In Patagonia

Bruce Chatwin

2 ideas

1. Charley Milward and the giant sloth skin

   Chatwin's grandmother kept a scrap of leathery skin with coarse reddish hair in her dining-room cabinet, sent by her cousin Charley Milward, a merchant sailor who settled in Punta Arenas and obtained it from a cave near Última Esperanza in southern Chile in the 1890s. The skin was from a mylodon, an extinct giant ground sloth, and the scrap was later thrown away. Chatwin's journey to Patagonia is framed as a quest to find another piece, so a single lost family heirloom becomes the thread that organizes the whole trip and the retelling of Milward's life.

2. The edge of the map collects exiles

   Treat a remote, sparsely governed place as a destination chosen by people who are fleeing something, such as debt, the law, persecution, failure, or restlessness, rather than as empty land. Seen this way, its population becomes a catalogue of displaced motives: Welsh nonconformists preserving their language, Boer and Scottish settlers, anarchists, outlaws, and eccentric self-made kings. The region's character comes from the accumulated reasons people had for leaving everywhere else.

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