Thomas Bridges (c. 1842 – 1898) was an Anglican missionary and linguist, the first to set up a successful mission to the indigenous peoples in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago shared by Argentina and Chile.

Adopted and raised in England by George Pakenham Despard, he accompanied his father to Chile with the Patagonian Missionary Society.

In the late 1860s, he worked to set up a mission at what is now the town of Ushuaia along the southern shore of Tierra del Fuego Island.

[2] After an attack on the Allen Gardiner,[note 1] Despard petitioned the missionary society to be allowed to return to England because of the danger to his wife and children.

[12] He spent some time on a lecture tour of England, when he discussed Tierra del Fuego and his work there, and helped raise funds for the missionary society.

While speaking at an award ceremony for schoolteachers in Clevedon, near Bristol, Bridges met Mary Ann Varder, his future wife.

Five weeks after the couple first met, Thomas and Mary Ann were married by licence in the parish church at Harberton on 7 August 1869.

[13] Two days after they were married, the Bridges sailed for Rio de Janeiro, en route for the Falkland Islands, where settlements had been established by the British.

On 10 October 1870, Bridges returned there with other men from the Falklands to dig the foundations and build Stirling House out of the iron structural elements delivered the previous year.

Another missionary, Mr. Lewis, traveled to Keppel Island to pick up his family, returning on 14 May with his wife, son, and new baby.

[15] After visiting Ushuaia, on 23 March he wrote, We have just returned from Tierra del Fuego, and can report favourably of our work there.

A spreading influence for good is manifest, and the future appears to me full of hope for these Southern Indian tribes.

Bridges later gave them space on his property, Estancia Harberton, in an effort to protect them from encroachment and attacks by Europeans.

[1] Mary's younger sister, Johanna Varder, arrived from England in 1874 to join the mission and help care for the growing Bridges family.

Bridges continued to work with the Yahgan, prosyletizing, teaching English, and trying to help them survive the rapid changes in the area.

In the late 19th century, gold was discovered on Tierra del Fuego, and waves of immigrants arrived looking to make their fortune.

They particularly encroached on the Selk'nam as they established large sheep ranches in the area, and then attacked the people for hunting the animals as game in their traditional territory.

Large sheep ranchers offered bounties to groups of armed men for proof of killing the indigenous people, and a Selk'nam Genocide was carried out.

By 1884 Bridges and his son Despard compiled a 1200-word vocabulary for the Kawésqar people (then called Alacalufe), who inhabited areas to the west of the Yahgan.

[18] His son Lucas learned Selk'nam and became close to the people; in addition, he compiled a vocabulary of the Manek'enk (or Haush).

The government granted him citizenship in Argentina and gave him 50,000 acres (200 km2) of land to the east of Ushuaia, which he and his family developed as Estancia Harberton.

[2] His house on the ranch was prefabricated in England by his wife's relation, Stephen Varder, and shipped to Tierra del Fuego in the 360-ton brigantine Shepherdess.

Aspinall relocated the mission to the Wollaston Islands, which he felt was more centrally placed in the archipelago to reach the Yahgan.

[4] In 1897, Bridges met Frederick Cook, an American doctor and explorer with the Belgian Antarctic Expedition, which stopped in at Tierra del Fuego on its way to (and later, from) the south.

Thomas' widow Mary Ann Bridges returned to England after her husband's death; she lived in Shipbourne, Kent, until 1922.

The Hestermann and Gusinde edition, still consisting of only the Yamana–English portion of the dictionary, was reprinted by Zagier & Urruty Publications of Buenos Aires in 1987.

[21] Chilean archeologist Alfredo Prieto, of the Universidad de Magallanes, discovered Bridges' English-Yámana dictionary manuscript, dated 1865, in the British Library in London.

Edited and organized by Prieto, the two portions of the dictionary have been published together online (2004–2013) by Campbell and Grace at their "Patagonia Bookshelf" website.