In Patagonia

by Bruce Chatwin

  The storm broke. Chutes of rain battered the flower-filled garden. The new house was small but warm. It had fitted green carpets and Chippendale furniture.

  ‘I’m not going away,’ she said. ‘I belong here. They’d have to kill me first. Besides, where would I go?’

  71

  AT CASILLA 182, Punta Arenas, an iron gate painted green, with crossed Ms twined about with Pre-Raphaelite lilies, led into a shadowy garden where still grew the plants of my grandmother’s generation: the blood-red roses, the yellow-spattered laurels. The house had high-pitched gables and gothic windows. On the street side was a square tower, and at the back an octagonal one. The neighbours used to say: ‘Old Milward can’t decide if it’s a church or a castle,’ or ‘I suppose he thinks he’ll go to heaven quicker in a place like that.’

  The house belonged to a doctor and his wife showed me into a hallway of solid Anglican gloom. From the tower room I looked out over the city: at the white spire of St James’s Church; at metal houses painted the colour of a Slav handkerchief; at bank buildings and warehouses by the docks. The sun slunk in from the west and caught the scarlet bow of the car ferry. Beyond were the black hump of Dawson Island and the cliffs running down to Cape Froward.

  My cousin Charley kept a telescope up in the tower, and as an old sick man he’d focus out into the Strait. Or he’d sit at a desk stirring his memory to recapture the ecstasy of going down to the sea in ships:

  72

  ON A blustery autumn day in 1870 a steam launch cast off from the landing stage at Rock Ferry on the Mersey and chugged towards H.M.S. Conway, the old ship-of-the-line, then moored in the channel as a training ship for the Merchant Marine. The two passengers were a boy of twelve and a gaunt but kindly clergyman, his face lined from mission work in India. The boy was ‘a small, well-built lad, ugly of countenance, but not repulsive looking’, his snub nose the result of interpreting the expression ‘Put your nose to the grindstone’ literally.

  The Reverend Henry Milward had decided that no amount of slippering would temper his son’s wildness and was sending him to sea.

  ‘Promise me one thing,’ he said, as the black and white gunports came up close. ‘Promise me you’ll never steal.’

  ‘I promise.’

  He kept his promise and his father was right to extract it: his own brother was a little light-fingered.

  Charley ran up the rigging and waved goodbye, but the ship’s bully, a boy called Daly, blocked his way down from the cross-trees and made him hand over his jack-knife and silver pencil case. Charley never forgot the tattoo on Daly’s arm.

  Two years later, his basic training was over, he joined the firm of Balfour, Williamson and went to sea. His first ship, the Rokeby Hall, took coal and railroad track to the West Coast of America and came back with Chilean nitrate. He left two accounts of his apprentice voyages. One is a log-book, in which the entries are short, seamanlike, and often in shaky handwriting: ‘Took on 640 bags of nitrate of soda.’ ‘Bardsey Island abeam.’ ‘Seaman Reynolds hurled against the wheel. Laid up.’ Or (his only comment on rounding the Horn) ‘Changed course to NNE from SE’.

  The other is the unpublished collection of sea-stories he wrote as an old man in Punta Arenas. Some of the yarns are a bit disordered and repetitive. Perhaps he was too ill to finish, or perhaps others discouraged him. But I think they are wonderful.

  He put down on paper all he could remember, of ships and men, at sea or in port; the train journeys; the dismal ports of Northern England—‘Liverpool or Middlesbrough are not places to raise your spirits to a high pitch’; the wet cobbles, the bed bugs in flophouses, and the crews coming aboard drunk. And then out in the tropics, riding the bowsprit, the sails slack and the white bow wave cutting the dark sea; or up aloft on a pitching yard-arm, with green water smashing over the deck, dragging in canvas that was wet through or frozen stiff; or waking one night in a norther off Valparaíso, the ship on her beam ends and his friend saying: ‘Go to sleep, Ugly, you little fool, and you won’t feel the drowning’, and then thirty-six hours on the pumps and the cheers of the men as the pumps sucked dry.

  Food was his overriding obsession. He wrote down ‘the peas like marbles in coloured water’; ‘the weevily biscuits, first weevily then maggoty’; and the salt beef ‘more like mahogany than meat’. He wrote the names of the dishes the boys made themselves, from biscuit, peas, molasses and salt pork-Dandyfunk, Crackerhash, Dogsbody and Slumgullion—and the boils that came on after when they ate too much. Gratefully he remembered the friends who gave him an extra feed—an old steward or a German pastrycook in a Chilean port. He remembered how the boys raided the skipper’s locker and came back with pillowcases of tinned lobster, tongue, salmon and jam; how he couldn’t eat them because of his promise; how he cried when the skipper found the theft and stopped their Christmas pudding; how the cook slipped them the plum duff all the same; and how, when the Captain surprised them, he stuffed his slice under his shirt and ran up the main yard and blistered his tummy.

  He wrote down the yarns of San Francisco’s Barbary Coast; the boarding-house masters who fed hungry sailors and delivered them, drugged, aboard crew-starved ships. Sammy Wynn was the worst of these men. He got three cadets to desert from an Austrian man-of-war but, when the reward proved higher than his blood-money, shipped them back to court martial and the death sentence.

  There were the easy Californian girls; the rough justice of the magistrates’ courts; or the Beale Street Gang, who drained Spanish wine out of barrels into a boat while Charley ate pumpkin pie with the watchman on the wharf; or the King of the Hoodlums who raided the ship in white tie and tails, and the silver watch Charley got for seeing this gentleman off ship.

  He remembered Ah-sing, the Chinese laundryman, who spat starch from his mouth; and the Chinese crew, decked out in gorgeous silks, burning joss-sticks, bowing to the sun while flying-tackle whizzed round their heads. There were the Chilean nitrate ports; pisco vendors; shanties of whale ribs and gunny bags; and the mule trains snaking down the cliff and the odd mule slipping and falling six hundred feet to the beach below.

  There was Able-Seaman Lambert, beaten black and blue for winning at poker. There were the rats that did leave a doomed ship; swimming races among sharks; and the time the boys hooked an eighteen-foot monster on their best shark hook: the mate wouldn’t let it aboard because of some new paint, so they triced it to the stern and Charley went down on a rope’s end and cut its heart out: ‘I have since ridden many curious animals, but I never found anything so hard to stick to.’

  The last bale of wool at Melbourne; the last sack of rice at Rangoon; the last bag of nitrate at Iquique—he put them down. And the ship easing out of harbour, and all the men singing in chorus the shanty ‘Homeward Bound!’ And the Captain calling: ‘Steward! Grog for all hands!’—the old Geordie skipper, dressed in black and white check trousers and a green frock-coat, with a soft white hat for sea and a hard white hat for port. Charley got him down too.

  Here is a story from his apprentice years.

  73

  WE WERE close to the Horn, running with all plain sail set to a spanking breeze on the starboard quarter. It was a Sunday morning. I was walking up and down the main hatch with Chips the Carpenter and he said: ‘The girls at home are pulling with both hands.’

  It’s an old sailor’s idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home. And when the ship has a fair wind sailors say the girls are pulling hard on the rope. But when the wind is foul, some say there’s a knot or a kink in the rope, which won’t go through the block; and others say the girls are sparking round with the soldier chaps and have forgotten their sailor laddies.

  Just then four bells struck. It was 10 a.m. and my turn to relieve the wheel. I had hardly got the middle spoke to my satisfaction, when the breeze backed northward a couple of points, so that the squaresails took some wind out of the foreand aft-canvas. The carpenter was still walking up and
down when the ship rolled heavily to port. There was no wind in the main royal staysail and the sheet hung slack in a bight on the deck. The carpenter lost his balance in the roll and, by mistake, laid his foot on the staysail sheet. With the next roll to windward, the sail filled again and tightened the sheet like a fiddle-string and caught Chips between the legs and dropped him in the sea.

  I saw him go. I left the wheel a second and threw him a lifebuoy. We put the helm down and threw the ship into the wind, letting the top-gallant and royal halyards fly. While some hands cleared the accident boat, the rest began to get in the kites (as the small sails are called), and in less than ten minutes the boat was on her way to pick up the carpenter, whom we could see swimming strongly.

  At the cry ‘Man Overboard!’ the whole of the ‘watch below’ had come on deck. First into the accident boat was the apprentice Walter Paton. The Second Mate, Mr Spence, knew Paton couldn’t swim much and told him to get out, and Philip Eddy, another apprentice, jumped into his place. Walter was not to be put off, though, and got in over the bows. The boat was in the water before Mr Spence saw him, and I heard a few remarks as they passed under the stern of the ship. Then we lost sight of them in the heavy sea that was running.

  The boat left the ship at 10.15, all the crew with their lifebelts on. We were busy for some time getting the ship shortened down. The Captain was aloft on the mizzen cross-trees watching the boat. They had a long pull to windward and it was not till 11.30 that they were close to us coming back. But we couldn’t see if they had the carpenter or not.

  The Captain gave the order to ‘Up Helm’ for the purpose of wearing ship, to bring the boat’s davits on the lee side and so hoist it aboard, and we all saw Mr Spence stand up and wave his arms. Whether to say they’d got the carpenter, or whether he thought we hadn’t seen them, will never be known. But in that one fatal second, his attention was off the boat, and she broached to and capsized. She was close to us, not more than two cables, and we saw them all swimming in the water.

  We put the helm down again and brought the ship into the wind. We hurried to get out the second boat, but in a sailing ship this is a very different matter from getting out the first. One boat was always ready, but the others were all bottom up on the skids; and not only bottom up, but stuffed full of gear. The Captain’s fowls were in one. All the cabbages for the voyage were in another, and firebuckets and stands were stowed there to prevent them being washed overboard.

  The men turned over the port boat first. But just as they had her over, a big wave struck the ship and two of them slipped, and she came down heavily and was staved in the bilge. Meanwhile I was watching the men in the water with glasses. I saw some helping others on to the bottom of the overturned boat. Then I saw Eddy and one of the Able-Seamen leave and swim towards the ship. They swam so close we could see who they were without glasses. But we were drifting faster than they could swim and they had to go back.

  After turning over the starboard boat, we had to put a tackle on the main royal backstay to lift it over the side. And I don’t know whether the man who put the strop on the backstay was incapable or hurried, but, time after time, the strop slipped and each time the boat came down. And the ship was drifting, drifting to leeward, and we lost sight of the boat and the poor fellows clinging to the keel. But we knew where it was by the flights of birds wheeling round the spot—albatrosses, mollymauks, sooty petrels, stinkpots—all circling round and round.

  The second boat, with Mr Flynn in charge, got away, but it was nearly 1 p.m. when she passed under the stern. She had a longer pull to windward and the men were hindered by their lifebelts. And she had a much longer pull back as the ship was drifting to leeward all the time.

  We lost sight of her after twenty minutes and there began a weary wait for us, knowing five of our comrades were doing their level best to cling to the upturned keel. The Captain put the ship on one tack and then another, but finally decided to remain hove to and not lose ground. So we lay there straining our eyes for the return of the boat.

  At 3.30 we saw her coming back. She came in under the stern but the wind and sea had risen and it was some time before she dared come alongside. By then we had realized the worst and locked the tackles on in silence and hoisted the boat inboard. Two or three of the men were bleeding about the head, those whose caps and sou’ westers were not fastened. When the ship was back on course, we were able to ask questions and the gist of what we heard was this:

  They had found the boat. They had brought back the lifebuoy I threw to the carpenter, and three of the five lifebelts, and had seen the other two in the sea, but not a sign of anyone. Then the birds attacked and they had to fight them off with stretchers. They swooped on their heads and took their caps off, and the men who were bleeding were struck by the cruel beaks of the albatrosses. When they examined the lifebelts and found all the strings untied, they knew what had happened. The birds had gone for the men in the water and gone for their eyes. And the poor chaps had willingly untied the strings and sunk when they saw that no help came, for they couldn’t fight the birds with any hope of winning. The lifebuoy proved they had rescued the carpenter before the second accident occurred. It made us all the sadder to know that they had accomplished this mission.

  After six and a half hours they relieved me from the wheel. It was the longest trick I ever experienced. I went down to the half-deck to get something to eat, but when I saw Walter’s and Philip’s bedclothes turned down and their pants lying on their chests, and their boots on the floor, just as they had left them at the cry ‘Man Overboardl’, I lost control of myself, thought no more of being hungry and could do nothing but sob. Later the Skipper told the Third Mate to take me away and let me sleep in his cabin.

  ‘It’s enough to drive the boy mad, in there with all those empty bunks.’

  74

  IN 1877 Charley signed on as Second Mate on the Childers, a full-masted barque bound for Portland, Oregon. She was a lousy ship. The Captain foul-mouthed his mother; the crew mutinied; and the Aberdonian Mate came at Charley with an axe. One trip was enough. He left, joined the New Zealand Shipping Company and stayed twenty years, graduating from cargo to passenger ships and from sail to steam.

  One evening in the late 1880s he was in the first steam room of the Aldgate Turkish Baths, alongside a big black-bearded man, who sat snoozing in a canvas chair. The face meant nothing but the tattoo on the arm had to be Daly’s. Charley sneaked behind, capsized the chair and left the scarlet imprint of his hand on the man’s back. Daly howled and chased Charley naked through the baths till the assistants overpowered them both. Charley managed to smooth the incident over and soon got talking about the ‘dear old Conway’. They left the baths together, went to a theatre and dined at the Criterion.

  ‘Verily,’ Charley wrote, ‘we are as ships that pass in the night.’

  Slowly—for he was not brilliant and his tongue did not always endear him to his superiors—he rose up the ranks of the service. In 1888 he was 2nd Officer on a mail steamer with a big freezing compartment. When she called in at Rio, the Emperor Dom Pedro II asked the agents if he could come aboard:

  ‘On arriving at the top of the ladder, the Emperor held out his imperial hand to be kissed by the various Portuguese and Brazilians present and then handed it to his secretary to be wiped. After each kiss the secretary produced a fresh handkerchief and wiped the hand before it was presented to the next kisser, no doubt a highly salubrious measure ... But the Captain was unaccustomed to “kiss hands”. He seized it with a warm grasp and shook it most heartily, saying: “I have great pleasure in welcoming Your Majesty aboard my ship.” To say the Emperor was surprised is to put it mildly. Probably his hand hadn’t been shaken like that since he was a boy. He looked at it as much as to say: “Well, old chap, you were lucky to get out of that one”, and passed it to his secretary to be wiped.’

  Charley took the Emperor down to the freezer and showed him his first deep-frozen pheasant. Dom Pedro said to his secretary: �
��We must have a freezer in Rio at once’; but before he got it, Charley said, he was deposed by ‘that awful ingrate, General Fonseca’.

  75

  CHARLEY LOVED amateur theatricals, and, on rising to the Crank of Chief Officer, gave orders for plays, charades, tableaux, potato races—anything to relieve the boredom of ten weeks at sea.

  Some of the entertainments were rather unusual:

  ‘I was Chief officer of R.M.S. Tongariro and when we called in at Capetown there came aboard a Professor with three Bushman Pygmies from the Kalahari Desert—an old couple and their son. They were very small, the tallest and youngest being about 4ft 6in. I don’t know if they had names already but we called them Andrew Roundabout the Elder, Mrs Roundabout, and Young Andrew Roundabout.

  ‘The old pair were very old indeed. The doctor declared that, from the white ring round the pupil of his eye, the man must be over a hundred. He himself claimed to be 115, but this was a matter of conjecture. They couldn’t speak one word of Dutch, or at least only Young Andrew could; the parents spoke no language anyone could understand.

  ‘The old man was a curious one to look at. He hadn’t a hair on his head and his face was wizened and wrinkled like a monkey’s. But he had his wife and son in complete subjection, so we guessed he’d been a bit of a Tartar in his time.

  ‘We asked the Professor to give a lecture on them, and he informed us they would dance first. We were all anxious to attend, and by 8.30 the saloon was well-filled with ladies and gentlemen in evening dress, and the Captain and officers in mess uniforms. The performance began with the old man twanging his bowstring and Mrs Roundabout and Young Andrew hopping about in a most grotesque fashion. Soon Old Roundabout got excited and banged and thumped the string in double-quick time; then he unstrung the bow and using it as a whip, started lashing his wife and son till they fairly skipped round. We imagined they hadn’t danced fast enough for his liking. But after a minute or two the Professor stopped them and began.