notes on robinson crusoe

chapter 1

Crusoe is the son of German immigrants. He’s second generation. His parents already stranded on an isle - only, as his father makes clear, happily so. His father urges Robinson to enter the “middle station” in life, which is where he has landed up, working in merchandise. His father stresses that it’s better to be neither in the upper nor the lower classes. Robinson, however, wants to see the world and ignores his father’s advice. He embarks on a ship. The year is 1651, not that long after Shakespeare’s Tempest. The shipwreck was already a key trope. Apart from the Tempest, there is also Pericles, and countless others. The shipwreck as the agency of destiny, precipitating change (likewise in the Odyssey). Of particular note to an island culture; Crusoe’s first journey is from Hull to London, although this too ends in a shipwreck, which is a forbearer of the shipwreck to come. 

chapter 2

Slavery. One imagines that Defoe is running the full gamut of contemporary paranoias. That of being on the other side of the slave trade must have been high in the contemporary consciousness. Perhaps what this shows is the awareness of the obscene nature of the condition of slavery. No doubt, many incorporated slaves into normality; but the phobia that “this could happen to me” suggests an awareness that slavery wasn’t an act of god; it was an institution which involved the oppression of fellow humans. Am trying to put my finger on a contemporary idea that exercises similar hold on the imagination, and the one that seems closest is that of the immigrant, from Africa or Asia or Central America. (Once again the trope of the shipwreck.)

chapter 3

So this chapter possibly lays waste to my reflections above. Crusoe escapes from slavery and makes his way to Brazil, where he settles down as a plantation owner and makes a lot of money, planting tobacco. There are two strands to this section of the story. Firstly he experiences loneliness as an immigrant. He feels himself to be on a desert island (did his parents feel the same way when they arrived?) and his wealth means little to him. The other is that he accepts a commission to go and buy slaves from the African coast, at the behest of his fellow plantation owners. Knowing that the plan is to exchange fripperies for humans. Defoe doesn’t seem to offer any kind of judgement on Crusoe for this action, which is taken more in a spirit of adventure than action. He cannot resist the lure of another voyage, after four sedentary years. The chapter closes with another shipwreck, this time one which will land him on the desert island, somewhere in the tropics. Is the shipwreck retribution for his slave trading? It doesn’t appear so. If this is what Defoe intends, the message is subliminal at best.

chapter 4

Arrival on the island. We enter a more technological chapter; albeit one which is driven by the resources Crusoe rescues from the ship. The process of recovering items from the ship takes up much of the chapter. Crusoe salvages all kind of tools, including weapons and gunpowder. In a sense, he is a colonialist, a Pizarro or a Cortes, only one with no apparent empires to conquer. He arrives on uncharted shores with slender but advanced resources, sufficient to offer him a degree of security. Technology is his saviour. There’s also an issue with the timeline; the second half of the chapter relates, briefly, the construction of his camp, which takes over a year and very few pages. Time has ceased to have much relevance. There’s surprisingly little about how he produces food: a few goats are killed and there were provisions from the boat, but as yet no detail regarding crops or diet. 

chapter 5

The first half of the chapter feels like filler. Defoe offers Crusoe’s diary, which merely repeats what has occurred in chapter 4, as though he was being paid by the page and needed to pad things out. Half way through the chapter, he more or less abandons the diary exercise, and returns to the first person narration. Here, the issue of food is addressed, with more details regarding his hunting expeditions as well as a segment on his discovery of agrarian agriculture, when the seeds from sacks he has thrown out germinate and grow months later. He has a minor religious episode which he then mocks; Crusoe’s ambivalence with regard to religion appears to chime with his belief in modernity. In a sense, Crusoe, the castaway, might be regarded as the exemplar of enlightenment man: a believer in technology above faith. He’s also a romantic, addicted to experience above comfort. An earthquake briefly disconcerts him, but then becomes the motivation to reconsider his living arrangements. There’s very little ‘dark night of the soul’: his restricted circumstances encourage his creativity and his belief in his ability to conquer nature and survive.

chapter 6

Then all of a sudden, as though Defoe is aware of all the potential criticism of Crusoe’s lack of faith, he gets religion! The chapter starts with a reversion to the diary format, which is then put on hold as Crusoe gets seriously ill (an illness he treats with tobacco and rum) and then goes on a long dissertation where any doubts about his christian leanings are supposedly put to bed. This extended confession feels slightly off-kilter, almost as though the writer is responding to voiced or unvoiced criticism of his protagonist’s lack of faith. It’s one of the least intriguing chapters, which holds no real surprises.

Chapter 7

A chapter largely dedicated to agriculture and exploration of the island. Crusoe’s religious enthusiasm seems to wane. There is a moment as he discovers the island’s variety and wealth when he sounds enamoured of it for the first time, taking on a colonial air, declaring that he could imagine himself the lord of this manor. 

Chapter 8

This chapter is effectively split into two parts. The diary structure is cast aside and Defoe offers a description of Crusoe’s explanation of the island. He goes to the other side (the west) from whence he can see what he assumes to be the mainland of the americas in the distance. He calculates this as being somewhere between Brazil and the Spanish speaking lands. He also identifies, somewhat surprisingly, penguins. All of which would put him at a far more southerly latitude than the tropics where one had assumed he was up to now. This side of the island is more fertile than his side, which leads to a reference to Leadenhall Market, something which lends a vertical link to London (not a city that Crusoe knew all that well, although Defoe would have done.) The second part of the chapter is given over to his crop of wheat and his struggle to learn how to make bread out of it. He notes in this chapter that he has now been three years on the island, time flying by rapidly in the narrative. 

Chapter 9 

This is the boat chapter. Crusoe’s dreams of escape suddenly take hold (after three years) and he seeks to resuscitate the old boat which is beached, with no success. He then goes on to make what he describes as a large canoe out of a vast tree, something that takes him months. However, the canoe is too heavy to move. He can’t get it to the sea, in spite of his best efforts, even though it’s only a hundred yards away. is this the first moment when we perhaps start to think that Crusoe doesn’t really want to leave the island, after all? For all his protestations that it’s impossible to get the boat to the shore, this is all down to his stupidity? It’s as though he’s enjoying the adventure rather more that he suggests. 

Chapter 10

Somehow the boat makes it to sea. In the opening two pages. Crusoe sets out to sea, with the intention of circumnavigating the island. Any idea of making it to the mainland is discounted. We are now eight years into the story, the timeline becoming harder and harder to follow. The circumnavigation almost leads to disaster as strong currents drive him out to sea. The dramatic need for obstacles is apparent. Crusoe overcomes the obstacle, (if he didn’t there would be no story), returns to shore where he is greeted by his parrot. The second half of the chapter deals with Crusoe’s goat management tactics. The history of humanity as an agricultural project once again. Milk and cheese and meat and hides. 

Chapter 11

Crusoe now states he has been on the island fifteen years. Finally he comes across the first trace of another human- a footstep on the beach. He has overcome every obstacle in his way and his narrative is crying out for a twist. Crusoe the hoarder of capital comes to the fore, as he does everything he can to protect his goods. He is consumed by paranoia that others will seek to pillage his store and kill him. As a result he spends the remainder of the chapter constructing more and more elaborate defences. The mere idea of the presence of another soul is something he sees primarily as a threat. 

Chapter 12

The other looms larger now. Crusoe discovers a beach littered with human skulls and signs of fire. He assumes that cannibal savages have been using the island as a kind of picnic venue. He starts to go a bit mad, entertaining fantasies of annihilating the ‘savages’ in all kinds of ways, roaming the island armed to the teeth, then hiding away, talking about living in the “constant snare of the fear of man”. Then he has regrets about his prejudices, comparing this to the actions of the Spanish: “that this would justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practised in America, where they destroyed millions of these people”. A strange side-note which gives an insight into contemporary attitudes towards the Spanish conquista, whilst at the same time revealing the contradictions and intellectual gymnastics which surrounded the whole process of colonisation. Finally in the chapter, Crusoe discovers a wondrous cave, which is the perfect safe space, eclipsing his years of work to construct fortified defences. The cave offers him great satisfaction; it is the safest place in the whole wide world. 

Chapter 13

Again a chapter divided between two separate incidents. In one, the cannibals return, provoking fresh paranoia in Crusoe. In the second part, a Spanish galleon founders on the rocks offshore. He hopes that there will be survivors, but there are none. He actually makes it to the ship and rescues a dog, along with large quantities of treasure. One thing that struck me, reading this chapter, was the way in which Friday has yet to appear. We’re 25 years in to his stay on the island and over two thirds of the way through the book. The trouble is that when Friday appears, the story takes a sharp twist. It will cease to be a survival story and become a buddy story or even a love story. Which doesn’t appear to be what Defoe wants to write, no matter how much Crusoe might protest that he longs for company. We start to think - of course the ship doesn’t have any survivors, and of course he never meets one of the ‘savages’ or rescue one of their victims. It would screw with the narrative. 

Chapter 14

As though reacting to the need to move his tale along, Friday finally appears. Two years pass between the previous chapter and this one, years marked by paranoia and fantasies of capturing the “cannibals” and converting them into his slaves. Finally, bizarrely, Crusoe starts to contemplate the notion that if the ‘savages’ are capable of crossing the sea from the mainland to the island, then perhaps he might be capable of doing the same, but this thought, (which we know won’t lead anywhere because we by now suspect that Crusoe has no intention of leaving the island if he can help it), is interrupted by the appearance of Friday, who he helps escape from said cannibals on one of their periodic feasting visits. His first thoughts regarding Friday are that he is not too ugly, with comments about skin tone and his nose, and that he would make a fine slave. The Edward Said Orientalism thesis has a variation: there is clearly a subtext running throughout the novel regarding the matrix of slavery. Crusoe is himself a slave at times, his eventual isolation comes as a result, (as he meditates upon in this chapter), of a failed slaving trip, and when a human finally appears his first thought is that this would make a fine slave. Without as yet seeking to draw any conclusions as to how Defoe finally comes down on this issue, one thing that seems clear is the centrality of the issue within the contemporary consciousness. Perhaps also worth noting that the slave trade itself was one of the prime movers of globalisation. The other side of this it seems to me is the way that Crusoe’s fate mirrors a capitalist drift towards atomisation within society. Crusoe is a prototype of Mersault or Joseph K; a determined outsider from the outset who struggles to square his individualistic instincts within a societal structure, only to find via the device of the shipwreck a convenient get-out-of-jail card (which is also a go-to-jail card). 

Chapter 15

Crusoe gets to know Friday. Which means, more than anything else that Crusoe gets to indoctrinate Friday into the ways of Christianity and enquire about how easy it might be to escape from the island. It’s finally defined more precisely where the island is: in the carribean, not far from the mouth of the Orinoco, only 40 miles offshore. Crusoe takes Friday to the high point of the island and when Friday sees the distant mainland, he identifies it as his territory. Crusoe explains that England, a country he can but have a distant, nostalgic memory of now, was part of Europe: “I described to him the country of Europe, particularly England, which I came from; how we lived, how we worshipped God, how we behaved to one another, and how we traded in ships to all parts of the world.” Within a chapter of Friday’s arrival, the end already feels in sight, with Crusoe showing him the boats he made so many years ago, and Friday suggesting that the bigger one might do for a journey to the mainland.

Chapter 16

So, Crusoe and Friday make a boat. But they don’t just leave. Instead, Crusoe prevaricates. He can’t leave until it’s the right season. He has to wait. He actually initially tells Friday he should go without him. He really doesn’t want to leave the island and he’d rather he was on his own again, but Friday refuses to leave without him. So Crusoe takes his time and makes ‘preparations’. Which are then interrupted by the arrival of another party of cannibals, come to feast on the island. Crusoe and Friday attack and overwhelm the cannibals, in the process freeing two prisoners, one a Spaniard, and the other who just happens to be Friday’s father. In true colonial style, Crusoe now declares he has three subjects, with three different religions. However, one wonders how this is going to tally with the protagonist’s Garbo complex, his need to be alone: four men on his island is not a sustainable situation. 

Chapter 17

Neither is 20. Crusoe’s push-me pull-you situation is repeated. After putting off departure from the island for another six months or more in order to grow crops, he gets rid of the Spaniard and Friday’s father, sending them back to the mainland. Travel between mainland and island now seems so regular it’s as if there is a shuttle service, but still Crusoe remains. When a boat appears on the horizon, it isn’t them coming to take Crusoe and Friday away; it’s a group of British mutineers. Crusoe and Friday liberate the mutineer’s three hostages and succeed in overwhelming the mutineers without too much trouble. However, Crusoe now has the problem of yet more people populating his island, his solitary idyll coming to a definitive end. 

Chapter 18

Crusoe would now appear to have multiple options for leaving the island. He doesn’t leave. Defoe spends the chapter giving a convoluted boy’s own account of the plot to overwhelm the mutineers and take back control of the ship. Friday is barely mentioned. The most interesting aspect of the chapter is that Crusoe insists that some of the worst mutineers are given the option of staying on the island, rather than going back to England and facing the gallows. He has no option but to leave, but he ensures that his legacy, his feverdream, will continue to be lived, vicariously, through the prisoners who will inherit his legacy.

Chapter 19

And then he finally is gone. After 28 years on the island, he returns to England on the boat. But he doesn’t stay long. Almost straight away he heads to Portugal to find out what happened to his Brazilian lands. The good news is he’s rich. He gives a long account of his finances, contemplates going back to Brazil but decides against it, and sets off on his travels again, looking to go back to England via land. 

Chapter 20

The final chapter is constructed around a long description of Friday fighting a bear. Was Defoe in any way conscious of the metaphor? The wily Carib out-thinking the lumbering giant. In the end we don’t learn anything about the fate of Friday. The closing pages describe Crusoe’s decision to travel again (after having married and had children?). This includes a return visit to “his” island, where he finds the Spaniards and the convicts have somehow muddled through, still alive. In addition some women have come to the island and there’s now some twenty children living there. A thoroughly modern representation of the colonised nation state in miniature. Defoe promises that there will be more adventures in the next instalment, the second volume. 

beneath the plough and the stars

It’s seven in the morning and for some reason I am awake. The night ended in Doyle’s about four hours ago. Young people were falling over each other dancing to James Brown whilst we finally wrapped up the conversation and decided to head for home.

Dublin has a lot of bars and my friend promised we’d end up in one of them. He promised a quiet nook somewhere, in a beautiful bar. There’s nothing wrong with Doyle’s but it’s neither quiet nor beautiful. Which given the context of the occasion is probably far more appropriate. 

My friend is called Sean Holmes. He’s a theatre director. I’ve known him for many years and seen many of his shows, although less of late. Last year, he came to give a workshop in the city were I live, Montevideo, Uruguay. At the end of the last night of the week, in the Plaza Independencia on the way back to the hotel, he said: “Why don’t you come to Dublin? The Abbey’s doing the centenary of the 1916 Uprising and for some reason they’re inviting lots of English directors over for it. I’m going to do The Plough and the Stars.” Standing in the plaza, Dublin and next year seemed a long way away. Nevertheless, a few months later here I am for one night, in time to catch the show’s first preview.

We go for supper before the event In a restaurant called The Winding Stair which overlooks the Liffey. Sean seems relaxed. The first preview is the moment the play finally confronts its audience. It’s opening night by any other name. He tells me that O’Casey’s play is “their Hamlet.” On the fourth night of the show’s opening run, in 1926, there was a riot. The rioters were widows of men who’d died in the 1916 uprising, who didn’t like what O’Casey had to say about it. With Jon Bausor, the designer, we speculate about what it would take to provoke a riot in a theatre today and decide it’s probably never going to happen again. 

In Montevideo, Sean had been giving a workshop with the playwright, Simon Stephens. Collectively, they were tackling the big issues of why people write plays and why they then choose to stage them. One of the exercises that Sean did involved investigating how you transform the theatrical space so that it feels as though the play being staged is actually happening in the same room, or physical space, as the audience. A great deal of theatre looks to separate the audience and the play; Sean was looking at how to integrate them. 

The Plough and the Stars is a play rooted in the geography of Dublin. Dublin’s not the most complex city, geographically. Within a single afternoon, I’d begun to get a handle on it. When O’Casey’s play talks about O’Connell Street, even I know where that is. For the audience, the play has some of the criteria of a video diary. The way in which people mercilessly film or photograph their lives, documenting their actuality. The Plough and the Stars is set in the actuality of Dublin’s geography. A local audience watches it with their own images of this world to hand. It’s not remote, it’s tangible. The only thing distancing the audience from the play is that it’s set in the past. 

Plays set in the past run the risk of being museum pieces. Audiences sometimes prefer this. They enjoy watching a play and feeling as though it belongs to another time; that they are cultural tourists. This might be a valid approach but it doesn’t have much to do with Sean’s exercise about making the audience feel part of the space. In order to achieve this, the director has to find a way to ‘de-museum’ the play. To make it feel contemporary.

We get to the theatre around 7pm. The theatre is sold out. The audience is a mix of young and old. There are several school parties. The doors are not opened until 7.20, ten minutes before the show is due to open. The spectators are crammed into the lobby by the bar. The Abbey is a gloriously unreconstructed seventies space. It wears its heritage lightly on its sleeve. This doesn’t feel like an audience which has come in a spirit of veneration. 

The first image in the production is a girl, aged about 14, wearing a Man Utd top. She approaches a microphone and sings, in Gaelic, what I later learn is the national anthem. The girl is of Pakistani descent. She speaks with a clear Irish accent. She’s the child of immigrants. The audience applaud her as she coughs her way through the song. Dublin, like many a contemporary European city, is a melting pot. One of the languages that I heard recurrently walking around was Portuguese Brazilian. Everyone’s here, on the edge of Europe. Dublin is no longer the white, classically Celtic city of O’Casey’s day. The production reflects this from the off. 

Having said which, modern dress is not the most radical of devices. The play uses costume wittily throughout, but the key tools in the director’s unlocking of the text are song and surprise. The character of Jack, Nora’s husband, might be said to be underwritten. Jack has one big scene before he goes off to join the militia and another midway through the battle of the Easter Uprising, the backdrop of the play’s second half. This is all the actor is given to convey what kind of man the husband of the play’s tragic heroine really is. The first scene between him and Nora has to communicate their passion. The scene begins naturalistically, then, suddenly, the actor grabs a mike. Hang on, you think, what’s the microphone doing on stage? This might be modern dress, but no-one has a microphone sitting around in their living room. The actor leaps out of naturalism. He sings a vivacious, sexy love song. Everything about their relationship, their desire, comes to life. The audience aren’t looking at a character from a great play. They’re looking at a man showing off for the woman he loves. 

This play between naturalism and non-naturalism creates the space that Holmes uses to remind the audience: we’re all in this theatre together. This theatre in this city. Which is the city of the past and the city of the future and the city, crucially, of the now. The rupture takes the audience out of the bubble of history and lands them in the here-and-now. The play isn’t talking about long-lost figures. It’s talking about the audience’s contemporaries. Music, humour, and the courage to break the moment, help to release the power of a play which is describing things that happened a hundred years ago. It makes them happen now, upon the stage, in Dublin, all over again.

In the interval I step outside for some air. Young people walk past, talking and laughing. They look like they’ve stepped out of The Plough and the Stars. 

It’s only the first preview. The play isn’t “finished’ yet. There’s more work to be done. Only today, Sean and Jon decided to rip out most of the set’s backdrop, locating the scenes on a larger, emptier stage. There are discussions about the speed at which a tower falls, whether a pram would be better as a shopping trolley; how to stage the final scene. These discussions carry on in Doyle’s until gone 2 in the morning. Director, designer, associate director, all thrashing it out. The play is still coalescing. The various aspects of stagecraft - acting, sound, lights, design, language, music - are being honed and refined. I will never see the finished version. But I have already seen enough. To feel as though O’Casey’s complex vision of the seminal Irish revolution is alive and kicking, as relevant to the Abbey’s audience today as it was when it was first produced in this theatre, ninety years ago. Enough to see that the audience and the actors are, indeed, sharing a common space as they explore the play together.

+++

At the curtain call, the actor playing Jack brings on an Irish flag and drapes it over the scenery. He has not been asked to do this. Sean is not too sure what to make of it. Given the importance of symbols in the play, it's not a negligible action. It’s reminiscent of the way a footballer might drape himself in his nation’s flag after having won an international tournament with his European club. There’s a pride in origins at play, a pride which is reflected in a kind of benign nationalism, which reminds me of my other adopted home, Uruguay, where this kind of gesture might also occur. On the other hand, were it to happen on a British stage, the semiotics of an actor bringing on a Union Jack for the curtain call might be perceived to be less innocent. With the audience having left the theatre and the stage bare, someone observes: nice to see us celebrating the role of the Ivory Coast in the Easter Uprising. The actor has placed the flag the wrong way round. The Irish flag, placed the wrong way round, becomes the flag of the Ivory Coast. 

Thursday, 10.03.16

london notes

Feb/ March 2016

• London air on a February morning: slices like an unseen dagger.
• Black kid being picked up by 7 cops at London Bridge.
• Latino having serious skype chat with novia on overland.
• I keep expecting to run into people i know. #montevideohead
• In the imperial war museum there is an interactive sub-Schwitters political photomontage workshop. Giant cut outs of  Obama/ Trump/ Merkel/ Blair & co are available for pre-teens to rebrand with their slogans. War is evil. Peace is good. Trite speakthought in a proto-libertarian brainwash. There are no anti-monarchy or pro-putinist options. The language of protest is reduced to a child's dribble.
• The Romanian busker on the tube is so angry he shouts at his two younger companions. He plays his sax like it’s a machine gun. People cringe before his anger. No one gives money.
• 2 Argentines at the bar in the Ritzy being told by the waitress that uni in the UK is very expensive. She asks how much it costs in Argentina. The young man looks at her and says...ah, it's free -
• In Punta Arenas, towards the end of the world, we came across the story of Ernest Shackleton, intrepid and vanquished arctic explorer. Walking down the hill from my sister's obscure corner of London to Sydenham station, I pass one of those big old houses with a blue plaque. The man who lived there was the explorer himself. A world so big and small all at the same time.
• 2 pubs face one another at the Limehouse end of Commercial Road. One is The Royal Duke. The other The Royal Duchess. Both duke and duchess are shut now. The guillotine has fallen.
• My friends move into a new house. Bought by her stepfather. To get them on the property ladder. Shortly after, the stepfather starts receiving letters. 3 or 4 a week. Demanding that the sender is paid the full value of the house, which is legally his. He threatens to have my friends evicted. They report this to the police. The sender now lives in a psychiatric hospital. 20 years ago he lived in the house, which he lost in a messy divorce. He keeps an eye on land registry records. Every time someone new buys it, he tries to claim his old house back.
• Big man in homburg on train, looks a bit like Churchill: "Damascus would have us." His companion: "I bet they would." Later in the conversation I realise they are talking about weapons sales. The last thing I hear is the other man, younger, looks ex-services: "You weren't there for the meeting with King Abdullah, were you? I thought he was jolly good."
• T is an actor. He was hired to do an advert for Italian cornflakes. He was flown to Nepal for the shoot. Himself and a girl eating cornflakes against the backdrop of Everest. the Italians treat the Nepalese like servants. They spend a couple of days setting up. The morning scheduled to film the wide with the mountain it's foggy. The next day too. The next as well. The mountain refuses to cooperate. The following day they get out the green screen. Everest will be added in in post.
• Sitting in the window at Curzon Soho, a portly figure on a bike goes by. There is something familiar about him. It is the mayor himself. Five minutes later the cafe space is swathed in the irrefutable odour of shit.

PATAGONIA NOTES

===

PUNTA ARENAS 1

The world changes depending on where you are. This overly-obvious truth never the less feels more true than ever here, in Punta Arenas. Next stop South is the South Pole. The tip of the continent of Antarctica reaches out so that it looks like it’s trying to touch Patagonia. Punta Arenas has been the base for many of the great Polar expeditions. In front of the port there are boards which include Scott, Peary, Admunson and Shackleton. Not to mention a whole host of other names from other countries whose fame hasn’t made it to the Anglo-Saxon world. It’s the middle of Summer and it feels like the edge of Winter, which is the permanent state of this outpost. If Summer is like this, you can’t help thinking, shivering in the biting wind, how can they survive Winter. You look South and realise the icecaps are almost within reach. The official name of the district is Región de Magallanes y Antártica Chilena. Legally speaking, we’re there, in amongst the icebergs, in a land of immense, dazzling whiteness.

Due East, more or less, are the Falkland Islands. Our taxi driver used to be a sailor and spent time there. He says there are two big islands and hundreds of little ones. On every one of these little islands there lives a British couple, who fly the flag and share their island with lots of sheep. He says the pubs open at ten in the morning and shut at eleven at night and the police fine you if they catch you drunk at 11.30. There’s nothing else to do there, so everyone drinks all day, but god help you if you’re caught drinking after closing time.

On the roof of Punta Arenas fire station, there’s a Croatian flag. The fire brigade was founded by Croatians in 1902. There’s also a Croatian club called Sokol. The immigration to this part of the world was diverse. The cemetery contains a Scottish quarter, an English quarter and a host of Eastern European sectors. Croats, Slovenians, Slovaks and more in amongst the more typical Spanish and Italian stock. A sign in town celebrates the Slovak novelist Mateo Bencur, who ended up going back to live in Croatia, where he wrote two nostalgic novels called Patagonian Travels and The Call of the Mother Country. Patagonia is as good a place as any to start over. You can imagine a whole load of Croatians arriving at the end of the world at the start of the last century, thinking, you know what, this town really need a fire brigade. Later we come across another fire station, founded by Germans. There’s probably one for every nationality that ever emigrated here.

===

TIERRA DEL FUEGO

We leave Punta Arenas around 8 in the morning, driving North East to take the ferry at Punto Delgado, the mouth of the Magellan Strait.. The wind is getting up and the guide is worried that the crossing will shut, as he later finds out happens around 1pm. The crossing takes no more than a breezy 20 minutes: this is the narrowest point in the Magellan Straits. The approach on the other side is cluttered with Argentine lorries taking petrol from the Argentine part of Tierra del Fuego north. They have to cross Chilean territory in order to return to Argentina. When the ferry shuts down due the to strong winds which are typical of the Summer months, the backlog of lorries trying to cross builds up incrementally.

Tierra del Fuego is an island, separated from the continent by the Magellan Straights, named after the man who found a passage through them in 1520. He never landed on the inhospitable island. He first named it Tierra del Humo, having seen smoke from native indian fires. When he got back to Spain, the king decided the name Tierra del Fuego was more evocative. The Chilean half of the island is far from beautiful. It’s low, flat, scrubby.. Further south, the cordillera continues its march towards Antartica and there are forests, but here it’s a bleak Lear-like heath. The wind sweeps the land like a lawnmower. The few, sparse trees are stunted and the grass sways in a vast, hypnotic emptiness.

After being driven for almost 2 hours, seeing little, we arrive at the Western coast in a Bay called the Useless Bay (Bahia Inutil), as it’s too shallow for boats and therefore good for nothing. [Wikipedia: “The bay was named in 1827 by Captain Phillip Parker King, because it afforded "neither anchorage nor shelter, nor any other advantage for the navigator.””] We’ve come to see a colony of King Penguins. There used to be a lot of King Penguins on Tierra del Fuego, but like the indigenous population, they were exterminated. About a decade ago, an enterprising fellow decided to bring them back. He set up a penguin colony, which is protected and thriving. It’s funded by the £12 every tourist has to pay to visit.

When we step out of the van, the wind is challenging. As we walk down to the coast it becomes even more so. The penguins stand around, an odd mix of noble and gawky, observing us. The wind does not appear to affect them. For us, the wind is a scourge. Never have I known a wind quite like it. It makes standing up a challenge. Not an intermittent challenge; it’s a constant one. Relax for a second and you’re in danger of flying off the earth’s handle. The wind whips its way off the coast, announcing without any doubt that this is not a place meant for human inhabitation. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what it feels like to be at the Pole. Or Mars, come to that.

We all sway about a bit. The penguins, who are on the other side of a stream, continue to observe the humans’ pathetic attempt to incorporate themselves into this ferocious landscape. Finally, having taken about a million photos each, we retreat back to the safety of the van and head towards the Chilean capital of Tierra del Fuego, Porvenir. Porvenir has a population of 5000. It is categorically not a tourist town. We’re taken to a cheap and cheerful place where we’re served sizeable guanaco sandwiches. The return ferry has been delayed an hour, which gives us time to walk around the town. However, this is a town where walking is a feat not to be approached lightly. The wind is a little less fierce than at the coast, but not a lot. We stagger around the low-rise streets, with houses made out of prettily-painted corrugated iron. There is a seaside promenade, but you’d need a constitution much stronger than mine to enjoy it. Places like Bridlington or Scarborough seem tropical in comparison with Porvenir.

The guide takes us to the museum. We learn about the two different native tribes who used to occupy this land. The Yahgan lived off the sea, using their canoes as second homes. The Selk’nam lived off the land, hunting guanaco. There’s a statue depicting them in a  small park. Four figures walk barefoot, wrapped in animal hides. These people occupied the land for over ten thousand years. There is a way of living in the wild nature of Tierra del Fuego, but the secrets have vanished with the tribes. They were hunted in the early twentieth century, when the land was given over to sheep farming. The sheep drove out the natives’ traditional food supply, the guanaco, so they started hunting sheep instead. As a result, the sheep barons paid people to hunt them. Hunters were paid at first upon presenting a pair of ears, but later they had to supply a head. The most famous hunter was s a Scot, Alex McLennan (nicknamed Red Pig), whose fitting fate is described in Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Chatwin also writes about another Brit, Thomas Bridges, a missionary who later become a landowner himself. Only Bridges, far from hunting the Selk’nam and the Yahgan, did all he could to preserve their culture. He complied extensive dictionaries of their languages and sought to offer them a safe haven on his land. It may have been a doomed endeavour, but the contrasting stories of Bridges and McLennan say a lot about what it is to be British. No matter how far you go, travel always seems to take you back to where you came from.

The ferry was due to leave at 7pm but ended up leaving at 8.30. This included a twenty minute wait in the biting cold as not one but two broken down cars were towed off. The towing involved a four wheel drive driving onto the ferry extremely quickly, executing a neat three point turn on deck, a rope being attached and the breakdown towed off. Except that the second time this happened, the  rope broke. Then, as if by magic, the broken down car started working again. We stood around in the wind, once again, watching the pantomime. Finally we boarded and the ferry headed off. The ferry was packed. A British man started telling a Dutchman about how terrible the Piccadilly Line was. As it got out into the current, the ferry began to pitch and yarl more and more impressively. Apparently, when sailors finally discovered the way round Cape Horn, the Southernmost tip of the Americas, they preferred going that way as the Magellan Strait seemed even more dangerous. I’m sure the minor paranoia which more than one person on board was experiencing as the ferry fought against the current would have seemed absurd to a hardened sailor, but the crossing helped to give some idea of what the early navigators faced as they tried to find their passage around the Americas, through to the Pacific, in this cruel but astonishing part of the world.

{Thought: a visit to Tierra del Fuego is a kind of anti-tourism}

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PUNTA ARENAS 2

There’s a woman speaking English in reception. I’m upstairs eating breakfast. I can hear her but I can’t see her. Her accent is weird. It’s fluent English with an accent I’ve never heard before. A kind of rarefied posh (Lady Di) mixed with Kiwi mixed with something coarser or earthier. The woman starts telling the receptionist about how many Chileans there are working in the islands. I realise she’s from the Falklands. The thought crosses my mind that the Falkland Islanders are like the King Penguins. A breed you hear a lot about but never see, unless you travel to the most inhospitable places on earth. She asks the receptionist if he’d like to visit the Falklands. The reply is ambivalent.

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FUERTE BULNES

The first stop, an hour or so South of Punta Arenas, is Puerto Hambre. Port Hunger. In 1584 a group of 300 settlers arrived here. Their objective was to establish a community that would safeguard the territory for the Spanish crown. On a mild Summer’s day, it’s a beautiful, if chilly spot. The settlers arrived in March. Every month the hours of daylight change radically. At high summer dawn arrives at 4am and night around 11pm. In midwinter, dawn arrives at 11am and night falls around 3.30 pm. Within weeks, the hours of daylight would have begun to evaporate. The settlers, trying to build a home in a land where nothing grows, must have felt as though the night was closing in on them. The wind and the cold and the darkness and the emptiness. The odd glimpse of distant mountains through rainclouds. Dolphins and whales passing by like freemen in the Straits whilst they were trapped like lifers. By the time the British adventurer Thomas Cavendish arrived, three years later, all that was left of Puerto Hambre were the fresh ruins of a failed endeavour.

A little further up the coast is Fuerte Bulnes, founded 300 years or so later, in 1843. This is a classic Wild West fort, made out of timber, rebuilt in the 80s to the exact specification of the original plans. The guide points out that whilst the location is spectacular, offering commanding views of the strait, it was a grim place to be stationed, with the nearest fresh water 5 kms away as well as being brutally exposed to the elements. The fort has a history of mutiny and rebellion, eventually falling into disuse, before it was rebuilt a first time, as a historic monument, in the 1940s. Whilst the rest of the world was at war, the Chilean army made a historical reconstruction of a 19th century fort. Recently a state-of-the-art museum has been opened next to the fort; the juxtaposition of the high-tech museum with the bare-necessities fort feels like a fitting metaphor for the way in which the country has developed in the course of 150 years.

There’s a lookout at the far end of the fort. As ever, we were pressed for time. The tours try to squeeze more in than they can and you don’t get the time to savour the place. All the same, I managed to slip down to the waterfront. The Magellan Strait continued towards the Pacific. To the East lay Dawson Island, where the Pinochet regime sent its political prisoners. In the distance was the Darwin mountain range, the last, seismic gasp of the Andes. The water was calm and kind. Great tree trunks, deunuded of all flesh, lay scattered and whitened on the shore. Small birds, far too tame for their own good, flitted about just out of reach. Twenty kilometres further on, off-road, lay Cape Froward, the Southernmost point on the continental land mass of the Americas. It wasn’t the end of the world, quite, but it felt tantalising close, as close as the birds which continued to hop around as though man was as tame an animal as they were.

I reached down and picked up some flints as a momento. The craggy shore is slowly fragmenting , as it has for millions of years. The flints were sharp and felt comfortable in the hand. When I got back to the hotel, I placed them on the table. Hours later, I looked at them again. They looked like tools. Perfect tools. Tools which are as well designed as an iPhone or a Ferrari. And, in their heyday, far more valuable.

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LA VICTORIA & THE BEAGLE

If you go past the vast tax-free Zona Franca, past the garage and the statue to the Selk’nam on the road to Puerto Natales, you come to a small park where there’s a re-creation of Magellan’s ship, La Victoria, as well as Darwin’s Beagle (still in construction). The most striking thing about the Victoria is how small it is. Fifty sailors, at least, various animals, and captured natives crammed into a space not much bigger than a two bedroom flat, adrift on the ocean, heading into the waters which defined the word ‘uncharted’. When they got to the Magellan Straits, one of the Admiral’s other boats in the flotilla turned round and deserted, hot-footing it back to Spain. Bowie died last night, the news was there when I woke up this morning. If I was looking for a connection between his death and our visit to the ship today, it would be found in the lyrics of Major Tom. The only way you can begin to capture the sense of complete alienation the voyagers must have felt would be to imagine floating in a most peculiar way, in a blue planet earth, with the stars looking very different, each and every day.

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PUNTA ARENAS 3

An antiques shop in the middle of town has a sign outside, inviting tourists to come in and browse. The man working there is friendly. He tells us it’s his mother-in-law’s place. He’s a journalist by trade. He shows me his book of photos of Patagonia, illustrating all the things we’re not going to see. The nature shots look astonishing and it’s clear that you need to try and spend more time down here to get to know it better. Everyone asks us if we’re going to Torres del Paine, the vast natural park that’s a five hour drive away, but the truth is we don’t have time to go there for more than a day, which doesn’t seem enough. We mosey round the antiques shop, looking at an old wood burning stove and other curiosities. There’s a sizeable metallic object in a cabinet. The journalist gets it out for us to look at. It’s part of a British helicopter, which made a forced landing at Agua Fresca during the Falklands War. Chile supported the British, in a neutral sort of way, and allowed the helicopter, which was in trouble, to land. The story goes that the helicopter was destroyed, but not before a local got to it and cut off part of what might be a propeller. It’s for sale for a comely £90. I say only a crazy Brit would want to buy it, and the journalist adds - or a crazy Argentine. He’s happy to let me take photos of a little bit of lost history. He tells us he’s been to the Falklands, showing us the pictures in his book. There’s a weekly flight from Punta Arenas, which means you’re compelled to spend a week there before you can come back. He seemed to think that a week was plenty long enough.

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A professional type, North American, sits writing emails on his Macbook Air in the Cafe Chocolate Baeriswyl, the finest purveyor of hot chocolate in Punta Arenas. Taped over the camera on the laptop is a small strip, cut from a post-it note. On this strip is the following slogan, handwritten in biro: “It’s always right now’.

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