Putting Chatwin on the Map In Patagonia

Endlessly pigeonholed as a travel memoir, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia often resembles anything but that. Chatwin’s 1977 classic is, at heart, a personal quest that dissects Patagonia and the myriad cultures that call it home. However, while the book certainly created a certain stir about the region in the late 20th century, it is clear that it was, in fact, Patagonia that cemented Chatwin in world literature and firmly put him on the map.

The book itself is innovative in style and experimental in structure. Divided up into 97 individual sections – some barely even a paragraph long – Chatwin’s story is less a coherent travel memoir and more a creative meander through one of the world’s most curious regions.

Illustrated & designed by Roman Stevens

A South American territory that spans across the southern regions of both Chile and Argentina, Patagonia encompasses an area of 900,000 square kilometres. Home to windswept stretches of coastline, treacherous straits and a series of archipelagos, Patagonia’s vast interior is often characterised as rugged, exposed and remote.

However, these are the exact details that Chatwin tends to shun. Instead, he spends much of the book exploring the lives of the various international peoples that chose to settle there. Yet, Chatwin isn’t content with just doing that either. Inherent in the book is a further exploration of the outlaws and vagabonds who once roamed the country, the mythological beasts that were claimed to linger in ancient places and the lost kingdoms that were always on the brink of discovery and even the ones still unrecognised by international law.

An amalgamation of lively episodes and fascinating anecdotes, Chatwin’s In Patagonia is a text that jumps off the page and truly comes to life, ultimately offering an honest, endearing and enthralling portrayal of a land before time.

The Lure of the Last Frontier

With countries and communities around the world becoming more and more connected all the time, the concept of a frontier has become increasingly outdated in recent times. Broadly speaking, a frontier is a strip of settled, cultivated land that sits shoulder-to-shoulder with an area of wilderness. The term specifically refers to the American western frontier, an area that existed before Pacific settlement. However, lingering under the surface of frontier life is the implication of lawlessness and anarchy – this is something that Chatwin explores in Patagonia’s past.

Butch Cassidy – one of the most notorious outlaws of the American Old West – and other members of the Wild Bunch moved to Argentina in 1901 in an attempt to shake off pursuing law enforcement agencies. In his book, Chatwin traces Cassidy’s Patagonian journey. At the beginning of the 20th century, at a time when America was starting to show signs of becoming the global superpower it is today, those who capitalised on the bedlam of America’s Wild West began to look for pastures new. What they found was Patagonia.

Studying the stories of the Wild Bunch and the more violent tales of Willie Wilson and Bob Evans, Chatwin depicts the territory, at the turn of the 19th century, as a new West where bandits and outlaws could reinvent themselves and start anew – or just continue kidnapping, looting and killing.

Yet, Chatwin’s last frontier did not just appeal to Yankee outlaws. Chatwin himself was fascinated by the idea of exile. British novelist, Nicholas Shakespeare wrote, “Chatwin was always attracted to border countries: to places on the rim of the world, sandwiched ambiguously between cultures, neither one thing nor another.”

Chatwin spends much of the book documenting a land devoted to treasure-hunters, wild-eyed philosophers and zany explorers, but ultimately, it’s fair to say that Chatwin was essentially one of them. Like those he depicts, Chatwin found his fame and fortune in Patagonia. While the idea of a mythical City of Caesars hangs over the country, in reality, the prospect of riches and glory is all too attainable.

The Land Before Time

Chatwin’s book is very much a cultural exploration of Patagonia. He visits Welsh communities, German families and old Boer exiles. However, Chatwin’s real personal journey concerns the skin of what he initially believes to be a Brontosaurus but is later discovered to be a Mylodon – a Giant Sloth that was native to Patagonia long ago.

The skin of this long-deceased animal had mesmerised Chatwin from a young age, having seen it adorned on his grandmother’s mantelpiece. After it was thrown away, part of Chatwin’s journey was to recreate the past and attain a piece of Mylodon skin for himself. This personal quest provides the story with a quirky air of mystery and mythological intrigue.

With a name that is derived from the term Patagon which refers to the mythological race of giants that were believed to once call the region home, Patagonia is rife with mythology in more than just one way.

As the book progresses, Chatwin goes on to document everything from a creed of male witches to extra-terrestrial sightings and the musings of a wandering Charles Darwin.

Chatwin fuses myth and legend with political and cultural musings in order to forge a new, ground-breaking form of travel writing that explores a number of different realms and domains.

In 1974, Bruce Chatwin abruptly flew out to Lima, Peru, leaving his job at The Sunday Times. He stayed in Latin America for six months.

Rounding off the book’s mythological adventure, the story offers a fantastic denouement as Chatwin himself visits the very cave that his long-deceased ancestor had explored years earlier in order to find the Mylodon skin. Searching through the cave, Chatwin finds some skin for himself and fulfils his own personal journey.

Putting Chatwin on the Map

With books based on travel, it’s always easy to say so-and-so put wherever on the map. But this time-worn cliche cannot so easily be applied to Chatwin’s story. In fact, it’s almost the complete opposite, Patagonia put Chatwin on the map.

An original book that concerns itself far more with the people who inhabit Patagonia than Patagonia itself, it is Chatwin’s rich tapestry of Patagonian locals that catapulted the young writer to literary glory and lasting international fame.