'In Patagonia, the drinker drinks'

Patagonia lies in the south of South America, spread over Chile and Argentina and includes a staggeringly diverse range of landscapes — the Andes, deserts, grasslands, lakes and forests. I have a distinct memory of a geography teacher in school enunciating the word gaucho when describing the inhabitants of this remote (for us in Asia) part of the world. Another name the teacher took distinct pleasure in pronouncing: Tierra del Fuego.

It took watching Walter Salles’ film adaptation of Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries almost 20 years ago to bring home to me the sheer scale and rugged beauty of Patagonia. When I searched for more writing about the place, the one suggestion that kept popping up was Bruce Chatwin’s travel classic, In Patagonia.

After a career as a Sotheby’s auctioneer and brief periods as a student of archaeology and art curator, Chatwin chucked a steady life in England for a more nomadic existence in the 1970s. One of the first places he went to was Patagonia, inspired by a piece of withered hide that was in a glass cabinet in his grandmother’s dining room and which family lore insisted was “A piece of brontosaurus” (it turned out, in reality, to have been from some species of sloth). Apparently, it was found by his grandmother’s cousin, Charley Milward the Sailor. And so young Bruce’s imagination was set afire, to go to this place where you could apparently still find dinosaur remains and ship them across the seas.

When In Patagonia came out in 1977, it sold around 6,000 copies and won widespread acclaim and awards. Graham Greene and Paul Theroux were among those who showered the book with praise. Nowadays it is increasingly common to write non-fiction of this sort that blends fact, fiction and myth but when In Patagonia was first published, Chatwin was considered a pioneer.

The book is not strictly a travelogue — rather, in its short chapters that are deft character sketches of the people and places that make up this region, it’s more of an anthropological study of what made Patagonia so attractive to so many from around the world.

Most of the original, indigenous inhabitants of the land had been reduced to a minority by the time Chatwin got there. In their place were those from Europe who had made a home there: Welsh and Scots and others who washed up on these shores. Chatwin gives a short account from Port Madryn:

“A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. They were poor people in search of a New Wales, refugees from cramped coal-mining valleys, from a failed independence movement, and from Parliament’s ban on Welsh in schools. Their leaders had combed the earth for a stretch of open country uncontaminated by Englishmen. They chose Patagonia for its absolute remoteness and foul climate; they did not want to get rich.”

Chatwin encounters even more members of tribes and groups who’ve run away from persecution in their homelands — Russian Jewish anarchists, and Iranian Bahai’is. He narrates the legends that have grown around the American outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who’d hidden in a log cabin in Patagonia for a while. These portraits that effortlessly blend myth and fact make In Patagonia an irresistible read, a compelling yarn authored by a writer who clearly delighted in the telling of tall tales.

Nowadays, of course, places like Patagonia no longer hold much mystery — the gorgeous vistas are all over Instagram, backgrounds for influencers as they #awakethesoul. You see one person sitting on a rocky outcrop gazing soulfully at a blue lake and wonder how many people are just out of the frame, queueing up to take the same picture. While you read In Patagonia and are grateful that the piece of skin in Chatwin’s grandmother’s dining room inspired him to write a classic, you do wonder if maybe it wasn’t a bit too good at selling a place that might have benefited from staying remote and shrouded in mystery.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.