When the wandering Englishman Bruce
Chatwin headed to South America, in the early 1970s, he wasn’t on a typical
Patagonia vacation, but his
ensuing narrative In
Patagonia (published in 1977) established the region’s contemporary credentials.
Many of the places he visited – such as Butch
Cassidy’s cabin in the Argentine province of Chubut - have become offbeat
pilgrimage sites.
Chatwin first got interested in Patagonia on seeing the
remnant of skin of what his grandmother told him was a “brontosaurus” sent to
Britain by his distant cousin Charley Milward, a shipwrecked sailor who stayed
in Punta Arenas and
built a house there, now colloquially known as the Castillo Milward (“Milward’s
Castle,” pictured above). Still standing, in prime condition, it’s barely nine blocks from the Muelle Prat (pictured below), the pier where Cape Horn cruises sail twice
weekly.
Chatwin visited the house, which he described as “a
Victorian parsonage translated to the Strait of Magellan,”
and it’s an attention-grabber in a city with an impressive architectural
heritage. It was then, and still is, a house with “high-pitched gables and
gothic windows. On the street side was a square tower, and at the back an
octagonal one.” Chatwin quotes the neighbors as having said that “Old Milward
can’t decide if it’s a church or a castle” and, on getting a tour from its
owners, he enters “a hallway of solid Anglican gloom.”
After seeing Milward’s home, Chatwin had one more goal. What
his grandmother called a “brontosaurus” was in fact a mylodon, a giant ground sloth
that may have existed simultaneously with the earliest humans to populate the
region. In the vicinity of Puerto
Natales, Chatwin hiked to a cave where he found no skin to match what he
had seen in England, but he did collect a few stray hairs resembling those he’d
seen attached to that skin. He’d get in serious for that trouble today, since
the Cueva del Milodón is
now a national park – complete with a life-size statue of the beast that once took
shelter there.
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