The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia

by John Randolph Spears

As seen from the passing steamer, Staten Island is a continuous ridge varying for the most part from 2000 to 3000 feet above the sea. The sides seem steep and the tops are rounded. The snow line in June was about 1000 feet above the sea, but the use of the word line should not be understood to imply that the snow ended at any well-defined limit. Not all the crests 2000 feet high were white, and on the sides of the mountains the drifts and blotches of snow sometimes reached down to within 500 or 600 feet of the surf. Still, there was comparatively little snow below an altitude of 1000 feet, and not much bare ground above that limit. At a distance of five or six miles the colors of the uncovered parts of the mountains were dark grays and black. The rocks looked very like the rocky declivities one may see all along the Hudson, though in no other respect was the scenery like that on the Hudson. A closer view of the island showed that the darkest shades of the mountain sides were green rather than black, and were due to wide masses of vegetation, among which tree trunks could be distinguished with a glass. But there was no sign of animal life ashore.

Over the sea, however, as we steamed along, the air fairly teemed with antarctic life. Ducks in flocks a half mile long drifted and sailed hither and yon. The little Cape Horn pigeons, whose black backs and wings are most beautifully mottled with white, floated in scores and hundreds in the air about the ship, sometimes so closely that one could almost touch them with the hand. The huge white albatross, with its ten-foot spread of wings, careened up and down and around, as if for the pure love of the motion, while coal black gulls—the web-footed ravens of the sea—contested with their light-colored cousins for the refuse thrown from the ship. Then there were the penguins. Once, as we steamed along, we ran into a flock of them, and sent them diving from wave to wave—in on one side and out on the other—in a way that at first sight made the spectators think that they were a school of fish, short and thick, black on top, and with a white stripe on the side, skurrying away for life. Even now, as I think of them, I am haunted with a doubt as to whether, after all, when I thought I saw webbed feet and outstretched neck, I was not mistaken, so great was the resemblance of the fleeing penguin to a fish. And then there was a tiny kind of gull, the male of which was almost pure white—a bird that seemed little, if any, larger than a robin. It was a most wary and most sprightly little fellow, and it almost always preferred diving to flying. In short, nowhere in the whole voyage of the Ushuaia, of which the trip to St. John harbor was but a small part, did I see bird life so abundant, so varied, or so beautiful and interesting as off the coast of Staten Island.

By ten o'clock in the morning we were plainly approaching the barren, bold promontory that faced the giant seas at the east end of the island. The gale of the night before had moderated considerably by that time, but the nearer we approached the headland the more boisterous did the sea seem to be before us. To the passengers who did not know the place we seemed to be rushing into a tide rip more dangerous than anything we had seen, but just when we were preparing for the tossing that appeared inevitable, the frowning coast line opened. A fiord between the mountains was seen off the starboard bow, and we at once headed in for it. The tide rip off the east end of the island, a rip that has mention in all the coast guides and charts of the Cape Horn region, begins at this harbor.

As we entered the mouth of the fiord, we could see that on a rock jutting out from the westerly side was a building in form and apparently in size the exact counterpart of the six-sided peanut and candy pavilions one can see about the picnic and other resorts near New York. Its peaked roof was surmounted by a bulbous cupola like the top of a tower of a Jewish synagogue, and near by was a tall flagstaff from which the blue-white-blue Argentine flag flapped vigorously in the gale.

By and by we got pretty close under this rock, and then we could see some men in naval uniform standing on a ledge beside a little cannon, which they fired off just as we ran from the breaking waves that were dashing across the mouth of the harbor into the oil-smooth water within. The ship answered the salute with a roaring blast of her whistle, and then we rounded the crag where the pavilion stood, and found ourselves in what looked like a bowl-shaped bay, walled in by precipices so high as to make our vessel seem utterly insignificant. Then on one side of this bowl, fifty feet or so above the water, was seen a row of little light-colored wooden houses, built on a narrow bench on the mountain side. There was a flagstaff before the largest of the buildings, and a neat picket fence before the whole row. From the centre of this fence a stairway ran down the steep decline from the bench to the beach, and from the foot of the stair a narrow pier projected a hundred feet into the bay. There were davits on both sides of the pier, with boats hanging to them, and not far away was a big lifeboat of heavy model lying at anchor. The grass that had grown below the water line of the lifeboat was so long that it could be seen a hundred yards away as she rolled lazily in the dead swell.

As soon as we had cast anchor a couple of officers and a crew of sailors came down to the pier, and then rowed off to us in one of the boats. There were enthusiastic greetings between those in the boat and their friends on the ship.

The little row of houses built on a cleft, so to speak, in the side of the rugged mountains that border St. John Bay is known among Argentine seamen as the "Sub-Prefectura del Puerto San Juan del Salvamiento." It was established late in the Antarctic summer of 1884. It should be kept in mind that the chief object of creating a Government post on Staten Island was for the support of a lighthouse to guide ships bound around the Horn, but a secondary consideration was the providing of a place of refuge with a depot of provisions for the crew of any ship so unfortunate as to be wrecked thereabouts. It was estimated that from seven hundred to one thousand ships of various nationalities pass within sight of Staten Island every year, and that before this light was established about one in a hundred was wrecked there. These estimates were wrong, but they had the effect of establishing the station.

In the United States the crew of a first-class lighthouse consists of three men. That of a life-saving station consists of a coxswain and not less than six men. To man the third-class lighthouse on Staten Island four men were provided, while in addition to the coxswain and crew of a lifeboat there was a naval officer of the rank of a lieutenant, known as the prefect; a second in command of a lower rank, a secretary to the prefect, a valet, a cook, a baker, and a file of soldiers.

Having learned this much while on the ship, it was with a great deal of curiosity that I climbed from the boat to the pier and walked ashore.

The foot of the bluff had been terraced with spiles to keep the seas from washing out the soil there, and it was said that a northeast gale sent an ugly swell into that part of the bay in spite of the shelter of the point on which I had seen the pavilion. Under such circumstances, the only perfectly safe anchorage for a vessel was further up the fiord around a bend. Although the Ushuaia seemed to be anchored in a bowl-shaped bay, there was really a passage through what seemed to be the western wall of the bowl, and a plan of the whole fiord as laid down on the chart was really of the shape of a sock.