Travels in a Thin Country (31 page)

The policemen treated me like a little queen. They tried to prepare extra special meals for my benefit, which was particularly touching given the primitive nature of the kitchen and the pathetically limited ingredients available. José, an intelligent man who would have been an officer had his family had enough money to get him trained, held strong opinions on a wide range of unsavoury topics such as military control and the evils of trade unionism, but I closed my ears, and couldn’t help liking him. They took me out on expeditions, anxious that I should see everything. If my boots were just a little damp they insisted on lending me shoes even though they were much too big, and I had to fight to be allowed to wash the dishes.

On the second day we went to pick mushrooms, and they taught me which ones were safe. I wasn’t a good student: I noticed that most of the mushrooms in my basket were rejected by Mauricio when he prepared lunch. We ate them with a bright orange spherical fungus picked off the beech trunks. Afterwards, Mauricio and Piglet took me with them on patrol to Wulaia, a bay to the south west.

‘What are we patrolling for?’ I asked as we guided the horses through gorsey bushes.

‘To see if there are any Argentinians, I suppose,’ said Piglet.

‘Well, what are we going to do if there are?’

‘Umm … go back and tell the boss, I guess.’

The bay looked towards the Murray Canal and the uninhabited Hoste Island, a series of peninsulas linked by fragile strips of land sprawling among the cold Pacific waters. Wulaia was a potent name in the history of the indigenous peoples of the Beagle Channel and the interlopers who came to disturb them. Captain Robert FitzRoy of HMS
Beagle
took four Yahgan with him on the long journey home, and after three of them (one died in Plymouth) had enjoyed the sophisticated pleasures of nineteenth-century England he conveyed them back to their channels and left them at the small, peaceful bay of Wulaia. They had spent about three years in British company.
¹

More than a quarter of a century later, on 6 November 1859, a small British mission held its first church service at Wulaia. Eight foreigners were present and they had mustered an impressive congregation of three hundred. The mission cook, Alfred Cole, had remained on board their ship, the
Allen Gardiner
, which was anchored opposite the little church. As Cole listened to the tuneless, enthusiastic verses of the first hymn from across the water he noticed movement outside the church, and then he saw all his colleagues butchered by a party of men led, it seems almost certain, by Jemmy Button, one of the three who had been presented at the Court of St James’ during his stay in England.

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.

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 play 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.