In Patagonia (17 page)

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.

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 richer 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.

Almost all the peons were migrants. They came—as they still come—from the green and beautiful island of Chiloé, where the air is soft, conditions primitive and the farms overcrowded; where there is always fish to eat and nothing much to do; and the women are fierce and energetic and the men are lazy and gamble away their earnings.

The Chilotes sleep in spartan dormitories, get saddle-sores on their backsides, and fight the cold on a diet of meat and maté till they collapse of age or stomach cancer. In general they work without enthusiasm. Often, at nights, I heard them grousing about their employers:
‘Es hombre despótico',
they'd say. But if you mentioned the name of Archie Tuffnell, they'd hold back and say ‘Well, Mister Tuffnell is an exception.'

‘
S
O YOU want to find Mister Tuffnell,' the barman said. ‘It's not easy. First there's a road that's hardly a road and then there's a track that isn't even a track.'

He was a big man in a striped suit and double-breasted waist coat. Seals and keys jingled on his fat gold chain. His hair was
engominado,
like a tango dancer's, gleaming wings of jet-black hair, but the white was showing at the roots and he looked sick and shaky. He had been a great womanizer and his wife had just got him back.

He drew a map on a paper napkin. ‘You'll see the house in some trees by a lake,' he said and wished me luck.

I found the place in the dark. Moonlight glimmered on the pearly shells of fossil oysters. There were some ducks swimming on the lake, black forms on silver ripples. I followed a thread of golden light into a clump of poplars. A dog barked. The door opened and the dog slunk past with a lump of red meat in its mouth. The woman pointed to a cabin in some willows.

‘The old man lives over there,' she said.

A straight-backed gentleman in his eighties peered through steel-rimmed spectacles and grinned. His face was shiny pink and he wore khaki shorts. I apologized for the late hour and explained my business.

‘Did you ever know a Captain Milward?'

‘Old Mill. Course I knew Old Mill. H.M. Consul Punta Arenas de Chile. Irritable old bugger. Can't remember too much about him. Young wife. A bit solid but a good-looker. Look here, come in and let me cook you some dinner. Fancy finding this place on your own.'

Archie Tuffnell loved Patagonia and called her ‘Old Pat'. He loved the solitude, the birds, the space and the dry healthy climate. He had managed a sheep-farm for a big English land company for forty years. When he had to retire, he couldn't face the coop of England, and had bought his own camp, taking with him 2,500 sheep and ‘my man Gómez'.

Archie had given the house over to the Gómez family and lived alone in a prefabricated cabin. His domestic arrangements were a lesson in asceticism: a shower, a narrow bed, a desk, and two camp stools but no chairs.

‘I don't want to get sunk down in an armchair. Not at my age. Might never get up.'

He had two sporting prints in the bedroom, and a sacred corner for photographs. They were sepia photographs, of confident ladies and gentlemen, grouped in front of conservatories or in hunting rig.

He was not a clever man but a wise one. He was a self-centred bachelor, who avoided complications and did little harm to anyone. His standards were Edwardian but he knew how the world changed; how to be one step ahead of change, so as not to change himself. His rules were simple: Keep liquid. Never wait for higher prices. Never use money to show off to your workers.

‘They're a proud lot,' he'd say. ‘You've got to keep your distance or they think you're a toady. I do it by speaking lousy Spanish on purpose. But
you'
ve got to do what they
have
to do. They don't give a hoot what you've got in the bank as long as
you
eat what they eat.'

‘My man Gómez' and Archie were inseparable. All morning they pottered round the garden, weeding the spinach or planting tomato seedlings. Señora Gómez cooked lunch and, in the heat of the day, the old man took a nap, while I sat in the blue kitchen listening to Gómez on the subject of his master.

‘What a miracle,' he said. ‘So intelligent So generous! So handsome! I owe everything to him.'

In the place of honour, where in some households you saw a picture of Perón or Jesus Christ or General San Martin, beamed an uncommonly large photo of Mister Tuffnell.

I
STOOD on the shore at San Julián and tried to picture a dinner party in Drake's cabin; the silver plates with gilt borders, the music of viol and trumpet, the plebeian Admiral and his gentleman guest, the mutineer Thomas Doughty. I then borrowed a leaky rowing boat and rowed over to Gibbet Point, combing the shore for the ‘great grinding stone' set over Doughty's tomb and carved with his name in Latin ‘that it might be better understood by all that should come after us'. Drake had him beheaded alongside the gibbet from which Magellan hung his mutineers, Quesada and Mendoza, fifty-eight winters before. Wood preserves well in Patagonia. The coopers of the
Pelican
sawed the post and made tankards as souvenirs for the crew.

Over lunch in the hotel some sheep-farmers were plotting to block the trunk road with bales, protesting against the government of Isabel Perón which had pegged the price of wool far below its value on the international market. The hotel itself was built in mock-Tudor style with black beams nailed over corrugated sheet. The style suited San Julián's various sixteenthcentury associations:

B
ERNAL DÍAZ relates how, on seeing the jewelled cities of Mexico, the Conquistadores wondered if they had not stepped into the
Book of Amadis
or the fabric of a dream. His lines are sometimes quoted to support the assertion that history aspires to the symmetry of myth. A similar case concerns Magellan's landfall at San Julián in 1520:

From the ship they saw a giant dancing naked on the shore, ‘dancing and leaping and singing, and, while singing, throwing sand and dust on his head'. As the white men approached, he raised one finger to the sky, questioning whether they had come from heaven. When led before the Captain-General, he covered his nakedness with a cape of guanaco hide.

The giant was a Tehuelche Indian, his people the race of copper-skinned hunters, whose size, strength and deafening voices belied their docile character (and may have been Swift's model for the coarse but amiable giants of Brobdingnag). Magellan's chronicler, Pigafetta, says they ran faster than horses, tipped their bows with points of silex, ate raw flesh, lived in tents and wandered up and down ‘like the Gipsies'.

The story goes on that Magellan said: ‘Ha! Patagon!' meaning ‘Big-Foot' for the size of his moccasins, and this origin for the word ‘Patagonia' is usually accepted without question. But though
pata
is ‘a foot' in Spanish, the suffix
gon
is meaningless. πάταγoς, however, means ‘a roaring' or 'gnashing of teeth' in Greek, and since Pigafetta describes the Patagonians ‘roaring like bulls', one could imagine a Greek sailor in Magellan's crew, a refugee perhaps from the Turks.

I checked the crew lists but could find no record of a Greek sailor. Then Professor Gonzáles Díaz of Buenos Aires drew my attention to
Primaleon of Greece
, a romance of chivalry, as absurd as
Amadis of Gaul
and equally addictive. It was published in Castille in 1512, seven years before Magellan sailed. I looked up the English translation of 1596 and, at the end of Book II, found reason to believe that Magellan had a copy in his cabin:

The Knight Primaleon sails to a remote island and meets a cruel and ill-favoured people, who eat raw flesh and wear skins. In the interior lives a monster called the Grand Patagon, with the ‘head of a Dogge' and the feet of a hart, but gifted with human understanding and amorous of women. The islanders' chief persuades Primaleon to rid them of the terror. He rides out, fells the Patagon with a single sword thrust, and trusses him up with the leash of his two pet lions. The Patagon dyes the grass red with blood, roars ‘so dreadfully that it would have terrified the very stoutest hearte', but recovers and licks his wound clean ‘with his huge broade tongue'.

Primaleon then decides to ship the creature home to Polonia to add to the royal collection of curiosities. On the voyage the Patagon cringes before his new master, and on landing Queen Gridonia is on hand to inspect him. ‘This is nothing but a devil,' she says. ‘He gets no cherishing at my hands'. But her daughter, the Princess Zephira, strokes the monster, sings to him and teaches him her language, while he ‘delights to gaze a fair lady in the face' and follows ‘as gently as if he had been a spaniell'.

Wintering at San Julián, Magellan also decided to kidnap two giants for Charles V and his Queen Empress. He put a number of gewgaws in their hands and, while his men riveted iron fetters round their ankles, assured them that these too were another kind of ornament. Seeing they were trapped, the giants roared (in Richard Eden's translation) ‘lyke bulls and cryed uppon their great devill Setebos to help them'. One escaped but Magellan got the other aboard and baptized him Paul.

History may aspire to symmetry but rarely achieves it: the Giant Paul died of scurvy in the Pacific and his body fed the sharks; Magellan's body lay face down in the shallows at Mactan, felled by a Filippino sword.

Ninety years would then pass before the first performance of
The
Tempest
at Whitehall on November 1st 1611. Shakespeare's sources for the play are the subject of brisk debate, but we know he read the account in Pigafetta's
Voyage
of the vile trick at San Julián:

Into the mouth of Caliban, Shakespeare packed all the bitterness of the New World. (‘This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak'st from me.') He saw how the white man's language was a weapon of war (‘The red plague rid you for learning me your language.'); how the Indians would grovel to any jackass who promised freedom (‘I'll kiss thy foot...' ‘ ‘I'll lick thy shoe ... 'Ban 'Ban Cacaliban has a new master—get a new man'); and he read Pigafetta more carefully than is usually noticed:
and: