Un petit texte (en version originale !) :
"THE
ALBATROSS
In In Patagonia I suggested that the Albatross which hung from
the neck of the Ancient Mariner was not the Great Wandering Albatross
but a smaller black species : either the Sooty Albatross or the black-browed.
The Sooty is the likelier of the two. Il is a streamlined bird that
keeps to the open sea. I think I saw one off the south-east coast of
Tierra del Fuego. The black-browed is everywhere, in the Magellan Strait
and the Beagle Channel, and ressembles a large Greater Black-backed
Gull.
On the south side of the Beagle Channel is the Chilean island of Navarino,
with its naval base at Puerto Williams. I hoped to walk around the coast
and get a glimpse of Hermit Island, which is the breeding colony of
the Black-browed Albatross. The wind and the rain drove me back.
East of the naval base there is a row of shacks in which live the last
of the Fuegian Indians – the Indians Darwin mistook for the ‘missing
link’. He compared their language to the ‘grunt of animals’,
being unaware that a young Fuegian spoke as many words as Shakespeare
ever wrote.
Most of the Fuegians on Navarino are half-bloods. But I met one old
man, Grandpa Felipe, who was said to be almost pure. He was a frail
old man, mending his crab-gear. He had never been strong. He had watched
his wife die. And all his children die.
‘It was the epidemics’, he said – and whenever he
said the word epidemias, it sounded as a mournful refrain.
The Fuegians were as skilful canoers as the Eskimoes.
A year and a half later, when In Patagonia was in press, I went to the
island of Steepholm in the Bristol Channel. My companion was a naturalist
in his eighties. The purpose of our visit was to see in flower the peony
that is supposed to have been brought there as a medicinal herb by monks
from the Mediterranean.
I told my friend the story of how, in the nineteenth century, a Black-browed
albatross had followed a ship north of the Equator. Its direction-finding
mechanisms had been thrown out of line. It had ended up on a rock in
the Faroe Islands where it lived for thirty-odd years and was known
as ‘The King of the Gannets’. The Hon. Walter Rothschild
made a pilgrimage to see it. Finally, it was shot, stuffed and put in
the Copenhagen Museum.
‘But there’s a new albatross,’ the old man said. ‘A
female bird. She was on Bass Rock last year, and I think she’s
gone to Hermaness.’
Hermaness, at the tip of Unst in Shetland, is the ultimate headland
of the British Isles.
From my flat in London, I called Bobby Tullock, the Shetland ornithologist.
‘Sure, she’s on Hermaness. She’s made a nest among
the Gannets and she’s sitting proud. Why don’t you come
and see her? You’ll find her on the West Cliff. You can’t
miss her.’
I looked at my watch. Il was nine o’clock. I had time to get to
King’s Cross Station before the night train left for Aberdeen.
I put on my boots and packed a bag.
There was a hold-up on the tube. I almost missed the train. I ran down
the platform at the last minute. The sleeping-car attendant was a craggy
white-haired Scot in a maroon uniform with a gold braid. Beside him
stood a small dark young man, waiting.
I was out of breath.
‘Have you got a berth?’ I asked.
‘Aye,’ said the sleeping-car attendant. ‘If you don’t
mind sharing with that!’
He jerked his thumb at the little man.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
The man jumped into the upper bunk. I tried to talk. I tried English,
French, Italian, Greek. Useless. I tried Spanish and it worked. I should
have guessed. He was a South American Indian.
‘Where
are you from?’ I asked.
‘Chile.’
‘I have been in Chile. Whereabouts?’
‘Punta Arenas.’
Punta Arenas on the Straits of Magellan is the southernmost city in
the world.
‘I was there,’ I said.
‘I come from Punta Arenas. But that is not my home. My home is
Navarino Island.’
‘You must know Grandpa Felipe.’
‘Es mi tio.’ ‘He is my uncle.’
Having exceptional powers of balance, the young man and his brother
found work in Punta Arenas as refuellers of the light-buoys at the entrance
to the Magellan Strait. In any sea they would jump onto the buoy and
insert the fuel nozzle. After the fall of Allende, the brother got a
job with an American oil company, using his talent on off-shore rigs.
The company had sent him to the North Sea oil field. He had asked for
his brother to join him. They would each earn 600 pounds a week.
I told him I was travelling north to see a bird that had flown from
his country. The story mystified him.
Two days later I lay on the West Cliff off Hermaness and watched the
Albatross through binoculars : a black exception in a snow field of
Gannets. She sat, head high and tail high, on her nest of mud, on her
clutch of intertile eggs.
I too am mystified by this story."
1988
– Bruce Chatwin –
‘What Am I Doing Here’.
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