In the late 1920s, sub-editors on the Times of London came up with a game to entertain themselves during tedious evening shifts. A prize was awarded to whoever wrote the dullest headline that made it into print. In his autobiography, journalist and novelist Claud Cockburn claimed to have won the competition on one occasion with ‘Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead’.
The anecdote may be apocryphal—no edition of the paper with the headline has been found —but has nevertheless entered Fleet Street folklore. It characterises a certain British attitude to South America as a distant place of little relevance. Yet the reality is quite different. As I explore in my new book Small Earthquakes: A Journey Through Lost British History in South America, Britain helped to shape Argentina, Chile and Uruguay in profound and unexpected ways – and vice versa.
British Buenos Aires?
Over two decades living, working and travelling across the continent, I’ve unearthed countless fragments of British history, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Largely forgotten in the UK, these stories feature footballers and pirates, nitrate kings and wool barons, polar explorers and cowboys, missionaries and radical MPs.
It was a story that I first discovered after swapping Brixton in London for Buenos Aires. The clue to unravelling this hidden history was often in the name. Near my apartment in Villa Crespo were streets named ‘Thames’, ‘Darwin’ and ‘FitzRoy’. Farther afield, I found intriguingly titled suburbs, towns and cities (‘Hurlingham’, ‘William C Morris’, ‘Temperley’) and football clubs (‘River Plate’, ‘Newell’s Old Boys’, ‘Racing Club’). Newsstands sold the English-language Buenos Aires Herald and a shuttered Harrods store sat on the main shopping strip.
It quickly became apparent that Britain and Argentina’s links ran far deeper than simply conflicts in the South Atlantic and rivalries on the football pitch.
A little Wales beyond Wales
These connections are particularly strong in Patagonia. During research for my book, a 20-hour bus journey from the Argentinian capital took me through the pancake-flat grasslands of the Pampas and the seemingly endless steppe of northeastern Patagonia to the city of Puerto Madryn on the Valdes Peninsula.
Modern Puerto Madryn is a popular destination for watching Southern right whales, but it takes its name from the Gwynedd castle of Thomas Love Jones Parry, one of the driving forces behind the establishment of a ‘little Wales beyond Wales’ in the region in 1865. Known as Y Wladfa (The Colony), the settlement was originally made up of around 153 Welsh men, women and children who voyaged across the Atlantic on a converted tea clipper in a bid to protect their culture from English encroachment.
Today, as many as 70,000 people in Patagonia have Welsh heritage, and estimates suggest as many as 6,000 speak the language. The caves in which the first colonists sheltered are now part of a historic site featuring a pocket-sized museum, outside of which a Welsh Patagonian flag flutters on a pole, featuring a red dragon in the centre of the sky-blue and white stripes of the Argentine flag.
Afterwards I headed inland into the Chubut River Valley, changing buses in the regional capital Trelew (‘Lewis Town’), which hosts South America’s biggest Eisteddfod, a Welsh cultural festival. My destination was Gaiman, whose sturdy, well-maintained chapel streets, named after pioneers such as Michael D Jones, JC Evans and Bryn Gwyn, betray its Welsh roots. The town is famous for its Welsh tearooms, which were once visited by Diana, Princess of Wales, and continue to serve copious arrays of cakes and tarts, including—of course— bara brith, Welsh cakes and torta galesa (Welsh fruit cake).
The footsteps of Darwin
Continuing south along the coast, I reached the city of Río Gallegos – which was once home to a British pub called the White Elephant as well as the private British Club, whose premises now house a cocktail bar – before veering inland and west towards the Andes. Here, Los Glaciares National Park provides a sharp geographic contrast to the Welsh Patagonian steppe: imperious mountains, evergreen forests and heaving glaciers the colour of blue toothpaste.
A haven for trekking, the northern sector of the park and its most eye-catching peak are named after Robert FitzRoy, the Royal Navy captain who took Charles Darwin on his groundbreaking voyage around South America in HMS Beagle. Ironically, FitzRoy never actually saw the mountain named for him, as it was christened in his honour by the Argentinian explorer Perito Moreno. Before that, it was known as El Chaltén by the indigenous Tehuelche people of the region, a name now given to the popular hiking hub that sits near the foot of FitzRoy.
Similarly, the naturalist—whose evolutionary theories were strongly influenced by his experiences in southern South America—leant his name to one of Patagonia’s most characterful species. Head across the nearby Chilean border to Torres del Paine National Park and you’re likely to spot Darwin’s rheas – large, flightless birds similar to ostriches, known locally as nandu.
One of the earliest first-hand, English-language accounts of this part of Patagonia came from Lady Florence Dixie. The Scottish feminist author, travel writer, war correspondent and suffragist who spent six months in the Pampas and Patagonia in an attempt to escape the strictures and sexism of Victorian Britain.
Published in 1880, her bestselling book Across Patagonia features a memorable description of the approach to the trio of dazzling granite peaks that dominate the landscape: ‘Before us stretched a picturesque plain, covered with soft green turf, and dotted here and there with clumps of beeches, and crossed in all directions by rippling streams. The background was formed by thickly wooded hills, behind which again towered the Cordilleras – three tall peaks of a reddish hue and in shape the exact facsimiles of Cleopatra’s Needle.’ More than a century before the hike to the Base of the Towers became an integral part of the W Trek and the O Circuit, Lady Florence Dixie got there first.
Missionaries and naval officers
In the far South of Patagonia across the Strait of Magellan lies Tierra del Fuego. A sparsely populated realm of islands, mountains, forests and serpentine waterways, it is one of the world’s last great wildernesses.
Yet even here, the British connections remain strong. Named after the vessel that carried Darwin and FitzRoy around South America, the Beagle Channel bisects the region, connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. Darwin was enchanted by the scenery here. A series of ‘magnificent glaciers extend from the mountain-side to the water’s edge,’ he wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle. ‘It is scarcely possible to imagine anything more beautiful than the beryl-blue of these glaciers.’
Darwin and FitzRoy’s voyage drew the attention of Anglican missionaries eager to proselytise to Indigenous peoples such as the Yaghan and the Selk’nam, who had lived in Tierra del Fuego for millennia. They included Thomas Bridges, who founded the region’s first non-Indigenous settlement in what is now the Argentinian city of Ushuaia, as well as its first sheep ranch. The latter, Estancia Harberton, is still owned by his descendants and open to visitors. Named after the Devon village where Bridges’ wife had lived, the homestead looks much as it did in the late 19th century: a set of whitewashed, red-roofed buildings flanked by green hills riddled with creeks and overlooked by snow-streaked mountains.
South of the Beagle Channel, on the Chilean side of Tierra del Fuego, is Navarino Island, which is home to Puerto Williams, the southernmost town on Earth. Around 620 miles north of Antarctica, backed by the fang-like Dientes de Navarino range and home to only around 2,000 people, this far-flung outpost was founded in the 1950s. A place where horses and cows roam the streets and people leave their doors unlocked, it takes its name from naval officer John Williams Wilson, one of thousands of Britons who fought in South America’s wars of independence in the early 19th century. Perhaps his most famous counterpart was Thomas Cochrane, who was nicknamed the ‘Sea Wolf’ by Napoleon, and who founded and led the Chilean Navy. A national hero, his name now adorns countless streets, squares and monuments across the country, as well as giving his name to the town of Cochrane, close to Patagonia National Park on the Carretera Austral Highway.
Sheep and Shackleton
After finishing my research in Tierra del Fuego, I headed back to London via Punta Arenas. On the north shore of the Strait of Magellan, the city was once one of the most important ports in the Americas, as well as a hub of the Patagonian sheep-ranching boom. The ‘age of the golden fleece’— which transformed the fate of Patagonia and its indigenous peoples—began when Yorkshireman Henry Reynard imported a 300-strong flock and set up a base on a nearby island in 1877. Within decades, Patagonia was home to some 22 million sheep.
At its height, the industry had a strong British character: Anglo-Chilean firms ran the biggest estancias (ranches) and Britons—especially Scots—made up more than 60% of the shepherds for a period. While the boom has long gone, the lavish palacios of downtown Punta Arenas are testament to the wealth generated for a lucky few. Many estancias in both Torres del Paine and Los Glaciares now make their money from tourism rather than wool.
During its early 20th century heyday, Punta Arenas was also a regular stop-off for polar explorers, including Ernest Shackleton. On the morning before my flight home, I walked down to the waterfront, where the scent of barbecued lamb drifted over on the breeze. Near the port, I found the polished prow of the naval tug Yelcho and a statue of its captain, Luis Pardo. A family posed for photos with him, taking it in turns to touch his outstretched finger.
Pardo played a key role in one of the most famous stories from the ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration. In 1916, he rescued Shackleton’s stranded crew of the Endurance from ice-bound Elephant Island, helping cement the Anglo-Irish adventurer’s epic reputation as one of Antarctica’s greatest survivors in the process.
Shackleton spent much of his childhood in South London, living in Sydenham and attending Dulwich College, barely a mile from where I grew up. A reminder that no matter how far you travel, there are always connections to home.
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Small Earthquakes: A Journey Through Lost British History in South America is published by Hurst Publishers. Follow Shafik on Instagram or Bluesky.
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