Famous First Colonist, Lucas Bridges, Finds his Fetish at the Uttermost Part of the Earth1

Lucas Bridges, the famous first colonist of Tierra del Fuego, author of Uttermost Part of the Earth, tells, in that memoir, of finding among his possessions a “wonder worker,” a cake of Pears' soap with the power to work miracles. It is significant that such a finding should occur at the southernmost part of South America, among the world's purportedly most primitive peoples, on an island already—in the late 1890s—synonymous with the word “elsewhere.” As such, Tierra del Fuego is perfectly sited to allow an early representative of European colonialism to coin fantastic anecdotes about the local meeting of civilization and primitivism, and to send them back to the metropolitan centres of Europe. For it is in this anecdotal realm, and through the eyes of these Indians, that Bridges discovers his “wonder worker…, a certain magic soap, the miraculous effects of which the manufacturers have been too modest to claim themselves” (Bridges 219). When it comes to claims about the miraculous effects of the white man's commodity, Indians at the uttermost part of the Earth feel no such modesty—or so Bridges tells us in the anecdote that follows.

A Fuegian Indian living on Bridges' coastal property had been away some time, and in his absence his wife gave birth to a boy with remarkably fair skin and blue eyes. Bridges, whose parents were English missionaries, hastens to add that his own eyes are brown. When the Fuegian father returned to see his child for the first time, his wife told him of the “incredible transformation” which occurred when she washed the child, initially quite dark, with a cake of Pears' soap given her by Bridges' sister (220). This led to even more deception, this time on the part of the colonist, who writes:

The Proud father was so impressed by these wonders that he came seeking another cake of soap. Suspecting that he wanted to try its effects on himself and might be foolish enough to doubt his wife's story if the experiment failed, I hastened to tell him tha