Bruce Chatwin’s most well-known work is In Patagonia. It’s a mix of travel writing, history and a fiction. It was first published in 1977. Below are a few paragraphs I highlighted.
A hundred years ago, the Araucanians were incredibly fierce and brave. They painted their bodies red and flayed their enemies alive and sucked at the hearts of the dead. Their boys’ education consisted of hockey, horsemanship, liquor, insolence, and sexual athletics, and for centuries they scared the Spaniards out of their wits […] The Araucanians are still very tough and would be a lot tougher if they gave up drink.
On the Patagonian desert:
Unlike the deserts of Arabia it has not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, but it does have a place in the record of human experience. Charles Darwin found its negative qualities irresistible. In summing up the Voyage of the Beagle, he tried, unsuccessfully, to explain why, more than any of the wonders he had seen, these ‘arid wastes had taken such firm possession of his mind.
In the 1860s W.H. Hudson came to the Rio Negro looking for the migrant birds that wintered around his home in La Plata. Years later he remembered the trip through the filter of his Notting Hill boarding-house and wrote a book so quiet and sane it makes Thoreau seem a ranter. Hudson devotes a whole chapter of Idle Days in Patagonia to answering Mr Darwin’s question, and he concludes that desert wanderers discover in themselves a primaeval calmness (known also to the simplest savage), which is perhaps the same as the Peace of God.
Darwin’s encounter with the Fuegians also inspired The Descent of Man and his discovery of sexual selection.
About the Welsh colonists in Patagonia, describing a common phenomenon among pioneers everywhere:
The Argentine Government gave them land along the Chubut River […] And when they did reach the valley, they had the impression that God, and not the Government, had given them the land.
Here‘s Werner Herzog on Bruce Chatwin, describing the style of travel they have in common.
Nehaveigur 