PORVENIR
This part of the Trip was a lesson in the art of patience and perseverance regarding travel information and then confirming the accuracy! Most folk were very helpful but as the locals said, it was difficult for them and so for a tourist a triple whammer! I hoped to explore part of TDF from the small town of Porvenir, a 3 hour ferry crossing from Punta Arenas (4900 pesos) , but a bus only went to 2 places on say a tuesday with a return only on friday and either a dead end one horse settlement or oil town where the through buses between The Mainland and Ushaia won´t stop and you could not cross the Chilean Argentinian Border running smack down the middle! Porvenir is usually only visited in a day trip but by staying 2 days I did get a better feeling of what is was like living in a fairly remote pioneer settlement of rusted metal clad Victorian houses, population about 6000. I found via a traveller web site a comfy, friendly B&B for 12000 a night so had my own ensuite room with a great shower and cable tv!
The small Museum had excellent material on the gold mining and sheep farming booms which largely caused the extermination of the native peoples. Great little library with free internet use but needed to type in your passport number, sex and age which I thought was strange but security on use? I wandered around in the rain, sun and wind, looking at the mix of older architecture and modern housing. The former echoed from 1850´s – 1930´s when many immigrants, particularly Croatian or from the Chilean island of Chiloe, initially built 1 storey houses with 2 rooms and a central passage. With affluence, 2 more rooms were added to the rear and one of more storeys with windows symmetrically divided, dormer windows and a gabled roof. The whole lot in timber and metal cladding and of blues, reds, greens, yellows etc looked European – Alpine.
Porvenir was a hotch potch of battered and new – tethered horses grazed in a semi barren yard half full of old cars, many dogs ran around the grid pattern streets jumping in on play fights or asleep in a bus shelter or rank grassland strip, derelict houses or shut-up fish merchants- wharf , little shops selling pink sexy tops, radios and coca cola which were mostly shut and satellite dishes stuck onto the end of a metal clad shack. There was a nice plaza aimed partly at tourists with old machinery and weedy gravel mazes amongst trees and statues of the exterminated tribes.
During the 1880´s adventurers from the Chilean Navy discovered gold such as in the Sierra Boqueron near Porvenir. In the late 1880´s 20,000 men, mainly Chileans and Austrians worked in the cold, wet, snow bound hills panning for gold with records saying 134 claims produced 98 kilos of gold. This was a very poor yield compared to other Regions but in 1902, men used to working in the Californian mines saw the potential of using machines powered by steam boilers with hydraulic pistons and dredges. Many companies were formed such as The Gold washers of TDF which employed mainly Chilean and Croatian men, however the boom ended in 1909 when production crashed. The Engineering and Mining Journal 1909 also talked about copper mines to the west of Punta Arenas saying Cutter Bay was sufficiently deep 200 yards offshore in a safe harbour for the largest ocean going steamships.
I took a fast 2.5 hour trip around the 115km Gold Route as a solo passenger in a ‘tourist taxi’ and saw derelict machinery lying in small river valleys and small buildings stuck on a very remote, windswept and rain sodden hillside at 500m. All this conjured up very atmospheric working conditions and that was during the Patagonian summer! Murky, distant views of the Magellan Straits were just possible through the low grey clouds. Three men still pan for gold but just in the summer as the ground is snow bound in winter.
In 1872, 300 sheep were brought from the Falkland Islands and proved very successful. Large landed estate concessions, rented out for 20 years, were granted by the Government and between 1885-94 all livestock land was split between 4 companies. For example, Estancia Caleta Josefina had a white painted timber and zinc plated sheep shearing shed dating to 1899 able to accommodate 36 men who sheared 170,000 sheep in 20 days. I cannot recall why I was only allowed 2 minutes to visit an Estancia but it was raining still. Most are of the order of 10,000 ha holding 6000 sheep with a few cattle. Saw a Hereford and Black Angus? bull plus 4 cows being moved along the road by two gauchos on horseback with others on horseback in a corral catching a calf that was to be killed according to the Guide. These formed other vivid snapshots of TDF living and as I seemed the only tourist for miles, was likely the authentic way of life.
The sheep wool is exported to Australia (why? as they have lots of sheep?!) and China with the organic meat going to Germany. The guide was part time and also worked as a fisherman. The entire Trip was in spanish which tested my understanding of farming, mining and sheltered waters for ships! Bahia Unutile is so called Useless Bay as it offers no shelter from the wind for ships. I saw dolphins near the shore and earlier on the Ferry also riding the stern wake of a small fishing boat –pretty good!
Native Peoples
Had a good chat with one of the Scientists on Carlos 111 Island and there were good exhibits at the Porvenir Museum about cultural history and the indigenous peoples with the awful history of extermination by westerners. The pictures of horsemen hunting down the natives who were only on foot and killing them made a strong impression and I recall well many of the exhibits and photos showing a way of life now gone. An Austrian Hungarian coloniser paid a bounty for their ears and hands and the Natural History Museum sent a team to get the skeletons of the tall 6 foot peoples when they were dying out – for posterity!? Before White man appeared there were about 4000 people on TDF who were easily wiped out in a few decades by disease, land appropriation and killing.
The Kaweskar used canoes to move in small groups around the archipelago, hunting seals, otters, birds, seafood and fish. The women tolerated the cold better so they dived nude carrying a basket made from rush to collect seafood. They also did the rowing and tied the canoes to kelp offshore and had to swim back. The men tended the fires and hunted. Clothes were made from seal or otter skins and they spread dirt and animal fat on their bodies. The Museum had video footage of these People such as in the canoes which were made from tree bark tied together with vegetable fibres and caulked with earth, fat and roots. To keep warm, clay was put in the middle of the canoe with a bonfire lit on top. There were superbly crafted artefacts by the Selknam of stone arrows, skin cleaning knives, bows and arrows made from lenga wood with guanaco sinew for string. Also necklaces of cormorant bones and shells on guanaco sinew and a comb made from whale bone.
Other tribes in the Region were the Yamana, also canoers of the Beagle Channel, Selknam or Onas living in the steppes and forests using bows and arrows to hunt guanaco, birds and rodents. The Tehuelches learnt how to ride horses after these were introduced by the Spanish. There was a replica model and photos of the Hain Ceremony which was just for men to discipline and order women and initiate young men. Men were never to tell the women what went on as otherwise the original upper hand of women from the power of the Moon would be restored. The Moon´s husband The Sun, peeped in on the Moon´s ceremony with women and their power was destroyed. Anyway, the men were painted in white, black, grey, dark red and yellow from clay, natural chalk and slack from bonfire and burnt guanaco bones mixed with fat or saliva. They painted their whole bodies to the features of the spirits they wished to represent with a hood covering their head. I recall finding it fascinating to learn of these adaptations, skills and beliefs allowing for survival in a harsh environment.
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