Terraferma

Year: 2001 Pages: 280 Bristol, mid-nineteenth century. The Anglican Reverend George Packenham Despard leaves with his family to found a mission on Keppel Island, a forgotten expanse of marshes three hundred miles from Tierra del Fuego. The reactions of the Fuegians to the work of evangelization oscillate between indifference and the most brutal violence, and the Despard family, after a few years, returns to England. Only Thomas Bridges, the reverend's adopted son, will remain in Keppel, who has his own particular project to complete: the compilation of a monumental English-Fuegian dictionary, now preserved at the British Library in London. Bridges' work, which Charles Darwin also used for his studies on the Descent of Man, represents a unique and moving testimony to the attempt to reveal to the world a society that was already in danger of extinction. A century and a half later, attracted by this singular human story, Ferrari decides to embark towards the Cape Horn archipelago in the footsteps of the first European inhabitants. The result is a text of extraordinary narrative strength, where Tierra del Fuego, a physical place but also a symbol of an elusive exoticism, reveals itself to be the final landing place of expert ocean sailors and eccentric extras fleeing from the world. A raw and desolate nature presses from the pages of Terraferma, the same nature, the same cliffs, the same empty horizons that hosted those romantic utopias in a time that appears infinitely distant to us today.