But this is an account of navigation rather than a description of scenery. The ships went along in the slack water easily and smoothly and again you wondered at the stories of the difficulty of steaming through this wide deep strait. You passed through Froward Reach into English Reach, and miles away, straight ahead, you saw the Thornton Peaks, where Jerome Channel cleaves a way into the large mysterious and only half explored Otway Waters, a body of water like one of the Great Lakes at home. You saw no channel ahead.
As you approached these mountains it was like the turn in the Hudson up in the Highlands, where you seem to be headed for the rocks with no way of escape except by turning back. You knew from the chart that you were then approaching Crooked Reach, that runs beside the island called Carlos III. Soon you saw a bend toward the left and then you stiffened yourself a little, for you knew that in less than half an hour you would be in the one dangerous place of navigation in the western half of the strait. It is necessary to make an S curve in Crooked Reach, something like the one in the Subway at Fourteenth street, only it is one six or eight miles long and not of a few hundred feet.
Just before you reached the line running from Jerome Point to the upper end of the island of Carlos III. you saw black lines in the water running from shore to shore, now only a little more than a mile apart. These lines were foam-crested and they marked the meeting place of the tides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. The officers had no time now to look at scenery. Here was serious work. The Connecticut crossed the first one and so intent were you in watching preparations to cross on your own ship that you scarcely noticed her movements. But what was the matter with the Kansas, directly astern? She was swaying off to starboard violently. Then she made a swoop to port. Queer kind of steering it seemed! Perhaps it was the Connecticut that had swayed this way and that. Wait a moment.
Soon the Kansas got fairly straight with the Connecticut and then the Vermont took to dancing sidesteps this way and that. The helm was being shifted constantly in the endeavor to keep in the middle of the road. It was the Louisiana's turn next. Standing on the bridge you scarcely noticed any deviation, but when you looked at the line of ships behind you knew that the Louisiana was having its troubles keeping straight and when you saw the quartermaster twisting the wheel about, now this way and now that, you knew that this ship had been doing fancy stunts far from home.
Then you looked at those behind. On they came, and that straight line, the pride of any one who has seen it from day to day, went zigzagging, twisting and turning, thrust here and there until it resembled the twists of a snake crawling along the ground rather than a fleet of majestic ships sailing in a straight line. Once again a similar performance of the fleet occurred and you began to realize what the dangers of navigating Magellan meant. You realized that with high-powered vessels such as these ships it was easy to correct the swaying of the tides and currents, but you understood what smaller ships had to contend with.
We were going through at the most favorable season of the year, but you shuddered to think what it must be to be caught here in the winter, perhaps with darkness coming on, no place to anchor and a blinding snowstorm or a fog hiding the way and your steamer having hard work even to hold its own against the terrific current that might be running against you. Oh, yes, then you knew what a task, a dangerous task it was to brave the perils of Crooked Reach and you were glad you were on a warship with strength enough to scorn nature's effort to hurl it against the rocks.
You passed dangerous Anson Rock and you soon glided out into Long Reach, an arm of the strait that runs for fifty or sixty miles to the northwest almost as straight as a taut rope, and you then took up your glasses to look around. You saw the little island just off Borja Bay, where the famous post office of the strait was situated, a place where sailors rowed ashore to leave their letters to be mailed and their newspapers months old to be read by those who followed them. You could see the signs nailed to the trees giving the names of ships that had called, the dates and the ports to which they were bound. All that is done away with now that Punta Arenas looks after the mails and gives hospitable welcome to sailormen, but those signs, some of them a half century old, told tales of hardship, of shipwreck, of misery to many a man who could read what they really meant.
Then you began again to watch the mountains. Far down Snowy Inlet you saw the sloping sides of Mount Wharton and a magnificent blue glacier sloping down its broad reaches. It had teeth all over the lower part where it had cracked under the sun's rays, but back for miles and miles, as far as the eye could reach, the blue ice extended until it hid itself in the vast snowfields of the mountain's top. You were glad that the sun's rays came out from time to time to show you a patch of the top of the mountain, for then you understood what Darwin meant when he compared some of the glaciers in the strait to "a hundred frozen Niagaras." You knew that you were looking at one of the greatest accessible ice patches in the world outside of the ice cap of Greenland.
The wind began to strengthen and black outbursts of it were seen coming toward you from time to time. Then at last you began to realize what a willywaw is. It is a fierce blast that comes down from these mountains with well defined limits like the ray of a searchlight in the night. One moment you do not feel it and then you shoot into it and it tosses you about, churns up the waters, roars and barks at you and you feel that a demon from the hills is trying to tear you to pieces. Half a dozen times one of these willywaws got started for the fleet and then the sun came out, the clouds broke up and the blast was dissipated. You could see it all with your eyes, you didn't have to imagine it. It was as if some big policemen had scattered a crowd that had begun to torment a procession and had said "G'wan!" It g'wanned all right. Finally a big one gathered force that laughed at the policeman, and it fell upon us. With it came mist and dashes of rain. It spat in our faces. It wrapped our coats about our legs in knots. It shrieked and howled at us, and when we staggered through it it laughed at us, as if to say:
"You may be a great fleet of warships, but I'm not afraid to tackle you, just like any other ship or set of ships. I have fun with every ship that goes through here, and if I don't one of my rough brothers does the business. No one who goes through here can escape a willywaw. How do you like being tousled up? Ha! Ha!"