The First White Family of Tierra del Fuego
Missionaries who became major landowners
In the days when the channels of Tierra del Fuego were crisscrossed by bark canoes and the guanaco (the small, wild cousins of llamas) were hunted with bows and arrows, a white man who spoke the indigenous Yahgan language settled near the bay known as Ushuaia with his wife and infant daughter. They came with the purpose of saving the souls of the Yahgan, and they stayed—even after the Ushuaia mission crumbled and the Yahgan population was decimated by disease, even amidst a gold rush and genocide and political turmoil. Descendants of the missionaries became one of the wealthiest and most influential landowning families in the area, and their descendants still live in the region today.1
Thomas Bridges was a presumed orphan, found wandering alone in Bristol, UK, when he was two or three years old. His hair, eyes, and skin were darker than the average British person’s, he didn’t speak English, and he was wearing a gold saint’s medal around his neck, so he was assumed to be the child of Catholic immigrants.
The little boy didn’t know his own name, so he was given the name “Thomas” for the letter T embroidered on his clothes and “Bridges” because he was found on a bridge. He was taken in by the Rev. George Despard and his wife, and was brought up alongside their three children and two other adopted boys. When Thomas was thirteen, the Rev. Despard became a missionary under the Patagonia Missionary Society and moved the family to the Falkland Islands, so he could direct the missionary efforts in Tierra del Fuego from that vantage point.
The strategy of the mission during this time was to “invite”2 Yahgan youth and families to the mission outpost in the Falkland Islands, where a school and model village existed to Christianize and Europeanize the Yahgan by teaching them about God, the Bible, European clothes, European farming methods, and private property. They were taught how to read and write, how to raise cattle and sheep, how to build fences and plant potatoes, how to sew and use an ax.
The Despards’ involvement in the mission was part of a massive wave of British missionary fervor that came in response to the deaths of Allen Gardiner and five other men while trying to reach the Yahgan with the Gospel in 1851.3 But after a second tragedy occurred—when a missionary named Garland Philips and seven others were killed in the middle of a church service during a trip to Tierra del Fuego4—the Rev. Despard left the Falkland Islands and went back to England with his family. Nineteen-year-old Thomas decided to stay, and he was given charge of the mission station.
Thomas had already started learning the Yahgan language from the people who had been brought to the Falkland Islands—something the missionaries before him hadn’t made much progress in. After the Despards left, Thomas became roommates with several Yahgan young men so that he could learn their language more thoroughly. His English-Yahgan dictionary, which he worked on for the rest of his life, is the best record we have today of a unique language once spoken by thousands of people.5
When Thomas was twenty-six, the mission—now rebranded as the South American Missionary Society—told him to go back to England to be ordained and to acquire a wife. While on a speaking tour of England, he met Mary Ann Varder in Bristol, at a meeting for schoolteachers. They married five weeks later, and two days after that, left together for the mission field.6
The Bridges’ first child, Mary, was born in the Falkland Islands, and nine months later, the young family moved to a clearing in the middle of the Beagle Channel. In Ushuaia, a place reachable only by navigating notoriously treacherous waterways, hundreds of miles away from a doctor or a nurse, Mary Ann gave birth to five more children. The Bridges lived among the Yahgan (alongside two other missionary families) for the next fifteen years.7
By 1884, the mission in Ushuaia had grown to about 330 Yahgan who lived in cottages with gardens in a neat row or in traditional conical or dome-shaped houses made of bark and hide. They owned 200 heads of cattle, which had been purchased from or gifted by the mission. Visitors were surprised to find a “proper English village” with streets and fenced-in fields amidst so much wilderness. There was a church, a blacksmith shop, and an orphanage. Two hundred of the Yahgan affiliated with the mission spoke English, and around 45 native children attended the missionary school. At that time, the total population of Yahgan throughout Tierra del Fuego was around 1000.8
But then an epidemic hit in October of 1884, right after the Argentinian government showed up in (friendly) warships and established their presence on the other side of the Ushuaia bay. In the course of a few weeks, hundreds of Yahgan died from measles.9 Aside from the fact that the Yahgan had no natural immunity to the measles, the epidemic was probably so deadly because of the wide-spread tuberculosis that had weakened (and killed) hundreds of people over the previous few years. By June of 1886, the Yahgan numbered around 400.
Thomas seemed increasingly frustrated with the mission’s inability to provide full employment for the Christianized Yahgan, who increasingly left the area in search of jobs or were employed by the estancieros (ranchers) newly establishing themselves in the region. Thomas thought the mission was doomed unless it could change its financial structure and its approach to what it offered in the physical—as well as spiritual—realm.
Thomas resigned as mission superintendent in 1886, and set up his own estancia, with the stated purpose of continuing his outreach to the Yahgan by offering a safe place of employment on private property that would be respected by the government and other landowners. He had corresponded for years with the director of the La Plata Museum, offering observations on the Yahgan and the region, and through this friend’s connections, he met with the President of Argentina and other high-up ministers of government. In recognition for his “humanitarian work” among the Yahgan, Thomas was promised possession of the land he requested, a place the Yahgan knew as Ukatush and which he (later) renamed Harberton.10
Using this land the government gifted them, the Bridges used their savings and borrowed money to set up cattle and sheep on their new ranch. They sold fresh meat and other goods to the government establishment in Ushuaia and to the gold miners who rushed to the area after gold was discovered in the 1880s. As promised, the Bridges did provide jobs for the Yahgan who wanted the work, and they did continue to treat the Yahgan with dignity and respect—as opposed to other estancieros who paid men to hunt down indigenous families or kill entire villages in retribution for theft—but the family also became increasingly “comfortable.”
Thomas Bridges, the energetic, enterprising, and idealistic former missionary, died in 1898 while on a trip to Buenos Aires. He’d had stomach problems for many years, and his cause of death was probably stomach cancer. He was buried in the tree-lined British cemetery in Buenos Aires, far from the Fireland he loved.
His five Argentinian-born children, meanwhile, were by this time full-fledged estancieros. They bought another, larger, ranch, called Viamonte, on better land further north on the island of Tierra del Fuego—in territory that had been hunting grounds of the Selk’nam (Ona). The family bought more sheep, and they built a larger, more comfortable house that could accommodate various spouses and children.
To put this into context, during this time Argentina was one of the top ten economies in the world, as a leading exporter of wool, beef, and wheat. A significant amount of sheep wool came from Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and the Bridges’ estancia became one of the five main estancias in Argentinian Tierra del Fuego.11
Thomas and Mary Ann’s six children had their own interesting lives that are worth discussing in more detail later. The short version, stripped of all the dramatic details, is that the older three ended up going to Paraguay, England, Zimbabwe, and Chile, while keeping a strong connection to Harberton and Viamonte. The younger three mostly stayed in Tierra del Fuego and ran those estancias. Their mother, Mary Ann, returned to England when she was 72, where she lived out the last years of her life in her beloved homeland.
In 1949, Lucas Bridges published a book called Uttermost Part of the Earth, in which he talks about his parents’ experience as missionaries as well as his own experiences on a rural estancia, living among the Selk’nam (Ona), hunting guanaco, and participating in indigenous traditions.12 The book became a bestseller in the US and has been picked for various lists as one of the best adventure stories of the twentieth century. It is many outsiders’ first introduction to Tierra del Fuego, and it’s what convinced me to write this novel.13
The Bridges name has “daughtered out” in Tierra del Fuego—as well as in other parts of Argentina and in Chile, the US, the UK, and Zimbabwe. However, the family lands of Viamonte and Harberton are today managed by Will’s grandchildren and their families. Harberton, the land granted by the Argentinian government in appreciation for their missionary efforts, has become one of the major tourist destinations in the region.14 Viamonte is still a working sheep farm, with a bed-and-breakfast for tourists and an organic garden that grows highly prized gourmet black garlic.
Meanwhile, the Yahgan—who lived freely throughout the region for thousands of years—are known to tourists only as static wax figures in a museum and through street murals that lament their demise.15
The story of this family is the foundation of my novel because it brings up so many questions for me. How does an idealistic missionary turn into a capitalist success story? How do you tease out good intentions from devastating results? There’s so much courage and altruism to admire, mixed with bald racism and Eurocentrism that caused active harm. Yet they were just people: plagued by stomach problems and headaches, thinking about what they were going to eat for dinner and worrying about their kids’ futures. (This is why I’m a fiction writer! I’d much rather speculate about the human motivations and impacts behind historical facts, rather than stick to the facts themselves. But let’s get back to the history here.)
There’s disagreement over whether the Yahgan received these offers as genuine hospitality. From my read of the contemporary records, the missionaries offered what they thought was a generous invitation, in good faith, with the promise of return passage whenever it was requested. But gifts of food, clothing, shelter were definitely used for the purpose of persuasion, and manual labor (alongside the missionaries) was an expected part of the proffered lifestyle. Not all of the Yahgan were returned to their homeland as promptly as they would have liked, and a number of people sickened and died away from their homes and families. There were hard feelings among some Yahgan because of this, and the approach was criticized by some contemporary witnesses outside the mission. There are people today who claim the missionaries abducted the Yahgan or treated them as indentured labor.
The British church’s missionary fervor in response to Allen Gardiner’s death has a lot of parallels to the American church’s response to Jim Elliott’s death in the 1950s, for those who are more familiar with that event. The circumstances of Allen Gardiner’s death are…interesting, and it’s a topic worth exploring in a post of its own. Stay tuned for that!
These killings were probably caused by a dispute over missing items on a ship and a forced search of the Yahgan passengers’ bundles. I’m sure the language barrier was also a factor: the missionaries spoke only a little Yahgan, and the Yahgan spoke only a little English. There was one British survivor, the cook Alfred Cole, whose version of events was published in the Patagonia Missionary Society’s magazine/newsletter, The Voice of Pity for South America. Some indigenous people who were friendly to the mission were also witnesses and expressed their grief over the killings. Here I’m indebted to Anne Chapman’s analysis of the event in ch. 9 of European Encounters with the Yamana People of Cape Horn, Before and After Darwin.
This dictionary has a whole epic story of its own, involving an Antarctic explorer, the Belgian king, a German professor, two world wars, and the Allied “Monuments Men” art-recovery officers. It’s a significant thread of my novel, but I’m going to have to write a post detailing the factual history, because it’s too wild to be believable in fiction.
Can you IMAGINE? Who goes off with a near stranger to the literal “ends of the earth”?? What kind of courage—or desperation?—must that woman have had?
It might be worth mentioning here that the Bridges actually weren’t the first white people to live in Ushuaia: the missionary (later Anglican bishop of South America) Waite Stirling lived there for six months in 1869, and James and Eleanor Lewis settled in with their toddler and newborn a few months before the Bridges arrived. But the Lewises went back to the Falkland Islands a few years later, and the Bridges were the first who stayed. Mary Ann’s younger sister, Joanna Varder, came over from England in 1873, a few months after the birth of the Bridges’ oldest son. Joanna helped raise the children and was an integral part of the family for the rest of her life. The Bridges siblings called her “Yekadahby,” the Yahgan title for a maternal aunt, which literally meant “little mother.”
Charles Darwin estimated the population of the Yahgan as being around 3,000 when he came to the area in the early 1830s. (More on Darwin’s connection to the area later!) Thomas Bridges thought that estimate was probably accurate as of the early 1860s. Between the mid-1860s and 1880s, at least one other epidemic and the wide spread of other diseases killed many Yahgan. European and North American seal-hunters and whalers also devastated the populations of these marine animals, which were an important traditional source of food for the Yahgan.
The missionaries’ children also got sick, but their illness was more mild, and they all recovered. None of the white adults—who’d all been exposed to measles as children—even got sick. I can’t imagine how unfair this must have seemed to the Yahgan.
This was during what’s popularly considered the “glory days” of Argentinian nation-building, when President Roca gave away a lot of land to white settlers to promote European immigration, leading to rapid growth of the young country. His government also actively encouraged the killing of indigenous people who had previously lived in the land for thousands of years and who violently opposed the encroaching settlers.
I base this assessment on the fact that it was one of the five estancias mentioned in the museum I visited in Río Grande. The other estancias were significantly larger, but Viamonte was seen as being of that strata.
Analyzing Lucas Bridges’ relationship with the Ona is a complicated topic. He often describes the people in admiring tones, sometimes describes himself as relying on their help, but often sounds patronizing towards them. He was sometimes called “the white chief of the Ona” by outsiders, a title he doesn’t seem to have disputed too much…though the Ona themselves never seem to have asked him to assume such a role among them. The Ona didn’t have chiefs in the traditional sense, only heads of families or smaller clans.
The book—and how I came across it—is worthy of its own post. (Spoiler: My mom read it and kept telling me the story would be a great basis for a novel. Thanks, Mom!)
A daytrip to Harberton is currently ranked as one of the top 20 destinations in Ushuaia on TripAdvisor, and I was surprised it wasn’t higher on the list. In paid posts, I’ll be talking about my personal experiences staying at Harberton and meeting the members of the Bridges family who currently manage the estancia. Check out upgrading your subscription if you’re interested!
But there’s more to the story of the Yahgan! Stay tuned for next week’s post.
Interesting how being an orphan becomes a common thread. And unbelievable what they did alongside their children. Thomas was only 19?! Brave and crazy seem to go hand-in-hand!
I am so enjoying your articles on Tierra del Fuego! Can't wait to read the novel. I'd bought your first novel some years ago but never read it and seem to have lost it in a recent move. So, I bought another! It is now next on my "pile." I'm excited for your career and look forward to reading more.