PAT NOURSE
Bruce Chatwin was the most famous visitor to Patagonia after Magellan, the Portuguese explorer. “Have gone to Patagonia,” he cabled his colleagues back at The Sunday Times in London, having simply vanished. The book he published about the trip in 1977 painted the defining picture of Patagonia in the Western mind. In Patagonia was also called the book that revolutionised travel writing, “a redeemer,” as The Paris Review would have it, “of literary nonfiction.”
Though Chatwin covered a lot of ground, there’s surprisingly little actual travel in the book. What captured his imagination was the people. He took tea with the ancestors of Welsh sheep farmers (“They chose Patagonia for its absolute remoteness and foul climate; they did not want to get rich”), and delved into Andean valleys to sift for traces of Butch Cassidy (whom he pictured seduced by land resembling his home state of Utah, “a country of clean air and open spaces; of black mesas and blue mountains; a country of bones picked clean by hawks, stripped by the wind, stripping men to the raw”). He investigated witchcraft, mooched on estancias, and eventually meandered all the way down to Ushuaia, the southernmost town on the continent, in Tierra del Fuego.
My trip was far shorter, taking in just a small corner of Patagonia on the Chilean side. But it was the part of Patagonia that had first called to Chatwin across the waters and across the years. He came to Patagonia looking for a brontosaurus. A scrap of skin (“a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair”) kept in a glass-fronted cabinet in his grandmother’s dining room in Birmingham had obsessed him as a child. When he grew older he learnt that it had, in fact, been a piece of a mylodon, a giant ground sloth that became extinct 10,000 years ago. It had come into Nanna Chatwin’s possession via her cousin Charley Milward, who had been the British consul in Punta Arenas when a well-preserved cache of skin and bones had been found in a cave on Last Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia.
I found many of the things Chatwin saw remain unchanged. The gardens of Puerto Natales are still choked with dock and cow parsley; the engine that used to run the men of the town to the meatworks still sits in the plaza, now painted red and scrawled with graffiti. The families of the islanders of Chiloé who migrated here nearly a century ago to work on the killing floor provide both the talent and the customer base for a handful of Chilote restaurants.
The mylodon looms large in Puerto Natales, too. There’s the life-sized statues that stand 10 metres high at the gateway to the small fishing town. There’s another one in Cueva del Milodón Natural Monument, the large, only mildly spooky cave half an hour north-west where the remains were found in 1895. The cave has also yielded evidence of prehistoric human occupations here, along with the existence of a species of dwarf horse, and a sabre-toothed cat called a smilodon. In a case by the towering, bear-like concrete mylodon, are claws (réplica), bones and fur (originales). The mylodon also lives on in the province’s gift shops (in carved timber), street signs (in Comic Sans), and the local cab company (Radio Taxi el Milodón).
The young Bruce Chatwin had fixated on Patagonia as the safest place on Earth, a place far from Cold War worries. “I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with the best books,” he wrote, “somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.”
The best travel writing has that same power to call to us across the seas and the years and the planes of our imagination. We chance upon a piece of brontosaurus skin in a dining room in Birmingham and it leads us to the ends of the Earth.