Esteban Lucas Bridges (December 31, 1874, Ushuaia – April 4, 1949, Buenos Aires) was an Anglo-Argentine author and explorer. He was the third child and second son of Anglican missionary Reverend Thomas Bridges (1842–98) and "the third white native of Ushuaia" (his elder brother, born in 1872, having been the first) 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 came as missionary settlers to 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 the 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 western civilisation's tragic effect on them. They were decimated by Indian hunters, working for sheepfarmers with the complicity of Argentine and Chilean states. Measles, to which they had no resistance, was also mortal. Outbreaks in 1884 (following a visit by three Argentine Navy ships), 1924 and 1929 became fatal epidemics with devastating results. Both civilisations (the Ona and the Yaghan) have been erased from the face of the earth.
After his father resigned his position as missionary, Lucas helped him build Estancia Harberton in a sheltered bay on the coast of the Beagle Channel, chosen by the Yaghans as a safe port.
In 1898 Lucas opened a trail north from Harberton to the east end of Lago Fagnano, where the land was better for rearing sheep. The trail now forms the basis of a hiking trail, known as the Lucas Bridges Trail.[1]. In 1902 Lucas and his brothers established Estancia Viamonte in the northern part of Tierra del Fuego, and the new trail was used to transport sheep between the two estancias.[2]
Lucas went to England to enlist in the army to fight in World War I and in 1917 married Jannette McLeod Jardine (1890-1976). After the war he moved to South Africa where he established a ranch with his brother-in-law. Finally, he moved back Argentina, where he lived out his last years. He died in Buenos Aires and is buried in the British Cemetery at Chacarita, Buenos Aires,[3], where his father had been buried.[4]