This man did just what might be expected, they say, of any one of the Cape Horn miners. He camped on the beach, and worked away at the pay streak as best he could, until rescued by other prospectors; and he is still a gold seeker in the Cape Horn region.
Sloggett Bay is really no bay at all. It is a roadstead with sheltering walls on the northerly and westerly sides, and a very good bottom to hold an anchor. It is about as much of a harbor as a ship would find on the bar off Sandy Hook, save that there are mountains along shore instead of low, sandy beaches. For a northerly or westerly gale the shelter is as good as any one could wish, but the waves from the southeast drive in with appalling fury. Indeed, any southerly gale is dangerous, for the whirling squalls slew a small boat around until broadside to the combers, and then the end comes before the unfortunate gold hunter has time to think twice.
The gold of Sloggett Bay is marvellous gold. It is, as said, nugget gold as distinguished from gold dust. The traditional "nuggets as big as kernels of corn" are to be had there. I have seen them myself, and when one has seen a handful of such stuff he does not wonder that prospectors keep trying again and again, in spite of the fair certainty of death.
The pay streak at Sloggett Bay lies under water, as it does elsewhere throughout the Cape Horn region, but it is harder to get, because it can hardly be said to crop out at all. One must strip off about six feet of sand and gravel at low tide, and then shovel out the pay streak, carry it up clear of high tide, and there wash out the gold. Of course, when the tide comes in again the space stripped of the covering sand is recovered, and stripping must be done over again at the next low tide. That is very discouraging work, but no form of coffer dam yet devised by the miners has saved it.
They all agree that there is only one way in which the Sloggett Bay field can be worked, and they think that that way would probably fail too. The ideal Sloggett Bay outfit would be a big steam dredge, fitted to scoop up sand, gravel, and pay streak all together, and after running the stuff over the sluices and copper plates, to discharge the débris in a lighter, that could be towed away and emptied in water too deep to work. If such an outfit could hold on for a week, they say it would pay for itself. If it could hold on for a month it would make its owners rich. That it might hold on for a week or two is reasonably probable, but the chances are that it would become a mass of wreckage even before it reached the bay. The prospectors say that no dredge ever built for harbor work could stand a southeast gale there for an hour, and yet the sailors among them say that a dredge built specially for the work on the lightship model, with proper ground tackle for mooring fore and aft, could stand the gales there as well as the storms on the Georges Bank of Massachusetts are weathered by the lightship.
Among the stories the miners tell of the luck they have had is one that, whether true or false, is interesting, for even if false it shows that the man who told it was an original liar; as a matter of fact, I have no reason for doubting the story. Mr. Theo Benfield, whom I met in Punta Arenas, said that during a journey from the strait up the coast he stopped one day under one of the vertical earth banks called barancas in that country to pick out a fossil that he saw protruding. The relic proved to be a part of a mastodon's lower jaw, having two teeth still in place. It was in bad condition, and he was about to throw it away, when he saw that in a split in the top and side of one tooth was a bit of some foreign substance to which he applied his knife. He found that it was gold, that had, as he believed, been deposited there in fine grains by the action of water, and that the grains had united as deposited. The gold, as he says, was in a split in the tooth evidently made there when the jaw was broken. He related the story in support of a theory in regard to the origin of nuggets which he held, thus: Gold, as it comes from the broken-down quartz veins is usually very fine, but as the grains are carried along by the water they fall into little cavities, where, by the action of chemicals in the water, they are united. The split in the old tooth had at some time been lying in a place where gold dust had silted into it until it was about full, and the particles uniting had formed a curious nugget. Unfortunately Mr. Benfield was more interested at that time in getting gold than in questions relating to the origin of nuggets, and so smashed the tooth to get the stuff. He got, he says, over eight grammes from the tooth. If his story be true, he might have obtained many times the value of that much gold for the relic intact, but he did not think of that at the time, and so we have only one man's word in relation to the matter.
It is a remarkable fact that, in spite of all the prospecting done, no gold-quartz veins have yet been found. Louis Figue, a merchant at Ushuaia, in the Beagle Channel, showed me a specimen of nickel ore that had yielded a remarkable per cent. on the first assay; but the only bit of gold ore I saw or heard of was a small piece of free-milling stuff belonging to Bruno Ansorge of Paramo. It was rich, but where the vein was none could tell, for it was from a bit of drift rock called float by the miners, and had been picked up between Useless and San Sebastian Bays.
Very likely the placer gold found in all the streams of Tierra del Fuego (stream gold as distinguished from that in the beach), and that in the streams emptying into the Straits of Magellan, comes from veins yet to be found up in the mountains where the streams rise. Very likely systematic search would discover the veins. But the search would have to be made under circumstances that would make the fair-weather prospectors of Colorado and the grubstake eaters of the Mojave desert gasp. The mountains of the Cape Horn region are snow-topped the year round. The cold is not so intense as the early travellers would make one believe, but there is a strength and a twist to the gales—especially a twist—that is beyond description. And the gales come every day in summer and every week in winter. Expeditions have traversed Tierra del Fuego with horses, but the cheapest and the most comfortable way (in spite of the danger) to prospect the region is from a well-found boat. Moreover, every land expedition must contain enough men to keep up a military guard, because of the hostility of the Indians, while two well-armed, sober men, can defend a well-found boat from the savages, and if skilful and cool can usually escape the danger of storms.
But neither from boats nor from a land expedition has any one as yet been able to explore the higher parts of the mountain sides. Indeed, where nothing else prevents it, the tropical luxuriance of the evergreen beeches and magnolia brush heads off the hardy prospector. It is hard work climbing up rocky gulches and declivities under the most favorable circumstances, but when one must face fierce gales of wind and at the same time hew his way through a solid mass of brush covering the whole space to be explored, the task becomes too great even for a Yankee prospector. It never has been accomplished, and possibly it never will be accomplished; but, as they say very often down there, who knows?
There is not a mine camp in all the Cape Horn region south of the strait, though Paramo, with its three buildings, and say thirty men, is known as a camp. The placers, as found on almost every sandy beach of the region, are all soon worked over, and thereafter pay only day wages. So no camp or village springs up, as would happen were a rich true fissure vein to be found. But Ushuaia, in the Beagle Channel, the capital of Argentine Tierra del Fuego, has three stores and a small mixed population, besides the troops that maintain Argentine dignity, and, with its occasional Indian visitors, its happy-go-lucky architecture, and its heaps of empty bottles, is not unlike a North American mine town.