In Patagonia (30 page)

The third exhibit from this time is a coloured print by Cecil Aldin, of dogs at a feeding bowl. It conjures up the image of Sir Ernest Shackleton, pacing round Charley's living-room, haranguing the newspaper editor, Mr Charles Riesco, about the plight of his men trapped on Elephant Island. From the article in the
Magellan Times—‘
the deep set grey eyes' ‘greatness equated by modesty' ‘the best of our race' etc.—you would never guess what happened:

Charley was pretending to doze off in a wing chair while the explorer waved his revolver about to emphasize important points. The first bullet whizzed past Charley's ear and hit the wall. He got up, disarmed his guest and put the weapon on the mantelpiece. Shackleton was quite shaken, apologized and mumbled about the last bullet in the chamber. Charley sat down again, but Shackleton's flow was inseparable from his gun. The second bullet missed again, but hit the print. The hole is in the lower right margin.

Meanwhile the ex-consul's life had taken a new direction. He had met a young Scotswoman called Isabel, who had got stranded, penniless, in Punta Arenas, after working on an estancia in Santa Cruz. Charley looked after her and paid her fare back to Scotland. He was lonely again once she had gone. They wrote to each other: one of his letters contained a proposal.

Belle came back and they started a family. In 1919 Charley calculated his assets at
£
30,000, enough to retire on and provide for all his children. He sold the Fundición Milward to a Frenchman, M. Lescornez, and his partner Senor Cortéz, agreeing they should defer payments until business recovered from the post-war slump. The family packed, sailed for England, and bought a country house, ‘The Elms', near Paignton.

Charley the Sailor home from sea. Charley the Pioneer with the restlessness gone; pottering round his garden; taking prizes at the Taunton Flower Show; growing old with his young wife in the English countryside; teaching the boy or playing with his two daughters, one showing signs of beauty, the other of his forthright personality—I am sad to report that this harmonious and symmetrical picture was not to be.

Panama was now cut through. Punta Arenas was again on the way to nowhere. Wool slumped. There was revolution in Santa Cruz. And the foundry failed.

Encouraged by two or more of the ‘true Britishers', acting out of spite, the new owners milked the business, ran up debts, signed cheques in the Milward name, and ran.

Charley was ruined.

He kissed the children. He kissed Belle. He said goodbye for ever to the green fields of England. He bought a ticket to Punta Arenas, one way, third class. Friends in the first-class saw him gazing sorrowfully at the sea. They offered to pay the difference, but he had his pride. No deck games for him this voyage. He preferred to bunk with shepherds.

Belle sold ‘The Elms' and followed, and for six years they picked up the pieces. Photos show a stooping old man in a homburg with huge whiskers and wounded eyes. He would hobble down to the foundry and growl at the men and laugh when they laughed. Belle kept the books; she would carry on for nearly forty years. Without her thrift they would have gone under, and, one by one, they paid off the debts.

I have one last image of Charley, dated around 1928, sitting in the tower with his telescope, straining to catch the last of the steamer that carried the boy to school in England. As she headed up eastward and was swallowed into the night, he said: ‘I'll never see the lad again.'

I
WAS in Punta Arenas on a Sunday and went to Matins at St James's. I sat in Charley's pew, knowing it was his by the brass ferrule screwed on for his walking stick. An American Baptist minister took the service. His sermon explained the technical difficulties of building the Verranzano Narrows Bridge, veered off among ‘Bridges to God', and ended with a thundering call: ‘Ye shall be that Bridge!' He asked us to pray for Pinochet but we were uncertain of the spirit in which our prayers were offered. In the congregation was an old Highland shepherd called Black Bob MacDonald who had worked for the Red Pig. ‘Grand man!' he said.

I also met an American lady ornithologist, down here to study the fighting behaviour of Darwin's Rheas. She said the two males locked necks and whirled round in circles: the one who got dizzy first was the loser.

A
N ENGLISHMAN suggested I take the air-taxi over to Porvenir on Tierra del Fuego and visit the old farm of one of Charley's contemporaries.

Mr Hobbs's cottage lay on the flat land between a flamingo lake and an arm of the Strait. It looked like a gentleman's shooting lodge, of clapboard painted a soft ochre, with white bay windows and a terracotta roof. White rambler roses tumbled over windbreaks enclosing the tiny garden. Some favourite English flowers lingered on long after the English had gone.

A Yugoslav widow had owned the place since land reform. She had put a peon in the house and let it go down. But the pitchpine floors were there and the curving banisters, and shreds of William Morris wallpaper adhered to the upper landing.

Mr Hobbs, from photos, was a thick-set man with wavy hair and a candid pink English face. He called his farm Gente Grande, ‘the Big People' after the Onas who hunted here when he came. Even today the farm bore the mark of his taste for fine craftsmanship —the dog-kennels, the finials on the sheep-pens, even the pig-sty, which was painted the same colour as the house. It can't have changed much since Charley was here in 1900.

About a month before his visit, the Chilean man-of-war
Errazuriz
was surveying the north coast of Tierra del Fuego and sent a boat crew ashore. Two sailors got separated from the rest and were killed and stripped by the Indians.

A search-party went out next morning, but it was several days before they found the mutilated remains of the men. The Captain sent a force to punish the murderers, but the Onas, who knew what to expect, had bolted for the mountains.

‘Tell me, Hobbs,' Charley said. ‘What do you propose to do about the Indians? Now they've killed two sailors, they'll get too big for their boots and someone else'll suffer. Your homestead's handy, and what with your wife and children and nurses and servants, I think you'll be next to be honoured with their attentions.'

‘I don't quite know what to do,' Hobbs said. ‘The Government's so horribly nasty nowadays if you kill an Indian, even in self-defence. I'll have to wait and see what can be done.'

Charlie went back to the island a few months later and Hobbs asked him to look at some pigs he'd imported from England. On top of the sty was a fairly fresh human skull.

‘You remember when the Indians killed the men from the
Errazuriz
,' Hobbs said.

‘I do. I even asked you what you were going to do about it.'

‘I said I'd wait and see. Well, now it's done and that is the result.'

Charley begged him tell the story, but he clamped up. Two nights later, they were in the smoking-room after dinner, when Hobbs began, suddenly: ‘You were asking about the Indians. There isn't much to tell really. They began coming nearer the house. At first they stole one sheep at a time, and then they got bolder and took thirty and forty. Then one of my shepherds barely escaped by galloping his horse. So I decided it was time to do something.

‘I sent out spies to report their strength and the exact place of their camp-site. I heard there were thirteen men, plus women and children. One day, when the women were not there, I gathered up my tame Indians, eight in all, and said: “We're going guanaco shooting.” I armed them with old guns and revolvers. We started out a good party, but gradually I ordered my own men home, so when we drew near the Ona camp, we were only Indians, myself and one man.

‘We sighted the Ona camp and I told my tame Indians to ask the wild ones where the guanaco were. But when they saw my lot coming with firearms, they let fly with arrows. The tame Indians, greeted in this manner, retaliated with rifles and killed a man. After that, of course, there was no quarter. The wild men were beaten and among the dead was the man who killed the sailors from the
Errazuriz
. That's his skull on the pig-sty.

‘I, as district magistrate, had to file a report to the Government. I wrote that the tame Indians had been fighting wild ones. There had been some deaths, among them the wanted murderer.'

T
HE PILOT of the air-taxi introduced me to a Yugoslav who flew freight to Dawson Island. He took me along. I wanted to see the concentration camp where ministers of the Allende regime were held, but the soldiers confined me to the aeroplane.

Charley had a story of the earlier prison on the island:

‘The Salesian Fathers established a mission on Dawson Island and asked the Chilean Government to send them any Indian who was caught. The Fathers soon collected a great many Indians and taught them the rudiments of civilization. This did not suit the Indians in any way, and though they had food and shanties to live in, they craved for their old wandering life.

‘By the time I am speaking of, epidemics had reduced their number to about forty. They had been giving a lot of trouble, trying to escape, being mutinous, and refusing to work. Then, suddenly, they became obedient and quiet. These signs did not escape the Fathers, who noticed that the men were always tired in the morning and would drop off to sleep in working hours. They laid traps for them and found that the Indians went out into the forest after having been placed in their huts at night. They tried to follow, but an Indian always knew it, and would simply roam in the woods for hours before returning to the settlement.

‘This went on for several months and the Fathers got no nearer the mystery. At last, one of them was returning from a distant part of the island and lost his way. As night came on, he lay down to rest—and heard voices through the trees. He crept towards them and realized he had found the missing Indians. He lay there all night, and when the Indians went back to resume their day's labour, he came out of hiding. He found, hidden under branches, a beautifully constructed canoe, dug out of a solid tree trunk. They had made it so thin it was not too heavy to handle, even though it was of immense size. The Indians were tugging it to the beach about four hundred yards away, and the Father found they had cleared a track almost to the water's edge.

‘He went back to the Mission with the news. The Fathers held a Council of War and decided to keep a sharp watch out and visit the canoe from time to time to see how they were getting along. The days passed, as the unsuspicious Indians dragged their craft to the beach. It was a long job; for the summer nights were short and they could only shift it a few yards each night.

‘The priests guessed that the Indians would wait till after Christmas Day, since they were promised extra rations. So while they were enjoying the Christmas festivities at the Mission, the Fathers sent two men with a cross-saw and newspapers. They cut the canoe through the middle, placing the newspaper on the ground to catch the sawdust, so the poor brutes would know nothing till all their provisions were aboard.

‘The great night came, after weary months of waiting. They all gathered at the canoe and tried to drag it to the water—and it came away in two halves.

‘That was the meanest trick I ever heard on these poor Indians, to find their canoe useless instead of carrying them away from their hated prison. It wouldn't have been half so bad if the Fathers had destroyed it when they first found it. But to allow the work to go on till the canoe was provisioned and hauled down to the beach, struck me as the very height of cruelty.

‘I asked what the Indians did about it. I was told they went back to their shanties and carried on as if nothing had happened.'

I
HAD one thing more to do in Patagonia: to find a replacement for the lost piece of skin.

The town of Puerto Natales was in sunshine, but purple clouds were piling up on the far side of Last Hope Sound. The roofs of the houses were scabby with rust and clattered in the wind. Rowan trees grew in the gardens and the red fire of their berries made the leaves seem black. Most of the gardens were choked with docks and cow parsley.

Raindrops smacked on the pavement. Old women, black specks along the wide street, scuttled for cover. I sheltered in a shop smelling of cats and the sea. The owner sat knitting socks of oiled wool. About her were strings of smoked mussels, cabbages, bricks of dried sea-lettuce, and trusses of kelp, coiled up like the pipes of a tuba.

Puerto Natales was a Red town ever since the meat-works opened up. The English built the meat-works during the First World War, four miles along the bay, where deep water ran inshore. They built a railway to bring the men to work; and when the place ran down, the citizens painted the engine and put it in the plaza—an ambiguous memorial.

The killing season used to last three months. The Chilotes had their first taste of mechanized slaughter at the killing season. It was something like their idea of Hell: so much blood and the floor red and steaming; so many animals kicking and then stiff; so many white-skinned carcasses and spilled-out guts, the tripes, brains, hearts, lungs, livers, tongues. It drove the men a little mad.

In the killing season of 1919, some Maximalists came up from Punta Arenas. They told how their Russian brothers had killed the management and now lived happily. One day in January the English Assistant Manager contracted two men for a painting job and refused to pay because the work was bad. They shot him through the chest that afternoon and then the rest of them ran amok. They commandeered the railway, told the driver to get up more steam, but there was no more steam and they shot him too. They lynched three carabineers and looted stores and burned them.