands, but still Patricio finished the evening ahead. He was a real card-player, one of those damned sharps who count the cards and remember who played what, and why, fifteen hands back.

  The next day was clear and windy and the Pico Frances, from which both the Romanche and Italia glaciers flow, was very distinct. Snow cornices 100 feet high ran up the south and east ridges to the peak, which was over 7,000 feet above us. The wall facing the Channel was an almost vertical cliff, 4,000 feet sheer, enclosed by the ridges which swept down on either side, like arms, to the sea. Clouds of snow blew off the summit arete, making opaque white veils in the northern sky. Deep caves pitted the ice at the foot of the central cliff.

  Then, as usual, clouds descended, the fog-horn blared mournfully, and it began to rain. The temperature was a bone-chilling 38 degrees, but that wasn't what made me hunch my shoulders deeper into my duffel coat. We were heading for Punta Arenas and 'civilization' now, and the prospect depressed me immensely. I was sorry, very sorry, to be leaving the desolate and savage splendour of the southern channels.

  For the next two days we crawled down a low tunnel between grey sea and grey cloud, back along Whaleboat Sound, Cockburn Passage, the Magdalena Channel and at last out into the Magellan Strait opposite Cape Froward. There the clouds lifted, rainbows, storms, and hail passed over and the deck hummed like a steel guitar. Then the sun came out, and when we docked the stars were shining.

  There was a man waiting on the jetty with a message for me: would I come for drinks at the British Club, right away. I sighed. I was back, all right.

  The note was signed Michael Pigott, late 4th Gurkhas, which baffled me until I reached the club and learned that Pigott had served with the 2nd Battalion of my regiment in Italy as a wartime officer. I was in Burma at the time, so had not met or even heard of him. His father, Michael Pigott Sr, was General Manager of the Sociedad Explotador de Tierra del Fuego, the giant sheep combine which owned most of Chilean Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Until very recently the (British) General Manager's word had carried considerably more weight in these parts than that of the (Chilean) Governor of the Province, Magallanes.

  So I stepped out of the Lautaro's world of steel and rain and sea into a chattering, perfumed flock of expatriates. Everyone was British, even the wives, and I gathered that it was deeply frowned upon to marry a Chilean. Everyone had been there a long time — Pigott Senior, forty-seven years — and no one spoke Spanish. Everyone complained about the weather, the Chileans, the peso. There was a lot of gossip, most of it silly (e.g. the local admiral was trying to get his daughter married off to an Englishman. What a hope!), but some informative. I solved a riddle which had been puzzling me for days: why was one mainland estancia called China Greek, on the map? An old gentleman explained: Greek was a misprint for Creek; Cina was the Ona word for 'woman'; by that creek the Ona women used to jump out at the early settlers to frighten the horses and enable their men to shoot the white men with bows and arrows.

  When I returned to the Lautaro I found Fierro reading in the ward-room, though it was late. Fierro was a more taciturn man than either Patricio or young Germain, but I liked him. I asked him how anyone could live so long in a country and not speak its language. He said, with a sardonic smile, 'It's the English snobismo. It prevents fraternization with the natives, and miscegenation.'

  On the next night I gave a farewell dinner party for the officers at the Cosmos Hotel, a marvellously rambling old firetrap long famous in Punta Arenas legend. Patricio, I had grown very fond of; he was a good man and a great sailor and I wished then, as I mixed my special extra-dry Martinis, that we could go on cruising those channels together for a long, long time more. They blinked when they tasted the Martinis and I can hear Patricio now, chuckling, 'Qué barbaro! Qué salvaje!'

  Next day they all came to see me off at the airport and to tell the captain of my flight what an important fellow I was. Only mildly hungover, I headed north. That flight up the southern Andes is one of the most spectacular in the world, particularly at the low altitudes of those days. On the way south I had flown in a
D.C.3 down the west side of the range from Puerto Montt to Balmaceda, where we passed through a gap to the east side. All the time we crawled along at eye level with mountain streams, snow-fields, or walls of forest sliding down to a crawling sea. Now, heading north in another D.C.3 over Patagonia, the landscape was at first a familiar desolation, of tundra pockmarked with half-frozen water holes and lakes large and small, the Andes cut out of the western sky. The light was pale blue and green, clouds low and streaky overhead, a path of sun, another hurrying cloud below. Gradually this gave way to the open pampa, a brown waste marked by the arrow-straight lines of sheep fences coming from nowhere and going to the same place. Mt. Fitzroy, the highest of the south Andes, wore cloud like a cloak on its shoulders.

  The drone of the engine dropped in pitch and we began our descent towards Balmaceda. We crossed the lip of the Lago Buenos Aires gorge five feet up and at once flew into strong turbulence over the huge lake. On the north side we snaked among low hills, and when I saw a sheep peering at us from a crag fifty feet higher than the wing tip, I made ready to complain.

  When we took off after the Balmaceda stop the pilot invited me forward. As we headed for the serried volcanoes of the south-central Andes he pressed me into his own seat and said, 'You fly her. She is easy... wonderful.' On orders I brought the D.C.3 down from 7,000 to 5,000 feet and controlled her through some turbulence, which felt much less alarming there than in the passenger cabin. 'Now head there,' the pilot said, pointing at the nearest volcano. 'Volcan Villarica, good volcano,' he said. 'Live! Very picturesque, take photos.' the sun blazed in a clear sky, the mountains thrust up all round, most of them higher than us. We flew on, a little winged insect among them. Volcan Villarica was smoking and the pilot's delight knew no bounds: then the co-pilot did take over the aeroplane, as they said I must be free to take pictures. He flew it over the crater 500 feet above the rim, then banked steeply. I got two photos straight down into the smoking, quaking, black and red bowels of the earth. It was wonderful. It was awful.