In Patagonia (20 page)

Some trucks were lined up outside the tin restaurant, waiting for the tide to refloat the two landing craft that ferried traffic across. Three ancient Scots stood by. Their eyes were bloodshotpink and nursery-blue and their teeth worn to little brown pinnacles. Inside, a strong juicy woman sat on a bench, combing her hair while her companion, a trucker, laid slices of mortadella on her tongue.

The advancing tide pushed mattresses of kelp up the scarp of the beach. The gale blew out of the west. In a patch of calmer water a pair of steamer ducks burbled their monogamous conversation
tuk-tuk
...
tuk-tuk
...
tuk-tuk
... I threw a pebble their way but could not disturb their absorption in each other and set their thrashing paddle-wings in motion.

The Strait of Magellan is another case of Nature imitating Art. A Nuremberg cartographer, Martin Beheim, drew the South-West Passage for Magellan to discover. His premise was entirely reasonable. South America, however peculiar, was normal compared to the Unknown Antarctic Continent, the Antichthon of the Pythagoreans, marked FOGS on mediaeval maps. In this Upside-down-land, snow fell upwards, trees grew downwards, the sun shone black, and sixteen-fingered Antipodeans danced themselves into ecstasy. WE CANNOT GO TO THEM, it was said, THEY CANNOT COME TO us. Obviously a strip of water had to divide this chimerical country from the rest of Creation.

On October 21st 1520, the Feast of St Ursula and her Eleven Thousand (shipwrecked) Virgins, the fleet rounded a headland which the Captain called Cabo Virgenes. Yawning before them was a bay, apparently landlocked. In the night a gale blew from the north-east and swept the
Concepcíon
and the
San Antonio
through the First Narrows, through the Second Narrows, and into a broad reach bearing south-west. When they saw the tidal rips, they guessed it led to the further ocean. They returned to the flagship with the news. Cheers, cannonades and pennons flying.

On the north shore a landing party found a stranded whale and a charnel-place of two hundred corpses raised on stilts. On the southern shore they did not land.

Tierra del Fuego—The Land of Fire. The fires were the campfires of the Fuegian Indians. In one version Magellan saw smoke only and called it Tierra del Humo, the Land of Smoke, but Charles V said there was no smoke without fire and changed the name.

The Fuegians are dead and all the fires snuffed out. Only the flares of oil rigs cast a pall over the night sky.

Until in 1619 the Dutch fleet of Schouten and LeMaire rounded the Horn—and named it, not for its shape, but after Hoorn on the Zuyder Zee, cartographers drew Tierra del Fuego as the northern cape of the Antichthon and filled it with suitable monstrosities: gorgons, mermaids and the Roc, that outsize condor which carried elephants.

Dante placed his Hill of Purgatory at the centre of the Antichthon. In Canto 26 of The Inferno, Ulysses, swept on his mad track south, sights the island-mountain looming from the sea as the waves close over his
ship—infin che 'l mar fu sopra noi richiuso—
destroyed by his passion to exceed the boundaries set for man.

Fireland then is Satan's land, where flames flicker as fireflies on a summer night, and, in the narrowing circles of Hell, ice holds the shades of traitors as straws in glass.

This perhaps is why they did not land.

The tide crept up to the ferries. The sun dipped under the cloudbank, gilding its edges, and sank into the middle of the Strait. A flood of saffron light turned the waves from greaseblack to viridian and the spray to a milky golden green.

Donne's deathbed stanzas, his ‘blowing out', through rocks and shoals into the bright beyond:

The jaws of the ferries opened for the trucks, but none was allowed to board until passed by a Chilean army officer. He was a proud fair young man of uncommon length and old-fashioned Germanic civility. A red stripe sped down his grey trousers. His exquisite pink nails hovered over my passport, halted by a Polish visa and passed on.

The churning engines spread an iridescent film over the water. The whiff of a sheep-truck attracted flocks of seabirds—gulls, giant petrels and black-browed albatrosses—wheeling round the ferry as she crawled crabwise across the tide and short breaking seas. Taking off, the albatrosses spread themselves to the wind, their huge webs paddling the water, streaming spray until the cutting edge of their wings lifted them clear.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once saw in a museum a stuffed Great Wandering Albatross, with its wingspan of twelve feet, and the idea of such a bird round the Mariner's neck struck him as yet another instance of the poem's absurdity. But Coleridge's albatross was a much smaller bird. Here is the text, taken from Captain Shelvocke's voyage, which gave the poem its marching papers:

There are two contenders and I saw them both on Tierra del Fuego: the Sooty Albatross, a shy bird, smoke-grey all over and known to sailors as the Stinkpot or Prophet; or, less likely, the Black-browed Albatross or Mollymauk, fearless and attached to human company.

Halfway across the Strait, V-formations of black and white cormorants flashed past, and a school of black and white dolphins danced in the golden sea.

The day before I had met the nuns of the Santa Maria Auxiliadora Convent on their Saturday coach outing to the penguin colony on Cabo Virgenes. A bus-load of virgins. Eleven thousand virgins. About a million penguins. Black and white. Black and white. Black and white.

T
WO OIL engineers drove me to Rio Grande, the one town on the east side of the island. In the old days it flourished with the English meat trade. Now, temporarily it was given over to Israel.

A party of young kosher butchers had flown from Tel-Aviv to perform the rites of Leviticus. Their skill with the knife made them friends among the workers, but their behaviour scandalized the management on two counts: their patriarchal methods of slaughter clogged the production line; after the day's work they swam naked in the river, washing the blood from their hard, white, stringy bodies.

In driving rain I walked along the shore to the College of the Salesian Fathers. It began life as a Mission (or prison) for the Indians, and since their disappearance they ran it as an agricultural school.

The Fathers were expert taxidermists and connoisseurs of frilly pelargoniums. A priest in steel-rimmed spectacles was in charge of the museum, and asked me to sit while he knifed out the eye of a young guanaco. His bloodied hands contrasted vividly with his bloodless upper arm. He had been lacquering an outsize spider-crab and the smell of acetate filled the room. Ranged round the walls was an aviary of stuffed birds. Their red-painted throats screeched at their preserver with terrible silence.

A young priest from Verona came with the key. The museum was housed in the old Mission Church. The Indians of Tierra del Fuego were the Ona and the Haush, who were foot hunters; and the Alakaluf and the Yaghan (or Yámana) who were canoe hunters. All were tireless wanderers and owned no more than they could carry. Their bones and equipment decayed on glass shelves—bows, quivers, harpoons, baskets, guanaco capes—set alongside the material advances brought by a God, who taught them to disbelieve the spirits of moss and stones and set them to petit-point, crochet and copy-book exercises (examples of which were on display).

The priest was a placid young man with droopy eyelids. He passed his time watching how low a barometer could sink and digging Ona campsites for artefacts. He took me to some green swellings along the shore. Lancing one of these with a spade, he uncovered a purple pie of mussels, ashes and bones.

‘Look,' he cried, ‘the mandible of an Ona dog.'

The museum housed a stuffed specimen of this ancient, wiry, sharp-muzzled breed, now smothered by the genes of Highland sheepdogs.

A
MAN I met in Rio Grande passed me on to his cousins who farmed close to the Chilean border.

Outside the town the Estancia José Menéndez lay on a grey-green hill. Paint peeling, it looked like a cruise ship gone aground. Above the door of the shearing shed were the words JOSÉ MENÉNDEZ in gold and above them the well-modelled head of a prize ram. The smell of mutton fat drifted from the peons' kitchen.

Beyond the buildings the dirt road twisted over and round the folds in the pampas. Banks of yarrow grew along the fence. I reached some peons' quarters in the half-light. Two sheepdogs yelped but an old Chileno called them off and signalled me in. An iron stove was blazing and an old woman was pegging her laundry on a wire. The room was bare and scrubbed clean. On the walls were pictures of Hitler and General Rosas pasted up long ago and browned over with smoke resin. The old man sat me in his canvas chair and blearily answered yes and no to questions.

The woman went into the kitchen and came back with a plate of stew. She set it on the table with a knife and fork, slowly and deliberately, one, two, one, two. I thanked her and she turned her face to the wall.

A young gaucho in bombachas came in carrying an embossed leather saddle. He went to his room and set it on a stand at the foot of his bed. His back filled the doorway and he began polishing. So now there were two noises, the crackling of the fire and the gaucho rubbing his saddle.

The old man got up and looked from the window. A horseman was cantering up the turf verge of the road.

‘Esteban,' he called through to the woman.

The rider bridled his horse to the fence and strode in. The woman had already set his plate down. He was a tall man, red in the face. As he ate, he talked about the wool-slump, and the province of Corrientes where he was born, and Germany where his father was born before him.

‘You English?' he asked. ‘Once many English here. Owners, managers,
capataces.
Civilized people. Germany and England—Civilization! The rest—
Barbaridad!
This estancia. Manager always English. Indian kill sheep. English kill Indian. Ha!'

We then talked about a Mr Alexander MacLennan who was manager of the estancia in 1899 and was better known as the Red Pig.

I
N THE 1890s a crude version of Darwin's theory, which had once germinated in Patagonia, returned to Patagonia and appeared to encourage the hunting of Indians. A slogan: ‘The Survival of the Fittest', a Winchester and a cartridge belt gave some European bodies the illusion of superiority over the far fitter bodies of the natives.

The Onas of Tierra del Fuego had hunted guanaco since Kaux, their ancestor, split the island into thirty-nine territories, one for each family. The families squabbled, it is true, but usually over women; they did not think of extending their boundaries.

Then the Whites came with a new guanaco, the sheep, and a new frontier, barbed wire. At first the Indians enjoyed the taste of roast lamb, but soon learned to fear the bigger, brown guanaco and its rider that spat invisible death.

The Onas' sheep rustling threatened the companies' dividends (in Buenos Aires the explorer Julius Popper spoke of their ‘alarming Communist tendencies') and the accepted solution was to round them up and civilize them in the Mission—where they died of infected clothing and the despair of captivity. But Alexander MacLennan despised slow torture: it offended his sporting instincts.

As a boy he had exchanged the wet slates of Scotland for the boundless horizons of the British Empire. He had grown into a strong man, with a flat face reddened by whisky and the tropics, pale red hair and eyes that flashed both blue and green. He was one of Kitchener's sergeants at Omdurman. He saw two Niles, a domed tomb, patched jibbahs and the ‘fuzzy-wuzzies', desert men who anointed their hair with goat grease and lay under cavalry charges, ripping the horses' guts with short hooked knives. Perhaps he knew then that wild nomads are untamable.

He left the army and was recruited by José Menéndez's agents. His methods succeeded where those of his predecessor failed. His dogs, horses and peons adored him. He was not among the farm-managers who offered
£
1 sterling for every Indian ear: he preferred to do the killing himself. He hated to see any animal in pain.

The Onas had traitors in their camps. One day a renegade came with a grudge against his own kind, and told MacLennan that a party of Indians was heading for the seal colony on Cabo de Peñas, south of Rio Grande. The hunters butchered the seals in a landlocked cove. From the cliffs the Red Pig and his men watched the beach run red with blood and the rising tide force them within range. They bagged at least fourteen head that day.

‘A humanitarian act she Red Pig said, ‘if one has the guts to do it.'