Esteban Lucas Bridges | |
---|---|
Born | 31 December 1874 Ushuaia |
Died | 4 April 1949 Buenos Aires |
Occupation | Author |
Notable works | The Uttermost Part of the Earth |
Parents |
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Esteban Lucas Bridges was an Anglo-Argentine author, explorer, and rancher. After fighting for the British during the First World War, he married and moved with his wife to South Africa, where they developed a ranch with her brother.
Bridges was the third child of six and second son of an Anglican missionary, the Reverend Thomas Bridges, (1842–98) and "the third white native of Ushuaia" (his elder brother, born in 1872, having been the first) in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, at the southernmost tip of South America.
Bridges wrote Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948) about his family's experiences in Tierra del Fuego, the Yahgan and Selk'nam indigenous peoples, and the effects on them of colonization by Europeans. The book was well reviewed, Madaline W. Nichols describing it as "fascinating" and "of basic ethnological importance". [1]
Stephen Lucas Bridges, also called Esteban and going by Lucas, was born to Thomas and Mary Ann Bridges in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. The third of six children and the second of three sons, he grew up speaking English, Yahgan, and Selk'nam. Thomas Bridges was an Anglican missionary who ministered to the indigenous Yahgan and Ona peoples, and the first foreigner to establish a permanent outpost in the Usi Yagán, or Yaghan country, in the area currently known as Beagle channel.
Lucas Bridges learned the languages and cultures of both tribes from a young age. He was the only European to be made a blood brother of the Selk'nam and was invited to witness their council. [2] He also compiled a vocabulary of the Haush or Manek'enk, a small indigenous tribe who lived to the east of the Selk'nam, at the end of Mitre Peninsula. [2]
Bridges witnessed the effects of change as immigrants from European cultures flooded the area, beginning in the late 19th century. There were gold and sheep booms in the region, attracting many new immigrants. The indigenous peoples were decimated. Eurasian infectious diseases such as measles caused high fatality rates. Outbreaks in 1884 (following a visit by three Argentine Navy ships), 1924 and 1929 became fatal epidemics for the indigenous peoples, with devastating results. [3]
In 1886 Thomas Bridges resigned his position as a missionary; Lucas helped his father to create the Estancia Harberton (named after his mother's hometown in England), a sheep farming ranch, in a sheltered bay on the coast of the Beagle Channel. The location was a Yahgan safe port.
In 1898 Lucas Bridges opened a trail north from Estancia Harberton to the east end of Lago Fagnano, where the land was better for rearing sheep. It has been improved as a hiking trail known as the Lucas Bridges Trail. [4]
In 1902 Lucas and his brothers Despard and Will founded Estancia Viamonte in the northern part of Tierra del Fuego. The new trail was used to transport sheep between the two estancias. The Ona people had asked for their help in finding a place of shelter from some of the pressures they were under. The Bridges family provided them with areas on their estancias where they could live in semi-traditional ways. Lucas Bridges became the main informant for almost every traveler, national explorer or international anthropologist in the area, and was quoted in most reports on the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego. Descendants of the brothers continue to live and work at the estancias. [5]
Bridges went to England to enlist in the Army at the outbreak of the First World War. In 1917 he married Jannette McLeod Jardine (1890-1976). After the war the couple moved to South Africa, where he developed a ranch with his brother-in-law. He and his wife raised their family there.
Bridges returned to Argentina much later, to live out his last years and where he wrote Uttermost Part of the Earth. He died in Buenos Aires in 1949 aged 74, and was buried next to his father in the British Cemetery at Chacarita, Buenos Aires. [6] [7]
Tierra del Fuego is an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan.
Ushuaia is the capital of Tierra del Fuego, Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur Province, Argentina. With a population of 82,615 and a location below the 54th parallel south latitude, Ushuaia claims the title of world's southernmost city.
Tierra del Fuego, officially the Province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and South Atlantic Islands, is the southernmost, smallest, and least populous Argentine province. The provincial capital city is Ushuaia, from a native word meaning "bay towards the end".
The Selk'nam, also known as the Onawo or Ona people, are an indigenous people in the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile, including the Tierra del Fuego islands. They were one of the last native groups in South America to be encountered by migrant Europeans in the late 19th century. In the mid-19th century, there were about 4,000 Selk'nam; in 1916 Charles W. Furlong estimated there were about 800 Selk'nam living in Tierra del Fuego; with Walter Gardini stating that by 1919 there were 279, and by 1930 just over 100.
The Yahgan are a group of indigenous peoples in the Southern Cone of South America. Their traditional territory includes the islands south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, extending their presence into Cape Horn, making them the world's southernmost indigenous human population.
Julius Popper, known in Spanish as Julio Popper, was a Romanian-born Argentine colonial engineer, adventurer, and explorer. He was known as a modern "conquistador" of Tierra del Fuego in southern South America, and was both a controversial and influential figure. Popper was one of the main perpetrators of the genocide against the native Selk'nam people in the islands, and the circumstances surrounding his own death remain a mystery.
Anne MacKaye Chapman was a Franco-American ethnologist who focused on the people of Mesoamerica writing several books, co-producing movies, and capturing sound recordings of rare languages from the Northern Triangle of Central America to Cape Horn in South America.
Ona, also known as Selk'nam (Shelknam), is a language spoken by the Selk'nam people in Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego in southernmost South America.
Fuegians are the indigenous inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. The name has been credited to Captain James Weddell, who supposedly created the term in 1822.
Ángela Loij López, baptized as Ángela Gómez, was an Argentine-Chilean woman considered to be the last surviving individual of full-blooded Selk'nam (Ona) descent, an indigenous group that resided in Tierra del Fuego.
Estancia Harberton was established in 1886, when the missionary pioneer Thomas Bridges (1842-1898) resigned from the Anglican mission at Ushuaia. The estancia was named for Harberton, the home of his wife, Mary Ann Varder (1842-1922), in Devon, England. Bridges was the author of a dictionary of the Yámana or Yaghan language, and their son Lucas Bridges (1874-1949) wrote The Uttermost Part of the Earth about his boyhood, the Yahgan people, and the family's adventures in getting the dictionary published in Europe.
Mitre Peninsula is the easternmost part of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, located in the very southeast of the island, with its easternmost point, Cabo San Diego, 29 km northwest of Isla de los Estados, from which it is separated by Le Maire Strait. In the south, the peninsula is bounded by the Beagle Channel, and in the north by the Argentine Sea. It is under 4000 km2 in area. The highest peak is Cerro Campana in the southern Montes Negros range with 1026 meters. Monte Atocha is nearby the southwest.
The Haush or Manek'enk were an Indigenous people who lived on the Mitre Peninsula of the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. They were related culturally and linguistically to the Selk'nam people who also lived on the Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, and to the Tehuelche people of southern mainland Patagonia.
Martín Gusinde was an Austrian priest and ethnologist famous for his work in anthropology, particularly on the native groups of Tierra del Fuego. He was one of the most notable anthropologists in Chile in the first half of the 20th century, together with Max Uhle and Aureliano Oyarzún Navarro.
José Menéndez Menéndez (1846–1918) was a Spanish businessman based in Argentina and Chilean Patagonia. He was the initiator of many large companies that remain to this day.
The Selk'nam genocide was the systematic extermination of the Selk'nam people, one of the four indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego archipelago, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Historians estimate that the genocide spanned a period of between ten and twenty years, and resulted in the decline of the Selk'nam population from approximately 4,000 people during the 1880s to a few hundred by the early 1900s.
Thomas Bridges was an Anglican missionary and linguist, the first to set up a successful mission to the indigenous peoples in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago shared by Argentina and Chile. Adopted and raised in England by George Pakenham Despard, he accompanied his father to Chile with the Patagonian Missionary Society. After an attack by indigenous people, in 1869 Bridges' father, Despard, left the mission at Keppel Island of the Falkland Islands, to return with his family to England. At the age of 17, Bridges stayed with the mission as its new superintendent. In the late 1860s, he worked to set up a mission at what is now the town of Ushuaia along the southern shore of Tierra del Fuego Island.
Between 1883 and 1906 Tierra del Fuego experienced a gold rush attracting many Chileans, Argentines and Europeans to the archipelago, including many Dalmatians. The gold rush led to the formation of the first towns in the archipelago and fueled economic growth in Punta Arenas. After the gold rush was over, most gold miners left the archipelago, while the remaining settlers engaged in sheep farming and fishing. The rush made a major contribution to the genocide of the indigenous Selk'nam people.
The Fuegian dog, or Yahgan dog, or Patagonian dog, is an extinct type of canid. Its ancestry is a matter of scientific debate, though traditionally it was thought to be bred and domesticated from the South American culpeo, also known as the culpeo fox.
Rae Natalie Prosser de Goodall April 13, 1935, near Lexington, Ohio, United States – May 25, 2015, Estancia Harberton, Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina,) also known as Natalie Goodall, was a botanist, cetologist, illustrator, natural historian and local historian based in Tierra del Fuego Province, Argentina and known for studying the region's flora and fauna.