Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  When I reached a question on the form asking the size of my boat I put a dash. When I came on to a complicated section on nets I realized I was renewing my place on the fisherman’s register. It turned out that the right form, when I located it, had to be signed by the governor, so I was obliged to leave it at the office, arranging optimistically to pick up the new visa when I got back from my next mini-trip. I left the officials huddled round fifteen lurid DDR stamps on a double-page spread in my passport and glancing up at me with narrowed eyes.

  I called into the post office, and found my name on the poste restante list. Waiting post in Chile is separated into male and female recipient lists, but in Punta Arenas they had achieved the feat of a third category. This list was labelled ‘Pseudonyms and numbers’. Why would anyone write to a number? How did they know if a name was a pseudonym or genuine? How did a recipient prove he or she was a number? Also, after my name on the female list I read, ‘Finney, Albert’.

  Largely due to the efforts of the Regional Director of Tourism in Punta Arenas I procured a plane ticket for almost nothing to the south of Tierra del Fuego. I later learnt that it was because a senior airline official had spread it round that I was ‘pretty’. This revolting state of affairs was a familiar one by this stage of the trip; it was never sufficiently revolting, however, for me to reject its fruits.

  The plane was a Canadian Twin Otter, and I boarded with ten islanders, citizens of the southernmost permanent settlement in the world (Antarctic bases don’t count) – though I can’t say it showed. Tierra del Fuego is a group of islands across the Magellan Strait from the Chilean and Argentinian mainland, divided by a vertical line between the two republics. It was spotted by Magellan in 1520, and he named it Smokeland after the wispy columns he observed rising from the natives’ fires; his peremptory patron, Charles V of Spain, however, wished it to be Fireland, and so it was. It wasn’t until Drake arrived half a century later that Fireland was discovered to be an archipelago. Properly, the toponym belongs to the group, but it is commonly used to refer to Isla Grande alone, the largest island in South America. The Twin Otter was propelling itself south of this main island to Isla Navarino, in turn usually known by the name of its only settlement, Puerto Williams.

  We crossed the north of Isla Grande, splashed with opaque green lakes ringed by mineral-tinted bands of earth, and continued over the dark blue vastness of Useless Bay, and then Dawson Island appeared, wobbling through the heat of the Twin Otter’s engines. In 1973, after the coup, every surviving minister in the Allende government except Carlos Briones was tied up in a small plane and taken to Dawson Island. It was a good place to choose to make them feel forgotten, cold and isolated, a Chilean Siberia.

  Shortly afterwards we followed the Almirantazgo Sound along the coast of the big island, skirting the Darwin cordillera, tipped with frosted snow and stretching into the distance, sunlight bouncing off the isolated lakes. The highest mountain wasn’t identified until 1962. The plane slid over a glacier in an air current and landed at a diminutive airstrip overlooking the Beagle Channel.

  Isla Navarino, a Chilean possession, lies below Argentinian territory, separated from it by twelve miles of water. Three small islands called Lennox, Picton and Nueva directly off its east coast almost caused a war between Argentina and Chile in 1978, six years before the Falklands. They had been arguing for a hundred years about which of them owned the islands, and in 1977 international arbitration assigned them to Chile. Argentina refused to accept the decision, and troops on both sides mobilized. The object of desire was not so much land as sea. Besides fish, there was oil there, and oil was what both republics needed.

  The Pope eventually persuaded the two governments to disarm and settle. Fourteen years had passed since then, but I had noticed a residual national anxiety over this southern territory. In Punta Arenas I had asked people if they thought Argentina might try to take the three islands again. My diary notes, ‘Everyone, no matter what their background, is convinced that the Argentinians are going to have a go again – if not the three islands, then another bit of southern Chile. It feels like a place on permanent alert, and when I heard shouting in the street outside the house this evening I thought it was an invasion, and put a new film in the camera. But they were celebrating victory in some local football match.’

  The present settlement at Williams exists largely as a deterrent, and it is dominated by a naval base. It acquired its peculiarly British name in 1953 in honour of John Williams, the Bristolian captain of the Ancud, the ship which claimed the Magellan Strait for Chile in 1843. The small settlement which existed prior to the base was called Puerto Luisa; its residents were descendants of English missionaries, and they ran a sawmill and farmed. Williams has been made the capital of Chilean Antarctica, its location outside Antarctic boundaries notwithstanding.

  The houses were low, with corrugated iron roofs, and the roads dirt tracks carved out with puddles. It was all very bleak, and I felt a long way from home as I stood in the rain trying to decide what to do. There was one guesthouse in what they called the square; it was rather an apathetic attempt at a square, with a low concrete wall sheltering a few dead shrubs. In this guesthouse, however, I was enthusiastically welcomed (I was the only guest) by the owner, Mario, and his wife; it was 29 February and Mario’s birthday, so he immediately invited me to his party, due to begin imminently.

  Mario took his birthday very seriously, running around the house and garden making the final preparations for the celebration. I guessed he was about forty-four, and he had lived on the island for twenty years. He had done all right; he had an entrepreneurial spirit, and the guesthouse supplemented an income from various agricultural interests. His wife, a figure of Chaucerian ribaldry and feisty spirits, presided over the household while knitting in her chair next to the wood-burning stove or pursuing her five-year-old son, Julio, a delightfully wicked little boy whom I took to greatly, though he allegedly told his mother at the end of the week that he didn’t like me. Entrepreneurial spirits have to be understood in context down there, and once the guesthouse had been set up it was clear that both Mario and his wife felt that they had discharged their responsibilities towards it. They were wholly disinterested in whether I intended to stay one night or one year and unembarrassed by the absence of any kind of heating in the bedrooms, which meant that they were like freezer rooms in meat-packing factories.

  I enjoyed their attitude to life. It followed a strict policy of laissez-faire – except when it came to birthday parties. The guests began to arrive, and Mario fussed around them. Knots of people stood in the garden, drinking from plastic beakers and hugging the bonfire. I was introduced like a cabaret act. Everyone wanted to invite me to their home or show me some special feature of the landscape, and the week was quickly booked up with projected outings and dinners. Later in the evening Mario made a fulsome speech thanking his good and loyal friends for sharing this special day with him. We ate meat grilled over charcoal and drank the popular mixture of wine and Coca-Cola, although I noticed that as it got later they abandoned the Coca-Cola, and soon it was two hours past midnight and I had forgotten to ask anyone to marry me.

  *

  At the brutal hour of seven-thirty a rusty juggernaut tooted outside the house: my first trip, to collect wood and deliver it to a police station at the western tip of the island. The house was silent and strewn with the debris of the party, which had moved indoors when the fire died. I had forgotten the driver’s name, and his mate’s, but it didn’t seem to matter, and we set off in good humour, three clouds of breath condensing in the high cab.

  After half an hour the driver slammed on the brakes. ‘Beaver!’ he said, pointing to a crocodile skin spatula disappearing into a bush. Often too in the undergrowth we disturbed fat upland geese, which looked brown and ordinary until they panicked, taking off towards the water and revealing their striped white wings.

  A sign welcomed us to Puerto Navarino, which consisted of a police station, a small jetty
, two houses owned by the navy and two derelict farm buildings. I believe it was the place once called Laiwaia where, in 1867, missionaries established an indigenous farming settlement. It might seem odd to locate a police station in an isolated spot with no one to police, but it was directly opposite Ushuaia, the southernmost town in Argentina, and this was a paranoid island.

  Two young policemen in mufti came out of the station and climbed into the back of the truck. We drove further west, and they began loading logs. I walked around the deciduous forest, already deep red, the silvery trunks covered in a pale primrose lichen. The prevailing south-westerlies had beaten them into surreal shapes, like distended letters of the alphabet.

  On the coast grass had grown in unnatural humps over piles of shells and ash, and I found a bone fish spear in an exposed pit, finely carved into a double point. I have it sellotaped to a corner of my word-processor now; I suppose it belonged to a Yahgan once. His tribe were nomadic (the name is westernized. They called themselves Yámana, which means ‘people’) and for generations paddled their canoes from the Brecknock peninsula to Cape Horn, but as they were hunted and marginalized by European colonists and their descendants they concentrated themselves in the canals around Isla Navarino. The spoke five mutually intelligible dialects, together constituting a linguistic group unrelated to any other: for family connections so distant that a sentence would be required to express them in English, the Yahgan had a word, and they enjoyed verbs such as ‘to come unexpectedly across a hard substance when eating something soft’ (like a pearl in an oyster). To express specific periods of the year they used phrases like, ‘the time when the bark is loose’. But they had no words for numerals beyond three.

  The last pure Yahgan, Abuela (Grandmother) Rosa, died in 1982.

  The Yahgan were distant relations of the Alacalufe (the westernized name of the Kaweshkar tribe) who canoed further north, from the Magellan Strait to the Taitao peninsula. They were nomadic too, and they could count up to five (though ‘five’ was synonymous with ‘many’).

  The third significant indigenous tribe around the Strait were the Ona, known to anthropologists as ‘foot Indians’ as opposed to ‘canoe Indians’. Divided into two branches, called Haush (or Aush) and Shelknam, they lived on Isla Grande, and hunted the guanaco. One of their ideas was that foetal development required repeated coitus. Even by the exacting standards of the conquerors of the Americas the Ona suffered a particularly brutal extinction.

  Darwin hadn’t been very impressed by the people he saw in Tierra del Fuego. He wrote, ‘Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.’ I wonder what they thought of him, or what they would have thought about a country which sent its working-class children down the mines and up the chimneys and into the textile mills until they collapsed under the looms.

  I was struck, too, by Darwin’s conviction that the primitive lifestyle of the Fuegians constituted evidence of a stunted sensibility, or even of no sensibility at all. He wrote of them, ‘How little can the higher powers of the mind be brought into play! What is there for the imagination to picture, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide upon?’ (Was he fingering his copy of Paradise Lost at that moment? He usually had it in his pocket on the journey.) Laurens van der Post frequently illustrates the folly of failing to understand that the imagination can be triggered in many different ways. I often stopped in a still place and thought of the moment in Venture to the Interior when van der Post drinks in a particularly scintillating African landscape whilst listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion. He remarks to his companion, a man who loves Africa profoundly, that it was a shame Livingstone couldn’t hear that music when he walked by there.

  ‘I expect he heard the same thing, in other ways,’ replies the companion sharply.

  Later, in the undergrowth behind the police station, I discovered a camouflaged bunker and a heap of empty cartridges. I realized how real their apprehension must be, with such concrete reminders of 1978 in their back gardens. I lay down on the grass next to a small wooden bridge, contemplating this permanent state of tension, and I must have fallen asleep, as I was woken by a warm breath on my cheek, and opened my eyes to the inquisitive stare of a white pig with large black spots.

  A policeman cooked lunch later, and after we had eaten we stretched out in the sun while the four police horses frisked on the beach. The policemen showed me round the station (‘the oldest in Chile’), and when they said it was hard in the winter, these lieutenants of the Cold War, I ventured to ask what they did in those months. They quickly listed numerous activities, the most arduous among them feeding the horses.

  As the sun moved towards the ocean and the truck driver muttered about leaving, the head policeman said to me, ‘Why don’t you stay with us? I’m driving to Williams on Tuesday morning – stay till then. You can live in the mess, and ride the horses … whatever you like …’

  ‘But I haven’t got any things with me.’

  ‘We can lend you a toothbrush.’

  It was a beguiling idea. I had never seen such a beautiful spot.

  ‘We’d love some company,’ said another policeman.

  My main worry (I had lived in the same clothes for three days often before) was that I had nothing to read. The head policeman showed me the small library, to solve this problem, and I selected from back issues of Police Review, A Legal Guide to Autopsies and An Anthology of Erotica (illustrated). (Out of boredom I did actually read several copies of the Police Review. Months later the Navarino policemen sent copies to me in London as they came out, addressed to my telephone number.)

  So it was that I was a guest of the Chilean carabineros for three days and two nights; my visa actually expired while I was enjoying their hospitality. The head policeman, José, was in his early forties and had a wife and two sons in Punta Arenas, but when he got out his photo album to show me, all the pictures were of him; it was his way of asserting his identity, I suppose, and a more honest one than many others. One of his two subordinates, Mauricio, was twenty-three and tall with Transylvanian good looks, and the youngest, called Piglet by the others, was thin, cheeky and highly strung.

  The mess window overlooked a skyline of Argentinian mountains, bleachy white and sharp as cleavers. At night the lights of Ushuaia flickered beyond the mute black strip of water. The small black-and-white television was permanently on in the dining area, tuned in to an Argentinian station, faute de mieux. It was ironic that the rationale for this outpost was to guard against Argentinian hostility yet its occupants spent all evening watching Argentinian dancing girls. Over dinner on the first night José said his piece about the shocking absence of censorship on Argentinian television. Ten minutes later he was goggle-eyed in front of a soft porn film.

  The policemen treated me like a little queen. They tried to prepare extra special meals for my benefit, which was particularly touching given the primitive nature of the kitchen and the pathetically limited ingredients available. José, an intelligent man who would have been an officer had his family had enough money to get him trained, held strong opinions on a wide range of unsavoury topics such as military control and the evils of trade unionism, but I closed my ears, and couldn’t help liking him. They took me out on expeditions, anxious that I should see everything. If my boots were just a little damp they insisted on lending me shoes even though they were much too big, and I had to fight to be allowed to wash the dishes.

  On the second day we went to pick mushrooms, and they taught me which ones were safe. I wasn’t a good student: I noticed that most of the mushrooms in my basket were rejected by Mauricio when he prepared lunch. We ate them with a bright orange spherical fungus picked off the beech trunks. Afterwards, Mauricio and Piglet took me with them on patrol to Wulaia, a bay to the south west.

  ‘What are we patrolling for?’ I asked as we guided the horses through gorsey bushes.

  ‘To see if there are any Argentinians, I suppose,’ said Pigle
t.

  ‘Well, what are we going to do if there are?’

  ‘Umm … go back and tell the boss, I guess.’

  The bay looked towards the Murray Canal and the uninhabited Hoste Island, a series of peninsulas linked by fragile strips of land sprawling among the cold Pacific waters. Wulaia was a potent name in the history of the indigenous peoples of the Beagle Channel and the interlopers who came to disturb them. Captain Robert FitzRoy of HMS Beagle took four Yahgan with him on the long journey home, and after three of them (one died in Plymouth) had enjoyed the sophisticated pleasures of nineteenth-century England he conveyed them back to their channels and left them at the small, peaceful bay of Wulaia. They had spent about three years in British company.1

  More than a quarter of a century later, on 6 November 1859, a small British mission held its first church service at Wulaia. Eight foreigners were present and they had mustered an impressive congregation of three hundred. The mission cook, Alfred Cole, had remained on board their ship, the Allen Gardiner, which was anchored opposite the little church. As Cole listened to the tuneless, enthusiastic verses of the first hymn from across the water he noticed movement outside the church, and then he saw all his colleagues butchered by a party of men led, it seems almost certain, by Jemmy Button, one of the three who had been presented at the Court of St James’ during his stay in England.