In Patagonia

In his grandmother's dining room, a glass-fronted cabinet holds a small piece of thick, leathery skin with strands of coarse reddish hair. His mother calls it "a piece of brontosaurus." The young Bruce Chatwin learns that the creature came from Patagonia, a remote region at the southern tip of South America, discovered by his grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, a ship captain who settled in Punta Arenas, Chile, after a shipwreck. When his grandmother dies, his mother reveals she threw the skin away. Years later, Chatwin sorts out the truth: The animal was a mylodon, or Giant Sloth, preserved in a cave on Last Hope Sound in Chilean Patagonia. During the Cold War, Chatwin and his schoolmates fix on Patagonia as the safest place on earth in the event of nuclear war, cementing the region in his imagination. Decades later, he sets out to find a replacement for the lost piece of skin.

Chatwin arrives in Buenos Aires in the mid-1970s and finds a city that reminds him of Tsarist Russia, with its secret police and landowners looking toward Europe. At the Natural History Museum in La Plata, he finds remains of the Giant Sloth, including skin with the same reddish hair he remembers from childhood. He crosses the Río Negro into Patagonia, entering a desert of grey-leaved thorns that Darwin found irresistibly compelling.

In an interlude, Chatwin recounts visiting Prince Philippe of Araucania and Patagonia in Paris, the latest in a line of pretenders descending from Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, a French lawyer who in 1859 proclaimed himself king of the Araucanian Indians, a confederation of Indigenous tribes in southern Chile, only to be captured, imprisoned, and deported.

Chatwin then explores the Welsh colony in Patagonia's Chubut Valley, where 153 colonists landed in 1865 seeking a New Wales free from English interference. In Gaimán, the center of Welsh Patagonia, he visits Mrs. Jones's teashop, where the elderly woman reminisces about her youth in North Wales. He meets the Powell family on their small farm and encounters Anselmo, a nervous young pianist of Italian-German parentage who plays remarkable Beethoven and Chopin in a bare room while the wind howls. On Christmas Day, the community gathers for hymn-singing at Bryn-Crwn Chapel, a Welsh Nonconformist chapel, where Gwynneth Morgan laments that the tradition is falling apart.

Traveling west into the Cordillera, the Andean mountain range, Chatwin visits a poet-hermit who has lived alone by the river for forty years, reading Ovid, Thoreau, and Whitman. At Cholila, near the Chilean frontier, he visits the log cabin built around 1902 by Butch Cassidy, the American outlaw whose real name was Robert Leroy Parker. Chatwin traces Cassidy's biography from his Mormon upbringing in Utah through his career leading the Wild Bunch gang to his flight to Argentina with Harry Longabaugh, known as the Sundance Kid, and Etta Place. The classic account of their death in Bolivia in 1909 is presented alongside competing theories: Cassidy's sister Lula Parker Betenson insists her brother returned home and ate blueberry pie with the family in 1925.

Chatwin follows the trail of two outlaws known as Wilson and Evans, who robbed a Welsh trading store in 1909 and killed its manager, Llwyd ApIwan. Near Río Pico, the outlaws kidnapped a young patrician named Ramos Otero, triggering a government manhunt that ended with their deaths. Chatwin suggests they may have been Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though the evidence remains inconclusive.

In the Río Pico area, Chatwin encounters a series of exiles clinging to fragments of distant homelands: a Russian doctor with prosthetic legs who reads Mandelstam and wants to return to the Ukraine; a former Swiss operetta singer who has covered her cottage walls with murals of Lake Geneva; a German settler obsessed with World War I; and a kilt-wearing Scotsman from the island of Lewis who makes his own bagpipes and dreams of retiring to Scotland.

Moving south along the coast, Chatwin recounts the history of British sheep-farming in Patagonia, built in the 1890s by Falkland Islanders and dominated by the commercial empire of José Menéndez and his son-in-law Moritz Braun. At San Julián, he reconstructs Magellan's 1520 encounter with giant Tehuelche Indians and traces the word "Patagonia" not to the Spanish pata (foot) but to the Grand Patagon, a monster in a 1512 Spanish romance of chivalry.

Chatwin narrates at length the 1920-21 Anarchist rebellion in Santa Cruz province. Antonio Soto, a Galician actor turned labor organizer, arrived in Río Gallegos during a wool slump and galvanized the Chilean migrant peons with rhetoric borrowed from Proudhon and Bakunin. After a first round of strikes ended with pardons, Lt-Col. Héctor Benigno Varela returned with permission for extreme measures and conducted a systematic massacre, executing hundreds of surrendered strikers on five separate occasions after promising to spare their lives. Soto escaped into Chile. A chain of assassinations followed as the cycle of political violence continued.

Crossing the Strait of Magellan into Tierra del Fuego, Chatwin recounts the career of Alexander MacLennan, the "Red Pig," a Scottish ex-soldier who managed an estancia for Menéndez and hunted Ona Indians, justifying the killings as humanitarian. Two elderly English spinsters describe MacLennan's end: Tormented by visions of Indians, he ran naked into a pasture, dropped to all fours, and ate grass, believing he was a bull. In Ushuaia, Chatwin traces the story of Simón Radowitzky, a young Anarchist from Kiev who assassinated the Buenos Aires Police Chief in 1909 and was sentenced to life imprisonment at the end of the world, enduring years of brutal treatment before his release in 1930.

Chatwin narrates Darwin's encounter with the Fuegians. In 1830, Captain Robert FitzRoy of HMS Beagle kidnapped a boy later named Jemmy Button and took him to London for schooling. On the Beagle's second voyage, Darwin was appalled by the wild Fuegians, and Jemmy's rapid reversion to his former ways reinforced Darwin's emerging ideas about evolution. Jemmy later orchestrated a massacre of eight Anglican missionaries in 1869. On Navarino Island, Chatwin meets Grandpa Felipe, the last pure-blood Yaghan Indian, who remembers the epidemics that destroyed his people. At Harberton, the estancia founded by the Rev. Thomas Bridges, Chatwin studies the missionary's Yaghan Dictionary, a monumental work of about 32,000 words revealing a language of extraordinary metaphorical richness in which "monotony" is defined as "an absence of male friends" and "depression" derives from a crab's vulnerable molting phase.

In Punta Arenas, Chatwin reconstructs the life of Charley Milward: his wreck of the Mataura in the Strait of Magellan in 1898, his second career as a pioneer and British Consul, and his final years in the tower of his gothic house with a telescope, ruined by business partners who embezzled from him.

At last, Chatwin walks to the Mylodon Cave on Last Hope Sound. The cave gapes four hundred feet wide into a cliff of grey conglomerate, its floor covered with ancient sloth dung. Groping in holes left by earlier excavations, he finds strands of coarse reddish hair, the same hair he remembers from childhood, and eases them into an envelope. He has accomplished the object of his journey. After a week's wait, he boards a ship in Punta Arenas. He notes the presence in the city of Walter Rauff, credited with inventing the Nazi Mobile Gas Truck, now working at a crab-processing factory, a final reminder of Patagonia's role as a refuge for fugitives of every kind. As they head into the Pacific, a Chilean businessman plays "La Mer" on a white piano missing many of its keys.