Where the Earth Ends: A Journey Beyond Patagonia - Hardcover

Harrison, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0719561515 ISBN 13: 9780719561511

Publisher: John Murray, 2000

Synopsis

At the end of the 20th century, John Harrison travelled through one of the most hostile environments on Earth. From the Argentine plains, he journeyed ever south, searching out the stories of natives and settlers, through Patagonia, the land where Magellan and Drake walked with giants, to Tierra del Fuego. On the tip of South America - the last continental land on earth colonized by man.;One morning a sign went up advertising trips on a Russian research vessel, so he tore up a year's lanning and added Antartica to the journey. Within days he was sailing through towering grey seas where in real life Coleridge's poetic albatross was shot. Then began an attempt to break through the ice and stand on the edge of the continent.;Returning round Cape Horn, he went north, through Chile's remote, wild fjords, where real journeys began to merge with fiction. He sailed through the mists where Byron's grandfather was wrecked, and walked on the bright Pacific isle where the real Robinson Crusoe taught his cats to dance.

About this title

Review

"His approach is thorough and his excitement contagious..." --The Independent on Sunday

"An engaging and entertaining narrative." --Sunday Telegraph

"An inspiring blend of new-look, literary, post-Granta traveller and intrepid adventurer. A glorious roundtrip to desolation and romance." --The Scotsman

"A fascinating book of insight, scholarship and adventurous travel, fired by childhood dreams perhaps, but fuelled by the skill of a writer from whom, I hope, we shall hear much more." --Sunday Times

"A most unusual and delightful book, full of surprises, ambiguities and strange quirks of knowledge, and written with attractive gusto." --Jan Morris

"Teems with erudition, anecdotes and facts that are a delight to retell... carries an echo of Raymond Carver, or even Carver's mentor Hemingway." --South China Morning Post

"A fascinating book of insight, scholarship and adventurous travel, fired by childhood dreams perhaps, but fuelled by the skill of a writer from whom, I hope, we shall hear much more." --Sunday Times

"A most unusual and delightful book, full of surprises, ambiguities and strange quirks of knowledge, and written with attractive gusto." --Jan Morris

"Teems with erudition, anecdotes and facts that are a delight to retell... carries an echo of Raymond Carver, or even Carver's mentor Hemingway." --South China Morning Post

"An inspiring blend of new-look, literary, post-Granta traveller and intrepid adventurer. A glorious roundtrip to desolation and romance." --The Scotsman

From the Author

A journey to the last land settled by humans
If you want to read a travel book which fully explores the history and poetry of a remote place, and doesn’t just record an outsider’s impressions, this is for you.

A chance encounter with a lost 300-year-old manuscript and a forgotten book led me down through Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego to the tip of South America, Where the Earth Ends’ - the English translation of the Aymara Indian word ‘Chile’.

I spent six years obsessed by a project to visit and write about the land where Stone Age cultures survived until the twentieth century. I found the last members of those tribes in wildernesses where reality blurs into myths, where the albatross shot by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner was a real bird, which haunted Captain Shelvocke’s ship as it fought Cape Horn. Then I went on, to the last continent, Antarctica.

I walked in dreams, you can too, Where the Earth Ends.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0719561515
• ISBN 13: 9780719561511
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296