Crossing Chubut
An Opening Word
Over the last years, together with the photographer Ken Griffiths, I've made three journeys to Patagonia, each time to a single area, a single Argentine province. Ken went to see; I went to discover and record.
On our three journeys, each in a different season, we were accompanied by a native of the place, Edi Dorian Jones, whose great-grandfather was one of the original Welsh settlers of 1865. Sharing in all our adventures, Edi became a fast friend. He was a photographer, a former hydrographer, and a studious amateur historian. From the Atlantic to the Andes, he showed us and explained to us the sparse settlements and endless stony wastes of his home ground. Later, it was my great good fortune to repay him in a small way for all he'd done for Ken and me. I accompanied Edi on a life-long dream of his - the discovery of the land of his fathers, from the old coalfields of southern Wales to the wooded hills of Bala, in the north, where he still had relatives.
Edi died young not long ago. Clearly he was the best Argentine I ever met, in good part because there was so little Argentine in him. He inhabits every one of Ken's photographs just as he now inhabits each of my memories of his far-off birthplace.
Here is the first chapter of my book Crossing Chubut.
The Reach of Chubut
Our span on earth is three score years and ten, yet how little the mass of mankind ever sees or bothers to learn of the elaborate globe's vast surface.
While most people have heard of Patagonia, few are able to say for sure where it is; but of Chubut, a district of Patagonia, the name draws mainly blank looks. Even among the reading fraternity - those potentially greatest voyagers of all - there seems to be more familiarity with Jorge Luis Borges's Uqbar, a fictitious region in Iraq or Asia Minor, than with a real locality in Argentina seven hundred or so miles southwest of Borges's beloved Buenos Aires.
So Chubut, a spot hardly anyone can pinpoint on a map, remains a dim land, an obscure name. Henry David Thoreau, perhaps the most accomplished of travel writers, rightly observed that 'The wild goose is more cosmopolite than we; he breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon on the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou.'
I'd been approaching Chubut for years, long before I was aware of amassing more than mild curiosity about the region. Four decades ago, I lived in Buenos Aires, marvelling at what I gleaned of the length and breadth and variety of the Argentine landscape, but I was too busy at the time to stray beyond the lamplight and the desk top, where my travels were limited to poring over maps and atlases and nibbling at the fringes of the country's history.
Borges, with whom I then worked, may have set the process in motion. Not because in 1922 he visited the oilfields of Chubut, which he described in a brief poem in his first published book, but because to unravel Borges's work in Spanish and to reconstruct it in English - the job he and I were engaged in at the time - required that I give myself a grounding in all things Argentine. Borges's Argentina, however, began and ended in the city of Buenos Aires and in the boundless grassy plains of Buenos Aires province. When he spoke of the south, he meant the south of his city and his province. When I dreamed over my maps, I began to wonder what the real south was like - the south beyond Borges's world, the south where Patagonia commenced.
The journey began in a roundabout, entirely bookish way. What beckoned was a whole vast land - a wedge of Argentina and the southern Andes covering more than 300,000 square miles - that disappeared into the sea farther south than any other habitable part of the globe. But unlike Bruce Chatwin or - seventy-five or more years before him - H. Hesketh Prichard, I was not burning to discover the skin of either a living or a long-dead animal; nor, like W.H. Hudson, was I trawling for new bird species; nor, like a host of magazine journalists, was I out for tea and cakes amongst the Welsh settlers of Gaiman. Looking for nothing in particular, I had no axe to grind and no end in sight; inquisitiveness was all that prompted me. I read Darwin, Pigafetta, Bridges, Musters, Falkner, Tschiffely; I skimmed travel guides and brochures and picture books of every kind; I culled the writings of chroniclers, travellers, explorers, hydrographers, mountaineers, and historians. My progress was luxuriously snail's-pace, pure, almost abstract.
Then, in 1996, the Argentine Embassy in London paid me to pull my reading together and compile a brochure for them to accompany an exhibition that marked the links between Patagonia and Britain, a relationship that ranged back to 1578. The work made me revisit the Voyage of the Beagle, and this time, when I came upon Darwin's famous summation in the book's concluding pages - his backward glance over 'five years' wandering' - I was filled with an impossible wistfulness for a landscape I'd never seen.
In calling up images of the past, [Darwin had written], I find the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes: yet these plains are pronounced by all most wretched and useless. They are characterized only by negative possessions; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm possession of the memory?
Something in these words, some vague echo, sent me on a blind rummage of my little library.
Early on, in a Buenos Aires second-hand bookshop, I had acquired a small volume by one H. Hesketh Prichard. The title alone made me buy it - Through the Heart of Patagonia. In 1900, when he was twenty-three, Hesketh Prichard was named to lead an expedition to determine whether the prehistoric mylodon, or giant ground sloth, any longer survived in the primeval forests of the southern Andes. It didn't, and the root of this fantasy smacks more of Steven Spielberg than it does of grown-up science. Yet at the time immense stretches of the Patagonian hinterland were still unexplored, and serious authorities, including the director of the British Museum of Natural History, were keeping open minds. C. Arthur Pearson, proprietor of the newly-founded Daily Express, financed the trek. From September 1900 to May 1901 - starting out with a wagon, a troop of sixty horses, and seven other men - young Hesketh Prichard roamed, combed, and crisscrossed Patagonia all the way from Trelew to Rio Gallegos. It was a journey of some 2,000 miles. Thanks to his heroic accomplishments, we became the richer in sundry ways. First, science found out once and for all not only that there was no horny-plated, hairy sloth still bumbling about in the thickly-forested slopes of the Cordillera but also that there was a singular absence of animal life in those forests. Second, geography was enriched by the discovery of a hitherto uncharted river and lake. Third, zoology was enhanced by the pelt of a new form of puma that Hesketh Prichard sent to the British Museum. (Both lake and puma subspecies were afterwards named for Pearson.) Fourth, readers have ever since been treated to a superb story of travel, adventure, and exploration. When I re-read the book after more than a quarter of a century, I was astonished to discover that most of the images I held of Patagonia and that I had long cherished and been fuelled by - the ones perfectly evoked by the passage in Darwin - were those first encountered in Through the Heart of Patagonia. I had not forgotten the book but I had forgotten just how much I owed to it.
Work on the Argentine Embassy booklet also introduced me to The Desert and the Dream, Glyn Williams' potent study of the Welsh in Chubut. Then, at this point, things accelerated and got turned on their head. Williams showed me that there was more to the transplanted Red Dragon than mere quaintness. The record of these colonizers - Patagonia's first permanent settlers - is unique in the annals of European immigration; their hardships and triumphs, by any account, have been nothing short of heroic. But what moved me in their story was something else, something I could not immediately define. Perhaps their isolation; perhaps the way they clung to their language and culture; perhaps their rectitude in what had been a lawless frontier. Everything about these people was against the odds. But then too perhaps my response was merely subjective, intuitive. As the son and grandson of emigrants and an emigrant myself, did I think these Welsh dreamers might somehow shed light on my own and my family's century-old uprootedness?
I wondered. Insight is a good thing, but also silly or even dangerous when it is wrong. In London, I met members of a visiting choir from Chubut. They had Welsh voices, bore Spanish and Italian surnames, exuded Argentine generosity, and spoke no English. Intriguing. I wanted to know more. Now, along with this glimmer of a focus, came the sudden realization that Patagonia was far too big. I also saw that a romantic fascination with untrammelled nature alone - with endless stony wastes, tangled forests, or mountain fastnesses - would not hold my interest for long. Hudson's Patagonia and the story of his idle days spent there during one whole summer of 1871 brought this home to me. For my taste his book falls off when he takes to theorizing or when he narrates his solitary jaunts on horseback in search of bird lore. But when he deals with other people and with episodes in the earlier history of the place - and best of all the opening chapter, which describes his shipwrecked landing on the Río Negro coast - the book is most engaging.
So my Patagonia, if I was going to see it, had to be cut down to a manageable size and it had be to well peopled - not just with colourful oddballs, like the characters collected or invented by Chatwin, but with real people who lived real lives. And finally, for good measure, I also wanted a slice of history.
Chubut appeared to offer it all. Thirty years of leisurely abstraction came to an end; an itch for actual travel was upon me. All I needed was a patron.