‘Patagonia!’, wrote the British aristocratic explorer Lady Florence Dixie in 1880. ‘Who would ever think about going to such a place? … Why, it is thousands of miles away, and no one has ever been there before, except Captain Musters, and one or two other adventurous madmen!’
Well, Lady Florence, Captain Musters—or to give him his full name, George Chaworth Musters—happens to be my great-great-great Uncle George. His extraordinary journey by horseback across the wild expanse of interior Patagonia over 150 years ago won him a gold watch from the Royal Geographical Society, and saw him crowned with the epithet ‘the King of Patagonia.’ I recently travelled through the region to follow in his footsteps.
Illustrious ancestor
Virtually unknown today in his home country of Britain, my Uncle George Musters (or ‘Moosters’, as I discovered his name is pronounced in Argentina) remains well-regarded in today’s Patagonia. This was largely because he befriended the indigenous Tehuelche people, who were making a nomadic living on the barren steppe, by treating them as equals at a time when most Europeans either kept a wary distance or regarded them as subhuman.
Musters’ 1871 book At Home with the Patagonians is a unique account of the Tehuelche lost way of life, which disappeared under the pressures of Argentina’s colonial expansion. It’s also a ripping read, telling a tale of danger and adventure that rivals the exploits of any of the better-known Victorian explorers. Musters survived attempted murder, drowning, and body lice and even received a marriage proposal – through his willingness to share their hardships, he became treated as a brother by his native companions.
Seeking a sabbatical cure for the proverbial mid-life crisis, I decided to retrace Musters’ footsteps in a four-week whirlwind road trip with my Argentinian friend James and his pick-up truck. Juggling Musters’ book with a modern map, we followed his trail across parts of Patagonia rarely visited by travellers, speeding across 1,500 dusty miles of a barren landscape that seemed to comprise fifty shades of brown.
Quite why Musters chose Patagonia for his adventure isn’t clear. Born into a Nottinghamshire landowning family but orphaned at a young age, he was brought up by guardians and joined the navy at the frighteningly young age of 13. Being relatively well-off, Musters could afford to retire early from his naval career aged 28 and disappear off with his military pension to what was then one of the uttermost parts of the earth. Some commentators have suggested that he was a spy for the British Government, but there appears to be no evidence for this. In his book, George told an inquisitive Tehuelche chief that he was ‘in the service of the Cacique [ruler] of England, who wished the Indians well, but that I had visited these parts for my own pleasure’. As an adventurous, worldly wise and unattached young man of means, at a loose end during the high-water mark of the British Empire, this explanation seems entirely credible.
Punta Arenas
This King of Patagonia’s odyssey commenced at the port of Punta Arenas on the shores of Magellan Strait, so almost exactly 145 years later, I arrived here to embark on a journey that would take me on a trip in his footsteps. Punta Arenas is home to an unusual mixture of grand colonial edifices and Bauhaus-style houses, and something else besides: the strong Patagonian wind that would be our constant companion through the trip. The day I arrived, it was so strong that the tall ships regatta on the main quay was cancelled.
In the city’s main square, there is a large monument to the navigator Ferdinand Magellan, standing on a plinth above a cluster of indigenous people playing the role of noble savages. I’m not sure that Uncle George would have approved. Still, local custom says that kissing the bronze toe of one of these figures ensures that you will always return to Punta Arenas. Putting my lips to bronze seemed hygienically unwise, so I settled on giving the protruding digit a furtive rub.
Most travellers use Punta Arenas as a jumping-off point for Torres del Paine or a cruise around the glaciers of Tierra del Fuego, but I was heading to the part of Patagonia that most visitors don’t see. Muster’s Patagonia lies to the north and east – a vast, sparsely populated series of open plains and pampa, whose unrelenting flatness are interrupted by deep river canyons, rocky outcrops and astonishingly remote estancia homesteads.
From Punta Arenas, Uncle George headed into this huge wilderness with a posse of Chilean soldiers who were in pursuit of army deserters. His plan was to reach a Tehuelche overwintering encampment near Puerto Santa Cruz on the Atlantic Coast, with a view to securing their trust and then accompanying them when they departed in the spring for their annual perambulations.
Toward the coast
As the condor flies, Puerto Santo Cruz is about 200 miles east of the modern city of El Calafate, the gateway to Los Glaciares. To get there, Musters and his party would have ridden through what is now the enormous Monte León National Park, containing miles of wild Atlantic coastline, extensive wildlife and a number of important paleontological sites. In 1870, they amused themselves by hunting pumas and guanaco, often fruitlessly, but in 2002 the US outdoor clothing entrepreneurs and conservationists Kris and Doug Tompkins helped fund the transfer of the area to the Argentinian National Parks Administration.
When I visited, my main preoccupation was battling the relentless Patagonian wind: with very little topographical obstruction between the Andes and the Atlantic coast, there is an interminable westerly blast that can drive people mad. It was easy to understand why the Magellanic penguins we saw all along the coast opted to nest in burrows – their eggs might easily get blown away otherwise. Certainly, I endured a few wrestling matches with an invisible opponent when opening the car in a strong gust.
From Puerto Santa Cruz I turned inland, entering a road of endlessly straight roads – some with tarmac surfaces but even more without. When I hit the fabled Ruta 40, as ridden by Che Guevara and described in his book The Motorcycle Diaries, I found that it closely mirrored the old nomadic track that Musters took with his Tehuelche friends. No doubt the indigenous inhabitants had the easiest gradients sussed out thousands of years before the highway bulldozers arrived.
Long hours at the wheel were interspersed with trying to match Musters’ adventures with real places on the ground. Near the town of Esquel, I passed close to the spot where Musters—who seems to have had an eye for the ladies—was nearly persuaded into matrimony with a Tehuelche widow. Having provisionally discussed marriage terms, he then lost his nerve and rapidly backed out, commenting that: ‘The lady was at first rather disgusted, but soon got over it, and we remained on our former friendly terms’. Quite what he meant by that remains a little opaque, but I didn’t spot anyone with a close family resemblance on my travels.
The Lake District
With the benefit of his book, together with generous guidance from the many Argentinian Musters enthusiasts, I was often able to get tantalisingly close to Musters’ footsteps, with the strange feeling of being almost just behind him. At Pilcaniyeu, near the modern city of Bariloche in the Argentinian Lake District, Musters describes seeing a condor’s nest atop a curious natural column of sandstone. Finding the exact same spot, I paused to reflect in the stillness of the day. Suddenly five of these enormous birds appeared out of nowhere to circle languorously above the column and then vanished just as mysteriously. Perhaps Musters and his Tehuelche friends were somehow checking me out – possibly disapproving of the comforts of modern travel compared to the harsh privations of their day.
Today Bariloche resembles something like an alpine resort with the dramatic snow-capped Andes as its backdrop. The alpine theme is further developed in the city’s Swiss chalet style architecture and its obsession with chocolate. After enjoying the scenery of Lake Nahuel Huapi, Musters turned back east on the last leg of his journey with the Tehuelche, across the lonely Somuncurá Plateau to the Atlantic coastal city of Carmen de Patagones. The area is barren to the point of desertification, thanks to the twin challenges of climate change and overgrazing by sheep.
It felt a long way from the deep greens of the Argentinian Lake District, but even here Uncle George made his presence felt in the most unexpected way. I stopped at the railway town Ingeniero Jacobacci (named after the director of the old Patagonian Railway before the First World War), where I found nearby a lonely obelisk erected on a rocky outcrop in 1970 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Musters’ travels. Nearby, and completely alone in the middle of the plain, was an abandoned train station called Musters. Under a vast sky, it felt like the most personal connection I’d made yet to Uncle George.
Musters’ monumental journey concluded at Carmen de Patagones, whose museum displays replicas of Tehuelche horse saddles and hunting gear, taken from the illustrations in Musters’ book. The boleadoras stood out: a selection of stones on the ends of leather cords used to entangle the legs of animals looked like it was potentially as deadly to the untrained user as any prey. No wonder that many of Uncle George’s attempts at hunting were unsuccessful.
Thankfully I didn’t encounter any of the weekly murders that apparently took place here when he visited, though a section of the historic fort that presided over the town in his day was still standing.
Journey’s end
Musters’ travels took him mainly across the boundless core of Patagonia, dominated by the great uniformity of the steppe, with its overpoweringly empty horizon. This was the adventurer’s route of the 19th century: he completely missed out on the dramatic Andean peaks to the west that draw today’s hikers and trekkers. Thankfully, today’s visitors are also more interested in tracking pumas with cameras rather than firearms. But if you have time on your trip to Patagonia, take a diversion into the wilderness that is the secret heart of the region to pick up the Musters trail. And say hello to Uncle George, if you see him.
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Justin Milward’s book Looking for Uncle George – A Journey in Patagonia is available from Amazon or Words by Design.
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