Back of the scattered row of houses the first ridge had once been covered with a forest, but the trees for ten rods or more up the slope had been subsequently cut for fuel and other purposes, leaving a field of stumps. Above the clearing the forest rose rapidly in solid rolling ridges until six hundred feet above the sea. Then the forest thinned out, and in clumps and bunches of brush spread up the mountain side for a few hundred feet more, to disappear entirely at the edges of the glaciers and banks of eternal snow that were piled among the rugged rocks clear to the crests three thousand feet above the sea.
To add to the sombre aspect of nature incident everywhere to the winter season is the lack, in Ushuaia, of sunshine. The Beagle Channel is in 55 ° south latitude, so that in winter the nights are long and the days brief at best, while even such lengths of days as they might have in the open is cut down by the shadows of the lofty crests. The sun does not get above these crests until almost ten o'clock, and it disappears again soon after two o'clock. Even then its face is so often hid by the snow clouds above the crests that one may almost say that the village in winter is shrouded in perpetual gloom.
As a port Ushuaia showed a substantial wooden pier over one hundred feet long, built by the government for the use of its officials. At some distance from this was a smaller and more slender pier, built by a merchant. There was anchored in the bay the dismantled hulk of what seemed to be a big, worn-out, seagoing tug. It had really been a tiny cruiser, however. Another vessel of a similar model, but much newer and well painted, was a cruiser kept there at the call of the Governor, but just what he might want to call it for did not appear. Moreover, the tubes in her boiler had gone wrong and she could not have answered anybody's call. In addition to these two there was quite a fleet—say half a dozen sailboats of the sort used by Cape Horn gold-hunters—sloops and catboats from twenty-five to thirty feet long, while a tiny schooner that had once been used by the missionaries lay rotting on the beach some distance around to the west. The vessels afloat, as they veered to and fro at the ends of their long cables, gave some air of life to the harbor, an air that was increased by two or three Indian families, who were paddling about in the wretched little dugouts the missionaries taught them to make in place of their old-fashioned bark canoes of Viking model.
Here, then, in the score of mine-camp shanties along the beach and in two broken-down hulks afloat, lived the inhabitants of the capital of Tierra del Fuego. If the town itself was curious, its people and their manner of life were found to be no less curious when one came to get acquainted. Small and wretched as the place was, it had a complete outfit of the officials and assistants needed for the dignity and peace of the most populous territorial capital anywhere. There was a complete list of executive officers, with secretaries and servants; a complete list of judicial officers, with clerks and servants; a complete list of police officials, from a commissioner to a patrolman; a file of soldiers with commissioned and non-commissioned officers; a crew of sailors for the vessels, with the usual officers, a school teacher (male), and a matron for a girls' school.
The town had also six citizens—plain, every-day folks, not entitled to wear uniform. All told, the number of inhabitants was less than sixty. I went on shore to learn something more about the local government than what I could see from the steamer. They told me that the Governor was in Buenos Ayres working for an appropriation to make improvements.
"Improvements in what?" I asked.
"Just improvements about the place."
"How much money does he want?"
"Who knows? He ought to have $20,000."
"What one thing, for instance, would he do with the money?"