Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  The twentieth-century Chileans had named an island after Button.

  Back at home, Fuegian missionary work already had a bad reputation, and its supporters were accused of naivety and worse. After news reached London in 1852 of a harrowing and ultimately fatal endeavour on Navarino a leader in The Times demanded the end of Patagonian missions. But it never came. The Anglican Mission established itself in various parts of the islands during those years, and from 1906 to 1920 its members worked in another corner of the west coast of Navarino, called Douglas Bay. We rode on to this place, one of the most desolate on earth, and Mauricio said, ‘I think you are the first here, from your country, since those protestantes.’

  I sensed that he was about to ask me why my compatriots had come, so I quickly developed a vigorous interest in the flora to head the question off; there were few things I would not have done to avoid answering it.

  We lay there in silence, capturing the last of the late afternoon sun, the dog pushing his nose under our chins and the horses stamping, steam dissolving off their coats into the sharp air. The Beagle glittered, lumpy steamer ducks careered over the rocks, redundant wings flapping irritably, and as I thought of Darwin’s judgments again a moment came into my mind from Lucas Bridges’ The Uttermost Part of the Earth, one of the best books ever written about South America. He was sitting only a dozen or two miles from that spot at a similar time of day almost a century ago.

  Talimeoat was a most likeable Indian. I was much in his company. One still evening in autumn … I was walking with him near Lake Kami. We were just above upper tree level, and before descending into the valley, rested on a grassy slope. The air was crisp … A few gilt-edged, feathery clouds broke the monotony of the pale green sky, and the beech forest that clothed the lake’s steep banks to the water’s edge had not yet completely lost its brilliant autumn colours. The evening light gave the remote ranges a purple tint impossible to describe or to paint.

  Across leagues of wooded hills up the forty-mile length of Lake Kami, Talimeoat and I gazed long and silently towards a glorious sunset. I knew that he was searching the distance for any sign of smoke from the camp-fires of friends or foes. After a while his vigilance relaxed and, lying near me, he seemed to become oblivious to my presence. Feeling the chill of evening, I was on the point of suggesting a move, when he heaved a deep sigh and said to himself, as softly as an Ona could say anything,

  ‘Yak haruin.’ (‘My country’.)

  At sunset, on my last night, we went on a final trip: they so much wanted me to see a beaver (my glimpse of a tail, apparently, didn’t count). There were many clearings of leafless and chiselled trunks enfolded within the luxuriance of the forest, but although we saw their wigwams and their swimming pools as we sloshed through the mud, we didn’t see a beaver. The policemen did show me old Yahgan canoe runways at the water’s edge. I had never seen a Yahgan canoe, but I saw an Alacalufe version in Punta Arenas. It was about ten feet long and made out of evergreen beech bark. This boat had arrived at the town’s sandy point in 1903, together with one other, and the people in it said that they had come from the canals to petition for the return of a five-year-old child who had been stolen by sealers. They got the kid back, and the public notary bought the canoe from them for posterity, dispatching its occupants home on a sailing ship.

  At twilight the clouds hung low like white canopies illuminated from below by a pink spotlight. The mountains turned shades of indigo and the mirrored water darkened, cracked by trails of ducklings. On the highest peak of Hoste Island a slender column of rock jutted upwards just before the perpendicular walls of the summit.

  ‘That,’ said José, ‘is what the locals call the monk entering the monastery.’

  When I woke on the last day there was a three-feet long beaver on the end of my bed, staring at me and baring its horrid little yellow teeth like an old man’s toenails. About five seconds passed as we looked at each other, then I heard sniggering outside in the corridor. I wiggled the beaver with a toe. It was stuffed. I shouted abuse through the door, and Mauricio and Piglet laughed for fifteen minutes.

  After breakfast and a good deal of shuffling around José cleared his throat.

  ‘Sarita, we’d like to present you with something.’

  Piglet stepped forward and thrust a slice of wood into my hands which he had been holding behind his back. They had sawed it off a beech trunk, glued the three silver badges of the police force in an arc at the top, painted on it ‘carabineros de Chile’ and inscribed this in Spanish: ‘Puerto Navarino, the tip of Chile and the southern limit of the world, reached only by true persons of sacrifice, bravery and loyalty to a cause, and these people include our friend Sara Wheeler. This plaque is from her devoted friends among the carabineros.’

  I looked down at it, and they stood in front of me with their coy smiles. José, who had a Pinochet sticker on his wardrobe door and whose politics made Pol Pot look like an innocent, said quietly, ‘Thank you for trusting us.’

  He shook my hand, and he touched my heart, too. I suggested photos, and they rushed off, changed into their uniforms and stood like woodentops, unsmiling, next to the carabineros sign outside the station.

  Back in Puerto Williams I reappeared at Mario’s guesthouse; there were still no other guests, and I doubted if anyone had noticed my absence. I said hello and walked back into my room, which was just as I had left it, bed unmade, three days previously.

  People were so used to nothing happening on the island that it rarely occurred to them to do anything themselves. There was seldom anyone on the street before ten, and at Mario’s it was difficult to raise anyone before eleven. Nobody washed up there until there was no clean crockery left in the kitchen. It was very endearing.

  I walked through the sphagnum bog and beech trees to a lake in the heart of the island, towards the Navarino Teeth, an uneven gum of gleaming lower canines. When I stopped on a high ridge to eat some bread and salted cod I had bought for lunch, for a minute I sat within two feet of a female guanaco who had climbed up from the other side, her smooth tawny fur damp with sweat and her dark hooked tail vibrating.

  The fish was like a salted cricket bat.

  At Ukika, a tiny settlement where the descendants of the Yahgan – all mixed blood now – live in dainty cabins, a man in metallic green football shorts was painting a wooden canoe on the beach. They couldn’t dive for shellfish like their grandparents even if they wanted to because a plankton known as the marea roja meant that all the filterers were poisonous. Their grandparents’ killers were imported western diseases and the European settlers themselves, who sliced off their ears after murdering them, presented the ears to the authorities as proof and collected a reward. The marea roja, the man in the green football shorts stopped to tell me when he saw me picking up a crab from the sand, his tone of voice indicating the importance of the matter, doesn’t affect the centolla. This crustacean, called a king crab in English, is an economic staple of the island, as famous as the Juan Fernández langosta and as expensive in Santiago. One had been soaking in the bathroom sink at Mario’s for two days.

  At six o’clock in the evening Luis appeared at the door of the guesthouse. I had met him at the birthday party; he ran the local shipping agency.

  ‘There’s a group of your countrymen at the yacht club.’

  I hadn’t seen a Brit for ages, and I missed them. In the Toyota van on our way to the club I learnt that all twenty-one had sailed in from New Zealand on a yacht which they were taking round the world. They were standing in the bar when we got there, laughing and drinking, pleased to be on land, and Luis smiled at our very British introductions. The captain invited Luis and me for dinner on board. The yacht was called Creighton’s Naturally, the name of the company which sponsored it when it raced, and we ate spaghetti. The idea was born of raising a football team, and Luis offered to fix up a local opposition. Once the idea set into reality, their jokes betrayed them.

  ‘We’ll have to stipulate a handicap: they p
lay in bare feet!’

  ‘Pete, they live in bare feet!’

  ‘You’d better close your porthole tonight, or you’ll get an arrow in your ear!’

  Everyone laughed. All through the country, when I had been asked what foreigners think of Chileans, the question had been followed by, ‘They think we’re wild indios, don’t they?’

  I always vigorously rejected this painful (for them) perception of their identity, but here were educated Europeans joking that Chileans were not yet sufficiently socially developed to wear shoes. I glanced at Luis – fortunately he hadn’t understood. He was leafing through a copy of the Sunday Sport.

  The next day Luis arranged a fleet of beaten-up vans to take us all to the hard dirt pitch on the edge of the forest. I took little Julio along with me. The Creightons hung a ship’s banner and Union Jack over one goal, but they looked hunted when the Williams team ran onto the pitch, mean in matching strip; the Brits were playing in boating shoes, and their leftwinger hadn’t touched a ball since 1954. Julio kept trying to run away. Our boys were slaughtered nine-one, and I was proud of them: this was true British grit, and they had facilitated the most southerly international ever played.

  I hitched a lift on a supply boat taking a coffin to Cape Horn. A passenger had died on a luxury North American cruise ship, and we were transporting the coffin to the ship and then returning to Williams, a round trip of about sixteen hours. The Ñandú (Rhea), a hundred-foot supply boat, left Williams at dawn, just when the colours exploding through the pearly sky were deep and vivid. There was a German seaman on board who had been living in Chile for ten years. He was wearing a stained peaked sailor’s cap, and he chainsmoked. After standing on deck next to me in silence for five minutes he gestured aggressively towards the dense southern beech forest at the eastern end of Navarino.

  ‘See those trees? The government’s sold vast tracts of forest in Tierra del Fuego recently to Japanese paper companies. Jam today, hunger tomorrow. It’s the same as the fish. They couldn’t sell off fishing rights quick enough. The foreigners moved in with their sophisticated equipment and it didn’t take long for the waters to be overfished and the Chilean fish industry paralyzed.’

  He lit another cigarette, then went on ‘Just look at how beautiful it is here. The Garden of Eden. Nothing like this in Europe. But they don’t know how to protect it – to protect themselves, their future.’

  The empty coffin was lying conspicuously down the middle of the main cabin covered in a candlewick bedspread, and everyone self-consciously avoided it. Chileans will use a diminutive for anything, and as if to prove it the sailors referred to the body for whom our cargo was destined as ‘el muertito’ (the corpsette). As the journey continued, however, we forgot the coffin, and shortly after we had passed two small penguin colonies I noticed that the sailors were playing cards on it.

  The German seaman pointed out a tiny island called Snipe which caused a major row between Chile and Argentina before the 1978 crisis (they seem to have disputed everything at some time or another), and soon afterwards we passed Picton, Nueva and Lennox themselves. They were always spoken of together, like a music hall act. So that’s what they were, those famous names of modern Chilean history: small, inhospitable lumps of wind-tortured desolation, permanently surrounded by damp mist and a growling grey sea.

  In the stretch of leaden water between Lennox and the Wollaston islands, the latter dripping from the end of the continent like drops of water from a leaky tap, I went up to the bridge. The black, curved back of a whale broke the surface straight ahead (it was a finback, one of the biggest) and the captain made a joke about the Britishness of the Malvinas.

  ‘Our air force was grateful for Chilean help,’ I said.

  That shut him up.

  ‘Isn’t that right? Chile helped Britain, at your bases?’

  After an awkward pause this civilian sailor said,

  ‘We don’t talk.’

  I was again amazed at the acute public awareness of the need for secrecy over events in 1982. Chile was, admittedly, officially neutral in the Falklands War, but the Argentinians must have known what went on, ten years later. Perhaps I, a child of the 1960s, didn’t appreciate the depth of patriotic secrecy fostered by war. It was very near home, for them.

  Two more islands appeared out of the mist, the last visible remnants of the longest mountain range on earth – 4300 miles from the Caribbean down to the Horn, and it doesn’t stop there, it just goes underwater. It began to rain, and I was summoned below deck for lunch. The Ñandú had begun to seem very small, as if it were shrinking, and it was no longer gliding smoothly. I didn’t feel much like lunch, but as their only guest I was ceremoniously placed at the head of the table; I simply didn’t know what to say to get out of it. Now I knew what George Bush had felt like immediately before his display of emetic diplomacy in Tokyo. The captain and five of his crew set about a four-course meal culminating in pieces of meat the size of shoe-soles. Someone made a joke about the British constitution; I could see they were warming up for a treat.

  Hornos itself, an island rather than a cape and as dark and lugubrious as the others, was meanly spiked with dwarf beech trees and coated with tussock-grass. We dropped anchor there in tumultuous winds and waited for the ship we were supplying, squinting through binoculars at the few lonely buildings above the cliffs. Out on deck the German seaman, confounding the laws of nature by keeping his cigarette alight, shouted into my ear, but the only phrase I caught above the squall was ‘corruption at the highest levels’. I had it all planned, if the Ñandú started sinking. I was going to hold on to the coffin. Remember Moby-Dick? It was the empty coffin which saved Ishmael when the Pequod went down.

  The cruise ship appeared and three of its Philippino crew lurched over in a Zodiac inflatable. We could have docked directly with the ship if its captain hadn’t wished to protect the sensibilities of his elderly US passengers, claiming that our cargo, now wrapped in a fluorescent orange tarpaulin, would be less conspicuous if loaded from a dinghy. I gripped the rail and through a curtain of rain watched the coffin being lowered, and just as one end banged into the Zodiac, the crew of the Ñandú straining at the ropes and waves slapping the leaning deck, I was sick.

  As the ship moved back into the mist the German appeared proffering a mug of café a punto (spiked coffee). One sniff of whisky sent me straight back to the rails, and the next five hours passed in delirium as I sank into a slough of misery and thought of an anecdote recounted by the halitosic Frenchman with the Légion d’bonneur in Juan Fernández involving a troopship he had taken to Singapore on which six men died of seasickness.

  At ten at night we docked for half-an-hour at Puerto Toro on the east coast of Navarino. An agitated shoal of people darted around on the quay, lit up against the tar blackness by the Ñandú’s bright lights. They scrambled over themselves to load boxes, chairs, children and dogs. Toro was inaccessible by land, and it was time for the eight kids to go back to school in Williams.

  When we left, the children leant over the rail as adult faces lined with anxiety dissolved into the darkness. The crew all decided they were hungry, and the German set about making a goulash, his cigarette set between his lips at a jaunty angle. I retired quickly to my bunk below deck.

  1 The story of the canoe people’s residence in England, including their audience with William IV and Queen Adelaide, is well documented. For a brief introduction see Chapter 61 of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.

  Chapter Thirteen

  If one doesn’t get birthday presents it can remobilize very painfully the persecutory anxiety which usually follows birth.

  Henry Reed, The Primal Scene as it were

  I had to go north, but from Punta Arenas it wasn’t going to be possible to continue very far by land, as the country soon disintegrates into an archipelago. The land simply runs out on you. I could have travelled over the Andes, through Argentina and then back into Chile further up, but I felt it would be disloyal to abandon the thin
country at this stage of my journey, and anyway I wanted to sail through the islands. Someone had told me there were a thousand of them.

  I flew back from Williams to Punta Arenas, horrified to see a familiar object laid down the middle of the Twin Otter. The North American cruise ship had docked at Williams and offloaded the now full coffin for speedy dispatch to the nearest international airport. At least I would be able to get a lift into town with the hearse at the other end.

  Tucked into the car nicely next to the head of the coffin, I noted that my unwitting pursuit of this dead stranger was taking on a macabre fascination, and as I got out and watched the hearse disappear I wondered if I was about to follow the man’s soul to Purgatory. As it happened, I believe I did.

  I picked up my visa and spent a wet Monday running between cold shipping offices, trying to persuade intransigent officials to convey me up the coast in their vessels. A naval ship was leaving that night for Tortel; I had never heard of the place, but I saw on a map that it was suitably positioned in the middle of an empty white space representing ice. A man at the naval headquarters announced triumphantly, on my fourth visit, that he had secured me a passage on this ship. I returned later for the final details. Another man came into the room, and when he saw me he let out a kind of sharp hiss.

  ‘But we can’t take you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re a woman.’

  Later that afternoon I heard a naval officer who was present describing this incident to a colleague. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘there was a very small explosion.’

  The captain was not at any of the mess halls, or on his ship, the Orompello, or in the naval offices, and I was beginning to consider loitering outside the brothels of Punta Arenas. Finally I discovered another wing of the naval headquarters and asked the duty officer if this captain could be located. The man told me to take a seat in the waiting room, and disappeared with my passport. I sat on a bench between two marines.