In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin Flashcards
The area is most effectively defined by its soil. You know you are in Patagonia when you see rodados patagonicos, the basalt pebbles left behind by glaciers, and jarilla, the low bush that is its dominant flora. 107
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Patagonia’s nothingness forces the mind in on itself. 111
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Ted Turner and Sylvester Stallone have bought properties there.132
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin was particularly adept at extracting from perfect strangers their best stories and making extravagant connections. 151
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
marvelous and limitless backdrop against which to play out his thesis. A theater for his own restlessness, Patagonia, he would covertly argue, was the source of everyone else’s restlessness too. 232
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
(Maté incidentally is a drink for which I also have a love/hate relationship). 279
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Bridges observed: “If you haven’t ruffled any feathers, you certainly haven’t written anything worth writing.” 324
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
the Welsh community of Gaiman, 328
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Chatwin’s book, she often wrote to the Buenos Aires Herald, “whilst containing some elements of truth was much exaggerated and in some instance pure lies.” 342
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
“Everything that is in the book happened, although of course in another order.” The “lies” he admits to Ignatieff are examples of his romanticism, as when he describes an ordinary stainless steel chair as being “by Mies van der Rohe” 349
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
He told not a half-truth but a truth and a half. 353
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
This version was less romantic but had the merit of being true. 403
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
‘He was very macho,’ she said, ‘like most Argentine boys, but I never thought it would come to that.’ 438
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
He loved his country with the passion of the second generation immigrant 467
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
He did his duty to his country and up-ended the chronology. He twisted the evidence to show that all hot-blooded mammals began in South America and went north. And then he got quite carried away: he published a paper suggesting that Man himself had emerged from the soil of the patria; which is why, in some circles, the name of Ameghino is set beside Plato and Newton. 479
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
‘My neighbours are Italian,’ Bill said. ‘The Its have got the whole region buttoned up. All came from one village in the Marches forty years back. 517
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Do you know what we pray for down here? Pray for sadistically? Bad winter in Europe. Makes the price of wool go up.’ 554
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Indians were migrant workers from Southern Chile. They were Araucanian Indians. A hundred years ago the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead. 601
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Araucanians are still very tough and would be a lot tougher if they gave up drink. 606
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Patagonian. desert is not a desert of sand or gravel, but a low thicket of grey-leaved thorns which give off a bitter smell when crushed. 614
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness 621
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
He was thirty-three (the age when geniuses die), 640
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
he made the common tourist’s mistake of confusing fifteen for fifty pesos.) 668
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
history of the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia belongs rather to the obsessions of bourgeois France than to the politics of South America. 700
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Port Madryn. A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. 716
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
the village of Gaimán, the centre of Welsh Patagonia today. 734
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The colonists came with few possessions but they clung to their family clocks. 737
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
salmuera, made of vinegar, garlic, chillies and oregano. 769
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
‘Patagonia!’ he cried. ‘She is a hard mistress. She casts her spell. An enchantress! She folds you in her arms and never lets go.’ 852
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Persians had come to Patagonia as missionaries for their world religion. They had plenty of money and had stuffed the place with the trappings of middle-class Teheran—wine-red 918
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
A marble monument marks the spot. Its name is Biddmyrd os syrfeddod ‘There will be a myriad wonders…’—a 966
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
went north of Esquel to a small settlement called Epuyen. 977
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The writer was Robert Leroy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, at that time heading the Pinkerton Agency’s list of most wanted criminals. 1101
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Bob Parker took the name Cassidy and rode into a new life of wide horizons and the scent of horse leather. (Butch was the name of a borrowed gun.) 1116
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The homesteaders loved him. Many were Mormons, outlawed themselves for polygamy. They gave him food, shelter, alibis, and occasionally their daughters. Today, he would be classed as a revolutionary. But he had no sense of political organization. Butch Cassidy never killed a man. Yet his friends were seasoned killers; 1130
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
A Dowd horse was ready for sale when its rider could balance a gun between its ears and fire. 1142
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
based on the skimpiest evidence, that the ‘family of 3’ died together in a shoot-out with the Uruguayan police in 1911. 1193
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Indian settlements were strung out along the railway line on the principle that a drunk could always get home. 1216
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Rio Pico was once the German colony of Nueva Alemania, and the houses had a German look. 1300
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
LAS PAMPAS was twenty miles on from Rio Pico, the last settlement before the frontier. 1302
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
the men played taba. The taba is the astragalus bone of a cow. The player throws it ten paces on to a prepared circle of mud or sand. If it falls on its concave side, this is suerte (good luck) and he wins; on its rounded side, this is culo (arse) and he loses; and if it falls on its edge there is no play. 1317
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I said Patagonia reminded me of Russia. 1369
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Police were criminals themselves, mostly Paraguayos; you had to be white or Christian to join. Everyone in Rio Pico liked the North Americans. 1449
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Wherever there were Germans there were blue lupins. 1457
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I found, in Patagonia, that people had the habit of underestimating age by ten to fifteen years. 1472
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
GOING DOWN to Comodoro Rivadavia I passed through a desert of black stones and came to Sarmiento. 1513
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
‘Different road,’ he sighed. ‘Same Divinity. 1623
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The one noise you did hear was a guanaco. A noise like a baby trying to cry and sneeze at once. 1635
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
His favourite expression was concha de cotorra which means ‘parrot-cunt’. 1694
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
‘The unicorn,’ he said. ‘The famous unicorn. I know the place. We call it Cerro de los Indios.’ 1714
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The river ran down to a lake, Lago Ghio, with water a bright milky turquoise. The shores were blinding white and the cliffs also were white, or striped horizontally white and terracotta. 1754
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Few travellers have ever set eyes on the City. Nor is there any one opinion about its true location: the island of Patmos, the forests of Guyana, the Gobi Desert or the north face of Mount Meru are among the suggestions. All these are desolate places. The names of the City are equally various: Uttarakuru, Avalon, The New Jerusalem, The Isles of the Blessed. 1772
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
THE TOWN of Puerto Deseado is distinguished for a Salesian College that incorporates every architectural style from the Monastery of St Gall to a multi-storey car-park; a Gruta de Lourdes; and a railway station in the form and proportion of a big Scottish country house. 1807
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
We talked late into the night, arguing 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. 1812
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Penguins are monogamous, faithful unto death. Each pair occupies a minute stretch of territory and expels outsiders. The female lays from one to three eggs. There is no division of labour between the sexes: both go fishing and take turns to nurse the young. The colony breaks up with the cold weather in the first week of April. 1817
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I’d want to murder. 1822
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I PASSED through three boring towns, San Julián, Santa Cruz and Rio Gallegos. As you go south down the coast, the grass gets greener, the sheep-farms richer and the British more numerous. 1889
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Patagonian sheep-farming began in 1877 when a Mr Henry Reynard, an English trader in Punta Arenas, ferried a flock from the Falklands and set it to graze on Elizabeth Island in the Strait. 1896
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Menéndez died in 1918, leaving a proportion of his millions to Alphonso XIII of Spain, and was buried at Punta Arenas 1900
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
History may aspire to symmetry but rarely achieves it: 1980
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
‘Bad business. Bunch of Bolshie agitators came down and stirred up trouble. That was one thing. Then the Army came down and that was another. Shot good men. They shot good, honest, reliable men. They even shot my friends. It was a filthy business from start to finish.’ The leader of the revolt was called Antonio Soto. 2019
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Antonio Soto recall a hulk of fallen muscle and an expression ranging from truculence to quiet despair. He lived in Punta Arenas then and ran a small restaurant. 2033
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Perhaps they saw in in him the white saviour promised in their folklore. He called them to stop work and they obeyed; 2057
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
he was dreaming of a revolution that would spread from Patagonia and engulf the country. 2082
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The end of Soto’s dream came at the Estancia La Anita, the prize establishment of the Menéndez family. 2099
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I asked about the sect of male witches, known on Chiloé as the Brujería. 2153
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Only men can become members, but the Sect does use women to carry urgent messages. A woman thus employed is known as the Voladora. 2178
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The most singular creature associated with the Sect is the Invunche or Guardian of the Cave, a human being perverted into a monster by a special scientific process. 2190
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
No one can recall the memory of a time when the Central Committee did not exist. Some have suggested that the Sect was in embryo even before the emergence of Man. It is equally plausible that Man himself became Man through fierce opposition to the Sect. We know for a fact that the Challanco is the Evil Eye. Perhaps the term ‘Central Committee’ is a synonym for Beast. 2208
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The coast of Tierra del Fuego was an ashy stripe less than two miles away. 2214
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Tierra del Fuego—The Land of Fire. The fires were the campfires of the Fuegian Indians. In one version Magellan saw smoke only and called it Tierra del Humo, the Land of Smoke, but Charles V said there was no smoke without fire and changed the name. The Fuegians are dead and all the fires snuffed out. Only the flares of oil rigs cast a pall over the night sky. 2231
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I had met the nuns of the Santa Maria Auxiliadora Convent on their Saturday coach outing to the penguin colony on Cabo Virgenes. A bus-load of virgins. Eleven thousand virgins. About a million penguins. Black and white. Black and white. Black and white. 2268
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Rio Grande, the one town on the east side of the island. In the old days it flourished with the English meat trade. Now, temporarily it was given over to Israel. 2272
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Indians of Tierra del Fuego were the Ona and the Haush, who were foot hunters; and the Alakaluf and the Yaghan (or Yámana) who were canoe hunters. 2282
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
IN THE 1890s a crude version of Darwin’s theory, which had once germinated in Patagonia, returned to Patagonia and appeared to encourage the hunting of Indians. A slogan: ‘The Survival of the Fittest’, 2311
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
the Onas did have one swift and daring marksman called Täapelt, who specialized in picking off white murderers with cold selective justice. 2332
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
She quite liked Tierra del Fuego. She had walked in forests of notofagus antarctica. 2384
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I WENT on to the southernmost town in the world. Ushuaia began with a prefabricated mission house put up in 1869 by the Rev. W. H. Stirling alongside the shacks of the Yaghan Indians. 2388
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The last house before the barracks was the brothel. 2397
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
In Argentina the words ‘Russian’ and ‘Jew’ were synonymous. 2436
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Russian Revolution was in full swing. Graffiti reading ‘Freedom for Radowitzky!’ were smeared all over Buenos Aires. 2462
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Simón Radowitzky died of a heart attack in 1956. 2493
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The kidnapper was Captain Robert FitzRoy, R.N., Chief Officer of H.M.S. Beagle, now winding up her first survey of southern waters. 2516
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Coming into Harberton from the land side, you could mistake it for a big estate in the Scottish Highlands, with its sheep fences, sturdy gates and peat-brown trout streams. 2629
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Bridges’s dilemma is common enough. Finding in ‘primitive’ languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’, so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. 2652
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Yaghans were born wanderers though they rarely wandered far. 2682
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Thomas Bridges coined the word ‘Yaghan’ after a place called Yagha: the Indians called themselves Yámana. Used as a verb yámana means ‘to live, breathe, be happy, recover from sickness or be sane’. 2686
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Lucas Bridges was the first White to make friends with the Onas. They trusted him alone when men like the Red Pig were butchering their kin. The Uttermost Part of the Earth was one of my favourite books as a boy. In it he describes looking down from Mount Spión Kop on the sacred Lake Kami, 2700
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
IN THE Plaza de Armas a ceremony was in progress. It was one hundred years since Don José Menéndez set foot in Punta Arenas 2749
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The Ministry bought this prize bull in New Zealand. No need for it! Plenty of good bulls next door in Argentina. But they couldn’t buy an Argentine bull, not without losing face. So they flew the bull from New Zealand to Santiago, flew it to Punta Arenas, where it was presented, 2819
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
CASILLA 182, Punta Arenas, an iron gate painted green, with crossed Ms twined about with Pre-Raphaelite lilies, led into a shadowy garden where still grew the plants of my grandmother’s generation: 2838
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Panama was now cut through. Punta Arenas was again on the way to nowhere. 3276
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Dawson Island. He took me along. I wanted to see the concentration camp where ministers of the Allende regime were held, 3330
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
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. 3364
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
No culture without conversion 3439
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
had quarrelled with union thugs and had dodged their attempts on his life, in the course of which he had developed a theory that once you kill—or even plan to kill—you are doomed. 3469
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
The shepherd knew the Mylodon Cave well. He advised me to call first on Senor Eberhard, whose grandfather found the place. 3489
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
THE MYLODON was a Giant Ground Sloth, rather bigger than a bull, of a class unique to South America. 3526
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Moreno got back to La Plata and took his piece of skin to London. He left it at the British Museum for safe-keeping, where it remains. 3573
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
the expedition of a Mr Hesketh Prichard to look for it. Prichard found no trace of the mylodon, but his book Through the Heart of Patagonia seems to have been an ingredient of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. 3579
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I WALKED the four miles from Puerto Consuelo to the Cave. 3621
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Walter Rauff is credited with the invention and administration of the Mobile Gas Truck. 3697
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Butch Cassidy’s letter to Mrs Davis is in the Utah State Historical Society and reprinted with their permission. 3730
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
