In Patagonia

By Bruce Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare

The masterpiece of travel writing that revolutionized the genre and made its author famous overnight
 
An exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land, Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite account of his journey through Patagonia teems with evocative descriptions, remarkable bits of history, and unforgettable anecdotes. Fueled by an unmistakable lust for life and adventure and a singular gift for storytelling, Chatwin treks through “the uttermost part of the earth”—that stretch of land at the southern tip of South America, where bandits were once made welcome—in search of almost-forgotten legends, the descendants of Welsh immigrants, and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy. An instant classic upon publication in 1977, In Patagonia is a masterpiece that has cast a long shadow upon the literary world.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 25, 2003
• ISBN: 9781101503140

Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield in 1940. After attending Marlborough School, he began work as a porter at Sotheby’s. Eight years later, having become one of Sotheby’s youngest directors, he abandoned his job to pursue his passion for world travel. He worked for the Sunday Times from 1972 to 1975, before announcing his next departure in a telegram: “Gone to Patagonia for six months.” This trip inspired the first of Chatwin’s books, In Patagonia, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the E. M. Forster Award, and launched his writing career. Two of his books have been made into feature films: The Viceroy of Ouidah, retitled Cobra Verde and directed by Werner Herzog; and Andrew Grieve’s On the Black Hill. On publication, The Songlines went straight to number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list and remained in the top ten for nine months. On the Black Hill won the Whitbread Literary Award for First Novel. Utz, another work of fiction, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Chatwin died in January 1989 at the age of forty-eight.  

Book preview

1

IN MY grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.

‘What’s that?’

‘A piece of brontosaurus.’

My mother knew the names of two prehistoric animals, the brontosaurus and the mammoth. She knew it was not a mammoth. Mammoths came from Siberia.

The brontosaurus, I learned, was an animal that had drowned in the Flood, being too big for Noah to ship aboard the Ark. I pictured a shaggy lumbering creature with claws and fangs and a malicious green light in its eyes. Sometimes the brontosaurus would crash through the bedroom wall and wake me from my sleep.

This particular brontosaurus had lived in Patagonia, a country in South America, at the far end of the world. Thousands of years before, it had fallen into a glacier, travelled down a mountain in a prison of blue ice, and arrived in perfect condition at the bottom. Here my grandmother’s cousin, Charley Milward the Sailor, found it.

Charley Milward was captain of a merchant ship that sank at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan. He survived the wreck and settled nearby, at Punta Arenas, where he ran a ship-repairing yard. The Charley Milward of my imagination was a god among men—tall, silent and strong, with black mutton-chop whiskers and fierce blue eyes. He wore his sailor’s cap at an angle and the tops of his sea-boots turned down.

Directly he saw the brontosaurus poking out of the ice, he knew what to do. He had it jointed, salted, packed in barrels, and shipped to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I pictured blood and ice, flesh and salt, gangs of Indian workmen and lines of barrels along a shore—a work of giants and all to no purpose; the brontosaurus went rotten on its voyage through the tropics and arrived in London a putrefied mess; which was why you saw brontosaurus bones in the museum, but no skin.

Fortunately cousin Charley had posted a scrap to my grandmother.

My grandmother lived in a red-brick house set behind a screen of yellow-spattered laurels. It had tall chimneys, pointed gables and a garden of blood-coloured roses. Inside it smelled of church.

I do not remember much about my grandmother except her size. I would clamber over her wide bosom or watch, slyly, to see if she’d be able to rise from her chair. Above her hung paintings of Dutch burghers, their fat buttery faces nesting in white ruffs. On the mantelpiece were two Japanese homunculi with red and white ivory eyes that popped out on stalks. I would play with these, or with a German articulated monkey, but always I pestered her: ‘Please can I have the piece of brontosaurus.’

Never in my life have I wanted anything as I wanted that piece of skin. My grandmother said I should have it one day, perhaps. And when she died I said: ‘Now I can have the piece of brontosaurus,’ but my mother said: ‘Oh, that thing! I’m afraid we threw it away.’

At school they laughed at the story of the brontosaurus. The science master said I’d mixed it up with the Siberian mammoth. He told the class how Russian scientists had dined off deep-frozen mammoth and told me not to tell lies. Besides, he said, brontosauruses were reptiles. They had no hair, but scaly armoured hide. And he showed us an artist’s impression of the beast—so different from that of my imagination—grey-green, with a tiny head and gigantic switchback of vertebrae, placidly eating weed in a lake. I was ashamed of my hairy brontosaurus, but I knew it was not a mammoth.

It took some years to sort the story out. Charley Milward’s animal was not a brontosaurus, but the mylodon or Giant Sloth. He never found a whole specimen, or even a whole skeleton, but some skin and bones, preserved by the cold, dryness and salt, in a cave on Last Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia. He sent the collection to England and sold it to the British Museum. This version was less romantic but had the merit of being true.

My interest in Patagonia survived the loss of the skin; for the Cold War woke in me a passion for geography. In the late 1940s the Cannibal of the Kremlin shadowed our lives; you could mistake his moustaches for teeth. We listened to lectures about the war he was planning. We watched the civil defence lecturer ring the cities of Europe to show the zones of total and partial destruction. We saw the zones bump one against the other leaving no space in between. The instructor wore khaki shorts. His knees were white and knobbly, and we saw it was hopeless. The war was coming and there was nothing we could do.

Next, we read about the cobalt bomb, which was worse than the hydrogen bomb and could smother the planet in an endless chain reaction.

I knew the colour cobalt from my great-aunt’s paintbox. She had lived on Capri at the time of Maxim Gorky and painted Capriot boys naked. Later her art became almost entirely religious. She did lots of St Sebastians, always against a cobaltblue background, always the same beautiful young man, stuck through and through with arrows and still on his feet.

So I pictured the cobalt bomb as a dense blue cloudbank, spitting tongues of flame at the edges. And I saw myself, out alone on a green headland, scanning the horizon for the advance of the cloud.

And yet we hoped to survive the blast. We started an Emigration Committee and made plans to settle in some far corner of the earth. We pored over atlases. We learned the direction of prevailing winds and the likely patterns of fall-out. The war would come in the Northern Hemisphere, so we looked to the Southern. We ruled out Pacific Islands for islands are traps. We ruled out Australia and New Zealand, and we fixed on Patagonia as the safest place on earth.

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew

Reviews for In Patagonia

[samqtrust2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

No way would any want to go to a run down post-Colonial wild west lawlessness. . . but then that was in the mid 1970S. . . Has anything changed?
A truly interesting book. . .
Clears up what happened to 'The Sundance Kid' as well. . .

[anniekmd · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a collection of short essays on folks (and what he learned from them) that the author met with on his travels through Patagonia. Despite the fact that I read this while I was travelling in Patagonia, I couldn’t get into the book. I was often confused with the stories and characters, and I didn’t come away feeling much more enlightened about the place – other than to get a sense that it was pretty tough. I confess that years ago I also struggled with Chatwin’s “Songlines”, so maybe this author is just not a good fit for me.

[alisony-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I adored Chatwin's In the Black Country novel, so as his legacy is sealed as much as a travel writer as novelist I thought I'd try one of his non-fiction travelogues this time around.

Travelling around Patagonia, this book is as much a collection of historical stories about individuals in Patagonia as it is an account of Chatwin's travels through it. The first part of the book focused more on his travels and the people he met as he went, and I enjoyed that more than later parts of his book where he seemingly ran out of things to say about this barren land and wrote heavily instead about the stories of various sailors, native Indians and robbers, etc. In the first half they were more interspersed with his travels to various towns, with many chapters referring to Butch Cassidy and his accomplices popping up in various parts of Patagonia, but I started to glaze over a little as the travel descriptions become the minority of his writing and the history took over.

Certainly he managed to invoke a wonderful sense of place where he focused on his travels, but there were too many names being thrown around as he got lost in his historical tales from the various towns and my interest waned.

3.5 stars - worth reading, but I'm a little disappointed that in the end this read less like a travelogue and more like a collection of research.

[Anderolatz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enormous travel book that traverses one of the earthly confines, a last frontier where characters straight out of a Western movie still live. Chatwin approaches them with the curiosity of an explorer but with great respect. It is striking that most of these characters come from Scotland or Wales, continue speaking in English, and seem foreign to the country in which they live. (Translated from Spanish)

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Published in 1977, this book is a mix of history and travel diary. Bruce Chatwin starts in Buenos Aires, and travels down Argentina, crossing the region known as Patagonia. He stops to visit people along the way, asks them questions about their family histories and the events that occurred in the area. We hear many immigration stories and local legends. Chatwin supplements what he hears from the people he meets with his own historical research.

It is all reasonably interesting, but there is little organization or narrative arc. As he travels, he jumps from one topic to the next in a series of extremely short chapters. We hear a lot about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who apparently owned a cabin in the region. We get a description of the landscape and see photos from his travels. There are descriptions of extinct giant sloths. We learn the story of Jemmy Button, an indigenous person taken in 1830 from Tierra del Fuego, who traveled on the HMS Beagle. These are just a few examples of many vignettes.

This is a memoir with very little introspection or analysis. He repeats historical stories that have been debunked as myths. I found lots of side dishes to enjoy, but it seems lacking in a main course.

[k6gst · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very good.

[JavierArmijo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is a book that, from my point of view, must be enjoyed with a slow reading. It has a great richness of vocabulary, sometimes not so light. It interweaves many passages, including the protagonist's present-day customs in Patagonia and the complexities of massacres, thefts, and stories from the past in the same region. Many character names throughout the book. Descriptions with authentic virtuosity from the writer, and it is especially noticeable his knowledge in archaeology. (Translated from Spanish)

[mithril_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great ambience and historical mood.

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Patagonia defies definition. It sits at the very end of a continent, nudges into the tumultuous Southern ocean, covers two countries and is a place of enigmas. It was a place that Brue Chatwin had longed to visit for years after seeing a piece of 'brontosaurus' in his grandparent's curiosity cabinet. It wasn't a piece of a dinosaur, but another part of an extinct animal that had been found in Patagonia.

The memory of it lived on in Chatwin's imagination and was the spark that made him give up his job and head out there in 1974. The six months that he spent there, become this book. It is not about the landscape or the countries, rather Chatwin spends his time there meeting people, finding out about them and then following the gossamer threads of their lives from place to place and backwards and forwards in time.

To be honest, this wasn't quite what I was expecting. It is often disjointed, it has some very short chapters, people only briefly appear in the narrative, before he heads off to the next location and snapshot of another life. And yet it is a wonderful piece of writing. Even though it is not about the place per se, Patagonia fully permeates the writing, you have a sense of the barrenness of the desert, the relentless wind off Tierra del Fuego, places that have attracted people from all over the world in search of the nomadic existence. He traces the characters backwards and forwards across this land but reveals as much about himself in his writing. Will try to get to Songlines a bit sooner than this now I have found a copy.

[kcshankd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Somewhat disappointing, not what I expected. Several notches below classic travel writing like Snow Leopard or Arctic Dreams.

The only parts that really shown were Chatwin's retelling of other's tales, how they came to Patagonia or traveled the world beforehand.

[heggiep · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While being aware that it's a classic of the genre and while enjoying it, I found myself lukewarm to it. Maybe I didn't read it at a propitious time of life. Still recommend it.

[jpsnow · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book is a collection of very short travel excerpts based on Chatwin's own wanderings throughout the region. Some of the sections are captivating and others mundane. Even though I read it while en route to the region, not much of the book has stuck with me. It's confusing because it's unclear what in it is based on his actual experiences versus inspired by them. There was apparently some controversy about some of the details he included. I took from this book some feel for the history and culture of the place, but it mostly seems like an experimental work needing more definition about its intent.

[tronella_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting and, on balance, well written, but the author assumed a lot of historical and political knowledge that I lack and was weirdly preoccupied with whether the people he met were Jewish.

[larryking1-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love to travel! And when I cannot travel, I love to read about other people's travels. In fact, travel literature is high on my list of favorite literary genres, peopled by authors like Graham Greene, Freya Stark, Paul Theroux, Edward Abbey, Colm Toibin, et al. In 97 short vignettes, Chatwin travels on foot and by hitch-hiking over the spiked southerly tip of a South America finding encounters with the likes of Darwin, Butch Cassidy, dinosaurs and giant sloths, shipwrecks, miner's strikes, and Shakespeare's Caliban. And his words flow from him like lasers focused upon sharp, gem-like prose!

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Suffering from emotional bumps and bruises I needed a holiday. My brother Tim sent me a voucher so that I could fly to San Francisco for free. I was grateful. It was cold and gray but I was in San Francisco. One afternoon I found myself footsore and starving. I was heading towards BART stop when I saw a Thai restaurant on the other side of the street. I up a block crossed the street and discovered a book shop. Ducking in, I was pleased with their selection. I bought In Patagonia and went down the block to the Thai restauant. Ordering a half liter of house red and pad thai with tofu I opened the book. My food was cold before I put the book down. I chugged the wine and gnoshed as best I could. I hurried to catch my train. Flushed from the wine and my sprint. I opened the book again, when a man seated across asked me if Chatwin was Australian. I told him I didn't think so but he wrote abook about the Outback titled Songlines. The man smiled. His name was Michel and he was from France and in California on holiday. His right hand was in a cast. We shook left hands and wished each other good travels.

[gwendydd · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Chatwin's writing is delightful and fun to read. He writes very vividly about small details, but tends to leave the larger picture murky. Although this is travel literature, it in no way really lets you know what to expect in Patagonia. It is a series of snapshots - he describes some of the people he encounters in vivid detail, and explores some historical anecdotes (especially around Butch Cassidy) and local legends (without clarifying where history ends and legend begins, rendering himself an unreliable narrator).

This book is racist in the way that only a British imperialist can be racist: that is, the native people of Patagonia are basically details of the landscape, like the livestock, and he focuses entirely on the European inhabitants of South America. Granted, it is fascinating how many cultural pockets he encounters - villages that remain entirely Welsh or German in language and culture - but Chatwin all but ignores the locals.

All in all, this is a strange book, but worth reading for the quality of the writing.

[encephalical · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great digressions, more than a travelogue. Worthwhile introduction. Cringe inducing attitudes towards indigenous peoples.

[neurodrew · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bruce Chatwin wrote this book about 1977, and I have been aware of it for years, seeing it praised as the best travel story in many years. It begins with his boyhood fascination with a piece of skin that his uncle told him was from a dinosaur. He set out as a young man to follow his uncles travels in Patagonia. He walked and hitched rides, took the trains, throughout Patagonia, ending up in Tierra del Fuego and finally in Chile. The skin probably came from a giant sloth, found in a cave in southern Chile. He tells the story of Butch Cassidy, trying to separate the facts from the fiction. He is very familiar with obscure revolutionaries and histories in the region, and with the occasional Nazi still living at that time. He describes a place, recounts a story, furnishes some history, in chapters of varying length, sometimes only a paragraph of less than a page. Fascinating and easily read. Finished in a few evenings in January 2017.

[profh-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I love the subject and the window into the time period. On the other hand, it was a chore to keep going. Not a big fan of his style, humor, or pacing.

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Patagonia" is such an evocative name; just the sort of name to compel you to travel there. Chatwin has a similar thought process and "In Patagonia" is the resulting travelogue of his trip there.

Rather than doing it in style, Chatwin hitchhikes throughout the enormous area of southern Argentina, meeting the locals and sharing their stories. He starts "In Patagonia" by referencing the hide of a long-extinct Patagonian mammal that just happened to be in his family's possession and how an old lady said he should go to Patagonia for her and then entertainingly meanders around.

Sadly Chatwin is no longer around to tell us tales from evocative places and that should sadden us all.

[jbreedlove_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A classic in travel literature. If not for a weak ending a certain 4.5 and maybe a r. New place and history, vignettes on peoples lives, great writing that wasn't focused on himself.

Loved the Charley Milward story.

Looking forwrd to Songlines.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

'In Patagonia' is said to have revolutionised the travel writing genre, and I can well believe it. Chatwin's book is the ideal combination of historical research and present-day exploration; personal yet unsentimental, Chatwin's writing takes you on a journey through all of Patagonia, both past and present.

[antt-4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Charming, nostalgic, nicely written—made me think of my own days long ago in Argentina...

[michplunkett · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I got through half of it and had to stop. I don't believe I've ever tried to read a book and had to stop reading due to pure boredom, or lack of wanting to finish it, since trying to read Heart of Darkness in high school.

This book may very well have some redeeming qualities to it, but in 100 pages I wasn't able to find any of them.

[jonarnold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Chatwin’s Patagonian journal is far more than an account of the lands he travelled through; instead he captures the spirit of the region, covering history and heritage ranging from the fates of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid through the European origins of the settlers and local wildlife. A fascinating, beautifully written account of why people travel to the ends of the earth and why they stay there.

[whwatson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read in one of the earlier reviews of this book, how this individual had attempted several times to start this novel without success. Finally, coming from a different place and mood, they started, finished and thoroughly enjoyed their reading experience.

Perhaps that has been my issue; and the primary reason why I have not rated or viewed this work of Bruce Chatwin’s as the exceptional or fascinating novel portrayed by most reviewers or critics before me.

I’m currently in a mood for Adventure books, and consequently, have searched various available book lists for ideas on highly rated authors and novels. “In Patagonia” was listed by Outside Magazine as one of the “Top 25 adventure books of the last 100 years.” Having read and been impressed by previous articles, videos, and DVDs on Patagonia, I was anxious to see how Chatwin treated this relatively untouched land of raw beauty, at times harsh living conditions, and limited population intrusion.

The book was interesting but not what I expected or was looking for. It was multi-facetted; part travel log, part search for ancestry heritage, and a fair amount of historical background. It would have been perfect in providing additional background before visiting and touring for several weeks. But the writing was inconsistent in holding my attention. Instances where I was captivated followed by sections that I wanted to just skip over.

To me it was not on the same plane as other novels listed in that top 25; ie, Touching the Void, or Alive, or Wind, Sand, and Stars. Or novels on other lists; such as Man Eaters of Tsavo, or Skeletons on The Zahara for instance.

So I’ll mark this one down as an interesting but not outstanding read. Then try a few others on the list and see if they satisfy my adventure craving.

[moncur_d_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I’ve just finished rereading Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. I first read it in 1978 or 79, I forget which, and still have my original Picador paperback copy.

I remember being impressed by the mystic otherworldliness of Chatwin’s luminous text – a journey to the end of the world in search of the skin of an extinct creature – a sort of Anglophone Borges.

Thirty plus years on I find myself still impressed by the quality of his writing and his technique of gluing little stories and events together in a narrative. Today, rather than a mystical journey I would view it more as a journey into a vanished society of English farm managers, Scottish Welsh and German migrants, more as social history than anything else.

When Chatwin travelled there, there were still people who remembered hearing stories of the early days of settlement and who remembered some of the events of the time. Now all these people would be long dead, and Patagonia, is doubtless a very different place – more Argentinian than perhaps it once was.

That said I still enjoyed the writing and the turns of phrase and the near fantastical parts of his story telling, and came away with the feeling that the world is now a more prosaic place than it once may have been...

[seriousgrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Chatwin's In Patagonia has been called a masterpiece. It's short, but a masterpiece nonetheless. This is not your typical travel book. Chatwin doesn't linger over landscape and sights to see. Instead, he focuses on the historical and follows in the footsteps of legendary characters like Butch Cassidy. He journeys through Patagonia with a thirst for all that Patagonia is rumored to be, past and present. Don't expect to have a clear picture of Patagonia in your head when you are finished. You will have captured the nostalgic and the profound instead. There are only a quiet collection of photographs that don't quite add up to the narrative.

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Een kruising tussen een reisverslag en antropologisch onderzoek naar verschillende vormen van menszijn. Chatwin stapt Patagonië af en ontmoet tal van merkwaardige mensen en gemeenschappen (daarbij veel bannelingen). Heel leuk, maar wat is de zin van dit alles? Mijn inschatting: de diversiteit van de menselijke ervaring illustreren in een uithoek van de wereld.

[tatteredpage · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is the second time I've read this novel and it was a far more successful read than the first. Previously I was bored to tears by it, but I was also a college freshman without much in the way of literary fine tuning. I was better prepared now for Chatwin's work, I think. I found the novel to be a kind of quiet meditation on life in a hard country. One part historical another part cultural it had a bit of an anthropological or journalistic tone to it, which offered a sense of observational distance while still allowing an intimacy to develop between the reader and the individuals, families, events and places he talks about. The writing carefully mirrors the Patagonian landscape both in its broad strokes and its beautiful subtleties.