What I Am Reading: "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin

This book is another target from the Outside Magazine list of adventure books, chosen perhaps because of the list’s haunting Nazi excerpt. This book is a travel story as a series of vignettes, from when the author, an Englishman, traveled to Patagonia in the '70s.

The vignettes retrace the travel, locations, and the people he encountered. Many of the places are small, remote, picturesque farms and villages set in the rugged region, and many of the vignettes are more meditative than they are expository. Some of them do focus on recurring topics, threads chased throughout the journey. One of these is a few possible fates of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (almost a decade after the movie), as handed down essentially from local oral history. It is fairly impressive that people are able to relate events from 50, 70, or even more years prior to their telling.

The main recurring theme, however, and the official purpose of the journey, involves paleontology. Chatwin's ancestor lived in Patagonia, and at one point mailed home a piece of "brontosaurus skin," which Chatwin recalled having in the house as a youth. This is obviously a misinterpretation, but the truth does turn out to be interesting. The ancestor, Charley Milward, was a sailor in the late 19th century who eventually settled in Patagonia as a small businessman and became British consul (Patagonia, and Argentina at large, is a melting pot with many European transplants). One of his adventures on this frontier was helping with the excavation (looting, really) of a cave that contained the preserved remains of mylodon, an ice-age giant sloth. This is the skin's origin, and at the end of the book, Chatwin does make it to the cave and find a few sloth hairs of his own. (Allegedly. Apparently the book's credibility is contested).

There are many accounts of crimes, both large-scale institutional crimes and small-scale person crimes, against the indigenous people of the area. There are also a few interesting items on labor uprisings. One, in 1920-22, was a general strike which turned into an armed uprising. When an initial attempt by the Argentine government to find a satisfactory outcome failed, an armed expedition was launched. The uprising of peasants and workers was led by anarchist Antonio Soto, whom Chatwin viewed as a rabble-rouser without much of a long-term plan. The rebellion melted away in the face of advancing troops, and most of the Chilote peasants who surrendered were summarily shot. Soto escaped to live in obscurity. This story came to Chatwin's attention because a historian, Osvaldo Bayer, had just written about it. Another story, predating that one but told later in the book, is that of Simón Radowitzky: a young, radical Russian émigré who bombed a police colonel in revenge for the violent suppression of a riot in 1909. Radowitzky was captured and became a celebrated political prisoner, subject to abuse in a prison in Tierra del Fuego and to high-profile clemency efforts. After a decade, his friends contracted with Pascualino Rispoli, the "last pirate of Tierra del Fuego," on an attempted jail break by sea, which ultimately led to a recapture. Eventually, after over two decades in captivity, Argentina's first democratic president, Hipólito Yrigoyen, freed him from prison. He was quiet and confused for a time, slowly adjusting to life in freedom, and worked a bit with the anarchist crowd. He went on to fight in Spain, and died in the mid-50s.

I am always interested in obscure leftist uprisings such as these. Beyond that, I find the Patagonia region interesting as a whole. In some ways it resembles the American Old West with its frontier intermingling, gauchos, genocide, and ranching economy, and of course even imported some real cowboys. At the same time, it is also a far-south region; the remote, seal-hunting, pemmican-scarfing counterpart to the inhabited far north, and similarly a crucial way-point for polar explorers. There is a cameo, for example, by the cook on the 1898 Belgian Antarctic expedition, which was also Roald Amundsen's first expedition. Another interesting socio-economic thread is woven when Chatwin recounts how his ancestor's business ventures suffered with the opening of the Panama Canal, as ships of course no longer had to travel around Cape Horn. This must have been a big change to the character of the region. This is my second travel book, and this is because I can see the attraction of a travelogue about this unique region at the far end of the hemisphere.