Skeleton helps trace story of Welsh settlers in Patagonia

Crew members and Nia Olsen Ritchie, in period costume, reenact the Mimosa mooring in Chubut.

By Julio Nakamurakare

Herald Staff

Discovery of 150 year-old human remains gives rise to unique TV documentary

The byways of historical developments are often exemplified by such evidence as linguistic traces of one language (the conquerors’) on the conquered people’s own.

Conquest entails violent confrontation over territorial domination and possession of other riches, but this is not always the case, as proved by the survival of the Welsh language (or the 19th Century Welsh spoken at the time) with scarce, or fossilized remnants still existing nearly 13,000 kilometres south of Cardiff, the capital city of Wales.

The story, as well known to Patagonians, the Welsh, historians and linguists dealing with the monumental achievement of the resurrection of a language on its dying phase, began in July, 1865, when the first wave of settlers sailed on the converted tea clipper Mimosa from Liverpool to Puerto Madryn, arriving on 28 July after a two-month journey that cost 12 pounds per head. It was the start of an epoch-making settlement of a people that chose the faraway, windswept Patagonia and its rough conditions to settle and make a new start in a place the language of which they did not speak and everything in it was foreign to them, as foreign as they were to the scarce local population of Patagonia, who began to refer to the Welsh migrants as the “gringos.”

Commemorating the 150th anniversary of that feat, the TV Pública Channel 7 will today at 6.30pm air the documentary entitled Los huesos de Catherine, directed by Argentine producer-filmmaker Ricardo Preve, narrating the story of the extraordinary finding of the remains of a Welsh migrant near the place where the Mimosa moored. Identified as the remains of Catherine Roberts, the bones remained under layers of mud for nearly 150 years when, in 1995, a building company working on a parking lot near the city of Puerto Madryn dug up some bones. The site was strikingly near to the shore where the Mimosa anchored in 1865.

Given the importance of the find, the Centro Nacional Patagónico (National Patagonian Centre, or CENPAT), and a team of specialists in skeletal remains, started to conduct research to identify the body.

The CENPAT team, led by Silvia Dahinten, soon established that those were the remains of a European woman aged around 40 at the time of death. A wedding ring and a button were found lying near the body, aiding the scientists’ research.

The tomb, the researchers found, was laid on an east-west orientation, as were other Welsh tombs from the 19th centure. There was an additional detail that provided more evidence: according to Dahinten, the body’s chin bone was slightly deformed, which coincided with a picture of Catherine Roberts, taken in 1865.

The archeological and anthropological circumstances were very telling, but further proof was needed to corroborate the deceased woman’s identity.

Twenty years after that finding, documentary-maker Ricardo Preve and a small technical crew resumed the research and came into contact with Nia Olsen Ritchie in Wales. Ritchie travelled to Patagonia in April this year to provide her DNA sample, which allowed scientists to come up with a positive match.

Filmed in Patagonia and Wales, the resulting documentary made by Preve, entitled Los huesos de Catherine, makes its début on La TV Pública. The documentary is presented by broadcaster Huw Edwards, who underlines that in the Chubut province of Patagonia in southern Argentina, around 5,000 people speak Welsh.

Apart from mate, asado, the tango and other staples of Argentine life being served in towns called Dolavon and Trevelin, and Argentine children reciting Welsh poetry, viewers will find a small recap of how this unusual story came to be.

In all, some 50,000 Argentine nationals can claim Welsh ancestry. But how did this remote and rugged land between the Andes and the South Atlantic become a distant outpost for a Welsh way of life?

The answer, and the epic story of the identification of the body of Catherine Roberts, are to be found in Preve’s historical-anthropological reconstruction.