Captain Zack Green stood looking at the land a long time, and then remarked,—
“I would have gone through the Straits ten years ago, but I don’t want to get in there any more.”
“What!” I asked, “would you take a vessel as heavy as we are through the Straits of Magellan?”
“Straits of thunder!” he replied. “Who said anything about going through the Straits of Magellan with a deep loaded clipper ship? Man alive! That’s the way of it. Whenever anybody talks of going through the Straits, every eternal idiot thinks it the Magellan, when he ought to know no sailing ship ever goes through Smith’s Channel. Strait of Le Maire, man, between Staten Land and Tierra del Fuego. It would have saved us thirty miles westing, and thirty miles may be worth thirty days when you are to the s’uth’ard.”
I admitted that what he said was true, but as people knew very little of this part of the world, they usually associated the word “Straits” down here with the Magellan.
“Well,” said he, “they ought to know better, for nothing but small sailing craft and steamers could go through there without standing a good chance of running foul of the rocks. It’s the Le Maire Strait I was thinking of; but even that is dangerous, for there is no light there any more, and the current swirls and cuts through like a tide-race. I’ve been going to the eastward since they had trouble with the light and can’t get any one to stay and tend it.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked; “is it too lonely?”
“No,” he answered, slowly, “it isn’t that altogether, though I reckon it’s lonely enough with nothing but the swirling tide on one side and barren rocks and tussac on the other. I was ashore there once and saw the fellows who ran the light, before they died, and the head man told me some queer things. It’s a bad place for the falling sickness, too, and that’s against it, but the mystery of the light-keepers was enough to scare a man.
“I knew old Tom Jackson, the skipper of the relief boat, and he asked me to go over to the light with him. It’s only a day’s run from the Falklands, and, as I was laid up with a topmast gone, I went.
“We had a whaling steamer to go over in. A vessel about one hundred tons, with an infernal sort of cannon mounted for’ard which threw a bomb-harpoon big enough to stave the side of a frigate.