In Patagonia

by Bruce Chatwin

  Opposite, the meseta of Lago Buenos Aires tilted upwards to the West. Its walls rose off a jade-green river, a sheer rampart two thousand feet, layer on layer of volcanic strata, striped like a pennon of chivalry in bands of pink and green. And where the meseta broke off, there were four mountains, four peaks piled one on the other in a straight line: a purple hump, an orange column, a cluster of pink spires, and the cone of a dead volcano, ash-grey and streaked with snow.

  The river ran down to a lake, Lago Ghio, with water a bright milky turquoise. The shores were blinding white and the cliffs also were white, or striped horizontally white and terracotta. Along the north shore were clear water lagoons of sapphire blue separated from the opaline water by a band of grass. Thousands of black-necked swans studded the surface of the lake. The shallows were pink with flamingos.

  Paso Roballos really did look like a site for the Golden City and perhaps it was.

  42

  AROUND 1650 two Spanish sailors, both deserters and murderers, stumbled out of the forests opposite the island of Chiloé, after walking up the eastern side of the Andes from the Strait of Magellan. Perhaps to divert the Governor’s attention from their crimes, they reported the existence of a city of silverroofed palaces, whose inhabitants were white-skinned, spoke Spanish and were descendants of survivors from Pedro de Sarmiento’s colony on the Strait.

  The men’s story revived interest in Trapalanda, the Enchanted City of the Caesars, another El Dorado hidden in the Southern Andes, and named after Sebastian Cabot’s pilot, Francisco César. In 1528 he wandered up-country from the River Plate, crossed the Andes and saw a civilization where gold was in common use. Around his report there grew a legend that fired human hopes and human greed until the nineteenth century.

  Several expeditions set out to find the City. Many single wanderers disappeared on the same quest. An eighteenth-century description placed it south of Latitude 45° (Paso Roballos is at Lat. 47°), a mountain fortress, situated below a volcano, perched above a beautiful lake. There was a river, the Rio Diamante, abounding in gold and precious stones. The city took two days to cross and had a single entrance defended by a drawbridge. The buildings were of dressed stone, the doors studded with jewels; the ploughshares were of silver, and the furniture of the humblest dwelling of silver and gold. There was no sickness; old people died as if sleep had come upon them. The men wore tricorn hats, blue coats and yellow capes (in Indian mythology the colours of the Supreme Being). They cultivated pepper and the leaves of their radishes were so big you could tether a horse to them.

  Few travellers have ever set eyes on the City. Nor is there any one opinion about its true location: the island of Patmos, the forests of Guyana, the Gobi Desert or the north face of Mount Meru are among the suggestions. All these are desolate places. The names of the City are equally various: Uttarakuru, Avalon, The New Jerusalem, The Isles of the Blessed. Those who saw it reached their destination after terrible hardships. In the seventeenth century two Spanish murderers proved you don’t have to be Ezekiel to mistake a rock face for Paradise.

  43

  THE TENANT of the Estancia Paso Roballos was a Canary Islander from Tenerife. He sat in a pink-washed kitchen, where a black clock hammered out the hours and his wife indifferently spooned rhubarb jam into her mouth. The house was all passage and unused rooms. In the salon a settee flaked patches of gilding to the floor. The optimistic plumbing of half a century had collapsed and reeked of ammonia.

  Homesick and dreaming of lost vigour, the old man named the flowers, the trees, the farming methods and dances of his sunlit mountain in the sea.

  Hailstones battered the currant bushes of the garden.

  The couple’s son-in-law was the gendarme, his occupation to guard the frontier and detain sheep-smugglers. He had a magnificent athlete’s body, but the accordion of his forehead whined a story of immobility and repressed ambition.

  His head swam with migrations and conquests. He spoke of Vikings in the Brazilian jungle. A professor, he said, had unearthed runic inscriptions. The people of Mars had landed in Peru and taught the Incas the arts of civilization. How else to explain their superior intelligence?

  One day he would return his wife to her father. He would drive the police camioneta north, over the Paraná, through Brazil and Panama, and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the chicas of North America would fall into his arms.

  He smiled bitterly at the mirage of an impossible dream.

  ‘Why do you walk?’ the old man asked. ‘Can’t you ride a horse? People round here hate walkers. They think they’re madmen.’

  ‘I can ride,’ I said, ‘but I prefer walking. One’s own legs are more reliable.’

  ‘I once knew an Italian who said that.’

  His name was Garibaldi. He also hated horses and houses. He wore an Araucanian poncho and carried no bag. He would walk up to Bolivia and then orbit down to the Strait. He could cover forty miles a day and only worked when he wanted boots.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for six years,’ the old man said. ‘I suppose the condors have got him.’

  Next morning after breakfast he pointed to a terrace high on the mountain opposite.

  ‘That’s where the fossils come from.’

  The Welshwoman in Sarmiento found mylodon bones here and the mandible of a macrauchenia. I climbed up, sheltered behind a rock from the driving sleet, and ate a can of stale sardines. An ancient seabed had been thrust up here, littered with fossil oysters, wet, glinting, and many million years old.

  I sat and thought of fish. I thought of portugaises and Maine lobsters and loup-de-mer and bluefish. I even thought of cod, my stomach rebelling against the diet of greasy lamb and old sardines.

  Stumbling about and getting knocked flat by the blasts, I found some obsidian knives along with the armour plating of a glyptodon, Ameghino’s Propalaeohoplophorus. I congratulated myself on a discovery of importance: no artefacts had yet been found with a glyptodon. But, later, in New York, Mr Junius Bird assured me my glyptodon had fossilized before men came to the Americas.

  From Paso Roballos I walked east—or rather ran before the gale—my leather rucksack heavy with bones and stones. The sides of the track were littered with empty champagne bottles, thrown away by gauchos riding home. The names on the labels were: Duc de Saint-Simon, Castel Chandon, and Comte de Valinont.

  I crossed back to the coast, arriving at Puerto Deseado, in the first days of February.

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  THE TOWN of Puerto Deseado is distinguished for a Salesian College that incorporates every architectural style from the Monastery of St Gall to a multi-storey car-park; a Gruta de Lourdes; and a railway station in the form and proportion of a big Scottish country house.

  I stayed at the Estacíon de Biología Marina with a party of scientists who dug enthusiastically for sandworms and squabbled about the Latin names of seaweed. The resident ornithologist, a severe young man, was studying the migration of the Jackass Penguin. We talked late into the night, arguing whether or not we, too, have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems; it seemed the only way to account for our insane restlessness.

  Next morning we rowed to the penguin colony on an island in mid-river. This, roughly, is what the ornithologist said:

  The Magellanic or Jackass Penguin winters in the South Atlantic off the coast of Brazil. On November 10th sharp, fishermen at Puerto Deseado see the advance guard swimming up-river. The birds station themselves on the islands and wait for the rest. The masses arrive on the 24th and start refurnishing their burrows. They have a taste for bright pebbles and collect a few to decorate the entrances.

  Penguins are monogamous, faithful unto death. Each pair occupies a minute stretch of territory and expels outsiders. The female lays from one to three eggs. There is no division of labour between the sexes: both go fishing and take turns to nurse the young. The colony breaks up with the cold weather in the first week of April.

  The young had hatched and swelled to a size larger than their paren
ts. We watched them waddle awkwardly to the shore and wallop into the water. In the seventeenth century, the explorer Sir John Narborough stood on the same spot and described them ‘standing upright like little children in white aprons in company together’.

  Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I’d want to murder.

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  ON OCTOBER 30th 1593, the ship Desire, of 120 tons, limping home to England, dropped anchor in the river at Port Desire, this being her fourth visit since Thomas Cavendish named the place in her, his flagship’s, honour, seven years before.

  The captain was now John Davis, a Devon man, the most skilled navigator of his generation. Behind him were three Arctic voyages in search of the North-West Passage. Before him were two books of seamanship and six fatal cuts of a Japanese pirate’s sword.

  Davis had sailed on Cavendish’s Second Voyage ‘intended for the South Sea’. The fleet left Plymouth on August 26th 1591, the Captain-General in the galleon Leicester; the other ships were the Roebuck, the Desire, the Daintie, and the Black Pinnace, the last so named for having carried the corpse of Sir Philip Sydney.

  Cavendish was puffed up with early success, hating his officers and crew. On the coast of Brazil, he stopped to sack the town of Santos. A gale scattered the ships off the Patagonian coast, but they met up, as arranged, at Port Desire.

  The fleet entered the Magellan Strait with the southern winter already begun. A sailor’s frostbitten nose fell off when he blew it. Beyond Cape Froward, they ran into north-westerly gales and sheltered in a tight cove with the wind howling over their mastheads. Reluctantly, Cavendish agreed to revictual in Brazil and return the following spring.

  On the night of May 20th, off Port Desire, the Captain-General changed tack without warning. At dawn, the Desire and the Black Pinnace were alone on the sea. Davis made for port, thinking his commander would join him as before, but Cavendish set course for Brazil and thence to St Helena. One day he lay down in his cabin and died, perhaps of apoplexy, cursing Davis for desertion: ‘This villain that hath been the death of me’.

  Davis disliked the man but was no traitor. The worst of the winter over, he went south again to look for the Captain-General. Gales blew the two ships in among some undiscovered islands, now known as the Falklands.

  This time, they passed the Strait and out into the Pacific. In a storm off Cape Pilar, the Desire lost the Pinnace, which went down with all hands. Davis was alone at the helm, praying for a speedy end, when the sun broke through the clouds. He took bearings, fixed his position, and so regained the calmer water of the Strait.

  He sailed back to Port Desire, the crew scurvied and mutinous and the lice lying in their flesh, ‘clusters of lice as big as peason, yea, and some as big as beanes’. He repaired the ship as best he could. The men lived off eggs, gulls, baby seals, scurvy grass and the fish called pejerrey. On this diet they were restored to health.

  Ten miles down the coast, there was an island, the original Penguin Island, where the sailors clubbed twenty thousand birds to death. They had no natural enemies and were unafraid of their murderers. John Davis ordered the penguins dried and salted and stowed fourteen thousand in the hold.

  On November 11th a war-party of Tehuelche Indians attacked ‘throwing dust in the ayre, leaping and running like brute beasts, having vizzards on their faces like dogs’ faces, or else their faces are dogs’ faces indeed’. Nine men died in the skirmish, among them the chief mutineers, Parker and Smith. Their deaths were seen as the just judgement of God.

  The Desire sailed at nightfall on December 22nd and set course for Brazil where the Captain hoped to provision with cassava flour. On January 30th he made land at the Isle of Plasencia, off Rio de Janeiro. The men foraged for fruit and vegetables in gardens belonging to the Indians.

  Six days later, the coopers went with a landing party to gather hoops for barrels. The day was hot and the men were bathing, unguarded, when a mob of Indians and Portuguese attacked. The Captain sent a boat crew ashore and they found the thirteen men, faces upturned to heaven, laid in a rank with a cross set by them.

  John Davis saw pinnaces sailing out of Rio harbour. He made for open sea. He had no other choice. He had eight casks of water and they were fouled.

  As they came up to the Equator, the penguins took their revenge. In them bred a ‘loathsome worme’ about an inch long. The worms ate everything, iron only excepted—clothes, bedding, boots, hats, leather lashings, and live human flesh. The worms gnawed through the ship’s side and threatened to sink her. The more worms the men killed, the more they multiplied.

  Around the Tropic of Cancer, the crew came down with scurvy. Their ankles swelled and their chests, and their parts swelled so horribly that ‘they could neither stand nor lie nor go’.

  The Captain could scarcely speak for sorrow. Again he prayed for a speedy end. He asked the men to be patient; to give thanks to God and accept his chastisement. But the men were raging mad and the ship howled with the groans and curses of the dying. Only Davis and a ship’s boy were in health, of the seventy-six who left Plymouth. By the end there were five men who could move and work the ship.

  And so, lost and wandering on the sea, with topsails and sprit sails tom, the rotten hulk drifted, rather than sailed, into the harbour of Berehaven on Bantry Bay on June 11th 1593, The smell disgusted the people of that quiet fishing village.

  Returning to Devon, John Davis found his wife taken up with a ‘sleek paramour’. The next two years he sat at a table and composed the books that made his reputation: The World’s Hydrographical Description, proving America to be an island; and The Seaman’s Secrets, a manual of celestial navigation, showing the use of his own invention, the backstaff, to measure the height of heavenly bodies.

  But the restlessness got him in the end. He went with the Earl of Essex to the Azores; then to the East Indies, as pilot for the Zeelanders. He died aboard the English ship, Tyger, in the Straits of Malacca on December 29th 1605. He had been too trusting of some Japanese pirates and made the mistake of asking them for a meal.

  ‘The Southern Voyage of John Davis’ appeared in Hakluyt’s edition of 1600. Two centuries passed and another Devon man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, set down the 625 controversial lines of The Ancient Mariner, with its hammering repetitions and story of crime, wandering and expiation.

  John Davis and the Mariner have these in common: a voyage to the Black South, the murder of a bird or birds, the nemesis which follows, the drift through the tropics, the rotting ship, the curses of dying men. Lines 236-9 are particularly resonant of the Elizabethan voyage:The many men so beautifull!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand, thousand slimy things

  Lived on and so did I.

  In The Road to Xanadu, the American scholar John Livingston Lowes traced the Mariner’s victim to a ‘disconsolate Black Albitross’ shot by one Hatley, the mate of Captain George Shelvocke’s privateer in the eighteenth century. Wordsworth had a copy of this voyage and showed it to Coleridge when the two men tried to write the poem together.

  Coleridge himself was a ‘night-wandering man’, a stranger at his own birthplace, a drifter round rooming-houses, unable to sink roots anywhere. He had a bad case of what Baudelaire called ‘The Great Malady: Horror of One’s Home’. Hence his identification with other blighted wanderers: Cain, The Wandering Jew, or the horizon-struck navigators of the sixteenth century. For the Mariner was himself.

  Lowes demonstrated how the voyages in Hakluyt and Purchas fuelled Coleridge’s imagination. ‘The mighty great roaring of ice’ that John Davis witnessed on an earlier voyage off Greenland reappears in line 61: ‘It cracked and growled and roared and howled.’ But he did not, apparently, consider the likelihood that Davis’s voyage to the Strait gave Coleridge the backbone for his poem.

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  I PASSED through three boring towns, San Julián, Santa Cruz and Rio Gallegos.

  As you go south down the coast, the grass gets greener, the sheep-farms r
icher and the British more numerous. They are the sons and grandsons of the men who cleared and fenced the land in the 1890s. Many were ‘kelpers’ from the Falklands, who landed with nothing but memories of Highland clearances and had nowhere else to go. They made big money in the sheep booms round the turn of the century, since their limitless supply of cheap labour allowed Patagonian wool to undercut its competition.

  Today their farms are on the verge of bankruptcy but are still smartly painted up. And you can find, nestling behind windbreaks: herbaceous borders, lawnsprayers, fruit-cages, conservatories, cucumber sandwiches, bound sets of Country Life and, perhaps, the visiting Archdeacon.

  Patagonian sheep-farming began in 1877 when a Mr Henry Reynard, an English trader in Punta Arenas, ferried a flock from the Falklands and set it to graze on Elizabeth Island in the Strait. It multiplied prodigiously and other merchants took the hint. The leading entrepreneurs were a ruthless Asturian, José Menéndez, and his amiable Jewish son-in-law Moritz Braun. The two were rivals at first, but later combined to assemble an empire of estancias, coal mines, freezers, department stores, merchant ships, and a salvage department.

  Menéndez died in 1918, leaving a proportion of his millions to Alphonso XIII of Spain, and was buried at Punta Arenas in a reduced version of the Victor Emmanuel Monument. But the Braun and Menéndez families continued to swamp the territory through their company, known for short as La Anónima. They imported stud flocks from New Zealand, shepherds and their dogs from the Outer Isles, and farm-managers from the British Army, who stamped the smartness of the parade ground over the operation. The result was that the Province of Santa Cruz looked like an outpost of the Empire, administered by Spanish-speaking officials.