Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [22]
When the Argentine governor of the Falklands felt forced to surrender them to the English in 1833, he had little power to resist, which didn’t stop him and other members of the government from grumbling loudly. “By the aweful language of Buenos Ayres one would suppose this great republic meant to declare war against England!” Darwin scoffed. He little understood the depth of feeling Argentines held for the islands, a pride that surfaced again in 1982, when the military dictatorship of Argentina decided to make another grab for them. Unfortunately they underestimated the depth of feeling English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher nurtured for the islands too. From my view, both were hard to understand. (The famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that “the Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”) What was supposed to be a quick and painless invasion turned into three months of war, handily won by the British, even though they were fighting 8,000 miles from home. Argentina suffered nearly three times as many casualties as the British—635 to 255—and their World War II-era military equipment couldn’t match England’s high-tech arsenal. Argentina’s military government resurrendered the Falklands in June 1982 and their authority quickly collapsed, leading to a new civilian rule in Argentina.
Twenty-five years later, the Falklands still fascinate the Argentines, and their passion is astonishing. Ubiquitous graffiti demands that the British ship off once again, and towns are cluttered with memorials and plaques pledging “We will return.” Argentine maps invariably display the name “Islas Malvinas (Arg.)” near the Falklands—the same treatment, incidentally, granted the large sector of Antarctica that Argentina claims, as well as the South Georgia Islands, the South Orca Islands, and the South Shetland Islands. An English friend who had been to Argentina told me that when he reported a stolen wallet in the town of Mendoza, the police shrugged and informed him, “We’ll give you back your wallet when you give us back the Malvinas.”
When the film ended, I turned my attention back to Walker’s history paper. He had titled it “Port San Julian, origin of the Patagonian myth,” and in it he made a fairly compelling argument that Darwin had been one in a long line of explorers to give outsiders the wrong impression of Patagonia as a harsh, sterile, wild land. The first subhead read, “Magellan lands in San Julian, and the cursed legend is born.” Magellan’s bloody mutiny and red-painted cannibal giants “made an impact in our collective imagination,” Walker wrote, and the explorer’s fantastical account, combined with the only other events outsiders ever seemed to know about Patagonia, including Drake’s harsh justice, failed settlements up and down the coast, and Darwin’s descriptions of plains “pronounced by all wretched and useless,” only fortified that myth.
“They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants,” Darwin wrote. But the myth had gripped him too. “Why, then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory?”
It was hard, though, when I later walked down the deserted Darwin Street, with the wind popping in my ears and the dust in my eyes, and all the stores locked and shuttered, and all the houses made of corrugated metal to withstand the elements, not to look around and think, myth?
Walker’s answer was to look to the water. But although Walker built his defense of Patagonia around the harbor at