South America Observations and Impressions

Next morning we were up on the bridge beside our friendly captain at the first glimmer of dawn. The vessel, going at half speed during the night, had covered no great distance, but the character of the scenery had already changed. Here in Long Reach the Strait was only three miles wide. The spiry pinnacles of Desolation Island had been replaced by mountains nearly or quite as high, but of more rounded forms, their faces breaking down sometimes in cliffs, but more frequently in steep, bare slopes of rock to the deep waters, their glens filled with blue glaciers, which sometimes came within two hundred yards of the sea, their upper slopes covered with snow or névé, which seemed to form vast ice fields stretching far back inland. Clouds lay heavy on these snows, so only here and there could one discern the outlines of a peak, and conjecture its height. The tops seemed to average from twenty-five hundred to four thousand feet, and the level of the line of perpetual snow to be somewhat over three thousand feet, varying according to the exposure, the line being, of course, a little higher on the south side, whose slopes face the north. On the lower declivities towards the sea there was now some grass, and in sheltered places, such as the heads of inlets, a little thick, low scrub of trees, probably of the two Antarctic beeches,72 which are here the commonest trees. What most struck us was the similarity of the mountain lines and their general character to those of the extreme north of Norway, between Tromsö and the North Cape. Everything seemed to point to an epoch when the glaciers, formerly more extensive than now, rounded off the tops of the ridges, and smoothed the surfaces, just as one finds them rounded and smoothed along the Lyngen fjord on this side the North Cape. It is also natural to suppose that rain and wind, which seem to be less copious and less violent in this part of the Straits than at their western opening, have done less here than they do there to carve the peaks into sharp spires and jagged precipices.

The day, when it came, was dark, for a grey pall of cloud covered sea and mountains; but as this was the usual weather, and suited the sternness of the landscape, we regretted only the impossibility of seeing the tops of the highest hills that rose out of the undulating snow plateau which lies back from the shores. Very solemn was this long, slightly winding channel, deep and smooth, broken rarely by an island or a rock, but now and then shewing a seductive little bay with a patch of green. Sometimes in a glen running back to the foot of a glacier one caught the white flash of a waterfall. The remarkable purity of the ice and smallness of the moraines may be attributed to the fact that the glaciers seemed to be seldom overhung by cliffs whence stone would fall, and that the rocks were evidently extremely hard. They seemed to belong to the ancient crystalline group, granite and gneiss or mica schist, with masses of white quartz, shewing no trace anywhere of volcanic action. This region on both sides of the Straits may be a prolongation not of the great Andean Cordillera, but of the Coast Range of Chile, which (as already observed) mostly consists of those older rocks which I have just mentioned.

At Crooked Reach the view, looking back westward, was specially noble. On a green slope above a sheltered inlet upon the south side are a few houses, the melancholy remains of a Swiss colony, founded some twenty years ago, which failed to support itself in this inclement nature. Behind there was a long curtain-like line of snows. On the north two or three small isles fringed the steep rocky shore with a background of peaks dimly seen through drifting snow showers. In the middle the eye rested on the smooth, grey-blue surface of the great waterway, here only a mile wide, dark as the clouds above and darker still in spots where a gust from the hill fell upon it, silent as when Magellan's prow first clove it. For steam vessels the navigation is not dangerous, since, though there are in this narrow part no lights, there are few sunken rocks. A rock is always indicated by the masses of very long, yellowish brown seaweed which root on it and wave in the tide. But squalls or williwaws (as they are called) come down from the glens with terrific suddenness, and the water is so deep that it is often hard to anchor, or to keep the ship, if anchored, from dragging. Magellan moored his vessels to the shore every night. How did he manage to get through so quickly, against the prevailing west winds, by tacking in a channel so narrow, especially as in those days mariners could not sail so near the wind as we do? Perhaps he may have made much use of the tide, mooring when it was against him and pushing ahead when the ebb set out to the Pacific. The tide flow is, however, not so strong here as is that which enters on the Atlantic side, and it there rises to a much greater height.

About this point another change comes over the scenery. There begins to be more wood, and though it is still stunted, one notes patches of it up to eight hundred feet. On the north shore more recent sedimentary strata, apparently of sandstone and limestone, replace the gneiss, and a growth of herbaceous plants and ferns drapes the face of the cliffs. Then at the end of English Reach rises a bold headland, Cape Froward, twelve hundred feet high, projecting from the much loftier Mount Victoria behind. It marks the southernmost extremity of the South American Continent in latitude 52°. Here the coast-line, which had been running in a generally east southeasterly direction all the way from the Pacific, turns sharply to the north, and in a few miles a new scene is disclosed. The Strait widens out, an open expanse of water is seen to the northeast with a low shore scarcely visible behind it; and to the south, nearly opposite Cape Froward, a channel diverges to the southeast between high mountains on its west side and lower hills on the east. This is the north end of Cockburn Channel, which, after many windings among islands, opens out southwestward into the Pacific, and this seems to be the place where Magellan halted, sending out the two ships – one of which deserted him – to explore the southeastward channel. Looking up it one can see in clear weather, some forty miles away, the peak of Sarmiento, highest of all the mountains of this region, a double pyramid of rock peaks rising out of snow. It is of old crystalline rock and is described as by far the most striking object in all the Magellanic landscapes. Thick clouds hid it from our longing eyes. Its height is estimated at six thousand feet, and so far as I know it has never been ascended. That dauntless climber, Sir Martin Conway, who got nearer to its top than any one else has ever done, was turned back by a frightful tempest below the last rock peak.

East of Cape Froward, one is at once in a different region with a different climate. The air is drier and clearer. The shores are lower, the wood, still mostly of the Antarctic beech, is thicker, with many dead white trunks which take fire easily. The hills recede from the sea, and grow smoother in outline, finally disposing themselves in low flat-topped ridges, six or eight miles behind the shore-line. A wide expanse of water, and of land almost as level as the water, stretches out to the eastern horizon, so that at first one fancies that this apparently shoreless sea is part of the Atlantic, which is in fact still nearly a hundred miles away. Signs of civilization appear in a lighthouse at San Isidro, and near it at a small harbour on the mainland to which a few whalers resort, boiling down into oil the produce of their catch. Presently the masts and funnels of vessels lying off shore at anchor rise out of the sea, and we heave to and disembark at the little town of Punta Arenas on the Patagonian coast, which English-speaking men call Sandy Point. This is the southernmost town not only in Chile, but in the whole world, twenty degrees further from the South Pole than Hammerfest, an older and larger place, is from the North Pole. It consists of about six very wide streets, only partially built up, running parallel to the shore, which are crossed at right angles by as many other similar streets, running up the hill, the houses low, many of them built, and nearly all of them roofed, with corrugated iron. It has, therefore, no beauty at all except what is given by its wide view of the open sea basin of the Strait, here twenty miles wide, and beyond over the plains of Tierra del Fuego, the great island which lies opposite. In the far distance mountains can in clear weather be seen in the south of that island, Mount Sarmiento conspicuous among them.

Punta Arenas was for many years only a place of call for whalers, since hardly any trading vessels passed through the Straits before the days of steam, and thereafter for a while a Chilean penal settlement. It grew by degrees and has profited by the discovery of lignite coal in its neighbourhood, though the seam is small and of poor quality; and within the last twenty years it has increased and thriven because sheep farming has been started on an extensive scale on the mainland of Patagonia as well as in Tierra del Fuego and some of the adjoining islands. All the sheep ranchmen within a range exceeding several days' journey come here for their supplies and all ship their wool from here, so it can now boast to be the leading commercial centre of the region, having no rival within a thousand miles. Whether it can develop much further may be doubtful, for traffic through the Straits will not greatly increase against the competition of the Trans-Andine railway for passengers and that of the Panama Canal for goods, and most of the land fit for sheep farming has been already taken up. Neither the whale fishery nor sealing is now prosecuted on a large scale.

The town is a cosmopolitan place, in which English, as well as Spanish and to a less extent German (for the steamers of a well-appointed German line call frequently), is spoken; people engaged in the sheep trade come and go from the Falkland Islands, and the ocean liners keep it in touch with the distant world of Valparaiso and Buenos Aires and Europe. It is the same distance to the south of the Equator as the Straits of Belleisle in Labrador is to the north, but the climate here is far more equable. It is never warm, but the winters are not severe, there is little snow, and frosts are moderated by the adjoining sea. The air is dry and healthy with a rainfall of only ten inches in the year. Though the landscape is bare, for trees can with difficulty be induced to grow, and though there is much wind and no shelter, still we found something attractive in this remote and singular spot, for one has a constantly stimulative sense of the vast expanse of sky and sea and the distant plain of Tierra del Fuego, with a touch of mystery in the still more distant ranges of that island which just shew their snowy peaks on the horizon. The light over sea and shore has an exquisite pearly clearness which reminds one of the similar light that floats over the lagoons between Venice and Aquileia. Can this peculiar quality in the atmosphere be due, here as there, to the presence of a large body of comparatively smooth and shallow water, mirroring back to heaven the light that it receives?

Tierra del Fuego, which one had been wont to think of as a land of dense forests and wild mountains, is, as seen from Punta Arenas, and all along the eastern part of the Straits from this point to the Atlantic, a featureless level. Its northern part is flat, like the Patagonian mainland, which is itself the southernmost part of the great Argentine plain. Some parts are arid, but most of it is well grassed, excellent for sheep. Only in the far south are there mountains, the eastern prolongation of the range that runs (interrupted by channels between the isles) southeast from Cape Pilar. Neither along the shores of the Strait nor in those southern mountains are there any signs of volcanic action, but I was told that such evidences do exist at the extreme eastern end of the island, and there are in the Patagonian mainland, a little way north of the Straits, a large crater and a lava stream eighteen miles in length, the last manifestations to the south of those volcanic forces which are visible along the whole line of the Andes northward to Panama. Both in Tierra del Fuego and on the mainland there are left a few Patagonian aborigines. Those who dwell in the island are of the Ona tribe, tall men who, like the Tehuelches that roam over the mainland, answer to the description of the Patagonian giants given by the early Spanish and English navigators. Pigafetta relates that when Magellan's men had, near Port St. Julian, where he wintered, guilefully entrapped and fettered one of these giants, he cried out on Setebos to aid him, "that is," says Pigafetta, "the big devil" (il gran demonio). Shakespeare would seem to have taken from this account, through Eden's Decades of the New World, the Setebos whom Caliban names as "his dam's god" in the Tempest.73 The Onas who used to come down to Punta Arenas to sell guanaco skins and obtain ardent spirits, are now seldom seen. Strong liquor was too much for them, as it was for Caliban, and has reduced their numbers. It is curious that the far more abject Fuegians, who love tobacco, detest intoxicating liquors. But the chief calamity that befell this interesting tribe was the discovery that the more level parts of Tierra del Fuego are fit for sheep. The ranchmen drove off the Onas: the Onas retaliated by stealing the sheep and when they got a chance, shooting the ranchmen with arrows, for they have scarcely any firearms. The ranchmen then took to shooting the Onas at sight, so that now, out of three thousand who used to inhabit Tierra del Fuego, there are said to remain only three hundred, defending themselves in the recesses of the wooded mountains in the extreme south of the island. They are manly fellows of great strength and courage, and go about clothed only with a guanaco skin. Few guanacos are now left, for they also have had to make way for the sheep.74

After midnight the steamer left Punta Arenas for the Atlantic. Rising at daybreak I saw the eastern half of the Straits, than which nothing could be less like the western half. After traversing for some distance the wide basin between the mainland and Tierra del Fuego, on the west shore of which Punta Arenas stands, we reached the part of the Strait called the Second Narrows, where the passage, between low bluffs of hard earth on each side, is only a few miles wide, and then emerged from this into another large basin. Twenty miles further come the First Narrows, narrower than the Second, and then a wide bay, which in its turn opens into the Atlantic between two low capes, that on the north being Virgenes, and that on the south Espiritu Santo. Here it was that Magellan anchored while his two small ships went ahead to explore. The space between the capes, which is the eastern mouth of the Straits, is about ten miles wide. The coast here, as well as both shores of the Straits all the way from Punta Arenas, is perfectly flat, with a very slight rise of ground some miles back on the Patagonian side. Clear as was the air, no hills were visible in the distance, neither those in the south of Tierra del Fuego nor those westwards behind Cape Froward, where the Andes end. Over all this vast plain not a dwelling or sign of life could be discerned save the lighthouse on Cape Virgenes, where the boundary line between Chile and Argentina strikes the sea. The northeastern part of Tierra del Fuego belongs to the latter, the southwestern part to Chile. From below the cape, a low point runs out into the sea, to which British mariners have given the familiar name of Dungeness from its similarity to that curious shingle bank which the tides of the English Channel have piled up on the coast of Kent. It is, however, much shorter than our Dungeness and the pebbles of the shingle are smaller.

Before I close this account of the Straits, a few remarks may be added on their general physical character, which some of my readers may have pictured to themselves as very different from what one finds them to be. I had myself done this, fancying them to be a channel long and narrow all the way from ocean to ocean, a channel between steep, dark hills, covered with dense forests, with volcanoes, more or less extinct, rising behind. Nothing could be further from the reality.

Magellan's Straits are unlike any other straits in this respect, that the physical aspect of the two ends is entirely different. The character of the shores on each side is the same in each part of the channel, but both shores of the eastern half, from the Atlantic to Cape Froward, are unlike those of the western half from Cape Froward to the Pacific. The former has low banks, with smooth outlines, slopes of earth or sand dipping into shallow water, and a climate extremely dry. The latter half is enclosed between high, steep mountains which are drenched by incessant rains. The eastern half is a channel, narrow at two points only, leading through the southernmost part of the vast Argentine plain, which has apparently been raised from the sea bottom in comparatively recent times. The western half is a deep narrow cut through the extremity of a great mountain system that stretches north for thousands of miles, forming the western edge of South America, and the rocks on each side of it are ancient (palæozoic or earlier). The western half is grand and solemn, with its deep waters mirroring white crags and blue glaciers. The low eastern half has no beauty save that which belongs to vast open spaces of level land and smooth water over which broods the silence of a clear and lucent air. A more singular contrast, all within a few hours' steaming, it would be hard to find. Unlike, however, as these two halves of the Straits are, they are both impressive in the sense they give of remoteness and mystery, a passage between two oceans through a wilderness most of which is likely to be forever left to those overwhelming forces of nature, rain and wind and cold, which make it useless to man.

Magellan's discovery of the Straits and circumnavigation of the globe was an event of the highest geographical significance, for it finally proved not only that the earth was round, and that the western sea route to India, of which Columbus dreamed, really existed, but also that the earth was immensely larger than had been supposed. A few years after Magellan, Pizarro and his companions, sailing southward from Panama to northern Chile, proved that the "South Sea" discovered by Balboa stretched so far to the south that it must be continuous with that which Magellan had crossed to the Philippines. Thereafter, not much was done in the Southern Hemisphere until the discovery of New Zealand and Australia two centuries later. But no great importance, either commercial or political, belonged to a long and narrow strait which it was extremely difficult to navigate against the prevalent west winds, so when it was presently discovered that there was an open sea not much farther south, it was round Cape Horn and not through the Straits that most of the English and Dutch adventurers made their way to plunder the Spaniards on the Pacific coast; and when the trade restrictions Spain had imposed finally disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century, commerce also went round Cape Horn, tedious and dangerous as was the passage to those who had to face the prevailing westerly gales. Even in the days when Charles Darwin sailed in the Beagle under Captain Fitzroy, hardly any merchant vessels traversed the Straits. It was the application of steam to ocean-going vessels that gave to this route the importance it has since possessed.75 It is now threatened, as respects passenger traffic, with the competition of the Transandine railway; as respects goods traffic, with that of the Panama Canal, and it may possibly retain only so much of the latter as passes between Pacific ports south of Callao and Atlantic ports south of the Equator.

The morning was brilliant with blue wavelets sparkling under a light breeze as we passed out to the east and saw the low, flat bluff of Cape Virgenes sink below the horizon. But the wind rose steadily, and next morning the spray was dashing over the vessel when we caught sight, through drifting clouds, of the shores of the Falkland Isles. They were wild and dreary shores bordered by rocky islands and scattered reefs, no dwellings anywhere visible on land, nor any boats on sea. In the afternoon, having passed, without seeing it, the mouth of the channel which separates the East from the West Falkland, we anchored in the deep bay which forms the outer harbour of Port Stanley, the chief harbour and village of the islands. The wind was still so strong that our careful captain decided not to take his vessel through the very narrow passage which leads to the inner harbour, so we got into the tiny launch which had come out with the mails, and after a tumble in the waves and a run through the narrows found ourselves in a landlocked inlet, on the shore of which stands the capital city of this remote and lonely part of the British Empire, a place of a few hundred inhabitants. Here was Government House, a substantial villa of grey stone. Indoors we found a cheerful little drawing-room with a cheerful blaze in the grate, a welcome sight to those who had not seen a fire during three weeks of almost constant cold. There was a tree beside the house, the only tree in the islands, and a conservatory full of gay flowers, looking all the prettier in such a spot. And from the top of its tall staff the meteor flag of England was streaming straight out in the gale. The village – it seems to be the only village in the colony – consists of one street built mostly of wood and corrugated iron, with a few better houses of stone whitewashed, and reminded us faintly of the little seaside hamlets of Shetland or the Hebrides, though here there was neither a fishlike smell nor any signs of the industry which dominates those islands. All was plain and humble, but decent, and not without a suggestion of internal comfort. The only colour was given by some splendid bushes of yellow gorse in full flower, an evidence that though it is never warm here, the thermometer never falls very low. The climate is extremely healthy, but the winds are so strong and incessant that everybody goes about stooping forward.

The isles were uninhabited when discovered, a fact creditable to the aborigines of South America, for a more unpromising spot for a settlement of savages could not be imagined; no wood and no food either on the land or on the sea. At present there are about two thousand three hundred inhabitants, nearly all of British origin, including a good many Scots brought hither as shepherds, for the colony is now one enormous sheep-farm, probably the biggest in the world, and lives off the wool and skins it sends home and the living sheep it exports for breeding purposes to Punta Arenas. Wild cattle, descendants of a few brought long ago by the earlier settlers, were once numerous, but have now almost disappeared; and the tall tussock grass, which was such a feature in the days of Sir James Ross's Antarctic Expedition (1840), has vanished, except from some of the smaller isles. Poor is the prospect for an agriculturist, for the climate permits nothing to ripen except potatoes and turnips with a few gooseberries and currants. As in most oceanic islands, the native land fauna, especially of mammals, is extremely scanty, and, what is stranger, there are, so one is told, so few fish in the sea that it is not worth while to face the storms to catch them. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, meant to justify the laziness as timidity of those who won't go out. Certain it is that the sea is always rough, and there are no fishing boats about. Neither are there roads; the population is so thin that they would cost more than its needs justify, and locomotion, even on horseback, is hindered by the bogs and swamps that fill the hollows.

One naturally asks in the spirit which fills us all to-day, whether anything can be done to "develop the place," i. e. to find some resources for the people and help them to make something more of the islands. Well, there are the seals which frequent the coast. They belong to a species different from that of the North Pacific, but with an equally valuable fur. Some are now taken by the few whaling vessels which still resort to these tempestuous seas, but nothing is done to prevent their destruction within territorial waters or to preserve a land herd, and it would no doubt be difficult to exercise effective control on such a wild and thinly peopled coast. Yet what one heard on the spot seemed to suggest that steps might be taken by international agreement for the protection and utilization of these and other large marine mammals both here and in the other islands in this part of the ocean. Some of the rarer species are threatened with extinction.76 The arrangements recently made by a treaty between Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and Japan, for the benefit of the North Pacific sealing industry constitute a useful precedent.