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Lucas Bridges
Topics: Anglo-Argentines
Esteban Lucas Bridges was an Anglo-Argentine author and explorer. He was the third child and second son of Anglican missionary Reverend Thomas Bridges (184298) and "the third white native of Ushuaia" at the southernmost tip of South America. Ushuaia was known as Ooshooia in the indigenous Yaghan language.
His acclaimed book Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948), published one year before his death, is a chronicle that covers nearly a century of the history of his family who started as missionary settlers in Tierra del Fuego in 1871, although his father had visited, and lived on Keppel Island in, the Falkland Islands and Tierra del Fuego intermittently since 1856. This literary classic tells a story of the clash of three civilisations: the white men, the Yaghan (Yahgashaga in Yaghan) and the Ona (Shilknum in Ona language). Having grown up among the indigenous tribes of the island, Lucas Bridges learned the language and customs of both tribes. He was a privileged witness of their lifestyle and beliefs as well as a witness of the tragic effects the advance of western civilisation had on them. These effects also included measles, to which they, unlike people of European descent, lacked any genetic resistance; outbreaks in 1884 (following a visit by three Argentine Navy ships to raise the flag and establish a sub-prefecture at Ushuaia), 1924 and 1929 became fatal epidemics with devastating results each time for population levels. Both civilisations (the Ona and the Yaghan) have been erased from the face of the earth.
Esteban Lucas Bridges helped his father, Thomas Bridges, build the Estancia Harberton after the latter resigned his position as missionary, moving from Ushuaia to this sheltered bay chosen by the Yaghans as a safe port.
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