As a child he was infatuated with a “piece of skin” in his grandmother’s glass-fronted cabinet. She told him it was part of a brontosaurus, which lived in Patagonia in South America, and was sent to her by a sailor cousin, Charley Milward, who had settled in Punta Arenas after a shipwreck. Bruce Chatwin never stopped dreaming of this story, and his interest survived the loss of the skin, which was thrown out by his mother while shifting houses.
And though it turned out that the brontosaurus was actually a mylodon or Giant Sloth, Chatwin, a journalist with The Sunday Times, landed up in South America in 1974 after writing to his boss: “Gone to Patagonia…” The months-long trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia , in 1977 and launched his writing career.
Arid wastes
Patagonia makes up the tail-end of South America, a huge mass of land shared by Argentina and Chile, filled with basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers — a “sea of grey-green thornscrub lying off in sweeps”. As he begins his journey, moving south from Buenos Aires on a night bus, Chatwin recalls the words of past travellers — how the “arid wastes” had taken firm possession of Charles Darwin’s mind, and W.H. Hudson, who had journeyed to the region in the 1860s, concluding that desert wanderers “discover in themselves a primeval calmness, which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.”
In the Chubut Valley, Chatwin arrives at a village called Gaiman, “the centre of Welsh Patagonia,” where the people are fiercely embedded in the past. The Welsh colonists had settled in the region ages ago: the houses have sash windows with the ivy trained to grow over porches, and one is named Nith-y-dryw or Wren’s Nest.
A teashop sells lemon-curd tarts and most cling to their family clocks. Elsewhere, he runs into restless souls from Italy, Scotland, Germany and also Araucanian Indians, often very drunk, as he goes up and down the Patagonian region to trace his original story, that of Milward and his sloth skin.
Outside a village in Rio Negro he climbs a path and looks up-stream towards Chile. “I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.”
The sea, the sea
Writing in short despatches, Chatwin is more interested in what the traveller sees. Finding a log cabin of the North American kind along the trail, Chatwin probes new information on Butch Cassidy and the Black Jack gang, following their tracks in Patagonia. Once when his hand is cut to the bone after a fall from a horse, he is treated by an exile, a doctor from Russia who spends every spare peso to order books from the YMCA Press in Paris.
At the town of Puerto Deseado, he argues with a bunch of scientists studying the migration of the jackass penguin: “We talked late into the night… whether or not, we, too, have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems; it seemed the only way to account for our insane restlessness.”
This restlessness or dogged pursuit of an idea would lead him to Casilla 182, Punta Arenas — the house where Milward lived, now owned by a doctor and his wife.
The story goes that when Milward was old and sick he would look out at the Magellan Strait through a telescope kept in one of the towers or “sit at a desk stirring his memory to recapture the ecstasy of going down to the sea in ships.”
In Patagonia was released to effusive praise, with The Guardian calling it “the book that redefined travel writing.” But it upset many of the people who lived there, as his biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare, notes: “He wrote quick snapshots of ordinary people among whom he passed a very short time,” mining memory, which is not always reliable.
Chatwin died at 48 after having put Patagonia on the map forever. Many wanderers still visit the place clutching a copy of his book.
The writer looks back at one classic every month.
