Why am I passionate about this?
My first experience of sailing was in an open dinghy in the North Sea in winter; the second was capsizing in the path of a hovercraft at Cowes. I was put off for years. But once Jenny and I moved to spectacular British Columbia, we were inspired to try again. In 1985 we left on what would become a 4-year circumnavigation of the world; more recently and over several years we made our way back under sail from Cape Town to BC, spending a year in Patagonian waters. My other (paying) career has been as a diplomat, which is everything long-distance-sailing is not: people, rules, compromises, convention. Over the years, things have more-or-less balanced out.
Nicholas' book list on sailing in Patagonia
Why did Nicholas love this book?
As a young teacher in Buenos Aires, two of my students were the Goodall sisters, direct descendants of Anglican missionary and pioneer Thomas Bridges, who settled on the north shore of the Beagle Channel in 1886. Thomas’s second son Lucas’s account of life at Harberton Estancia – which truly was at the edge of the world at that time – is a luminous but saddening account of the last days of the Ona, Selknam, and Yahgan peoples. It’s full of sailing adventures too. As we threaded our way through snow-lined Acwalisnan Channel – between the Beagle and the Straits of Magellan – we leafed to page 113 of our sepia-illustrated 1949 edition of the book. We read how Lucas became the first European to pass this way, with his Yahgan friend Acwalisnan as pilot. I’m hoping to catch up with Abigail Goodall, whom I last saw in 1981, this (southern)…
1 author picked Uttermost Part of the Earth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"E. Lucas Bridges provides in his brilliantly written book our most valuable resource on the lost heritage of the Yamana." The Daily Beagle
Famous for being the southernmost city in the world, the wild and windswept port of Ushuaia sits at the inhospitable southern tip of Tierra del Fuego in South America. That rugged, rocky landscape of sharp mountains, beech forests, and barren outcrops was originally home to hunter-gatherer Yaghan Indians, the southernmost indigenous people on the planet. The western world’s colonization of the area (sometimes called “Fireland”) began in the 1800s when explorers and missionaries established settlements. The Bridges…