Travel narratives of the far south: Patagonia, southern lands, Antarctica

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

• Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan's Voyage (c. 1524) (c. 1524)

  In the same bay of San Julián, in 1520, Magellan wintered for five months and faced a mutiny. The Vicentine knight Pigafetta recorded there the meeting with the Patagonian “giants”, matrix of all later fables. Two centuries later, Cardiel and Quiroga walk on foot through the same mud, open the same grave, measure the same bones and conclude: ordinary size. To read Pigafetta and then Lozano is to witness the birth and death of a myth.

• George Anson, A Voyage Round the World (1748)

  Five years before the Strobl-Cardiel-Quiroga expedition, the English commodore Anson set out to sail around the world at the head of a squadron ravaged by scurvy. It is precisely his printed charts that gave rise to the fables of giant rivers and outsized oysters at San Julián which the voyage of 1746 would dismantle. The English account is a masterpiece of naval propaganda: wild Patagonia, the Manila galleon captured, a triumphant return. To read Anson beside Lozano is to see the same coast through two enemy pens, one that magnifies everything, the other that counts fathoms.

• John Byron, relation du voyage du Dolphin (1773)

  Twelve years before Viedma, the English admiral enters San Julián Bay and swears he saw men nine feet tall. His account revives in Europe the old fable of the Patagonian giants and sets the engravings circulating. To read Byron and then Viedma is to pass from a tale to a measuring rod: the second measures his hosts in varas, notes that they are tall but by no means outsized, and calmly explains that it was their garment from neck to feet that deceived hasty visitors.

• Thomas Falkner, A Description of Patagonia (1774)

  An English physician turned Jesuit spends forty years in the missions of the Río de la Plata and comes home with the first reasoned description of the Patagonian interior, its peoples and its rivers. The book appears six years before the departure from Montevideo, and its shadow hangs over the whole enterprise: it is partly because Falkner showed the English the strategic value of the coast that Madrid decides in haste to plant towns there.

• James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World (1777)

  While Kerguelen defends his February 1772 land at Versailles, James Cook leaves England with the Resolution and the Adventure to settle the question of the southern continent. In January 1773 he crosses the Antarctic Circle; a year later, as the Breton gives up in the fogs of his islands, he pushes on to 71 degrees south before the ice stops him. His sober, numbered account erases from the maps the fertile continent promised by the geographers, the very one whose tip Kerguelen believed he had glimpsed. The two men chase the same chimera with opposite fortunes: Cook keeps his crews free of scurvy, while Kerguelen returns with men ruined by disease.

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• James Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784)

  In December 1776, bound for the North Pacific, James Cook anchors the Resolution and the Discovery in a bay of the Kerguelen lands, which he names Christmas Harbour. His men find there the message left by the French in 1774, proof of the taking of possession. Cook surveys the coast, describes the low vegetation, the seals and the penguins, and suggests a name that will stick: the Island of Desolation. His account, published after his death, confirms the Breton's discovery just as the latter, condemned by the court martial, writes his defence in the château of Saumur.

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• Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) (1839)

  The young English naturalist anchored in 1834 off Puerto Deseado and San Julián. He found a country almost unchanged since Cardiel: the same cliffs, the same guanacos, the same solitude. But Darwin adds the question of deep time, that of the fossils buried in the barrancas. His Patagonian chapter, written a century after the San Antonio, gives the Jesuits' inhospitable landscape a geological and evolutionary dimension they could not have suspected.

• George Chaworth Musters, At Home with the Patagonians (1871)

  An English naval officer crosses Patagonia from the Strait of Magellan to the Río Negro, living for eighteen months with the Tehuelche, on horseback, in their toldos, at the rhythm of their hunts. It is the late and intimate counterpart of Viedma's description: the same bolas, the same mourning, the same ceremonies of entry into foreign territory, observed a century later by a man who, for his part, has the time to learn the language.

• Francisco Moreno, Viaje a la Patagonia austral (1879)

  The young Argentine scholar explored southern Patagonia to assert national sovereignty against the Chilean claim. He rediscovered the bay of San Julián, the salt lagoons, the Indian trails. His accounts would serve to fix the modern border. A century and a half after Cardiel, the same coast became a political stake again, but this time between republics.

• Henry Nottidge Moseley, Notes by a Naturalist on the Challenger (1879)

  A century after Kerguelen's second voyage, in January 1874, the British corvette Challenger puts in at the archipelago during the round-the-world cruise that founds modern oceanography. The naturalist Henry Nottidge Moseley walks its bays and observes the penguins, the elephant seals, the mosses and the famous cabbage, the fresh food Kerguelen's crews had so sorely lacked. His notes, written for a wide public, have the freshness of a field notebook. They show, up close and on foot, a land Kerguelen had only glimpsed in the fog, which in a hundred years had become a field of study for scientists and a hunting ground for sailors.

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• Lady Florence Dixie, Across Patagonia (1880)

  A Scottish aristocrat sets out to hunt in the south with her brother, her dogs and a cook, and brings back the first Patagonian narrative written by a woman. The tone is that of a pleasure party, and that is precisely what is striking: where Viedma counted his sick and his weevil-ridden flour, here people picnic and take photographs. A century was enough to turn a deadly end of the world into a sporting ground.

• William Henry Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (1893)

  A naturalist born on the pampa, Hudson spends months motionless on the banks of the Río Negro, one arm in a sling, watching the birds and the wind. His book invents a way of speaking of the Patagonian emptiness as an inner experience. After Viedma's latitudes, this reading gives the sensation that the journal lacks: what it does to a man to live in a landscape where nothing happens for weeks.

• Ramón Lista, Viaje al país de los tehuelches (1894)

  Explorer and governor of the territory of Santa Cruz, Lista goes up the river that Viedma had not been able to ascend and reaches by land the lakes of the Cordillera. He finds, drained of strength, the groups whose population the 1783 journal estimated at four thousand souls. The two texts, a hundred and eleven years apart, read like a before and an after from which one does not emerge unscathed.

• Otto Nordenskjöld, Antarctica, or Two Years Amongst the Ice of the South Pole (1901-1903)

  In 1902, the Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjöld settled to winter on Snow Hill Island, on the edge of the Weddell Sea, in the waters Ross had surveyed in January 1843. The plan went wrong: his ship, the Antarctic, was crushed by the ice, and the crew made their way by boat to Paulet Island, the very island Ross had named, where they spent the winter in a stone hut, living on penguins. The scattered parties finally found one another, and the Argentine gunboat Uruguay came to collect the survivors at the end of 1903. The account, translated into English in 1905, makes these islands a setting of survival and restores to Ross's cartography its due place.

• Otto Nordenskjöld et Johan Gunnar Andersson, Antarctica, or Two Years amongst the Ice of the South Pole (1901-1903)

  Sixty years after Dumont d'Urville, the waters around Louis-Philippe Land became the setting of a polar Robinsonade. In February 1902 the ship Antarctic, commanded by Carl Anton Larsen, landed the Swedish geologist Otto Nordenskjöld and five companions on Snow Hill Island for a winter stay. Sent to bring them back, the ship was caught in the ice and sank on 12 February 1903; the crew wintered in a stone hut on Paulet Island, while three men spent the winter at Hope Bay in a makeshift shelter. The three groups met again in November 1903 and were picked up by the Argentine corvette Uruguay. The narrative, published in Swedish and then in English in 1905, tells of these two years among the ice.

• Robert Falcon Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery (1901-1904)

  Sixty years after Ross, Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery wintered in 1902 at the head of McMurdo Sound, named for the lieutenant of the Terror. Scott follows along the great Barrier that Ross had traced without being able to land on it, even rises above it in a captive balloon, then pushes south with Wilson and Shackleton beyond 82 degrees, on foot and behind poorly used dogs. The narrative, published in 1905, names on every page the capes and volcanoes of Ross, the Erebus and the Terror first among them. What in 1842 was only a wall of ice seen from the deck becomes a territory one crosses, at the price of scurvy and exhaustion.

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• Robert Neal Rudmose Brown, Robert Cockburn Mossman et James Hunter Harvey Pirie, The Voyage of the Scotia (1902-1904)

  On 25 March 1903, the Scotia of William Speirs Bruce's Scottish expedition dropped anchor in a bay of Laurie Island, in the South Orkneys, which the French corvettes had skirted in February 1838. Held by the ice until 23 November, the team built a stone house, Omond House, and ran a meteorological observatory there. On 22 February 1904, Bruce handed the station over to the Argentine government: this is the Orcadas base, in uninterrupted service ever since. The Scotia then pushed into the Weddell Sea, discovered Coats Land and stayed caught in the pack ice at 74° 01' south. The narrative, written by three members of the expedition and published in 1906, keeps the verve of ships' journals.

• Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Le Français au pôle Sud (1903-1905)

  Jean-Baptiste Charcot sailed in 1903 aboard the Français, a three-master built at Saint-Malo, at first to relieve Nordenskjöld's Swedish expedition, which the Argentines had already found. He then turned to the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the other side of those lands Ross had glimpsed from the east under the names of Joinville and Louis-Philippe. Wintering in a bay of Booth Island, hydrographic surveys, magnetic and meteorological observations: the doctor turned seaman takes up, sixty years later, Ross's scientific program. The Français, struck on a rock, came home damaged and was sold to Argentina. The narrative, published in 1906 as Le Français au pôle Sud, keeps the verve of a ship's log.

• Jean-Baptiste Charcot, Le Pourquoi-Pas ? dans l'Antarctique (1908-1910)

  In August 1908, Jean-Baptiste Charcot left Le Havre on the Pourquoi-Pas?, a polar three-master built for him at Saint-Malo, and reached Antarctica in December. Like Dumont d'Urville seventy years earlier, he passed through the South Shetlands: at Deception Island, off which the Astrolabe had known calm weather and its commander's gout, whalers were already established, and the expedition gave their anchorage the name Whalers Bay. Charcot wintered in 1909 on Petermann Island, surveyed the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula and in 1910 discovered the land he named after his father. His journal, published in 1910, extends in French the narrative of the sailors of the Astrolabe.

• Roald Amundsen, Sydpolen (Le Pôle Sud) (1910-1912)

  In January 1911, Roald Amundsen set up his base, Framheim, in the Bay of Whales, an indentation in the great Barrier that Ross had followed in 1841 and seen again in 1842, without being able to set foot on it. The Norwegian made the wager of living on the floating ice itself. From there, with four companions and dog sledges, he reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, more than a month ahead of Scott. His narrative, published as early as 1912, is that of a method: marked depots, furs, dogs sacrificed along the way. It closes the story opened by Ross: the Barrier, an impassable wall seen from the ships, becomes the great road to the pole. The Norwegian original is Sydpolen, in English The South Pole.

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• Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1910-1913)

  In the dead of the southern winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers left Cape Evans for Cape Crozier, which Ross had named for the commander of the Terror. Five weeks in the polar night, in cold that fell below minus 40 degrees, to bring back emperor penguin eggs that the science of the day believed decisive. The three men returned barely alive. A year later, Cherry-Garrard was part of the party that found the tent of Scott, Wilson and Bowers on the Barrier. His book, published in 1922, is probably the finest account of the Antarctic: where Ross measured the ice, he tells what it does to men.

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• Ernest Shackleton, South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition, 1914-1917 (1914-1917)

  In January 1915, Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, the one Dumont d'Urville had tried to force in February 1838. The ship drifted ten months with the ice before being crushed; it sank on 21 November 1915. The twenty-eight men camped on the floes, then in April 1916 reached Elephant Island by boat, the steep land the corvettes had skirted after the Orkneys. Shackleton set out again with five companions in the James Caird to South Georgia and came back for the others on 30 August 1916 aboard the Chilean Yelcho. South, published in 1919, tells to the end what the commander of the Astrolabe feared during his five days of blockade.

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• Raymond Rallier du Baty, 15,000 Miles in a Ketch (1917)

  In September 1907, two Breton brothers, Raymond and Henri Rallier du Baty, leave Boulogne aboard the J.-B. Charcot, a 48-ton fishing ketch, with four companions. Their aim: to map the Kerguelen Islands, which France has scarcely explored. To pay for the adventure, they hunt elephant seals and sell the oil. Their account, published in English before appearing in French as Aventures aux Kerguelen, has the humour and daring of expeditions without a budget. Raymond will return in 1913; his surveys will serve for the first complete map of the archipelago, published in 1922, a hundred and fifty years after his countryman's discovery.

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• Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (1977) (1977)

  The English traveller crosses Patagonia in the footsteps of a piece of mylodon skin brought back by a forebear. A fragmentary, poetic account, obsessed with earlier narratives, it meets Cardiel, Darwin and Magellan everywhere, without always naming them. The best contemporary guide for finding, in the silences of the pampa, the echo of the Jesuit voyages.

• Jean-Paul Kauffmann, L'Arche des Kerguelen (1993)

  A few years after his release, the journalist and writer Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a hostage in Lebanon from 1985 to 1988, sets out for the Kerguelen Islands in the footsteps of Yves de Kerguelen, Rallier du Baty and the other discoverers. He shares the life of the scientists and soldiers at the base, sinks into the peat, gets lost, endures the wind that never stops. He dreams of sighting the rock arch that gives the book its title, and bad weather prevents him. The account of a goal missed, like that of 1774, his book turns southern isolation into literary material, never losing sight of the Breton navigator who revealed it.

• Sylvain Tesson, La Panthère des neiges and Patagonian notebooks

  In several recent French travellers, the Patagonian coast appears in filigree: in Le Clézio, in Kessel, in Tesson. The austral desert has become a topos there, almost a commonplace; one must return to the Jesuits of 1746 to find this coast when it was still a blank on the map, a coast of the Patagons that people doubted was inhabited at all.