Land of Tempest E-Book

Eric Shipton

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Land of Tempest reveals Eric Shipton at his best - writing with enthusiasm and humour about his explorations in Patagonia in the 1950s and 1960s. He is an astute observer of nature and the human spirit, and this account of his travels is infused with with his own zest for discovery and the joy of camaraderie. Undaunted by hardship or by injury, Shipton and his team attempt to cross one of the great ice caps in Patagonia. It's impossible not to marvel at his determination, resilience and appetite for travel and adventure, be it climbing snow-clad mountains, or walking in forested foothills. Shipton takes a reader with him on his travels, and the often-inhospitable places he visits are a stark contrast to the warmth of the people he encounters. Land of Tempest is essential reading for anyone who loves nature, mountains, climbing, adventure or simply the joy of discovering unknown places.

Leseprobe

Land of Tempest

Land of Tempest

Eric Shipton

www.v-publishing.co.uk

– Contents –

Chapter 1 A Strange Land

Chapter 2 Some Pioneers

Chapter 3 Lago Onelli

Chapter 4 ‘Vulcan Viedma’

Chapter 5 Seno Mayo

Chapter 6 The Elusive Volcano

Chapter 7 The Nunatak

Chapter 8 Preparing for a Journey

Chapter 9 Crisis in Punta Arenas

Chapter 10 Voyage Through the Channels

Chapter 11 The Landing

Chapter 12 The Approach

Chapter 13 The Reluctant Sledge

Chapter 14 A Cheerless Christmas

Chapter 15 On the Plateau

Chapter 16 Familiar Landmarks

Chapter 17 Cordon Darwin

Chapter 18 The Journey’s End

Chapter 19 Land of Fire

Chapter 20 ‘The Uttermost Part of the Earth’

Addenda

I Further Travels in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego

II Crossing the North Patagonian ice cap

Maps

Southern Patagonia

The Great Lakes of Patagonia

Tierra del Fuego: Cordillera Darwin

Photographs

– Chapter 1 –

A Strange Land

Having a taste for strange country, I had long nursed a strong desire to visit Southern Patagonia; but the habit of travelling among the mountain ranges of Central Asia, like all agreeable habits, had been hard to break. Those ranges had provided an unlimited field, fresh opportunities kept occurring and each new venture suggested another batch of enticing projects; so Patagonia had receded ever further and more dimly into the future.

I once thought of applying for the job of British Consul in Punta Arenas, on the Straits of Magellan. I was Consul-General in Kunming at the time, and after a year of non-recognition by the Chinese Communist Government, it had become clear that I would have to move elsewhere. Having previously spent four years as a similar official in Kashgar, which had enabled me to travel in the Pamir, Kuen Lun and Tien Shan, it seemed an excellent way to achieve my purpose. However, I discovered that the post of Consul in Punta Arenas was an honorary one held by a local British resident. In any case, when I returned to England in the summer of 1951, I immediately became embroiled in the revival of the attempts to climb Everest, and soon found myself back in the Himalaya.

I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in the Karakoram. It was doubtless this melancholy event that impressed me with the urgency of making definite plans for an expedition to Patagonia before I became too senile for such an undertaking. Even so I might have done nothing about it, had it not been for Geoff Bratt.

Geoff was a young Australian student, working (in his spare time between more attractive activities) for his Ph.D at the Imperial College of Science. In 1957 the College had launched an expedition to the Karakoram and had invited me to lead it. Geoff was a member of the party and he had done much of the preliminary organisation. We often shared a tent, and a great deal of varied discussion. Occasionally, of course, we talked of travel and exploration; and I found that he, too, was less interested in mountaineering for its own sake than as a means of getting to strange and little known parts of the world. On the subject of Patagonia it was not difficult to arouse his enthusiasm; his warmth brought mine to the boil and we agreed to go there together the following year.

Patagonia is not a country. The name refers to the whole of the mainland of South America south of the Rio Negro in Latitude 40° S. The bulk of this vast territory, lying in Argentina to the east of the Andes, consists of prairie, some of it flat, much of it hilly, nearly all of it dry, treeless and covered with coarse grass and open scrub. It is a stark, inhospitable land which, until late in the nineteenth century, was inhabited only by a few scattered Indian tribes. It was only then, towards the end of the century, that white men came, mostly direct from Europe or from the Falkland Islands, to settle there as sheep farmers, first along the Atlantic coast, then gradually further inland. Indeed the settlement of Patagonia is so recent that even today many of the estancieros are the sons and daughters of those original pioneers.

The Chilean part of Patagonia, except for a small area in the extreme south, is utterly different. Most of it is wild, rugged and uninhabited, a region of tempest and torrential rain, of fantastic geographical form and strange natural phenomena. The Pacific coast immediately west of the Andes, is split by a complex network of fjords which bite deep into the mainland and form an archipelago, a giant jigsaw of islands, 1,000 miles long. The climate is sub-antarctic, and the glaciation so extensive that, although the mountains are not particularly high, they are as spectacular as any in the entire range. There are two great ice caps, which are the only examples of their kind outside Polar regions. Many of the innumerable glaciers which radiate from these, flow down through dense ‘tropical forest’ (as Darwin described it) and thrust their massive fronts into the intricate system of waterways surrounding them. Parrots and humming-birds inhabit these forests.

There was no lack of interesting objectives. Apart from scores of unclimbed peaks, much of the region had never been visited. For example, the whole of the northern half of the main ice cap was untrodden ground, and with two exceptions none of the glaciers on the western side of the range had been explored. Although most of the channels had been charted since the voyage of the Beagle in 1831, for hundreds of miles along this tortuous, uninhabited coast, no one had penetrated inland, while the interior of many of the islands was unknown. The eastern side of the range was comparatively well explored, but even there, there was much interesting work to be done.

That so much of the region still remains unexplored is due almost entirely to the physical difficulties of travel there, for during the last fifty years many attempts have been made to penetrate it. The chief problem is presented by the weather, which is said to be some of the worst in the world. Heavy rain falls for prolonged periods; fine spells are rare and usually brief, and above all there is the notorious Patagonian wind, the savage storms which often continue for weeks at a stretch, with gusts up to 130 m.p.h. The terrain too, is unusually difficult. Most parts of the main range, even many on the eastern side, can only be approached by water and, because of the weather, the use of small craft on the lakes and fjords is liable to be a hazardous business. The glaciers in their lower reaches are often so broken and crevassed that it is virtually impossible to travel on them, and lateral moraines rarely provide an easy line of approach, as they usually do in the Himalaya. In the foothills the forest often presents an impassable barrier, particularly on the western side of the range, where the wind has twisted the stunted trees into a low-lying mass of tangled trunks and branches. It is these obstacles which have prevented most expeditions to the area from achieving more than a limited objective or covering more than a very small proportion of the region.

The lakes of Southern Patagonia were explored towards the end of the last century by several expeditions, notably by that of Francisco Moreno, a distinguished Argentine geographer, who discovered Lago Argentino and Lago San Martin. The first expedition into the main range was made in 1914 by Dr Frederick Reichert, who succeeded in reaching the head of the Moreno Glacier from Lago Argentino. Later, in 1916 and in 1933, he made two attempts to cross the main ice cap, the first from the head of Lago Viedma and the second from Lago San Martin. Though on both occasions he was frustrated by appalling weather conditions, he was able to bring back the first detailed accounts of the remarkable Plateau. Several more explorers have since tried to cross it. Another dominant figure in the exploration of the region was the redoubtable Salesian priest, Father Alberto de Agostini, who made no fewer than twelve expeditions to various parts of it, including the mountains of Tierra del Fuego, which have contributed the major part of our knowledge of the main range. The only complete crossing of the range had been made south of the ice cap by H.W. Tilman in 1956. During the course of his long voyage in Mischief he landed with two companions at the head of the Calvo Fjord on the Pacific side, and crossed the range to the front of the Moreno Glacier and back, a journey as the crow flies of twenty-five miles each way, which took them six weeks of arduous travel.

Geoff and I had first to decide upon the kind of expedition we were to take, and to begin with we were confronted by something of a vicious circle. Until we had formulated some clear objective we could hardly expect to receive financial support, and until we could discover the kind of work most likely to evoke support it was hard to choose an objective; particularly in view of our ignorance of local conditions. Neither of us cared very much what we did, so long as it gave us the chance to make the acquaintance of this fascinating region, and acquaintance that I hoped might ripen into terms of intimacy. In fact, I regarded this first trip as a reconnaissance, to learn something of problems and possibilities of exploratory travel with the view, later, to tackling a more ambitious venture. Eventually, after a good deal of research, we found the Trustees of the British Museum willing to send a botanist with us and to furnish a grant to cover his share of the cost. The man chosen for the job was Peter James and his assignment was to make a comprehensive collection of plants, lichens and mosses. This was a most valuable advance, for it gave us a nucleus upon which to build our plans.

Before the war, Tilman and I used to boast that we could work out our plans for an expedition to the Himalaya in half an hour on the back of an envelope. Basic simplicity was the keynote of all our ventures together; we knew exactly the weight of the food and equipment we would need, what we would have to take from England and what we could obtain locally and, above all, its cost. We were never more than a few pounds out in estimating our expenses. Planning an expedition to a new continent where inflation was rife was quite another matter, and Geoff and I soon found ourselves floundering in such a morass of uncertainties and conflicting advice that I began to wonder if we would ever get it organised. Moreover, Geoff was faced with the stern necessity of passing, his final examinations in the summer of 1958, while I was engaged in forestry work in Shropshire; with the result that things moved slowly.

Fortunately, in July, John Mercer appeared on the scene. He had recently returned from his second visit to the Andes of Southern Patagonia and was anxious to go there again. Having heard of our plans he immediately offered to come with us; an offer we gladly accepted. With his first-hand knowledge to guide us, most of our troubles dissolved. A man of thirty-five, he had had a varied career as a geographer; his activities having ranged from a study of the glaciers of Baffin Land to an investigation of the population problems of Samoa. In 1949 he had made an attempt to cross the ice cap from the vicinity of Lago Viedma. His main reason for wishing to return to Patagonia was to continue a line of study which he had begun, the object of which was to determine the dates of successive periods of glacial advance. As Geoff himself was keen to do some glaciological work, this fitted in very nicely.

Peter Miles, the last member of the party to be recruited, was an Anglo-Argentine from Venado Tuerto in the Province of Santa Fe. A farmer by profession, he was a keen amateur naturalist, and he undertook to make collections of birds and insects both for the British Museum and for the Darwin Institute in Buenos Aires.

With this battery of scientific objectives we were able largely to finance the expedition with grants from the British Museum, and Percy Sladen Trust and the Mount Everest Foundation.

For our field of operations we chose the section of the range embraced by the western arms of Lago Argentino, largely because it was the most easily accessible. To begin with, Lago Argentino had a small town, El Calafate, on its shore, while none of the other lakes of Southern Patagonia had a town within hundreds of miles. Secondly it could be reached by air and by reasonably good roads. But by far the most important consideration was the fact that there was a Government launch operating on the lake, by means of which we would be able to reach our various bases. Our plan, which was indefinite and elastic, was to establish a series of these bases at the heads of the western fjords of the lake, spending three or four weeks at each, over a total period of three months.

Peter James, Geoff and I sailed for Buenos Aires from Tilbury on November 1. John travelled by way of the United States, where he had some private affairs to settle. In securing the cheapest available third class passages, we had been required by the shipping company to sign a document stating, in effect, that we realised what we were in for and that we would not complain. The reason became apparent when we reached Lisbon, where our meagre accommodation in the stern of the ship became congested with a multitude of Portuguese emigres bound for Rio and Santos. The small saloon, particularly in bad weather, was rather like an underground train in the rush hour, and the noise was shattering. It was an interesting experience but scarcely enjoyable, and we were not sorry when, on the 23rd, we reached Buenos Aires, where we were met by Peter Miles.

We found ourselves staying at the City Hotel, one of the best in the capital, which provided a remarkable change from the slum conditions of the voyage. Normally we would have chosen a more modest establishment, but we were guests of the British Council, for whom I had undertaken to give some lectures. Dr MacKay, the representative of the Council, and his assistant Mr Whistler, had made admirable arrangements for our stay, and we spent a busy week meeting a large number of people who could help and advise us. They also helped us to steer our baggage through the intricacies of the Argentine Customs which, without friends at court, can be a long and difficult business. Besides our camping, climbing and survey equipment we had brought an inflatable rubber dinghy and a small outboard motor; but the bulk of our luggage consisted of twenty-five large venesta cases to accommodate Peter James’ botanical specimens. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs arranged for this equipment to be imported duty free.

The directors of Shell Argentine Ltd. generously placed a station-wagon at our disposal, which proved invaluable. On December 1 Peter Miles, Geoff and John left Buenos Aires in this vehicle which was loaded with as much of our baggage as it would hold. They completed the 2,000 mile drive to El Calafate by the evening of the 7th, having stopped a day in Comodoro Rivadavia to repair a broken main spring and a shattered wind-screen. The rest of our baggage was sent on a ship sailing from Buenos Aires on November 29 and due to reach Santa Cruz a week later. In fact she took more than three weeks to make the voyage, with the result that our baggage did not reach El Calafate until Christmas Eve. I flew there on December 4 and Peter James, who had been invited to attend a botanical congress in Cordoba, followed on the 11th.

– Chapter 2 –

Some Pioneers

In shape the outline of Lago Argentino resembles a squid. The main body of water, which drains eastward into the Santa Cruz River, is forty miles long by fifteen miles wide. Two channels run westward from this and subdivide into eight sinuous tentacles. Some of the fjords so formed are more than thirty miles long, and penetrate deep into the foothills of the Andes. The country surrounding the main lake is, like most of the Patagonian pampas, dry, treeless and covered with coarse, yellow grass; it rises gently from the level of the lake at 600 feet to hills and undulating plateaux some 3,000 feet high. It reminded me very much of Tibet: the bleak, arid landscape, the level strata of the sandstone hills, the clear, exhilarating air, the pale blue sky and the keen wind blowing from the glaciers.

El Calafate, which lies halfway along the southern shore of the main lake, consists of a few houses, mostly built of wood, with corrugated iron roofs. It seemed to me such a perfect replica of a Wild West film set, that I would hardly have been surprised to see a troop of cowboys galloping down the broad, dusty street, firing their six-shooters into the air. It has three small and, by modern standards, primitive hotels, and several stores which sell anything from onions to tweed suits, from gramophone records to farm implements. It is the only town within hundreds of miles, and it serves all the sheep estancias in the vicinity of the lake. It derives its curious name from a thorny bush, common on the Patagonian pampas, which has an edible berry like a blackcurrant. There is a local saying that any visitor who eats calafate berries is sure to return to Patagonia.

Though in that area there is little land left to be exploited for sheep raising, the country is sparsely populated. This is because the land is so poor, owing largely to the lack of rain, that on the average it requires four acres to keep one sheep; and as each estancia carries from 3,000 to 20,000 head, and some even more, the farmsteads themselves are few and far between. Some of the estancias are run by large companies, but for the most part they are owned by private individuals who comprise the cosmopolitan community. Among those we met were Britons, Spaniards, Germans, Danes, Norwegians, Hungarians, Turks and Yugoslavs.

The first estanciero I met was Carlos Santiago Dickie, generally known as ‘Charlie’. He was wearing one of those old-fashioned caps with ear-flaps turned back over the crown. In his early sixties, his handsome, rather aristocratic face was framed by bushy grey side-whiskers which gave him something of the appearance of a Victorian country squire. His father had come to ‘the Lago’ from the Falkland Islands in the early years of the century. He had a prodigious zest for life, and a fund of thrilling stories that would have kept the editor of a popular magazine in copy for a year or more. He told them with great fluency and with such enjoyment that they were frequently interrupted by gusts of Rabelasian laughter, which were usually accompanied by an eruption of sparks from his pipe, with the result that his clothes and (as I saw later) the cover of his favourite arm-chair were pitted with burns. Though I saw a great deal of him then and later, he never exhausted his repertoire, nor did I ever hear one of his stories repeated. His wife came from Shropshire and they had met in England during the First World War, when she was a nurse and he a wounded soldier. They had a widespread reputation for generosity and kindness, and I often heard it said that Charlie would give the shirt off his back to anyone who needed it. This was indeed high praise among people to whom generous hospitality is second nature.

Another couple that we were most fortunate to meet was Mr and Mrs Atkinson, whose Estancia Lago Roca lay near one of the southern arms of the lake. They immediately invited us to make it our base whenever and for as long as we liked. They were both keen naturalists and their knowledge of the flora and the birds of the region was of great value to Peter James and Peter Miles who, later, accepted their offer so literally that the living-room of the farm became littered with a wild confusion of drying plants and skins.

The most remote estancia in the district, and perhaps in Patagonia, is La Cristina, which lies at the head of one of the north-western arms of Lago Argentino. Almost surrounded by rugged mountains, the only practicable approach to it is by launch, and then only when the weather is calm enough to permit the voyage. When we reached El Calafate it had already been isolated by constant storms for three months, but the owners, Mr and Mrs Masters and their son Herbert, were in daily communication by radio with the Dickies. When they heard of our arrival they invited us to come and stay with them as soon as possible. As we had been hoping to make our first base somewhere in that vicinity, this suited us admirably. They had a small steam launch which they offered to lend us, but it was old and not very seaworthy, and they advised us to come by Government launch as soon as the weather moderated.

This vessel was operated by the National Parks Administration, the director of which, Senor Tortorelli, we had met in Buenos Aires. He had very kindly issued instructions to the local authorities to place the launch at our disposal when we required it. It was kept at Punta Bandera, a small settlement on the lake shore, forty miles by road west of El Calafate, and at the entrance of the southern fjord system. This was a splendid place for Peter Miles to begin his work, for there were enormous numbers of waterfowl in the shallow, reedy lagoons surrounding it; among them black-headed swans, widgeon, teal, steamer ducks, flamingoes and several varieties of geese. None of the local inhabitants seemed in the least interested in shooting these birds, which would have been very easy prey.

The morning of December 13 was fine and calm. We set out in the launch from Punta Bandera at 8 o’clock, and half an hour later passed through a narrow passage, known as Hell’s Gate, into the northern channel. Here the scene changed abruptly. The low-lying yellow pampas gave place to tall rock precipices and steep, forested slopes on either side of the fjord while, ahead, a mighty rampart of ice-peaks burst into view. These were the mountains of the Cordon Darwin, as that part of the main range is called. Even remembering that I was viewing them from only 600 feet above sea level, I found it hard to believe that none of them was more than 10,000 feet high. We passed a score of icebergs, some smooth and rounded like giant mushrooms, some like craggy islands with cliffs of royal blue, one like a medieval castle with turrets and battlements standing more than 100 feet above the water. They were drifting eastward to the main lake; some of them would reach its farthest shore, to be stranded there, incongruous objects among the desert sand and scrub.

After a voyage of two and a half hours, the launch dropped anchor in a little landlocked bay at the southern end of the La Cristina valley. Herbert Masters was there to meet us when we came ashore and, having disembarked our baggage, we accompanied him to his house, a large bungalow with a corrugated iron roof, set in a garden gay with flowers and half surrounded by a grove of tall poplars. There we met his parents.

Mr and Mrs Masters were both eighty-two years old. They came from Southampton where he had been a seaman on a nobleman’s yacht; but they had decided that this was no life for a married man, so in 1900, at the age of twenty-four, they had emigrated to Patagonia, where he had worked on various estancias to gain some knowledge of sheep farming. In those days it was a wild and desolate land; there were virtually no roads, the only means of transport were by horseback and bullock cart, and the journey from the coast to Lago Argentino took several weeks. It is difficult to imagine the impact of such conditions upon a young woman, brought up in an ordinary Victorian home, who had never left England before.

The valley was first visited in 1902 by H. Prichard, while on an expedition to discover the Giant Sloth, which was then believed to exist in Patagonia. The Masters came there not long afterwards, looking for a place to settle. They were captivated by its beauty, and immediately decided that it was to be their home. They acquired a lifeboat that had been salvaged from a wreck in the Straits of Magellan, and brought it to the lake by bullock cart, a journey of several hundred miles. Then, with none of the amenities which most of us take for granted as basic necessities, beyond the reach of medical help and with little resource save their courage, their staunch reliance upon themselves and each other, they calmly faced the years of toil and privation which they knew must intervene before they could win even a small measure of comfort and security. They named their estancia after their daughter, Cristina, who died there when still a young girl.

They started with a small flock of sheep. Living in tents before they had built themselves a house, they cleared and ploughed a small plot of land and planted the grove of poplars which now shields them from the wind-storms blowing down from the glaciers. Today they own 12,000 sheep which range over twenty square miles of country. They employ a capitas (headman) and a number of peones, mostly half-breed Chilean Indians, who do the shepherding and other work of the estancia. Their produce is taken to Punta Bandera in a barge towed by the steam launch (successor to the lifeboat). Their comfortable house, their well-appointed shearing sheds and farm buildings, are equipped with electricity generated by wind-and water-power. They have two cars which they keep in Punta Bandera and use once a year ‘to go to town’, by which they mean Rio Gallegos, on the coast.

Their story, of course, is not unique, for such was the pattern of the lives of most people who came to settle in Patagonia, little more than half a century ago. But what a lesson it should be to us in our pampered modern society.

Mr Masters was small and spare, and as active as most men in their prime. He held himself so erect that he always gave me the impression that he was leaning over backwards. He had lively, humorous eyes but a diffident, almost apologetic manner. But despite his apparent shyness, he made no attempt to hide his enormous pride in his wife, his ‘Senora’ as he called her. He once came to me with a photograph of an attractive girl in Victorian dress and, with a conspiratorial wink said, ‘This is the one I left my home for.’ I replied, ‘Who wouldn’t?’ and meant it. Mrs Masters looked very frail, as though it would hardly require a Patagonian wind to blow her away; and her hands were knotted with arthritis. But she ran her house with quiet efficiency and very little outside help; she cooked delicious meals and worked in her garden, which obviously gave her tremendous pleasure. In her face there was a look of profound serenity.

Herbert, their only son, was fifty-seven. He was well over six feet tall and so towered over both his parents. He had been educated at a British school in Buenos Aires, but otherwise had spent his whole life on the estancia. He was very clever with his hands, a gift for which he had plenty of scope. Perhaps his most remarkable achievement was the building of a launch, about forty tons displacement, from timber cut and seasoned on the estancia. It was beautifully made from plans taken from a magazine, and it had taken him several years to complete. It was not yet in use, as he was waiting the arrival of a motor which had been ordered from abroad, but he hoped that it would soon replace the old steam launch.

Chief among his varied interests, however, was his radio, which amounted almost to a passion. He had built a powerful transmitter with which he spent a great deal of his time talking to other ‘Hams’ in every part of the globe. This was probably the origin of his extraordinary knowledge about distant lands, from Tibet to New Zealand, from the Congo to Alaska. Oddly enough he seemed to have no desire to travel. This hobby, of course, had practical value for he was in constant touch with El Calafate and Rio Gallegos and with various estancieros in the district, several of whom he had inspired with his enthusiasm. It was also a great joy to his mother to be able to have a cosy chat with Mrs Dickie every morning at 10 o’clock.

It was easy to understand why the Masters had fallen in love with the valley as soon as they saw it, for it is an enchanting place. It lies in a climatic zone between the heavy precipitation of the main range and the dry conditions of the pampas to the east, so that while there is a great deal of forest, there is also plenty of open country. It is several miles wide and runs northward from the fjord to the foot of Cerro Norte, a beautiful peak standing at its head, twelve miles away. Its upper five miles contains Lago Pearson (named after the patron of Prichard’s expedition), the source of a wide river that flows through flat grass-land to the fjord, and is joined by a tributary coming down over a series of fine waterfalls from another large lake, high up in the mountains. The valley is bounded on the east by forested slopes rising in a series of terraces to a range of barren mountains, which again reminded me of Tibet, particularly in the evening light when they glowed with soft and varied colour. To the west, the valley is contained throughout its whole length by a narrow ridge separating it from the Upsala Glacier. Its crest, which can be reached in an hour from the estancia, commands a superb view of that vast ice-stream: westward eight miles across it to the great peaks of the Cordon Darwin; southward to where it plunges on a three mile front into the waters of Lago Argentino; northward in an ever widening sweep to the ice cap itself. I little thought that, two years later, I would arrive at La Cristina after a journey from the Pacific coast across the whole length of that fascinating region.

The series of terraces on both sides of the valley, which cradle a score of small lakes among the forest, are formed by old lateral moraines, which mark the successive stages in the retreat of a glacier, which not so long ago filled the valley and was once united with the Upsala Glacier. The latter has itself retreated considerably in recent years, and when the Masters first came there it used to overflow the ridge at several points with long tongues of ice.

Though the bulk of our baggage had not yet arrived at El Calafate, we had the survey instruments and much of the camping equipment with us, so that a start could be made with the field work. On December 16, Geoff and John went to the farther shore of the north-western fjord, where they were to spend a fortnight working on the Upsala Glacier and its lower tributaries. They were taken there in the steam launch which was operated by the capitas and one of the farm hands. It was a remarkable contraption, like a sort of marine version of Stevenson’s Rocket; the engine made a prodigious noise and steam issued from a dozen unlikely parts of the vessel’s anatomy. Geoff enlivened their departure by falling into the water with a box of provisions which he was carrying aboard. He spent most of the three-hour voyage huddled in the minute boiler-room drying his clothes.

The rest of us spent ten delightful days in the La Cristina valley, which provided Peter James with an excellent opportunity to make a botanical survey of this intermediate zone. It contained a great variety of climatic conditions and he had to work extremely hard to cover the ground. He was out every day collecting from early morning until evening, while he spent most of each night sorting and pressing his specimens. Fortunately the Masters had an inexhaustible supply of old newspapers, for most of his drying equipment was contained in the baggage we had sent by sea. Peter Miles also had plenty to occupy him. Like Punta Bandera, the valley was teeming with waterfowl, and there were large numbers of plover and ibis, and a variety of birds of prey, such as condors, eagles, owls and hawks; but he was mainly interested in the smaller forest birds. Apart from foxes, wild animals seemed to be comparatively scarce, and we saw none of the small deer (huemul) which inhabit the forest, and are exceedingly shy. Herbert told us that there were still a great many pumas in the mountains, which killed a lot of sheep during the winter; but though he had shot plenty of them in his time, they were very hard to find.

On December 23, the Government launch came to fetch us and, bidding a most reluctant farewell to the Masters, we returned to Punta Bandera. From there we drove out to the Atkinsons’ estancia, for Peter James had decided to spend the next fortnight collecting in the country surrounding Lago Roca and in the mountains to the south before tackling the flora of the rainforests in the main range.

The following day our baggage arrived in El Calafate, and Peter Miles and I spent Christmas Day unpacking it and transporting the collecting equipment to Lago Roca. Apart from some dehydrated meat and tea which we had brought from England, we obtained all the provisions that we required for our excursions into the mountains in El Calafate. We dealt mostly with a Yugoslav storekeeper named Tonko Simunovic, a huge man with courtly manners, who also acted as our banker and our post office. Letters we received were addressed to ‘c/o Tonko, Lago Argentino’.

On December 26, Peter and I were taken in the Government launch to Onelli Bay on the coast of the north-western fjord, ten miles south of Upsala Glacier front, where we had arranged to meet Geoff and John a couple of days later.

– Chapter 3 –

Lago Onelli

We disembarked on a spit of land half a mile wide, separating Lago Onelli from Onelli Bay. It was covered with dense forest, which also clothed the steep mountainsides surrounding the bay and extended 2,500 feet above it. Like all the forest in Patagonia it was composed of nothofagus, which is said to be a first cousin to our beech, though personally I could see no resemblance. Though there are a great many varieties of this tree, only four extend to these southern latitudes; of these Nothofagus Antarctica, is the most common. Though we had seen plenty of woods at La Cristina, this was the first time we had been in the rain belt covering the main range, and the forest here was altogether different. There was a strange feel about it, eerie but not unfriendly, as though it belonged to another geological age, or perhaps to a Hans Andersen story.

As soon as the launch had departed, we went about making ourselves at home in a small clearing ten yards from the shore. Peter was a fastidious camper, and an excellent cook. Our stores were unpacked and neatly stored, while bunches of onions, garlic, and salami sausages, and backs of bacon were slung from poles. He was fond of his food, but for a man of his size (he weighed over seventeen stone) he did not eat a great deal, and could go for a long time with nothing at all. When I first met him in Buenos Aires dressed in his city suit, which looked as if it were about to burst, his sallow face under an Al Capone hat, he appeared corpulent, and I had grave doubts about his ability to survive an expedition of this sort. Now, in his rough expedition clothes, his appearance was completely transformed and he resembled the toughest of lumberjacks. I already knew that this was the real Peter Miles; physically immensely strong and very tough, well used to rough living and able to endure a great deal of hardship. He was a splendid companion, humorous and versatile in his talk (some, perhaps, might have thought he talked too much), an excellent raconteur and remarkably even-tempered.

It was a lovely evening and we cooked and ate our supper by a large fire, Peter was as thrilled as I was with our situation on the shore of this huge, uninhabited fjord, at the gateway to an unexplored part of the range. We slept on the beach, but in the night there was a sharp shower which sent us scrambling to our tent. But the rain did not last long, and by morning it was fine again. Indeed during the whole of our stay in the Onelli region we were blessed with a spell of weather very rare in Patagonia, and except for a few rain storms it was fine and almost windless the whole time.

We set off early to reconnoitre our surroundings, first making our way westward through the forest. Many years ago Mrs Masters’ brother had made a bold attempt to establish an estancia here to breed cattle; but he had abandoned the project together with much of his stock. As a result, the surrounding forest was inhabited by wild cattle and horses, which were confined to comparatively narrow bounds by the precipices and glaciers. Within these bounds, however, they had trampled a network of tracks, which was a great help to us in moving about.

When we reached the eastern shore of Lago Onelli we found that end of the lake so filled with icebergs that there was little water to be seen. We then went round to the northern shore and climbed up through the forest above it, making for a prominent hill standing 1,000 feet over the lake. On the way we had an alarming encounter with a wild bull. He was only a few yards away when we saw him, and he looked as if he was about to charge; however, he thought better of it and trotted off, bellowing, into the undergrowth.

As we had expected, the hill commanded a splendid view of the surrounding country. We could see the whole of the lake, which measured three miles by two miles. The entire western and north-western shores were occupied by the fronts of two great glacier systems, which joined each other a mile beyond. The western ice-stream, which we called the Onelli Glacier, entered the lake as a low, comparatively smooth tongue, but the northern front presented a continuous cliff of ice-standing 200 feet above the water. Every now and then as we watched, huge blocks of ice calved from this cliff and fell into the water with an impressive roar. The waves started by these avalanches spread right across the lake; though, from where we stood, they looked like ripples on a pond, we discovered later that this was not quite the case. The blocks of ice breaking from the glacier fronts drifted down the lake and pressed themselves into a confused mass at its eastern end, which we had seen that morning. Our first objective was to establish a base at the western end of Lago Onelli, and for this our rubber dinghy would be needed; for there was obviously no way round the northern side of the lake, and on its southern side there was a river to cross and also one place where a precipice fell sheer into the water. Returning to camp, we spent the afternoon unpacking the dinghy and motor, assembling them and going for a cruise in the bay to try them out.

The following morning we carried the dinghy and motor and 80 lb. of food through the forest and along the northern shore of Lago Onelli, until we found a narrow channel running through the mass of icebergs. Here we launched the boat, stowed the food and rowed cautiously through the channel until we reached the open water beyond. There we started the motor, set a course for the south-west corner of the lake and sat back to enjoy ourselves.

It was a perfect day, cloudless and still; the sun was so warm that we might have been on one of the Italian lakes. The blue water and the dark green forest, fringed with emerald at its upper limit, contrasted beautifully with the immense cirque of glaciers and ice mountains which opened to our view. We watched several avalanches falling into the lake from the glacier front, and we could now appreciate the size of the wave caused by the ice-blocks, some as large as houses, hitting the water; but by the time they reached us they had so broadened that we scarcely felt them. When we reached the south-west corner of the lake we found a little cove partly enclosed by the lateral moraine of the Onelli Glacier which projected far into the water. Bordering the cove there was a grassy glade covered with flowers, and sheltered on two sides by the forest and on the third by a high ridge of the moraine. We landed the stores at this delightful spot, which later became known as ‘Pedro's Camp’.

It was only 1 o’clock when we started back, so we spent some time cruising along the northern and southern shores. When eventually we reached the packed icebergs towards the eastern end of the lake we found that the channel which we had come through that morning had widened, so instead of stopping the motor and getting out the oars, I merely throttled down to a slow speed. As we drew near to the point where we had embarked, we reached a narrow passage between two bergs. I was just about to stop the engine when the propeller guard struck a submerged ledge of ice; the motor was wrenched from its fastening and I turned in time to see it sinking beneath the surface. I made a grab at it, but it was just out of reach, and a moment later it disappeared.

At first I was not particularly worried, for by then we were only ten yards from the shore and I thought that we were in shallow water, though it was too heavily charged with glacier mud to see more than a foot below the surface. I scrambled on to the berg, of which the submerged ledge was part, and stayed there to mark the spot while Peter went ashore and returned with a twelve-foot pole. To our dismay we found that even with this we could not reach the bottom. We then discovered that the berg, which we had thought was grounded, was in fact afloat and had already drifted over the spot where the accident had happened, so that this was now impossible to locate. Neither of us was prepared to dive to the bottom of more than twelve feet of icy water and grope about beneath the ice, so there was nothing for it but to abandon our precious motor.

Very crestfallen we returned to camp, where we found that John and Geoff had arrived overland from their Upsala Camp, where they had spent a profitable time on their respective glaciological tasks. To save carrying it through the forest they had left most of their equipment behind; so the next day, while Geoff did a survey station on top of the hill we had climbed, and Peter began collecting, John and I took the dinghy round the coast to fetch it. The prospect of a twelve-mile row gave us cause to regret the loss of the motor; but again the day was fine and calm, and pulling gently over the smooth, sunlit water, which reflected the forest and the ice peaks around us, was a most pleasant occupation. After rounding the point of Onelli Bay we passed a number of very large icebergs drifting down from the Upsala Glacier front, with cliffs and caverns of vivid blue, some of them worn into fantastic shapes. We gave these monsters a wide berth, for sometimes weird noises would emanate from one or other of them; it would begin to pitch like a ship in a rough sea, and occasionally the whole mass would turn turtle causing a tremendous commotion in the surrounding water. As we approached it the glacier front itself was a spectacular sight, consisting of an ice cliff nearly three miles wide and 200 feet high, which was constantly calving fresh bergs into the fjord. We returned to camp by 6 o’clock.

Lago Onelli drained into the bay by a short but wide and rapidly flowing river. After supper that evening we struck camp and I ferried the party in three relays across the mouth of the river to the far side, and from there we carried the dinghy and our equipment through the forest to the south-east corner of Lago Onelli, which we reached at 11 o’clock as night was falling. It was mid-summer and we were in Lattitude 50° S, so that the night was very short, and it never became really dark, particularly when the sky was clear.

The next day I took the equipment in the dinghy, keeping close in to the southern shore of the lake, while the others walked along it as far as they could. I rowed to a point beyond the line of precipices which rose sheer from the water, unloaded my cargo on to some rocks a few feet above the water, and returned to ferry the others, one at a time, round the cliffs. While I was bringing John across we heard an avalanche fall from the glacier, two miles away across the lake. Five minutes later we reached the place where I had dumped the loads to find that a heavy swell was beating against the rocks where they lay and all but washing them away. We had to stand well off the shore, or the dinghy would have been ripped on submerged rocks now revealed by the backlash of the waves. At length the swell subsided and we were able to land and carry the equipment to a safe place in the forest above.