In Patagonia (25 page)

The Yaghans were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far. The ethnographer Father Martin Gusinde wrote: ‘They resemble fidgety birds of passage, who feel happy and inwardly calm only when they are on the move'; and their language reveals a mariner's obsession with time and space. For, although they did not count to five, they defined the cardinal points with minute distinctions and read seasonal changes as an accurate chronometer.

Four examples:

Thomas Bridges coined the word ‘Yaghan' after a place called Yagha: the Indians called themselves
Yámana
. Used as a verb
yámana
means ‘to live, breathe, be happy, recover from sickness or be sane'. As a noun it means ‘people' as opposed to animals. A hand with the suffix—
yámana
was a human hand, a hand offered in friendship, as opposed to a death-dealing claw.

The layers of metaphorical associations that made up their mental soil shackled the Indians to their homeland with ties that could not be broken. A tribe's territory, however uncomfortable, was always a paradise that could never be improved on. By contrast the outside world was Hell and its inhabitants no better than beasts.

Perhaps, that November, Jemmy Button mistook the missionaries as envoys of the Power of Darkness. Perhaps, when later he showed remorse, he remembered that pink men also were human.

I
N HIS autobiography
The Uttermost Part of the Earth,
Lucas Bridges tells how his father's manuscript was filched by Frederick A. Cook, a glib American doctor on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1898-9, who tried to pass it off as his own work. Cook was the mythomane traveller from Rip van Winkle country who began with a milk-round and claimed the first ascent of Mount McKinley and to have beaten Robert Peary to the North Pole. He died at New Rochelle in 1940, after serving a sentence for selling forged oil shares.

The manuscript of the dictionary got lost in Germany during the Second World War, but was recovered by Sir Leonard Woolley, the excavator of Ur, and presented by the family to the British Museum.

Lucas Bridges was the first White to make friends with the Onas. They trusted him alone when men like the Red Pig were butchering their kin.
The Uttermost Part of the Earth
was one of my favourite books as a boy. In it he describes looking down from Mount Spión Kop on the sacred Lake Kami, and how, later, the Indians helped him hack a trail linking Harberton with the family's other farm at Viamonte.

I had always wanted to walk the track.

B
UT CLARITA GOODALL did not want me to go. The distance to Lake Kami was about twenty-five miles but the rivers were in spate and the bridges had fallen.

‘You could break a leg,' she said, ‘or get lost and we'd have to send a search party. We used to ride it in a day, but you can't get a horse through now.'

And all because of the beavers. A governor of the island brought the beavers from Canada and now their dams choked the valleys where once the going was clear. But still I wanted to walk the track.

And in the morning early she woke me. I heard her making tea in the kitchen. She gave me slabs of bread and blackcurrant jam. She filled my thermos with coffee. She took sticks soaked in kerosene and put them in a watertight bag: so if I fell in the river I should at least have fire. She said: ‘Do be carefull' and stood in the doorway, in the half-light, in a long pink housecoat, waving slowly with a calm sad smile.

A film of mist hung over the inlet. A family of red-fronted geese rippled the water, and at the first gate more geese stood by a puddle. I passed along the track that led up into the mountains. Ahead was Harberton Mountain, black with trees, and a hazy sun coming over its shoulder. This side of the river was rolling grass country, burned out of the forest and spiked with charred trees.

The track rose and fell. Platforms of logs were laid in corrugations in the hollows. Beyond the last fence was a black pool ringed with dead trees and from there the path wound uphill in among the first big timber.

I heard the river before I saw it, roaring at the bottom of a gorge. The track snaked down the cliff. In a clearing were Lucas Bridges's old sheep pens now rotting away. The bridge was gone, but a hundred yards upstream the river opened out and slid over slippery brown stones. I cut two saplings and trimmed them. I took off my boots and trousers and eased out into the water, testing each footfall with the left stick, steadying myself with the right. At the deepest point the stream swirled round my buttocks. I dried off in a patch of sunlight on the far bank. My feet were red from cold. A torrent duck flew upstream. I recognized its striped head and thin whirring wings.

The track soon lost itself in the forest. I checked the compass and struck north towards the second river. It was a river no longer, but a swamp of yellow peat moss. Along its edge, young trees had been felled with sharp oblique cuts, as if with the swipe of a machete. This was beaver country. This is what beavers did to a river.

I walked three hours and came up to the shoulder of Mount Spión Kop. On ahead was the valley of the Valdez River, a halfcylinder running north twelve miles to the thin blue line of Lake Kami.

A shadow passed over the sun, a whoosh and the sound of wind ripping through pinions. Two condors had dived on me. I saw the red of their eyes as they swept past, banking below the col and showing the grey of their backs. They glided in an arc to the head of the valley and rose again, circling in the upthrust, where the wind pushed against the cliffs, till they were two specks in a milky sky.

The specks increased in size. They were coming back. They came back heading into the wind, unswerving as raiders on target, the ruff of white feathers ringing their black heads, the wings unflinching and the tails splayed downwards as air-brakes and their talons lowered and spread wide. They dived on me four times and then we both lost interest.

In the afternoon I
did
fall into the river. Crossing a beaver dam I trod on a log that felt firm but was floating. It pitched me head first into black mud and I had a hard time getting out. Now I had to reach the road before night.

The track showed up again, yawning a straight corridor through the dark wood. I followed the fresh spoor of a guanaco. Sometimes I saw him up ahead, bobbing over fallen trunks, and then I came up close. He was a single male, his coat all muddied and his front gashed with scars. He had been in a fight and lost. Now he also was a sterile wanderer.

And then the trees cleared and the river wound sluggishly through cattle pastures. Following their tracks I must have crossed the river twenty times. At one crossing I saw boot-marks and suddenly felt light and happy, thinking I would now reach the road or a peon's hut, and then I lost them and the river sluiced down a schist-sided gorge. I struck out across the forest but the light was failing and it was unsafe to clamber over dead trees in the dark.

I spread my sleeping-bag on a level space. I unwrapped the sticks and piled up one half with moss and twigs. The fire flared up. Even damp branches caught and the flames lit the green curtains of lichen hanging from the trees. Inside the sleeping-bag it was damp and warm. Rainclouds were covering the moon.

And then I heard the sound of an engine and sat up. The glare of headlights showed through the trees. I was ten minutes from the road, but too sleepy to care, so I slept. I even slept through a rainstorm.

Next afternoon, washed and fed, I sat in the parlour Viamonte, too stiff to move. For two days I lay on the sofa reading. The family had gone camping all except Uncle Beatle. We talked about flying saucers. The other day he had seen a presence in the dining-room, hovering round a portrait.

From Viamonte I crossed the Chilean half of the island to Porvenir and took the ferry to Punta Arenas.

I
N THE Plaza de Armas a ceremony was in progress. It was one hundred years since Don José Menéndez set foot in Punta Arenas and a well-heeled party of his descendants had come south to unveil his memorial. The women wore black dresses, pearls, furs and patent shoes. The men had the drawn look that comes of protecting an over-extended acreage. Their Chilean lands had vanished in land reform. As yet they clung to their Argentine latifundias, but the good old days of English managers and docile peons were gone.

Don José's bronze head was bald as a bomb. The bust had once adorned the family's estancia at San Gregorio, but under the Allende regime the peons shoved it in an outhouse. Its reconsecration on the plaza symbolized the return of free enterprise, but the family were unlikely to get anything back. Insincere eulogies tolled like funeral bells.

The wind sighed through the municipal araucarias. Ranked round the square were the cathedral, the hotel and the palazzos of the old plutocracy, now mostly officers' clubs. A statue of Magellan pranced over a pair of fallen Indians, which the sculptor had modelled on ‘The Dying Gaul'.

The top brass had lent their presence to the occasion. A band drowned the wind in Sousa marches, as the Intendente, a redfaced General of the Air-Force, prepared to unveil the memorial. The Spanish chargé d'affaires stared with the glassy eyes of absolute conviction. The American ambassador looked affable. And the crowd, which always turned out for a brass band, shambled round the ceremony with expressions of stone. Punta Arenas was a Leftist town. These were the people who elected Salvador Allende their deputy.

A block away was the
palais
which Moritz Braun imported piece-meal from Europe when he married Don José's daughter in 1902, its mansard roofs poking above a shroud of black cypresses. Somehow the house had weathered the confiscations and, in a setting of hygienic marble statues and buttoned sofas, the domestic serenity of the Edwardian era survived.

The servants were preparing the dining-room for the evening's reception. The afternoon sun squeezed through velvet draperies and bounced off a runway of white damask, reflecting light over walls of Cordoba leather and a painting of amorous geese by Picasso's father, Ruiz Blasco.

After the ceremony the older generation relaxed in the winter-garden, attended by a maid in black and white, who served scones and pale tea. The conversation turned to Indians. The ‘Englishman' of the family said: ‘All this business of Indian killing is being a bit overstretched. You see, these Indians were a pretty low sort of Indian. I mean they weren't like the Aztecs or the Incas. No civilization or anything. On the whole they were a pretty poor lot.'

T
HE SALESIAN FATHERS in Punta Arenas had a bigger museum than the one at Río Grande. The prize exhibit was a glass showcase containing the photo of a young, intolerant-looking Italian priest, the cured skin of a sea-otter and an account of how the two came together:

Life-sized painted plaster effigies of the Indians stood in mahogany showcases. The sculptor had given them ape-like features which contrasted with the glucose serenity of the Madonna from the Mission Chapel on Dawson Island. The saddest exhibit was two copy-book exercises and photos of the bright-looking boys who wrote them:

So, the Salesians had noticed the significance of Genesis ; 3:19. The Golden Age ended when men stopped hunting, settled in houses and began the daily grind.

T
HE ‘ENGLISHMAN' took me to the races. It was the sunniest day of summer. The Strait was a flat, calm blue and we could see the double white crown of Mount Sarmiento. The stands had a coat of fresh white paint and were full of generals and admirals and young officers.

The ‘Englishman' wore suede boots and a tweed cap.

‘Day at the races, eh? Nothing like a good race-meeting. Come along with me now. Come along. Come into the V.I.P.'s box.'

‘I'm not dressed properly.'

‘I
know
you're not dressed properly. Never mind. They're quite broad-minded. Come along. Must introduce you to the Intendente.'