In Patagonia

Bruce Chatwin was twenty-six and working as an arts correspondent for the Sunday Times when he sent his editor a telegram: “Gone to Patagonia for six months.” He had no commission and no plan beyond the piece of skin — a fragment of what his grandmother had always called a brontosaurus — displayed in a cabinet in her house. The skin, which he eventually traces to a mylodon (a giant ground sloth extinct for ten thousand years), is the nominal destination of his journey and the structuring device of a book that has no conventional narrative shape. It is organised as a series of encounters, each rendered as a complete vignette: a Welsh sheep farmer, a colony of anarchist refugees, the descendants of a Scottish outlaw, the ruins of a pioneer homestead. The fragments do not add up to a continuous story; they accumulate into a portrait of a place.

Chatwin’s prose in In Patagonia is unlike anything else in travel writing. It has been described as laconic, but the better word is surgical — each sentence contains exactly what is necessary and nothing that is not. A character is established in two sentences. A landscape is present in a paragraph. The accumulative effect is of a world rendered in the highest resolution, even though Chatwin uses far fewer words than writers who achieve far less precision. He was influenced by Flaubert, and the influence shows in the way description is used not decoratively but structurally — to reveal character, mood, and meaning through the specific detail chosen rather than through interpretation.

The historical material — the outlaws, the Darwin connections, the settler communities — is integrated into the vignettes without interrupting the journey’s rhythm. Chatwin’s account of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who spent years in Patagonia farming sheep under assumed names before returning to armed robbery, is more detailed and more interesting than most accounts of their American careers. The Welsh colony in Chubut Province — established in 1865 by settlers who wanted a place where Welsh language and culture could survive British assimilation — maintained its identity for over a century and still exists, producing Welsh-speaking gauchos who have never visited Wales.

The book’s honesty has been questioned: Chatwin was known to composite characters and occasionally invent encounters while presenting them as fact. This is a legitimate objection to a work that presents itself as journalism. It is also, in a sense, beside the point: In Patagonia works as literature in a way that strictly factual travel writing rarely does, and Chatwin’s Patagonia — the landscape, the atmosphere, the particular quality of exile and extremity he captures — is more truthful than accuracy alone could produce. It is the book that made Patagonia a literary destination and remade travel writing as a form.

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