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Tierra del Fuego, the end of the world.

Tierra de Fuego, Ushuaia, Argentina

Divers at the end of the world, or Tierra del Fuego, which is just about one in the same. We’re in Patagonia. There’s no other inhabited place in the world closer to Antarctica. As the continent gets closer to the South Pole, it splits into multiple islets, pieces of a giant puzzle that neither want to stick together nor separate. Tierra del Fuego is the biggest of all, separated in the north by the Magellan Strait and in the south by the Beagle Channel. Two passages which link the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific. The boldest adventurers of yore travelled through them: Magellan fulfilled Columbus’ dream of getting to India via the West; Captain Cook, seeking fame, travelled around the world not once, but twice, if there was any doubt that he was the best; and the pirate Drake fled from the Spaniards after stealing their gold and sense of shame.

Not a single one of them, however, bothered to take a look at the naked loonies that inhabited the freezing land. If only the next travelers had done the same, because as soon as seal hunters and whalers took a look and a shot in these waters, a hundred years were enough to make a whole race disappear without leaving any more traces than a couple of bad photographs and thousands of shells piled up around their round shacks. They are, no, they were the Yamana people, nomads that not only inhabited the end of the world, but also dived in the frozen waters without any other protection than their own skins and a layer of grease. In a barren land without mammals, the protein from mussels and other mollusks not being enough to subsist on, they had no other choice than to get wet without freezing to death and hunt sea lions and seals.

Tierra de Fuego, Ushuaia, Argentina

While they believed in spirits, if they adored anything it was the fire they travelled with without letting it go out. Each family had their own fire, which they transported from the conchera to the canoe, and from the canoe to the conchera. Husband and wife hunted together, the first with harpoons from the gunwales, the latter with her hands diving. Meanwhile, the children bailed out the water that ceaselessly penetrated the badly sewed joints of the canoe. And so on, day after day, for seven thousand years, until we arrived. Our intentions weren’t bad this time, but we blew it anyway. On the one hand, we used up their resources and ruined their means of sustenance, sea lions, with our hunting practices. And on the other, we brought diseases known to us but not to them. Lung diseases or simple colds that grew even worse when the missionaries tried to civilize them by making them wear clothes. Because they were forced to run around in clothes to cover their shame, the Yamana were wet the whole day –very chaste but drenched to the bone. Because they wore their clothes in the water, they came out completely soaked and no fire was able to dry them out. Thus, the flu destroyed them in a few decades.

What a sad and stupid ending for an entire nation. Death by cold, clothes wet, but yes, very decent and respectable. Not even fire could save them, the one thing they never abandoned, the thing that gives their land its name. That’s what Magellan called it when he crossed the strait that now bears his name. Imagine the scene in 1628. Completely dark, sails lowered, and a cold wind. On the starboard side, total silence; on the port side thousands of bonfires and people dancing like ghosts hiding the unknown. On deck, the whole crew looks on with amazement at the end of the world without daring to disembark. And we’re now watching all this from the window of an Airbus 320. A mere stroll in the park!

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