Reading Fuegian Narratives and Nonhuman Sensibility in Francisco Coloane’s Patagonian Tales

Abstract

One of the first Chilean authors to write extensively about Patagonia, Francisco Coloane has long been revered for his tales of life in the region. In Coloane’s literature, murderous deluges sweep away entire homesteads and pinnipeds smother sealers to death, events that have often been interpreted as symptomatic of Patagonia’s inhospitable climate and the difficulties settlers faced in the region. This article proposes a reading of Coloane’s work in tandem with examples of recorded narratives of the Indigenous populations of Tierra del Fuego, many of which were recounted by Coloane himself in his journalistic publications. In so doing, I show how the violence that is common across Coloane’s oeuvre constitutes just retribution whereby nonhuman life is exacting revenge for settler and hunter incursions. I therefore demonstrate that by reading Coloane alongside Fuegian narratives we can uncover new ecological and didactic currents in his writing that further complicate his reductive position as Chile’s “Patagonian” writer.

Keywords:

• Francisco Coloane
• Patagonia
• Tierra del Fuego
• ecological literature
• Chile

Born in Quemchi on the island of Chiloé in 1910, Chilean author Francisco Coloane’s (1910–2002) tales of life in the southernmost reaches of his homeland have been credited with expanding the geographical limits of the nation’s literature (Droguett 1974, 624; Ferrada 2004, 29). Long hailed as Chile’s archetypal Patagonian author, Coloane moved to Punta Arenas, the region’s largest city, aged thirteen, where he attended secondary school, and worked in a variety of jobs including on the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego’s (SETF) Estancia Sara, before relocating definitively to Santiago in 1936. Coloane was a prolific writer, publishing not only the short story collections and novels for which he is best known such as Cabo de Hornos (1941), Tierra del Fuego (1956), and El último grumete de la Baquedano (1941), but also maintaining a sustained journalistic output throughout much of his life.¹ He was conferred multiple accolades over the course of his long career: Coloane won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 1964, was awarded the rank of “Chevalier” of the French Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1997, and shortly after his death in 2004, Chile’s first Marine Park, located in the XI Region of Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic, was named in his honour.

In spite of Coloane’s prominent position in Chilean letters, his work is little studied in comparison to that of other national authors. Many overviews of Chilean literary history only refer “tangentially” to his production, and criticism of his work has been largely limited to contemporary reviews (Ferrada 2004, 14).² That said, the recent growth of animal studies and ecocritical scholarship in Latin American literature, as well as the development of Chilean ecocriticism, has seen some renewed interest in Coloane’s work. His preoccupation with topics including environmental destruction, social justice, state violence, and representations of Indigenous dispossession and assimilation in austral Patagonia during the early twentieth century led Chilean literary scholar Juan Gabriel Araya Grandón to term him a “protoecological” writer in a novel ecocritical reading of his short stories (2009, 47). A 2010 collection published in his memory, Coloane: Literatura y ecología al sur del mundo, enriches this reappraisal and offers testimonies from critics and colleagues who read his work definitively as “ecoliterature,” defined in the introduction by Pablo Vargas as texts that are “characterised by their unifying approach to the environment and community” (Vargas 2010a, 16). This volume additionally highlights Coloane’s preoccupation with Indigenous Fuegian history and culture, a topic that has also been explored by VanWieren (2009, 2010) in her work on Selk’nam women in Coloane’s writing.

Building on this emergent analysis of Coloane, this article proposes a reading of his work in tandem with Fuegian oral tradition. Focusing on stories from Cabo de Hornos and Tierra del Fuego, I show how instances of animal or elemental behaviour often reflect events recorded in Fuegian etiological narratives. As such, I contend that beyond Araya Grandón’s observation of a “symbiosis” between lifeforms in Coloane’s literature where they must cooperate to survive (2009, 42), his instances of somatic fluidity, nonhuman revenge and interspecies relations evidence a sensibility that echoes the animist ontologies of the Indigenous Selk’nam, Haush, Yahgan, and Kawésqar.³ This dialogue therefore reveals the influence of Fuegian narratives upon the ecological and didactic currents in Coloane’s writing that condemn the disruptive incursions of settlers in the region as well as the political and economic structures that led them there.

Parades and McLean have defined ecological literature in their seminal article focusing on production in Spanish as texts with “a clear message regarding the need to reexamine relations between human beings and other elements of Nature, which should result in increased awareness of the need to respect and defend our environment” (2000, 6). Literary scholars have since continued to debate the temporal bounds of this genre, which this early piece pinpoints as emerging in 1983 with the publications of Dolor de patria (José Rutilio Quezada, El Salvador) and Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú (Rigoberta Menchú and Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, Guatemala), with many finding evidence of these concerns throughout the colonial and post-independence periods (DeVries 2013; Marrero Henríquez 2014; French 2014). In the particular case of Chile, recent studies of texts by Coloane’s contemporaries including Gabriela Mistral, Nicanor Parra, and Pablo Neruda have revealed ecological sensibilities in their literature (Casals 2016b; Ostria González 2016; Wylie 2020). For example, Casals notes how Mistral’s Poema de Chile (1967) has a clear “ethno-ecological commitment” as it seeks to “protect the native heritage which she recognizes embedded in our mestizo culture” by decrying injustices such as Mapuche dispossession in Araucanía (2016b, 166). Coloane’s literary and journalistic corpus demonstrates similar aims in his denouncing of settler violence and Indigenous genocide. Beyond evidencing the “constant” thematic presence of Fuegian history and culture that Vargas (2010c, 32) has identified across Magellanic literature, I contend that reading Coloane’s short stories in tandem with Fuegian narrative allows us to identify new didactic currents in his writing.

Situating Coloane: Issues of genre and representation

The struggle to pin down the exact genre of Coloane’s writing speaks to his status as an outlier in Chilean literature. He remains a central figure in Magellanic literature, with his writing serving as “an invitation to become acquainted with the history and geography of the region” (Muñoz Lagos 2010, 26). Yet his animate, metamorphic vision of nature is distinct from that of other authors who have included Fuegian characters and settings in their work such as Patricio Manns (1937–2021) and Manuel Rojas (1896–1973). Coloane has often been identified as a member of the neocriollista Generation of ’38 whose neorealist work “denounced social inequality, structural exploitation of peasants and miners, corruption, and urban poverty, among other issues” (López-Calvo 2021, 12). His contemporary Latcham (1955, 644) argues that Coloane’s writing is neocriollista since it goes beyond the established parameters of Chilean criollismo in its consideration of the nation’s most remote geographical regions. Araya Grandón posits that Coloane’s inclusion of scientific content, drawing on fields such as palaeontology and ethnography, situate him outside of neorealist writing entirely (2009, 42). Ferrada similarly contends that Coloane goes beyond the parameters of realist literature (2004, 14), and in this vein, Petreman (1988, 124) has even read him as a precursor to Latin American magical realism. None of these categorisations fully account for the influence of Fuegian narrative or the explicit ecological concerns platformed in his work.

Araya Grandón justifies his designation of Coloane as a protoecological writer on account of his literature preceding the environmentalist movement that began to emerge in Chile in the 1960s, stating that “the creation of an ecological conscience in Chile certainly has Coloane as one of its forefathers” (2009, 47) Yet, as the wealth of scholarship on ecological literature in Spanish across the Americas has shown, these sentiments and concerns are identifiable long before Coloane, including in Chilean texts.⁴ Vargas has since argued for a distinct “ecological discourse” in Coloane’s work where instead of pitting humans against nature, he reveals the “asymmetric power relations that different social groups establish among themselves and with the environment” (2010b, 56). Following Vargas and Araya Grandón, I argue that situating Coloane’s production within this wider genealogy of ecological literature enables us to characterise his oeuvre as one that identifies with the “silenced native environment, and the interconnectedness between the more-than-human and the human” (Casals 2016a, 108), rather than simply reflecting the struggle for survival in a harsh landscape.

Coloane’s childhood in Chiloé, which has its own rich mythology drawn from Chonos and Huilliche tradition, introduced him at an early age to “a world populated by fabulous and primordial creatures, filled with secret zones where whales, sea lions, guanacos and caracaras reign” (Barquero 2000, 9). Coloane later developed a keen interest in Fuegian history and culture during his time working in Tierra del Fuego. The native Fuegian populations, all of whom are traditionally hunter-gatherers, comprise the Selk’nam, Haush, Kawésqar, and Yahgan who inhabit Tierra del Fuego and its surrounding waters, with the Kawésqar traversing north into the Patagonian Channels. The most comprehensive anthropological studies of Tierra del Fuego were completed by Breslau-born priest and anthropologist Martin Gusinde (1886–1969), who undertook four research trips to the archipelago from 1918 to 1924 and whose research continues to be used and scrutinised by anthropologists studying the region (Butto and Fiore 2021). Of these groups, the least is known about the Haush, who were already few in numbers by the time Gusinde arrived in the region. He considered them to be a Selk’nam subgroup, and so while some of his informants were Haush, he usually did not differentiate between their culture and that of Selk’nam individuals in his studies (Chapman 1982, 158 note 4). Until the early twentieth century, the Selk’nam and Haush were nomadic terrestrial cultures that traversed the main island of Tierra del Fuego, while the Yahgan and Kawésqar were maritime nomads who travelled in canoes. The Fuegian populations suffered considerably following the arrival of sheep farmers, missionaries, and gold prospectors in austral Patagonia that began in the late nineteenth century. Settlers often subjected them to extreme brutality; the Selk’nam especially were murdered by prospectors and ranchers including those working for the SETF as part of what has been termed the Selk’nam Genocide.

Coloane was an avid reader of Gusinde’s studies, even citing him as one of the two key “footprints” upon his work, alongside Charles Darwin (Coloane 2000, 89–90).⁵ Coloane recounted many Fuegian tales, especially origin myths, in articles published in outlets such as the Chilean state railways’ travel magazine, En Viaje (1933–73) and Zig-Zag (1905–64). He also interacted with several ethnographers who were working in the region in the mid-twentieth century, including the staff of the Mission Ethnographique Française du Chili Méridional (1946–8), whose member Joseph Emperaire published a landmark study of the Kawésqar, Les nomades de la mer, in 1955. He was acquainted with Federico Lawrence, son of Anglican Missionary John Lawrence who had helped Thomas Bridges found the Ushuaïa Mission in 1871 and raised his family there. Federico was married to Nelly Calderón Lawrence, a Yahgan woman who was one of Gusinde’s informants, and the aunt of Cristina Calderón, the last native speaker of Yahgan, who passed away in February 2022.

Coloane’s lifelong interest in Fuegian history and culture can be traced throughout his literary career. His early writing on Fuegian history and narrative, published primarily in En Viaje, evidences a paternalism that is common in the publication’s articles describing Fuegians.⁶ He represents their extinction as a foregone conclusion and infantilises the Kawésqar, for example, framing them as a “people without malice” who sport “Beatles hairdos” (Coloane 1968c). This reflects the prevailing view of twentieth-century anthropological scholarship on the Selk’nam, Haush, Yahgan, and Kawésqar such as Gusinde’s work and that of U.S.-French scholar Anne Chapman, both of whom “protested white massacre” but still “reflect classic anthropology’s commitment to the white gaze, complicit with the colonizing power” (Molina Vargas, Marambio, and Lykke 2020, 192).

That said, Vargas has identified Coloane’s approach to the Fuegian cultures as subversive even among his Magellanic peers. Upon his 1980 investiture into the Academia Chilena de la Lengua, Coloane used Selk’nam, Kawésqar, and Yahgan vocabulary alongside Chilean terms to describe regional flora and fauna. Vargas reads this as a radical attempt to “reconstitute our world and our culture” in a way that values Fuegian languages and situates them as part of Chile’s diverse heritage (Vargas 2010b, 42), This episode is testament to Coloane’s mission as an author who sought to decry dispossession, ecocide, and violent erasure on the biggest stages in Chilean letters. It further sets the scene for the reading presented here which foregrounds ecological justice and retribution via a focus on happenings that decentre the human subject.

Despite Coloane’s marked interest and numerous Indigenous characters, including the protagonist of his novel El guanaco blanco (1980), close analysis of his literature alongside Fuegian tradition is lacking. Collections including Francisco Coloane En Viaje (2003) and the aforementioned Coloane: Literatura y ecología al sur del mundo (2010) have reprinted En Viaje articles such as “Mitología de Tierra del Fuego” (Coloane 1968b, 8–9), but do not bring the content of these recorded narratives into conversation with Coloane’s work. This absence may reflect broader anxieties in the Chilean literary canon about the place and influence of Indigenous narrative: Casals has highlighted how greater attention to both Indigenous rights and ecological concerns started to be paid concurrently only following the transition to democracy in the 1990s, with the first anthology of Mapuche poetry being published in 2003 (2016b, 165). In the Fuegian context, significant recent literary works and scholarship are testament to the ongoing community work to preserve and maintain ancestral knowledge: as Hema’ny Molina Vargas emphasises in her epistolary declaration to the Chilean state, “El pueblo selk’nam sigue existiendo. The Selk’nam people exist. I exist’ (Molina Vargas, Marambio, and Lykke 2020, 191). Víctor Vargas Filgueira’s (2017) recent publication Mi sangre yagán/ahua saapa yagan, a history of his grandfather Asenewensis, and José Tonko Paterito and Óscar Aguilera Fáundez’s (2009, 2013) Kawesqár language revitalisation work and extensive research on Kawesqár narrative evidence current efforts to disseminate and study Fuegian languages, history, and culture.

For the purposes of this article, I have tried to identify examples of Fuegian narrative as recorded in sources that were known to Coloane, although it is of course likely that further tales were recounted to him orally, especially during his time working for the SETF alongside Indigenous labourers. The main source for this is Gusinde’s study, which features separate tomes on the Selk’nam (including the Haush) (1931), Yahgan (1937), and Kawésqar (1974), and was originally published in German. Lamentably there is little information included on Kawésqar narratives since as Aguilera Fáundez and Tonko Paterito have highlighted, neither Gusinde nor Emperaire, extensively recorded the Kawésqar oral tradition, and it is possible that a known lost part of Gusinde’s manuscript covered this topic (2009, 11). To account for this I have also attempted to draw some connections between the stories recorded by Aguilera Fáundez and Tonko Paterito in Cuentos Kawésqar (2009) and Coloane’s work. It is important to further highlight the dynamic nature of oral tradition: as Aguilera Fáundez has noted, each Kawésqar individual is the owner or kuk’ér of their discourse “in the same manner that one is the owner of a material object” (2013, 173). No two tales are the same as they are unique to that narrator and each iteration is distinctive. Further, when Gusinde recorded many of these narratives, Selk’nam, Haush, Yahgan, and Kawésqar ways of life had already been violently disrupted by European settlers, meaning that traditional storytelling modes and practices were undergoing significant changes: in the case of the Yahgan, for example, “storytelling had become a rarity” (Wilbert 1977, 6). My intention here, then, is to highlight some of the static versions that may have influenced Coloane’s work, reflecting on how he understood and interacted with Fuegian narratives and how this has facilitated a nonhuman sensibility in his short stories. Before embarking upon some close reading, I should also like to note that this is not an exhaustive study of the influence of Fuegian oral narratives on Coloane’s work, and that there are doubtless other examples from across his vast corpus and the recorded iterations of Fuegian tales.

The great Patagonian flood

Coloane’s affinity with the sea is a defining feature of his oeuvre. It is a constant presence in his work, as Carlos Droguett has observed, appearing as “the great frenzied murderer, the formidable creator of memorable tragedies” (1974, 626) qualities that mirror Yahgan and Kawésqar perceptions of the sea as the outer “envelope” of murderous ocean gods as recorded by Coloane (1995, 32) in a 1967 article. This section considers Coloane’s representation of a Patagonian flood in the tale “Tierra de olvido” (“Forgotten Land” from Tierra del Fuego), where a wayward torrent seeks vengeance for an estanciero’s incursion into a glacial basin. This example clearly illustrates the influence of Fuegian narrative on Coloane’s writing while also criticising the activities of settlers in austral Patagonia.

Recorded Fuegian deluge narratives are often etiological, accounting for the presence and forms of marine fauna. The versions of the Selk’nam flood myth recorded by Gusinde, for example, attribute the deluge to the inattention of shamans to rising water levels (Gusinde 1982, 2:600–601). In one iteration, recounted by an unnamed informant, the water’s actions highlight the need for conscientious shamans, especially in their role mediating between different physical actualisations, thus reinforcing the social hierarchy of Selk’nam society. When the water rises again, the powerful shamans are alert this time and halt its progress. In the first instance, notably, nobody dies. Instead, the Selk’nam run towards the rocks, but “Along the way, some of them became sea lions and other birds,” which explains why today “sea lions and birds prefer to sit atop the rocks and sandbanks” (Gusinde 1982, 2:600).

The Yahgan deluge myths recorded by Gusinde point to a more vindictive flood. He documented two similar versions, and although they tell the same story, their consequences are different. Both state that a great snowstorm was caused by a female black-faced ibis (Theristicus melanopis; at this stage in human form) who became offended by the Yahgan’s failure to revere her (Gusinde and Wilbert 1977, 26). The snowfall is incessant, eventually covering the world with ice. When it melts, in the second account, it causes a great flood that drowns anyone who has not managed to reach one of five high peaks in their canoe (27). In the first story, recounted by an anonymous informant, it is the ice that kills since it prevents the Yahgan from navigating (26). This tale ends with the Yahgan having learnt to always treat the sensitive bird, who heralds the coming of spring, with the utmost respect (26). The second, recounted by informants Alfredo, Charlín, and Richard, which takes place around the time the Yahgan women’s domination over the men is being reversed, leaves only a few survivors who restart the Yahgan as a patriarchal society.⁷

There is one further version of the second ibis story, recorded by Lucas Bridges, son of Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges, where it is actually Hánuxa, the moon-woman, who causes a flood to castigate the men for seizing power from the women. The moon falls into the sea, which “rose in consequence with great turmoil, just as it will rise when a large stone is dropped into it” (Bridges 1948, 165). These Yahgan origin narratives indicate that the deluge was necessary for the punishment of the women and for the refoundation of their society, or, in the case of the moon story, to reprimand the men for their transgression. In detailing these we can see the capability of nonhuman subjects to inhabit watery forms; it is the ibis who “[calls] forth a heavy snowstorm” (version one) or “lets it snow” (version two) (Gusinde and Wilbert 1977, 26–27), demonstrating that this sensibility extends to the elemental realm.

It is this same elemental “envelope” concealing sensibility that can be read in Coloane’s deluge. In a 1969 article published in En Viaje, Coloane himself recounts two further versions of the Yahgan deluge myth. Coloane met Federico Lawrence on board a ship traveling from Punta Arenas to Puerto Róbalo on Isla Navarino in 1936. He told Coloane the tale of how the Yahgan had originated from Agamaca Lagoon on the main island of Tierra del Fuego. Coloane would later name the cutter in his 1945 novella Los conquistadores de la Antártida after the lagoon (Coloane 1967, 30). He records Lawrence’s tale thus:

Their traditions speak of a rise in sea level or of a great deluge that flooded all of their lands, and when the waters retreated, only a canoe with some Yahgans and a whale killed by harpooning were left in Agamaca Lagoon. Since the Yahgan harpoons were made from oak, with a whalebone point… they supposed that the oak poles must have reproduced until they became the forests that today surround Agamaca Lagoon. The Yahgan fed upon the miraculous whale and, like the oaks, reproduced on the archipelagos of Cape Horn once more. (Coloane 1969, 4)

Coloane also briefly cites a further Yahgan version in the article, recorded by the French expedition: “In the first instance the deluge tradition must be mentioned, which they explain as the falling of the sun into the sea, which has since gone away, leaving no trace of its presence on earth other than a small lake in the vicinity of Ushuaïa” (Coloane 1969, 94).⁸

Possibly inspired by Lawrence’s account, “Tierra de olvido” is narrated by a man from Punta Arenas who is traveling with his friend Clifton to the latter’s small estancia in the Baker River basin near the Northern Patagonian Ice Field (Coloane 2008, 131). En route they encounter a strange old man, Vidal, who lost his entire family to a flood, and his deformed crossbreed dog which the narrator thinks is a combination of a water dog and a greyhound, but also resembles a seal (133). Clifton tells him that he doesn’t think that such an animal could realistically exist, but that he has seen a reconstituted horse in the Salesian Museum in Punta Arenas that has the skin of a guanaco, and that he once saw an island in the Moraleda Canal further north populated by rats that had learnt how to fish and hunt birds (136–137). This offhand observation is profound in that Clifton is unknowingly alluding to the somatic fluidity that is common to animist ontologies. To the two men, then, the nature appears “unnatural”: As Clifton observes, this is an environment “where even God seems to have changed” (136).

Coloane frames the tale as an origin myth by paying close attention to the glacial past of the area, located in the south of actual Aysén Region, Chile. In this way, he also evokes the notably icy deluge of the Yahgan narratives. The men are travelling on horseback alongside the deep glacial trough that the Baker River flows through: “It was a huge slash cut through the heart of the mountains by a massive glacier, one of those age-old, long-vanished rivers of ice” (Coloane 2008, 132). The millenary setting draws the reader’s attention to the geological processes that have left profound scars on the land, many of them carved out by bodies of water. While the estancia and the presence of men from Punta Arenas tell us that this is taking place around the turn of the twentieth century, the landscape is simultaneously timeless, evoking the state of potentiality and fluidity that beings find themselves in in Fuegian narratives of how the world came to be.

The trough is bounded by lush pasture, which the narrator describes as being ruffled by the wind, “like the fine coat of an otter being breathed on by a furrier” (Coloane 2008, 132). While recalling the efforts of fur trappers in the region, this image also has an important connection to a Kawésqar deluge myth recounted by José Tonko Wide (Kstákso) in Puerto Edén in 1975, which pinpoints the murder of a cursed otter as the cause of a great flood (Aguilera Faúndez and Tonko Paterito 2009, 53). Here Coloane evokes the violent, extractive practices of the hunters who drove the region’s marine otter (lontra felina) population to near extinction around 1900 (Delgado Rodríguez, Álvarez, and Pfeifer 2006, 3). Clifton reveals to the first-person narrator after their encounter with the lifeless Vidal that his condition is a consequence of having returned to his farm after a trip to deposit some of his wool yield to find everything destroyed after a flash flood. Upon the pasture Vidal saw “strewn about, the bodies of his wife, his children, and some of his farmhands and shepherds, already rotting and half-eaten by a flock of condors that had taken over the valley” (Coloane 2008, 138). The narrator asks Clifton whether this was caused by a rapid rise in the level of the sea. “No,” he replies, “The sea’s a long way from here” (140). Clifton continues, “What happened in this valley was due to a flood, the kind that occurs here quite unexpectedly [‘en forma extraña y caprichosa’ (Coloane 1968a, 168)] from time to time. Four years or more can go by without anything happening, but then, when you least expect it, a huge wave of water sweeps across it and covers it to a height of several feet” (140). This phenomenon, he states, is caused when cool summers and harsh winters produce flooding and landslides that dislodge trees which later become trapped in the Baker’s northern tributaries, forming dams that can give way without warning and violently flood everything at a lower altitude (140–141). In an evocation of the tale recorded by Gusinde and recounted by Alfredo, Charlín, and Richard, water usually breaches these dams when ice melt increases their volume (141). It seems as if these elements are conspiring against Vidal in order to instigate his removal; the causality of this process is complex and requires each lifeform to work together to create a deluge.

Yet Clifton’s scientific reasoning does not account fully for the insidious nature of the occurrence. The identified regularity of the flood means it is not simply a freak accident, and points to a vengeance on the part of the natural environment. In this way, Coloane’s fictional world is shown to be governed by an understanding of life that echoes those identifiable in the Fuegian narratives, where transgressions are punished accordingly to restore or create order, and cycles of life continue as the condors nourish themselves with the human corpses. While the two men understand the hydrological element of this process, Coloane shows that they have clearly not conceived of the autonomy or sensibility of the deluge. At the end of the tale, Clifton tells his companion that between the Strait of Magellan and the Golfo de Penas “there are lots of beautiful pastures like this, and no one knows why they’ve been abandoned. Forgotten lands, that’s what they are!” (141). Their failure to link the “capricious” or “unexpected” nature of the deluge with a verifiable desire to remove Vidal from the “abandoned” region visited traditionally by the Kawésqar means they conclude that it is an arbitrary process that Vidal was simply unlucky to be caught up in.

Coloane therefore implies that the true reason these fertile lands remain unsettled is that sentient beings have worked together to reject Kawésqar dispossession. Beyond the symbiosis proposed by Araya Grandón, there is a distinctly human quality to Coloane’s “capricious” deluge in its capacity for affect and retribution that posits the shared human interiority Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2019, 22) has argued is common to Amerindian ontologies. Unsurprisingly, this sensibility goes unrecognised by the settlers. In Vidal’s position as an honest, hardworking man unaware of his transgression, we can comprehend something of Coloane’s own relationship with austral Patagonia: he undertook gruelling physical labour during his time in the region yet was still complicit in Indigenous dispossession by working for the SETF. Notably, Vidal is driven to the Baker basin because the sociedades ganaderas have taken all of the good land further south (137). Coloane points here to the larger economic and political structures that created harsh conditions for Patagonian workers, but he does not exempt them from nonhuman justice. The arrival of the cleansing deluge is intended to teach the men an important lesson about the need to respect all forms of life, yet while Clifton and the narrator come close, they ultimately fail to understand what has taken place.

Bestial beaches: Human--pinniped relations on Patagonian shores

Pinnipeds are a common feature of Coloane’s tales that also appear in Fuegian narratives. The most common pinnipeds in Tierra del Fuego have historically been the eared seals Arctocephalus australis (South American fur seal/lobo de dos pelos) and Otaria byronia (South American sea lion/lobo de un pelo), and the earless seal Mirounga leonina (elephant seal/elefante marino) (Chapman 1982, 162 note 59). They have been hunted by Fuegian populations for centuries, who consumed them as well as smearing their blubber on the body to maintain warmth (Chapman 1982, 32; 2010, 94). For the Yahgan and Kawésqar, pinnipeds were traditionally the primary food resource (Orquera 2002, 146). All three of these species almost became extinct around the end of the nineteenth century due to overhunting (Soluri 2013, 259). Many of the early immigrants to Punta Arenas were sealers, and within this trade, the lobo de dos pelos was particularly sought after on account of its quality fur that was popular in the U.S. and Europe.

Seals, as Chapman has noted, “are not difficult to kill”, and they were “often simply clubbed to death, shot with an arrow at close range or harpooned” by the Selk’nam (1982, 23). This straightforwardness meant that upon finding a fur seal rookery, sealers armed with guns or simply with their fists looking to harvest as many pelts as possible could quickly kill huge numbers of pups. As pinniped populations declined throughout the nineteenth century, hunting methods also adapted, with sealers seeking out remote rookeries where females went to give birth, which became the only way of ensuring a large bounty of pelts (Soluri 2013, 253). The fur trade not only had a devastating effect on the marine ecosystem; sealers have also been recorded as murdering and stealing from the Yahgan and Kawésqar as well as raping women (Orquera 2002, 149). In fact, Luis Abel Orquera has suggested that the proliferation of diseases brought by Europeans to Tierra del Fuego among the Yahgan and Kawésqar in the early twentieth century was exacerbated by the fact that the depletion of their primary food source had left them with an insufficient calorific intake to withstand illness (2002, 158).

Owing to their important roles providing both sustenance and elemental protection, pinnipeds are present in many recorded Fuegian narratives, often being the subject of female affections that lead to sexual relationships and the birth of hybrid children. Pinnipeds also feature in instances of species transgression in Coloane’s work. In the tale “Passage to Puerto Edén” (Tierra del Fuego), a mussel diver tells Dámaso Ramírez, captain of the schooner Huamblín that is traveling to the titular town, that he was once amid a group of sealers who had intercourse with a seal (Coloane 2008, 118). The story follows the boat as it travels from Puerto Montt to Puerto Edén through the Patagonian Channels to collect mussels from smaller diving boats, depicting an area where Coloane recounted often having seen Kawesqár canoes (Coloane 1968c, 22). Kawésqar men and women both dived for mussels traditionally (Acuña Delgado 2016, 122), and the Puerto Edén area was well known to the Chilean authorities in the early-mid twentieth century as a site where sealers and mussel collectors would abuse Kawésqar women and implement forced labour, so much so that in 1946 they were banned from entering the Kawésqar settlement there (Martinic Beros 2004, 81).

The tale revolves around the crew’s dilemma when they realise that the cook, Villegas, has failed to purchase any meat for the journey. Villegas and Álvarez, a fellow crewmember, steal a ewe that has recently given birth from a nearby island to feed the men (Coloane 2008, 111). Her lamb follows Villegas, and unable to kill it, Villegas keeps it as a pet, himself replacing the slaughtered mother (113). The lamb disappears from the small craft during a storm, and convinced that Álvarez has killed it, Villegas stabs him to death (127). The tale closes with a description of the crucifix erected on a small island facing Puerto Edén in Álvarez’s memory (128).

The coveted lamb serves as a foil to the mutilated seal in “Passage to Puerto Edén”. The diver who tells Ramírez the seal story states that the events took place in the absence of any Indigenous women for the crew to force themselves upon, although he claims he did not partake himself (117). Not wanting to waste a good pelt, following the violation they skin the half-alive pinniped, but the next day, her mutilated corpse is nowhere to be seen; somehow, “even without her skin, she’d dragged herself to the sea” (118). One of the sealers, he informs Ramírez, “went crazy later… He’d wake up screaming, saying the skinned seal was pursuing him” (118). The sealer has to be held down to prevent him from throwing himself overboard so as to cease to be tormented by the animal, and the diver notes how the seal is “like people who die in shipwrecks and torment those who did them wrong” (118). It is able to inhabit a spectral form in order to exact its revenge upon the sealer.

In this example, Coloane’s attention to the plight of the violated seal highlights the brutality that often characterises settler-animal relations in the region. Notably, it is a violence that extends beyond the hunt: the men defile the seal as well as profiting from its fur. The nature of the bestial act prompts reflections upon the humanity of the men involved, and in this way, Coloane engages with what Calarco (2015, 36) argues is at stake in considerations of the limits of the human subject in relation to animals: “a better sense of the deep, internal workings of anthropocentrism and of the anthropocentric logic at work in the formation of other kinds of oppositions and violent hierarchies”. Through the violation, Coloane reverses the hunter-prey dichotomy as the sealer is pursued by the pinniped. Ramírez’s rebuff that such instances of bestiality and haunting are “old wives’ tales” in the plural indicates that this might not be the first time he has heard of such an occurrence (Coloane 2008, 118). The nonhuman lifeforms that suffer mutilation evidently do not let hedonistic transgressions go unpunished. The sealers’ quest for momentary pleasure might be successful, but the disgusting impression of the skinned seal crawling back to the sea to exact her revenge continues to haunt the Huamblín’s crew.

Coloane’s tale shares traits with the Selk’nam and Yahgan tales of a young woman who marries and reproduces with a sea lion, and whose family in most iterations kill the pinniped in revenge for this transgression.⁹ In the first, told to Gusinde by Ventura Tenenésk in June 1923, the girl is abducted by a sea lion, but eventually falls in love with him and they populate a rookery. She later becomes a sea lion herself and her brothers lament her disappearance (Gusinde 1982, 2:640–42). In the other, told by José Cikiol in April 1923, the girl falls in love with a sea lion after meeting him at her regular fishing spot. She has a child but refuses to tell her brothers who the father is. When she eventually relents, they force her to take them to the beach where they ambush the sea lion and kill him. Upon witnessing his father’s murder, their son runs out into the ocean and also becomes a sea lion. The brothers eat the dead sea lion’s flesh and give his sexual organs to their sister, a tragic memento of her indiscretion (642–646). Recorded Yahgan versions I have consulted mostly align with this latter narrative, except with a further vengeful twist. In narratives recounted by both Cristina and Úrsula Calderón and to Gusinde, whose informant is not named, the young girl’s sister lures her away from home, where the sea lion is residing with her and her family, so that her brothers can kill him (Zárraga, Calderón, and Calderón 2013, 28; Gusinde and Wilbert 1977, 53). When she returns, she sees them feasting on his blubber, and in the Calderón sisters’ account, their son partakes, remarking, “how delicious, my father’s flesh that I am eating” (2013, 28). She angrily throws a sea urchin at her son, who transforms into a thornfish (Gusinde) or a kelpfish (Calderón and Calderón), never to return from the ocean (Gusinde and Wilbert 1977, 55; Zárraga, Calderón, and Calderón 2013, 29). In the version recorded by Gusinde, the young woman also slowly begins to participate in the feast of her husband (1977, 56).

While the murder and consumption of the corpse might seem reprehensible, this story demonstrates the painful consequences of subverting a hunter--prey relationship that is built on mutual respect. As Ingold (2000, 72) has highlighted, “the hunter hopes that by being good to animals, they in turn will be good to him. But by the same token, the animals have the power to withhold if any attempt is made to coerce what they are not, of their own volition, prepared to provide”. The disruption of the marine ecosystem brought about by the colonisation of austral Patagonia in the late nineteenth century devastated this relationship, not only impacting the availability of this key food resource but, as Coloane highlights, violating the pinnipeds as well. While Coloane’s instance of bestiality is performed for gratification and is achievable by the men due to their disrespect for animal life, in the Fuegian tales, the shore relationships are usually founded on romantic love as well as sexual desire. The sealers, already causing damage by overhunting, further desecrate their prey in an act that, in turn, dehumanises one of their own. Prior to the event, they do not consider the seal’s will or capacity to seek revenge, and her faculties prove to be all too real as the sealer repeatedly attempts to end the torment by taking his own life. The parallels between “Passage to Puerto Edén” and the Fuegian tales therefore highlight the traumatic consequences of disrupting the respectful, sustainable relationship shared between hunter and prey in this context. More broadly, this tale shows how the exploitation and desecration of Patagonia for profit by settlers can be avenged in Coloane’s world, levying a profound critique of patriarchal and capitalist norms (Vargas 2010b, 77).

While in the girl’s return to the consumption of sea lion flesh, the Yahgan story advocates for restoring this dichotomy, Coloane’s solution is for the seal to advocate for her own sensibilities by reciprocating human violence, thus shattering western man’s “illusion of invulnerability”, a notion that Plumwood (1995, 34) has identified as being “typical of the mind of the coloniser”. As such, Coloane challenges the commodification of marine life and the cruel behaviour of commercial agents that goes far beyond the violence of killing animals for consumption. The respectful hunter-prey dichotomy has been replaced under the auspices of the predominantly foreign capital that drove the extractive industries that were crucial to establishing Chile’s presence in Patagonia (Soluri 2013, 244). Pursuing further links to capital, I shall now consider a carnal process common to both Coloane’s work and Fuegian narrative: metamorphosis.

Marine metamorphosis

Coloane’s propensity for hybrid creatures is not limited to those that are produced by interspecies relationships or crossbreeding; there are also notable examples of transformation from one species to another in his work. Instances of metamorphosis are identifiable in Fuegian narratives, and as previously mentioned, are often etiological, explaining the origins of a certain creature and its behaviours. For example, in one Selk’nam tale, recounted by Cikiol in February 1922, Támhken, a malevolent warrior, flees to the ocean during the first war as he fears for his life. He hides between the stones and grips them tightly so that he will not be discovered. The tale concludes that he can still be found today clinging to the many stones by the seashore as a limpet, camouflaged against the rocks (Gusinde 1982, 2: 607).

Pinnipeds are again important in this regard, especially for the Selk’nam. A stage of the Hain, the male puberty rite which “served to initiate young men, the kloketens, into adulthood and train them in the ways of adult society” (Chapman 1982, 1), includes a period where the men participating roll on the ground imitating the movement and behaviour of sea lions as demanded by Ochanhéuwan, a female earth spirit (131). This ritual has interesting parallels with Coloane’s titular tale from Cabo de Hornos, which delivers another poignant message about the devastation caused by overhunting. “Cabo de Hornos” sees two British brothers living on Sunstar Island near Cape Horn encounter a fugitive from Ushuaïa prison who tells them of a hidden rookery where sea lions calve in large numbers, meaning that there will be many high-value pelts for the taking (Coloane 1991, 16). Jackie and Peter hunt popis, the South American sea lion pups whose fur, if they are killed within eight days of being born and skinned within twenty-four hours, can be used by European manufacturers to imitate the more desirable pelt of the South American fur seal (15). Not only do the siblings hunt seals and sea lions, they have also developed pinniped mannerisms and features: Jackie and Peter “never open their mouths except for violent purposes or to gulp down food” (14).¹⁰ Jackie is in fact inspired by a man that Coloane knew during his SETF days who had grown up among the Fuegians and enjoyed torturing small animals (Coloane 2000, 86). Finding newborn pinnipeds is an extremely difficult task due to the remoteness of calving sites, and when the fugitive is revealed to be telling the truth about the sea lion paradise, the men are overwhelmed by both the sheer quantity of pups and the number of the killings that they enact: “Killing and killing!…The more quickly done, the better! As if possessed by a strange insanity, the men aimed their clubs and stacked up the little bodies” (Coloane 1991, 20). Having spent many years struggling to survive at the margins of both the Chilean and Argentinean states, in this moment the siblings and the fugitive attain maximum functionality as contributors to the sealskin export market of austral Patagonia’s early global economy.

The men tear the calves from the birthing mothers in order to kill them. The third-person omniscient narrator astutely summarises the laws that govern this cruel passage into the world: “it is useless for life to hide itself in the depths of its womb: man, with his instincts, enters in there to rip it out” (20). Here, Coloane shows his disdain for the cruelty and harm inflicted by the settler populations despite nonhuman lifeforms’ best efforts to protect themselves. The remote island abounds with life: Coloane describes how the outside is teeming with thousands of seabirds, the namesakes of “the aviary” (16). The island itself has the shape of “a reclining monster or seal” (17), and the sea lions emerge from its cavernous womb which the three men access via a long passage with “smooth, slimy walls”: the canal of “the island giving birth” (20). The destitute Jackie and Peter will only survive if they can continue to provide animal skins for the European market, which is what dictates the nature of their relationship with both the sea lions and with the fugitive, onto whom their sadistic attitude towards animals is similarly projected: on their final hunting trip, the siblings decide to abandon him to die in order to keep the knowledge of the aviary to themselves (21). In their attempt to secure exclusive access to the income stream provided by Sunstar, the siblings further forfeit their conventionally human faculties. Jackie and Peter’s murderous capacity extends to the fugitive in an attempt to supersede the “pan-human bond of vulnerability” imposed by the global economy (Braidotti 2013, 63), but as their death after departing indicates, their efforts are not successful.

DeMello (2012, 67) has characterised the relationship between animals and humans among traditional hunter-gatherers as one of “mutual trust in which the environment and its resources are shared by animals and people; animals that are hunted by humans are seen as equals”. The men’s actions in “Cabo de Hornos” represent a violent disruption to this equilibrium, not only in ecosystemic terms but also in their lack of respect for nonhuman life. The Yahgan, for example, did not hunt pinnipeds in their breeding colonies despite having the means to do so (Soluri 2013, 249). Instead, driven by the demands of the global market and their own survival, the siblings take more than their share and are punished by drowning shortly afterwards while returning home with their bounty (Coloane 1991, 24). It is the fugitive who remains in the cavern, though, through whom the reader experiences metamorphosis in the tale’s uncanny ending.

Jackie and Peter’s decision to depart from the island without the fugitive is conveyed by a single glance (21). This nonverbal communication reflects their loss of speech faculties attested to by Coloane’s earlier zoomorphic description of their mannerisms. Engrossed in his murderous task, the fugitive does not notice the siblings’ retreat until their boat is out of view (22). He sits down on the sand, staring at the scene of pinnipedal creation. Following an asterism, Coloane takes us into the mind of the fugitive as he regains consciousness, presumably after having passed out on the beach. The narrative voice switches between that of the third-person narrator and first-person interjections: “My god, what is that?” (23), as the fugitive attempts to make sense of the scene before him, at once situating the reader both inside his internal mania and outside of it as a spectator. He suffocates under the weight of one of the large male sea lions before realizing it is Luciano, a man he murdered in Ushuaïa in a fight over sealskins (23). The siblings appear beside him in chimerical form “…by his side he sees two large seals…no; they are monsters, half men, half seals…but no; they are Jackie and Peter, showing their clenched teeth, and they are smiling…” (23). A female sea lion births a cub onto his face and her entrails smother him, and the sows begin to take revenge on the fugitive for the violence that he has previously enacted (23). The scene is furious and chaotic; as he flaps in the water, fighting for his life, the outlaw becomes like the sea lions, swimming with them in the crystalline depths that turn into blood (24). Coloane does not clarify whether this change is real or imagined, mental or physical, but it is not a complete metamorphosis. Unable to embrace the potential of inhabiting a nonhuman form, the fugitive continues punching the pack of sea lions to death in an attempt to resist his integration with the group and maintain his human subjectivity. Winged cherub-like pups appear to line the walls, and he begins punching them too until he can fight no longer and develops his own flipper-like wings, that allow him to ascend “toward a place of light and peace” (24).

The fugitive has to adopt pinnipedal behaviours in his fight to survive. His formerly privileged position as a human subject is diminished as he comes to manifest in a hybrid form. The sealers’ anthropocentric view of life which they believe entitles them to hunt beyond their needs is challenged by Coloane as the animated island and its inhabitants seek their retribution, forcing the fugitive to become one of them or perish. Unlike the active participation of the Selk’nam and Haush in the seal ritual, though, the fugitive’s inability to “open [himself] to the sensation of animal affects” results in his death at their flippers (Goh 2009, 45). VanWieren has underscored a further edifying aspect of this tale, since “certain moments in the story function indirectly as a way to transfer [Peter, Jackie and the fugitive’s] guilt as murderers away from them as individuals to the society that left them in this state of desperation” (2010, 167). As such, we can identify Coloane’s critique as targeting not only the trio’s behaviour, but also the global economic structures that have landed them in this situation which promotes a relationship with nonhuman life that is “at once predatory and parasitic” (Andermann 2021, 5).

Conclusion

This article has sought to uncover new didactic currents in Coloane’s short stories by highlighting influences and convergences with examples of recorded Selk’nam/Haush, Yahgan, and Kawésqar narratives. By highlighting concerns about processes such as overhunting and dispossession, I have furthered the case for reading Coloane as an ecological writer who shares the “ethno-ecological commitment” identified by Casals in the works of other Chilean writers such as Mistral and Parra. Coloane’s advocating for nonhuman life in ways that chime with the sensibilities evidenced in the select recorded Fuegian narratives examined here posits a radical defence of the natural world that was innovative in the Chilean literary landscape and in terms of ecological activism in the mid-twentieth century. In recognising this, we can continue to address the enduring critique levied by Coloane’s good friend and fellow author Patricio Manns, that he has too often been praised only for writing about the South and not for his literary talent (Manns 1975, xxiii). Close analysis of his work in tandem with oral tradition shows a clear openness to understanding life in ways that reject anthropocentrism and promote sustainable forms of human-nonhuman animal coexistence, demonstrating the relevance of his work for “deepening and amplifying the debate around environmental and natural resource conservation” (Rojas and Vargas 2010, back cover). In the revenge that many of his human subjects experience, Coloane clearly shows the reader how “sometimes nature is more moral and compassionate than the best doctrines in the hands of bad men” (Coloane 1968c, 23), a sentiment that remains prescient in the context of the current climate crisis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Arts and Humanities Council Doctoral Fellowship Grant number 515892 and an Institute of Historical Research Doctoral Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Chant

Elizabeth Chant is an Assistant Professor in Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research examines the commodification of nature particularly in relation to travel in Argentina and Chile. Liz is currently developing a monograph on the trope of desolation in literature and visual culture depicting Patagonia while also advancing a project that examines domestic tourism to industrial sites across Argentina, Chile, and the Western United States in the early twentieth century. More broadly, Liz is interested in map and ephemera history, travel writing, and environmental history in Latin America.

Notes

1 Two reprinted collections of Coloane’s journalistic articles have been published posthumously: Francisco Coloane: Velero anclado (Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 1995) and Francisco Coloane En Viaje: Antología testimonial, ed. Alejandro Jiménez Escobar (Santiago de Chile: Pehuén Editores, 2003).

2 This trend has continued: the recent landmark volume A History of Chilean Literature, ed. Ignacio López-Calvo (Cambridge University Press, 2021) does not include any study of Coloane’s work.

3 The terms Yámana and Ya(h)gan have often been used interchangeably in anthropological scholarship. The Yahgan community has chosen to use this ethnonym; see Butto and Fiore (2021, note 3), and Chapman (2010, xxi–xxii) for further discussion of these ethnonyms.

4 A few examples include Barbas-Rhoden (2011), DeVries (2013, 2016), and French and Heffes (2021). On Chile in particular, see the Issue Section “Chilean Ecocriticism” in ISLE 23:1 (Winter 2016), and Casals and Chiuminatto (2019).

5 VanWieren (2010, 18 note 6) notes that the copies of Gusinde’s Selk’nam and Yahgan studies in Coloane’s personal collection date from 1951 and were well used, with many inserted newspaper clippings. This date is posterior to the publication of Cabo de Hornos (1941), but prior to the publication of Tierra del Fuego (1956).

6 See, for example, José Kramarenko’s article “¡No hay INDIOS en MAGALLANES!” in issue 124 (February 1944).

7 See p. 11 in Wilbert’s introduction to Folk Literature of the Yamana Indians for a discussion of the subversion of matriarchal order in Yahgan society. This origin myth is also apparent in Selk’nam tradition.

8 Here Coloane is citing Martial (1888, 213).

9 Aguilera Faúndez and Tonko Paterito do not record any narratives with seals or sea lions as central figures in Cuentos Kawésqar, despite their importance in Kawésqar culture. Acuña Delgado’s (2020) recordings of Kawésqar narratives undertaken in 2008–9 do include mentions of pinnipeds.

10 Blonde fur seals do exist, but they are extremely rare. See Acevedo, Torres, and Aguayo-Lobo (2009).