FIRELAND
A Journey to the Uttermost Part of the Earth
I have a thing for end of the road places. It's not enough to go to a country; I need to go to the end of a country. This can be irritating for anyone travelling with me.
Estancia Harberton, on the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, had been on my mental list of such places for years. So, when I planned a trip to Patagonia, I picked up The Uttermost Part of the Earth by E. Lucas Bridges and booked a stay.
Bridges grew up at Estancia Harberton in the late nineteenth century, when his family lived among the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego. Published in 1948, The Uttermost Part of the Earth is his account of a way of life that was already disappearing during his lifetime. I wanted to see what remained of the world he described.
I.
At Estancia Harberton, on the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, there is no key to the door of the little red-roofed house I'm staying in. Perhaps this is a clerical error, or just an old habit, as this is a ranch that existed for a century without a road, accessible only by the frigid waters of the Beagle Channel until 1973.
Harberton was built in 1886 by Thomas Bridges, an English missionary turned sheep farmer. It is the oldest ranch in Argentine Tierra del Fuego, and the most southerly ranch on earth — a place where the road ends and Antarctica begins to loom large in the imagination.
Today, Harberton looks much as it did in old photographs: a collection of whitewashed wooden buildings set on a sheltered bay, flanked by snow-streaked Andean peaks. Each house still looks out onto an old lavatory building, perched precariously at the end of a small pier in the bay. Although, mercifully, these are no longer in use.
II.
As the wood-burner warms up the living room, I think about the Yaghan people who were here long before this house was built.
The Yaghan lived naked, covering themselves with animal fat to protect them from the elements while they hunted seals and sat by fires built on beds of wet turf and clay in the bottom of their bark canoes. It was the continuous flames of fires lit by the Yaghan along their coastlines that prompted Spanish explorers to refer to this land as Tierra del Fuego — the Land of Fire. Personally, I prefer Thomas Bridges' term for this place: Fireland.
I go for a walk, leaving my friend Aky drinking tea by the fire. A boisterous black collie appears from between the wooden houses and joins me. Together we pass stacks of winter logs and a neat picket fence fronted with the bleached skulls of killer whales. The dog races ahead; I'm sure he’s done this walk before with miscellaneous tourists.
Everywhere I look, I see a clean and untouched landscape. Mosses grow on top of each other in tiny forests on the rock surfaces. The scrub bushes are turning vibrant shades of red, yellow and orange as they prepare for the coming southern summer. Sage green lichens that only thrive in air this pure cover the Magellan beech trees like tangles of hair.
III.
On my trip back to the estancia, the dog is done with me and heads home. I meet Tommy Goodall, the grandson of Thomas Bridges and a descendant of a family that has lived here since the early days. We are standing by a whalebone arch, the wind blowing between us, when he tells me about the winter of 1995.
“The snow fell from May until September,” he says. “Eighty-five percent of our animals died. They really hit us hard.”
Today, the estancia is funded by tourism. People come to see the Magellanic penguins that live on Martillo Island and to view the exhibits at the Acatushún Museum, Natalie Goodall’s renowned collection of southern marine skeletons. Mariana, a resident scientist, shows us the skeletons of Peale's dolphin and the Andrews' beaked whale, some of South America's rarest creatures. Next door, large plastic tubs reek of the odour of sea mammals that have been completely disarticulated to their skeletal remains.
IV.
The book that brought me here, The Uttermost Part of the Earth, was published in 1948 by Lucas Bridges, who was only the third white child born in this vast region. He grew up by the sea, sailing boats with his father through the glacier-strewn waters of the Beagle Channel. As he grew older, he became enraptured with the Yaghan, Selk’nam, and Haush tribes: wearing moccasins, hunting with bows, speaking their languages and eventually becoming the first “blood brother” to the Selk'nam.
But The Uttermost Part of the Earth is more than an adventure story; it's a record of the last of the Yaghan people. When Darwin sailed down the Beagle Channel in 1830, the Yaghan numbered around 3,000. By 1900, Lucas wrote that only 200 remained — their numbers decimated by measles, smallpox, violence and the spread of European culture.
The only reminder of the Yaghan at Harberton is a reconstruction of a Yaghan shelter, built with branches and foliage on top of the hill, next to the Bridges family graveyard and surrounded by a copse of Ñire and Lenga trees swaying in the wind.
V.
With the death of Cristina Calderón, the last native speaker, the Yaghan language became functionally extinct in 2022.
According to my guide, Joaquin, the last Yaghan word really used today is mamihlapinatapai. He says it refers to “a moment of meditation around the fire when the elders pass on stories to the young, and there is deep, shared silence.”
That sounds like a reasonable interpretation, albeit a romantic one. In his actual Yamana-English Dictionary, Thomas Bridges defined mamihlapinatapai with dry, unromantic precision:
“To look at each other, each hoping that the other will offer to do something which both desire but which neither is willing to do.”
But folklore—and internet culture—has smoothed it into something softer and remixed in dozens of ways; its beauty lies in its resistance to the grasp of modern tongues.
For me, the word carries something of Michael Ondaatje's poem What We Lost: the gestures, courtesies and hidden knowledge that have slipped away with the loss of tribes such as the Yaghan, the Selk'nam and the Ona.
VI.
On my last day, I meet Abby Goodall, the fifth-generation descendant of Thomas Bridges and the current manager of Harberton. She walks me down to the allotment garden, where rhubarb and cauliflower push up through the cold Patagonian earth without a polytunnel. When I ask if she’d ever share her secrets online with my gardening friends back in England, she laughs softly. “They need to come here to have their hands deep in the soil. It’s the only way to learn.”
On the drive back toward Ushuaia, our driver admits he rarely comes this way. Most people take the boat or the day coach, go to the penguin colony, and leave before the light begins to fail.
But at the end of the road, it's good to feel the fire in the stove go cold at night, to linger by the water when everyone else has gone, and let the place work on you.
