Books: Ona-Land

UTTERMOST PART OF THE EARTH (558 pp.”) —E. Lucas Bridges—Dutton ($10).

“When I was very young,” writes Author Bridges, “stories of little boys being adopted by wolves fascinated me . . . I yearned to live in the woods, far from whatever civilization existed in Ushuaia.”

The “civilization” that young Lucas Bridges resented was a tiny scattering of houses and shanties at the tip of South America, in desolate Tierra del Fuego. Ushuaia’s closest contact with the outside world lay 400 miles away in the Falkland Islands, where Author Bridges’ father had begun his career as an English missionary. The senior Bridges had sailed westward with his bride, and in 1871 arrived at his mission at Ushuaia harbor, in Beagle Channel. There he set about the business of building a few houses, civilizing the Indians (whom Naturalist Charles Darwin called, says Bridges, “if not the missing link, then the next thing to it”) and raising a family. Lucas was his second son.

Guanaco Country. Like his father, young Bridges was determined to learn the” Indians’ language, which was “infinitely richer and more expressive than English or Spanish.” By the time his father had resigned the missionary post and moved his family about 40 miles down the channel to Harberton, where he started a sheep and cattle ranch, young Bridges was able to make out most of what the Yahgan Indians were talking about. But an even bigger challenge confronted him. In rugged, unexplored northeastern Tierra del Fuego lived the fierce Ona tribe. Naked under their calf-length, guanaco-skin capes, the nomadic Ona stood as high as six feet in their fur moccasins, hunted their game (mostly guanaco) with bow & arrow, and spoke a language that sounded like “a man clearing his throat.”

Young Bridges learned a little about the Ona from the few tribesmen who came to the ranch for handouts, but he wasn’t satisfied. In his 20s, hardened by years of outdoor life, he determined to cross the mountain range into Ona-land. With the help of his brothers and a couple of Indians, he succeeded on his third attempt. After that, with gifts and with demonstrations of his own prowess, he won the suspicious Ona’s admiration.

Down with Tyranny. One of the Ona sports was killing off members of strange tribes, but now & then they settled for huge intra-tribal wrestling matches. When Author Bridges heard that an Ona was going to challenge him, he trained for weeks, then bested his opponent when the match came off. But his most important asset was courage in the face of Ona threats. He once flabbergasted some savages, who had bought rifles for the purpose of killing him, by walking into their camp and reproaching them for their unfriendly attitude. Bridges frankly adds: “I have never felt more frightened in my life.”

With Ona help, he laid a trail across Fuego’s biggest island and established a large sheep ranch in the heart of Ona territory. In his years of camping out with the Indians, he learned more about them than any other white man. The Ona way of life, says Bridges, was “communistic”; there were no chiefs. A man owned his wives (usually two, one much older than himself and one much younger), his weapons and his clothing; he spent his time hunting or feuding with other tribes while his women fished, cooked, reared the children. The Ona believed in neither gods nor devils, but were sure that birds could talk and that some mountains had once been human beings.

For a long while Author Bridges thought his savage friends believed in the spirits they imitated in their crude rituals; but the Ona opened his eyes by initiating him into the tribe’s all-male lodge. There he heard that once upon a time the women had ruled the tribe with witchcraft, until the men, in desperation, had banded together and killed all the women. To forestall any attempt by growing girls to reestablish female tyranny, the men had “invented a new branch of Ona demonology: a collection of strange beings . . . who would take visible shape” and scare the women into submissiveness. The women never failed to scare, but Author Bridges believed it “impossible that [they] were utterly deceived.”

Measles Massacre. When World War I broke out, Author Bridges sailed to England to enlist. After the war he returned to Tierra del Fuego only occasionally, spent much of his time developing frontier land in South Africa. He would have learned little more about his Indian friends anyhow, for in the ’20’s two epidemies of measles killed almost three-quarters of them.*

A weak heart finally forced Bridges to settle down in Buenos Aires. There, before his death in 1949, he wrote his book. It contains many of the faults its author saw in his first draft, which “like the country of its origin, was criss-crossed by precipitous gullies interspersed with tangled thickets and bogs.” But readers who follow daredevil Author Bridges’ trail will hardly care to complain about a few irregularities in the terrain.

*By 1947 the pure-blooded Indian population of Tierra del Fuego numbered less than 150. The white population, principally engaged in sheep-raising, had grown to over 10,000.