Land of Tempest: Travels in Patagonia: 1958-1962

By Eric Shipton

Land of Tempest reveals Eric Shipton at his best - writing with enthusiasm and humour about his explorations in Patagonia in the 1950s and 1960s.
He is an astute observer of nature and the human spirit, and this account of his travels is infused with with his own zest for discovery and the joy of camaraderie. Undaunted by hardship or by injury, Shipton and his team attempt to cross one of the great ice caps in Patagonia. It's impossible not to marvel at his determination, resilience and appetite for travel and adventure, be it climbing snow-clad mountains, or walking in forested foothills. Shipton takes a reader with him on his travels, and the often-inhospitable places he visits are a stark contrast to the warmth of the people he encounters.
Land of Tempest is essential reading for anyone who loves nature, mountains, climbing, adventure or simply the joy of discovering unknown places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vertebrate Digital
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910240311

Eric Shipton

Eric Shipton (1907-1977) was one of the great mountain explorers of the 20th century, often known for his infamous climbing partnership with H.W. 'Bill' Tilman. He climbed extensively in the Alps in the 1920s, put up new routes on Mount Kenya in 1921, and in 1931, made the first ascent of Kamet with Frank Smythe - the highest peak climbed at that time. Shipton was involved with most of the Everest expeditions in the 1930s, reaching a high point of 28,000 feet in 1933. He went on to lead the 1951 expedition, which was the first to approach Everest from the north (Nepali) side through the Khumbu ice fall, and on which Edmund Hillary first set foot on the mountain.

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Land of Tempest

Land of Tempest

Eric Shipton

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– Contents –

Chapter 1 A Strange Land

Chapter 2 Some Pioneers

Chapter 3 Lago Onelli

Chapter 4 ‘Vulcan Viedma’

Chapter 5 Seno Mayo

Chapter 6 The Elusive Volcano

Chapter 7 The Nunatak

Chapter 8 Preparing for a Journey

Chapter 9 Crisis in Punta Arenas

Chapter 10 Voyage Through the Channels

Chapter 11 The Landing

Chapter 12 The Approach

Chapter 13 The Reluctant Sledge

Chapter 14 A Cheerless Christmas

Chapter 15 On the Plateau

Chapter 16 Familiar Landmarks

Chapter 17 Cordon Darwin

Chapter 18 The Journey’s End

Chapter 19 Land of Fire

Chapter 20 ‘The Uttermost Part of the Earth’

Addenda

I Further Travels in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego

II Crossing the North Patagonian ice cap

Maps

Southern Patagonia

The Great Lakes of Patagonia

Tierra del Fuego: Cordillera Darwin

Photographs

– Chapter 1 –

A Strange Land

Having a taste for strange country, I had long nursed a strong desire to visit Southern Patagonia; but the habit of travelling among the mountain ranges of Central Asia, like all agreeable habits, had been hard to break. Those ranges had provided an unlimited field, fresh opportunities kept occurring and each new venture suggested another batch of enticing projects; so Patagonia had receded ever further and more dimly into the future.

I once thought of applying for the job of British Consul in Punta Arenas, on the Straits of Magellan. I was Consul-General in Kunming at the time, and after a year of non-recognition by the Chinese Communist Government, it had become clear that I would have to move elsewhere. Having previously spent four years as a similar official in Kashgar, which had enabled me to travel in the Pamir, Kuen Lun and Tien Shan, it seemed an excellent way to achieve my purpose. However, I discovered that the post of Consul in Punta Arenas was an honorary one held by a local British resident. In any case, when I returned to England in the summer of 1951, I immediately became embroiled in the revival of the attempts to climb Everest, and soon found myself back in the Himalaya.

I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in the Karakoram. It was doubtless this melancholy event that impressed me with the urgency of making definite plans for an expedition to Patagonia before I became too senile for such an undertaking. Even so I might have done nothing about it, had it not been for Geoff Bratt.

Geoff was a young Australian student, working (in his spare time between more attractive activities) for his Ph.D at the Imperial College of Science. In 1957 the College had launched an expedition to the Karakoram and had invited me to lead it. Geoff was a member of the party and he had done much of the preliminary organisation. We often shared a tent, and a great deal of varied discussion. Occasionally, of course, we talked of travel and exploration; and I found that he, too, was less interested in mountaineering for its own sake than as a means of getting to strange and little known parts of the world. On the subject of Patagonia it was not difficult to arouse his enthusiasm; his warmth brought mine to the boil and we agreed to go there together the following year.

Patagonia is not a country. The name refers to the whole of the mainland of South America south of the Rio Negro in Latitude 40° S. The bulk of this vast territory, lying in Argentina to the east of the Andes, consists of prairie, some of it flat, much of it hilly, nearly all of it dry, treeless and covered with coarse grass and open scrub. It is a stark, inhospitable land which, until late in the nineteenth century, was inhabited only by a few scattered Indian tribes. It was only then, towards the end of the century, that white men came, mostly direct from Europe or from the Falkland Islands, to settle there as sheep farmers, first along the Atlantic coast, then gradually further inland. Indeed the settlement of Patagonia is so recent that even today many of the estancieros are the sons and daughters of those original pioneers.

The Chilean part of Patagonia, except for a small area in the extreme south, is utterly different. Most of it is wild, rugged and uninhabited, a region of tempest and torrential rain, of fantastic geographical form and strange natural phenomena. The Pacific coast immediately west of the Andes, is split by a complex network of fjords which bite deep into the mainland and form an archipelago, a giant jigsaw of islands, 1,000 miles long. The climate is sub-antarctic, and the glaciation so extensive that, although the mountains are not particularly high, they are as spectacular as any in the entire range. There are two great ice caps, which are the only examples of their kind outside Polar regions. Many of the innumerable glaciers which radiate from these, flow down through dense ‘tropical forest’ (as Darwin described it) and thrust their massive fronts into the intricate system of waterways surrounding them. Parrots and humming-birds inhabit these forests.

There was no lack of interesting objectives. Apart from scores of unclimbed peaks, much of the region had never been visited. For example, the whole of the northern half of the main ice cap was untrodden ground, and with two exceptions none of the glaciers on the western side of the range had been explored. Although most of the channels had been charted since the voyage of the Beagle in 1831, for hundreds of miles along this tortuous, uninhabited coast, no one had penetrated inland, while the interior of many of the islands was unknown. The eastern side of the range was comparatively well explored, but even there, there was much interesting work to be done.

That so much of the region still remains unexplored is due almost entirely to the physical difficulties of travel there, for during the last fifty years many attempts have been made to penetrate it. The chief problem is presented by the weather, which is said to be some of the worst in the world. Heavy rain falls for prolonged periods; fine spells are rare and usually brief, and above all there is the notorious Patagonian wind, the savage storms which often continue for weeks at a stretch, with gusts up to 130 m.p.h. The terrain too, is unusually difficult. Most parts of the main range, even many on the eastern side, can only be approached by water and, because of the weather, the use of small craft on the lakes and fjords is liable to be a hazardous business. The glaciers in their lower reaches are often so broken and crevassed that it is virtually impossible to travel on them, and lateral moraines rarely provide an easy line of approach, as they usually do in the Himalaya. In the foothills the forest often presents an impassable barrier, particularly on the western side of the range, where the wind has twisted the stunted trees into a low-lying mass of tangled trunks and branches. It is these obstacles which have prevented most expeditions to the area from achieving more than a limited objective or covering more than a very small proportion of the region.

The lakes of Southern Patagonia were explored towards the end of the last century by several expeditions, notably by that of Francisco Moreno, a distinguished Argentine geographer, who discovered Lago Argentino and Lago San Martin. The first expedition into the main range was made in 1914 by Dr Frederick Reichert, who succeeded in reaching the head of the Moreno Glacier from Lago Argentino. Later, in 1916 and in 1933, he made two attempts to cross the main ice cap, the first from the head of Lago Viedma and the second from Lago San Martin. Though on both occasions he was frustrated by appalling weather conditions, he was able to bring back the first detailed accounts of the remarkable Plateau. Several more explorers have since tried to cross it. Another dominant figure in the exploration of the region was the redoubtable Salesian priest, Father Alberto de Agostini, who made no fewer than twelve expeditions to various parts of it, including the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, which have contributed the major part of our knowledge of the main range. The only complete crossing of the range had been made south of the ice cap by H.W. Tilman in 1956. During the course of his long voyage in Mischief he landed with two companions at the head of the Calvo Fjord on the Pacific side, and crossed the range to the front of the Moreno Glacier and back, a journey as the crow flies of twenty-five miles each way, which took them six weeks of arduous travel.

Geoff and I had first to decide upon the kind of expedition we were to take, and to begin with we were confronted by something of a vicious circle. Until we had formulated some clear objective we could hardly expect to receive financial support, and until we could discover the kind of work most likely to evoke support it was hard to choose an objective; particularly in view of our ignorance of local conditions. Neither of us cared very much what we did, so long as it gave us the chance to make the acquaintance of this fascinating region, and acquaintance that I hoped might ripen into terms of intimacy. In fact, I regarded this first trip as a reconnaissance, to learn something of problems and possibilities of exploratory travel with the view, later, to tackling a more ambitious venture. Eventually, after a good deal of research, we found the Trustees of the British Museum willing to send a botanist with us and to furnish a grant to cover his share of the cost. The man chosen for the job was Peter James and his assignment was to make a comprehensive collection of plants, lichens and mosses. This was a most valuable advance, for it gave us a nucleus upon which to build our plans.

Before the war, Tilman and I used to boast that we could work out our plans for an expedition to the Himalaya in half an hour on the back of an envelope. Basic simplicity was the keynote of all our ventures together; we knew exactly the weight of the food and equipment we would need, what we would have to take from England and what we could obtain locally and, above all, its cost. We were never more than a few pounds out in estimating our expenses. Planning an expedition to a new continent where inflation was rife was quite another matter, and Geoff and I soon found ourselves floundering in such a morass of uncertainties and conflicting advice that I began to wonder if we would ever get it organised. Moreover, Geoff was faced with the stern necessity of passing, his final examinations in the summer of 1958, while I was engaged in forestry work in Shropshire; with the result that things moved slowly.

Fortunately, in July, John Mercer appeared on the scene. He had recently returned from his second visit to the Andes of Southern Patagonia and was anxious to go there again. Having heard of our plans he immediately offered to come with us; an offer we gladly accepted. With his first-hand knowledge to guide us, most of our troubles dissolved. A man of thirty-five, he had had a varied career as a geographer; his activities having ranged from a study of the glaciers of Baffin Land to an investigation of the population problems of Samoa. In 1949 he had made an attempt to cross the ice cap from the vicinity of Lago Viedma. His main reason for wishing to return to Patagonia was to continue a line of study which he had begun, the object of which was to determine the dates of successive periods of glacial advance. As Geoff himself was keen to do some glaciological work, this fitted in very nicely.

Peter Miles, the last member of the party to be recruited, was an Anglo-Argentine from Venado Tuerto in the Province of Santa Fe. A farmer by profession, he was a keen amateur naturalist, and he undertook to make collections of birds and insects both for the British Museum and for the Darwin Institute in Buenos Aires.

With this battery of scientific objectives we were able largely to finance the expedition with grants from the British Museum, and Percy Sladen Trust and the Mount Everest Foundation.

For our field of operations we chose the section of the range embraced by the western arms of Lago Argentino, largely because it was the most easily accessible. To begin with, Lago Argentino had a small town, El Calafate, on its shore, while none of the other lakes of Southern Patagonia had a town within hundreds of miles. Secondly it could be reached by air and by reasonably good roads. But by far the most important consideration was the fact that there was a Government launch operating on the lake, by means of which we would be able to reach our various bases. Our plan, which was indefinite and elastic, was to establish a series of these bases at the heads of the western fjords of the lake, spending three or four weeks at each, over a total period of three months.

Peter James, Geoff and I sailed for Buenos Aires from Tilbury on November 1. John travelled by way of the United States, where he had some private affairs to settle. In securing the cheapest available third class passages, we had been required by the shipping company to sign a document stating, in effect, that we realised what we were in for and that we would not complain. The reason became apparent when we reached Lisbon, where our meagre accommodation in the stern of the ship became congested with a multitude of Portuguese emigres bound for Rio and Santos. The small saloon, particularly in bad weather, was rather like an underground train in the rush hour, and the noise was shattering. It was an interesting experience but scarcely enjoyable, and we were not sorry when, on the 23rd, we reached Buenos Aires, where we were met by Peter Miles.

We found ourselves staying at the City Hotel, one of the best in the capital, which provided a remarkable change from the slum conditions of the voyage. Normally we would have chosen a more modest establishment, but we were guests of the British Council, for whom I had undertaken to give some lectures. Dr MacKay, the representative of the Council, and his assistant Mr Whistler, had made admirable arrangements for our stay, and we spent a busy week meeting a large number of people who could help and advise us. They also helped us to steer our baggage through the intricacies of the Argentine Customs which, without friends at court, can be a long and difficult business. Besides our camping, climbing and survey equipment we had brought an inflatable rubber dinghy and a small outboard motor; but the bulk of our luggage consisted of twenty-five large venesta cases to accommodate Peter James’ botanical specimens. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs arranged for this equipment to be imported duty free.

The directors of Shell Argentine Ltd. generously placed a station-wagon at our disposal, which proved invaluable. On December 1 Peter Miles, Geoff and John left Buenos Aires in this vehicle which was loaded with as much of our baggage as it would hold. They completed the 2,000 mile drive to El Calafate by the evening of the 7th, having stopped a day in Comodoro Rivadavia to repair a broken main spring and a shattered wind-screen. The rest of our baggage was sent on a ship sailing from Buenos Aires on November 29 and due to reach Santa Cruz a week later. In fact she took more than three weeks to make the voyage, with the result that our baggage did not reach El Calafate until Christmas Eve. I flew there on December 4 and Peter James, who had been invited to attend a botanical congress in Cordoba, followed on the 11th.

– Chapter 2 –

Some Pioneers

In shape the outline of Lago Argentino resembles a squid. The main body of water, which drains eastward into the Santa Cruz River, is forty miles long by fifteen miles wide. Two channels run westward from this and subdivide into eight sinuous tentacles. Some of the fjords so formed are more than thirty miles long, and penetrate deep into the foothills of the Andes. The country surrounding the main lake is, like most of the Patagonian pampas, dry, treeless and covered with coarse, yellow grass; it rises gently from the level of the lake at 600 feet to hills and undulating plateaux some 3,000 feet high. It reminded me very much of Tibet: the bleak, arid landscape, the level strata of the sandstone hills, the clear, exhilarating air, the pale blue sky and the keen wind blowing from the glaciers.

El Calafate, which lies halfway along the southern shore of the main lake, consists of a few houses, mostly built of wood, with corrugated iron roofs. It seemed to me such a perfect replica of a Wild West film set, that I would hardly have been surprised to see a troop of cowboys galloping down the broad, dusty street, firing their six-shooters into the air. It has three small and, by modern standards, primitive hotels, and several stores which sell anything from onions to tweed suits, from gramophone records to farm implements. It is the only town within hundreds of miles, and it serves all the sheep estancias in the vicinity of the lake. It derives its curious name from a thorny bush, common on the Patagonian pampas, which has an edible berry like a blackcurrant. There is a local saying that any visitor who eats calafate berries is sure to return to Patagonia.

Though in that area there is little land left to be exploited for sheep raising, the country is sparsely populated. This is because the land is so poor, owing largely to the lack of rain, that on the average it requires four acres to keep one sheep; and as each estancia carries from 3,000 to 20,000 head, and some even more, the farmsteads themselves are few and far between. Some of the estancias are run by large companies, but for the most part they are owned by private individuals who comprise the cosmopolitan community. Among those we met were Britons, Spaniards, Germans, Danes, Norwegians, Hungarians, Turks and Yugoslavs.

The first estanciero I met was Carlos Santiago Dickie, generally known as ‘Charlie’. He was wearing one of those old-fashioned caps with ear-flaps turned back over the crown. In his early sixties, his handsome, rather aristocratic face was framed by bushy grey side-whiskers which gave him something of the appearance of a Victorian country squire. His father had come to ‘the Lago’ from the Falkland Islands in the early years of the century. He had a prodigious zest for life, and a fund of thrilling stories that would have kept the editor of a popular magazine in copy for a year or more. He told them with great fluency and with such enjoyment that they were frequently interrupted by gusts of Rabelasian laughter, which were usually accompanied by an eruption of sparks from his pipe, with the result that his clothes and (as I saw later) the cover of his favourite arm-chair were pitted with burns. Though I saw a great deal of him then and later, he never exhausted his repertoire, nor did I ever hear one of his stories repeated. His wife came from Shropshire and they had met in England during the First World War, when she was a nurse and he a wounded soldier. They had a widespread reputation for generosity and kindness, and I often heard it said that Charlie would give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it. This was indeed high praise among people to whom generous hospitality is second nature.

Another couple that we were most fortunate to meet was Mr and Mrs Atkinson, whose Estancia Lago Roca lay near one of the southern arms of the lake. They immediately invited us to make it our base whenever and for as long as we liked. They were both keen naturalists and their knowledge of the flora and the birds of the region was of great value to Peter James and Peter Miles who, later, accepted their offer so literally that the living-room of the farm became littered with a wild confusion of drying plants and skins.

The most remote estancia in the district, and perhaps in Patagonia, is La Cristina, which lies at the head of one of the north-western arms of Lago Argentino. Almost surrounded by rugged mountains, the only practicable approach to it is by launch, and then only when the weather is calm enough to permit the voyage. When we reached El Calafate it had already been isolated by constant storms for three months, but the owners, Mr and Mrs Masters and their son Herbert, were in daily communication by radio with the Dickies. When they heard of our arrival they invited us to come and stay with them as soon as possible. As we had been hoping to make our first base somewhere in that vicinity, this suited us admirably. They had a small steam launch which they offered to lend us, but it was old and not very seaworthy, and they advised us to come by Government launch as soon as the weather moderated.

This vessel was operated by the National Parks Administration, the director of which, Senor Tortorelli, we had met in Buenos Aires. He had very kindly issued instructions to the local authorities to place the launch at our disposal when we required it. It was kept at Punta Bandera, a small settlement on the lake shore, forty miles by road west of El Calafate, and at the entrance of the southern fjord system. This was a splendid place for Peter Miles to begin his work, for there were enormous numbers of waterfowl in the shallow, reedy lagoons surrounding it; among them black-headed swans, widgeon, teal, steamer ducks, flamingoes and several varieties of geese. None of the local inhabitants seemed in the least interested in shooting these birds, which would have been very easy prey.

The morning of December 13 was fine and calm. We set out in the launch from Punta Bandera at 8 o’clock, and half an hour later passed through a narrow passage, known as Hell’s Gate, into the northern channel. Here the scene changed abruptly. The low-lying yellow pampas gave place to tall rock precipices and steep, forested slopes on either side of the fjord while, ahead, a mighty rampart of ice-peaks burst into view. These were the mountains of the Cordon Darwin, as that part of the main range is called. Even remembering that I was viewing them from only 600 feet above sea level, I found it hard to believe that none of them was more than 10,000 feet high. We passed a score of icebergs, some smooth and rounded like giant mushrooms, some like craggy islands with cliffs of royal blue, one like a medieval castle with turrets and battlements standing more than 100 feet above the water. They were drifting eastward to the main lake; some of them would reach its farthest shore, to be stranded there, incongruous objects among the desert sand and scrub.

After a voyage of two and a half hours, the launch dropped anchor in a little landlocked bay at the southern end of the La Cristina valley. Herbert Masters was there to meet us when we came ashore and, having disembarked our baggage, we accompanied him to his house, a large bungalow with a corrugated iron roof, set in a garden gay with flowers and half surrounded by a grove of tall poplars. There we met his parents.

Mr and Mrs Masters were both eighty-two years old. They came from Southampton where he had been a seaman on a nobleman’s yacht; but they had decided that this was no life for a married man, so in 1900, at the age of twenty-four, they had emigrated to Patagonia, where he had worked on various estancias to gain some knowledge of sheep farming. In those days it was a wild and desolate land; there were virtually no roads, the only means of transport were by horseback and bullock cart, and the journey from the coast to Lago Argentino took several weeks. It is difficult to imagine the impact of such conditions upon a young woman, brought up in an ordinary Victorian home, who had never left England before.

The valley was first visited in 1902 by H. Prichard, while on an expedition to discover the Giant Sloth, which was then believed to exist in Patagonia. The Masters came there not long afterwards, looking for a place to settle. They were captivated by its beauty, and immediately decided that it was to be their home. They acquired a lifeboat that had been salvaged from a wreck in the Straits of Magellan, and brought it to the lake by bullock cart, a journey of several hundred miles. Then, with none of the amenities which most of us take for granted as basic necessities, beyond the reach of medical help and with little resource save their courage, their staunch reliance upon themselves and each other, they calmly faced the years of toil and privation which