All that the writer of this cares to say is that willywaws are rude things, the rudest kind of things he has ever met, and he's glad that you can find them nowhere else in the world than in Magellan Strait. Like the man who made a mistake in matrimony, he is willing to sing hereafter the old song:
"Once was enough for him!"
When you got past that willywaw you began perhaps to speculate on the height of the mountains and you were surprised to learn that they are not high, as snow-capped mountains go; that they varied in height from 3,000 to 4,500 feet with occasionally a monster in the distance from 5,000 to 7,500 feet tall. They looked like the Alps or the Canadian Rockies. You soon realized that it was because they rose directly from the water and there was no slope to them before they began to shoot upward, as is the case in the great mountain ranges of the earth. The fact that they were snowclad, like all the other great mountains, also made you feel as if they were as high as such elevations.
As hour after hour passed you saw why it was that one writer had said that if you had taken the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps, and had moved them all here and had submerged them up to their necks you would get scenery like that which the strait presents. As you looked at the mountains and saw the bays here and there you began also to realize what another writer meant when he said that a hundred Lake Comos, Lucernes and Genevas could not present the lordly beauty of some of these bays and inlets. Perhaps you compared the trip with that of the Inland Sea of Japan. If you did you could only say:
"This is grand; the Inland Sea is beautiful."
And when we began to reach the end of Long Reach and to get into the wide open waters of Sea Reach and the fog shut us in completely many a person then was not altogether sorry, for he had been surfeited with it all. We went down to dinner just as the ships began to feel the Pacific's swells. The wind from the northwest began to blow violently and soon after 8 o'clock word was passed that we had passed Cape Pilar, where no shipwrecked mariner ever escapes, and that the fog had lifted and those on the bridge had caught a glimpse of it. There had been thirty miles of fog navigation in the strait itself. Two hours later as the ship was plunging and careening in the gale—they always have a gale or extremely heavy swells at the Pacific entrance to Magellan—we heard that the Evangelistas Islands, four rugged rocks with a light on one, had been seen, and then we turned in, knowing that in an hour or so the fleet would be headed due north, every turn of the screws bringing us nearer home. On the whole, every one was glad that if the fog was to be it had shut off the view of the mountains and glaciers and bays just after it had been finest. We had seen the strait at its best and there was not a man who did not feel something of awe over it, believing as he did that he had been in sight of the grandest handiwork of the Creator that the earth presents.
"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters.
"And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so."
Any one who has sailed through the Strait of Magellan can easily believe it was there that God began to divide the waters from the waters. Any one also who has sailed through the strait into the heaving, tossing Pacific, wrongly named for that part of the world, could realize the full significance of what was in the heart of a sailor of the midwatch who sang softly to himself as you passed him:
"Rocked in the cradle of the deep!"