It was a journey Bruce Chatwin hankered to make: to Southampton and the grave of General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the exiled Argentine dictator described in the Southampton Times after his funeral in 1877 as ‘one of the most cruel, remorseless and sanguinary tyrants who ever existed on Earth’. Chatwin died before I could accompany him to the Hill Lane Cemetery, but four years later I stood with his widow in front of Rosas’s ornamented tomb in Buenos Aires as we prepared to meander south on a 2,000-mile car journey in his footsteps.
In 1989, the year of Chatwin’s death, President Menem decided to have Rosas’s remains repatriated as a gesture of national reconciliation. Their arrival was greeted by mounted lancers wearing Rosas’s signature red uniform. But his bones were still contentious. W.H. Hudson’s great-niece told us that the original grave in Southampton – Rosas ended his days as a dairy farmer in nearby Swaythling – had been destroyed by bombing in the second world war that had killed some stray cattle. The returned relics were unlikely to be Rosas’s. ‘People say they are the bones of a cow.’
To read Matthew Carr’s ‘grim history’ of Patagonia is to realise how much of our understanding of this evocative region has been based on a succession of monstrous misidentifications and misconceptions. As the author does not flinch from reminding us, the vast territory which Rosas had sought to subjugate in his Desert Campaign (1833-4) – and which Chatwin’s 1977 travel book In Patagonia resuscitated as a mysterious, exotic wilderness – was misunderstood by outsiders from the start.
Take its name. The first European to clap eyes on the southernmost straits he christened was the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan.
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