Among the isles on the north side of the Strait the most conspicuous is that to which, from its high-gabled central ridge, the name of Westminster Hall has been given. It seemed strange to find in this remote region nearly all the headlands, bays, and channels bearing English names, but the explanation is simple. As there were no native names at all, the Fuegians not having reached that grade of civilization in which distinctive proper names are given to places, and extremely few Spanish names, because the colonial government never surveyed the Straits and few colonial vessels entered them, the British naval officers who did their hydrographic work in and around the Fuegian archipelago were obliged to find names. Like Cook and Vancouver in the north Pacific they bestowed upon places the names of their ships, or of their brother seamen, or of persons connected with the British Admiralty at home. Hence Smyth's Channel and Cockburn Channel and Croker Peninsula and Beagle Sound and Cape Fitzroy and Fury Island and Mount Darwin. The Dutch captains, sea-rovers or whalers, have contributed other names, such as Barnevelt Island and Staten Island and Nassau Bay and Cape Horn itself. Thus a chart has here the sort of historic interest which the plan of an old city has, where the names of streets and squares speak of the persons who were famous when each was built, like Queen Anne Street and Harley Street and Wellington Street in London, or the list of Napoleonic victories which one has in the street names of Paris.
The Admiralty surveys have also named the different parts of the long line of the Straits. First comes, beginning from the westward, Sea Reach, which, narrowing gradually till it is about four miles wide, has a length of about thirty miles; then Long Reach, thirty-five miles long, and averaging two to three miles wide; then the shorter, and in parts narrower, Crooked Reach, and English Reach, which brings one to Cape Froward, nearly halfway to the Atlantic. Darkness fell before we came to the end of Sea Reach, and we had our last view of the range of formidable pinnacles and precipices which, beginning from Cape Pilar, run along the shore of Desolation Island, the northernmost of the mountainous isles that lie between the Straits and Cape Horn. It is separated from the two isles next to it on the southeast by channels so narrow that the three were long supposed to form one island. The peaks, some of them apparently inaccessible, are of bare rock and run up to four thousand feet. On the slopes near the shore there is a little short grass, but no wood, so violent and unceasing are the winds. The sea was absolutely solitary. For three days we had seen no ship. Formerly a few Fuegians in their canoes haunted these shores, but they now come no longer. Scattered remnants of their small tribes, Yahgans and Alakalufs, wander along the shores of the more southerly islands, supporting existence on shell-fish and wild berries. With the exception of the now all but extinct Bushmen of South Africa and the Veddas of Ceylon, they are the lowest kind of savage known to exist, going almost or quite naked, rigorous as is the climate, possessing no dwellings, and having learned from civilized man nothing except a passion for tobacco. There are missionaries at work among them who have done what can be done to ameliorate their lot, which would be even more wretched if they knew it to be wretched. They would appear, from the vast remains of their ancient middens, to have inhabited these inhospitable regions for untold ages, and their low state contrasts remarkably with the superior intelligence and the progress in some of the arts of life which mark the Lapps and Esquimaux and other barbarous tribes of regions far nearer to the North Pole than this is to the South. The contrast may possibly be due to the greater scarcity of wild creatures both on land and sea in this extremity of South America.[71] Here are no bears, black or brown or polar, and no creature like the reindeer of Lapland, and no musk-ox; nor has the dog ever been harnessed.
Next morning we were up on the bridge beside our friendly captain at the first glimmer of dawn. The vessel, going at half speed during the night, had covered no great distance, but the character of the scenery had already changed. Here in Long Reach the Strait was only three miles wide. The spiry pinnacles of Desolation Island had been replaced by mountains nearly or quite as high, but of more rounded forms, their faces breaking down sometimes in cliffs, but more frequently in steep, bare slopes of rock to the deep waters, their glens filled with blue glaciers, which sometimes came within two hundred yards of the sea, their upper slopes covered with snow or névé, which seemed to form vast ice fields stretching far back inland. Clouds lay heavy on these snows, so only here and there could one discern the outlines of a peak, and conjecture its height. The tops seemed to average from twenty-five hundred to four thousand feet, and the level of the line of perpetual snow to be somewhat over three thousand feet, varying according to the exposure, the line being, of course, a little higher on the south side, whose slopes face the north. On the lower declivities towards the sea there was now some grass, and in sheltered places, such as the heads of inlets, a little thick, low scrub of trees, probably of the two Antarctic beeches,[72] which are here the commonest trees. What most struck us was the similarity of the mountain lines and their general character to those of the extreme north of Norway, between Tromsö and the North Cape. Everything seemed to point to an epoch when the glaciers, formerly more extensive than now, rounded off the tops of the ridges, and smoothed the surfaces, just as one finds them rounded and smoothed along the Lyngen fjord on this side the North Cape. It is also natural to suppose that rain and wind, which seem to be less copious and less violent in this part of the Straits than at their western opening, have done less here than they do there to carve the peaks into sharp spires and jagged precipices.
The day, when it came, was dark, for a grey pall of cloud covered sea and mountains; but as this was the usual weather, and suited the sternness of the landscape, we regretted only the impossibility of seeing the tops of the highest hills that rose out of the undulating snow plateau which lies back from the shores. Very solemn was this long, slightly winding channel, deep and smooth, broken rarely by an island or a rock, but now and then shewing a seductive little bay with a patch of green. Sometimes in a glen running back to the foot of a glacier one caught the white flash of a waterfall. The remarkable purity of the ice and smallness of the moraines may be attributed to the fact that the glaciers seemed to be seldom overhung by cliffs whence stone would fall, and that the rocks were evidently extremely hard. They seemed to belong to the ancient crystalline group, granite and gneiss or mica schist, with masses of white quartz, shewing no trace anywhere of volcanic action. This region on both sides of the Straits may be a prolongation not of the great Andean Cordillera, but of the Coast Range of Chile, which (as already observed) mostly consists of those older rocks which I have just mentioned.
At Crooked Reach the view, looking back westward, was specially noble. On a green slope above a sheltered inlet upon the south side are a few houses, the melancholy remains of a Swiss colony, founded some twenty years ago, which failed to support itself in this inclement nature. Behind there was a long curtain-like line of snows. On the north two or three small isles fringed the steep rocky shore with a background of peaks dimly seen through drifting snow showers. In the middle the eye rested on the smooth, grey-blue surface of the great waterway, here only a mile wide, dark as the clouds above and darker still in spots where a gust from the hill fell upon it, silent as when Magellan's prow first clove it. For steam vessels the navigation is not dangerous, since, though there are in this narrow part no lights, there are few sunken rocks. A rock is always indicated by the masses of very long, yellowish brown seaweed which root on it and wave in the tide. But squalls or williwaws (as they are called) come down from the glens with terrific suddenness, and the water is so deep that it is often hard to anchor, or to keep the ship, if anchored, from dragging. Magellan moored his vessels to the shore every night. How did he manage to get through so quickly, against the prevailing west winds, by tacking in a channel so narrow, especially as in those days mariners could not sail so near the wind as we do? Perhaps he may have made much use of the tide, mooring when it was against him and pushing ahead when the ebb set out to the Pacific. The tide flow is, however, not so strong here as is that which enters on the Atlantic side, and it there rises to a much greater height.
About this point another change comes over the scenery. There begins to be more wood, and though it is still stunted, one notes patches of it up to eight hundred feet. On the north shore more recent sedimentary strata, apparently of sandstone and limestone, replace the gneiss, and a growth of herbaceous plants and ferns drapes the face of the cliffs. Then at the end of English Reach rises a bold headland, Cape Froward, twelve hundred feet high, projecting from the much loftier Mount Victoria behind. It marks the southernmost extremity of the South American Continent in latitude 52°. Here the coast-line, which had been running in a generally east southeasterly direction all the way from the Pacific, turns sharply to the north, and in a few miles a new scene is disclosed. The Strait widens out, an open expanse of water is seen to the northeast with a low shore scarcely visible behind it; and to the south, nearly opposite Cape Froward, a channel diverges to the southeast between high mountains on its west side and lower hills on the east. This is the north end of Cockburn Channel, which, after many windings among islands, opens out southwestward into the Pacific, and this seems to be the place where Magellan halted, sending out the two ships—one of which deserted him—to explore the southeastward channel. Looking up it one can see in clear weather, some forty miles away, the peak of Sarmiento, highest of all the mountains of this region, a double pyramid of rock peaks rising out of snow. It is of old crystalline rock and is described as by far the most striking object in all the Magellanic landscapes. Thick clouds hid it from our longing eyes. Its height is estimated at six thousand feet, and so far as I know it has never been ascended. That dauntless climber, Sir Martin Conway, who got nearer to its top than any one else has ever done, was turned back by a frightful tempest below the last rock peak.
East of Cape Froward, one is at once in a different region with a different climate. The air is drier and clearer. The shores are lower, the wood, still mostly of the Antarctic beech, is thicker, with many dead white trunks which take fire easily. The hills recede from the sea, and grow smoother in outline, finally disposing themselves in low flat-topped ridges, six or eight miles behind the shore-line. A wide expanse of water, and of land almost as level as the water, stretches out to the eastern horizon, so that at first one fancies that this apparently shoreless sea is part of the Atlantic, which is in fact still nearly a hundred miles away. Signs of civilization appear in a lighthouse at San Isidro, and near it at a small harbour on the mainland to which a few whalers resort, boiling down into oil the produce of their catch. Presently the masts and funnels of vessels lying off shore at anchor rise out of the sea, and we heave to and disembark at the little town of Punta Arenas on the Patagonian coast, which English-speaking men call Sandy Point. This is the southernmost town not only in Chile, but in the whole world, twenty degrees further from the South Pole than Hammerfest, an older and larger place, is from the North Pole. It consists of about six very wide streets, only partially built up, running parallel to the shore, which are crossed at right angles by as many other similar streets, running up the hill, the houses low, many of them built, and nearly all of them roofed, with corrugated iron. It has, therefore, no beauty at all except what is given by its wide view of the open sea basin of the Strait, here twenty miles wide, and beyond over the plains of Tierra del Fuego, the great island which lies opposite. In the far distance mountains can in clear weather be seen in the south of that island, Mount Sarmiento conspicuous among them.
Punta Arenas was for many years only a place of call for whalers, since hardly any trading vessels passed through the Straits before the days of steam, and thereafter for a while a Chilean penal settlement. It grew by degrees and has profited by the discovery of lignite coal in its neighbourhood, though the seam is small and of poor quality; and within the last twenty years it has increased and thriven because sheep farming has been started on an extensive scale on the mainland of Patagonia as well as in Tierra del Fuego and some of the adjoining islands. All the sheep ranchmen within a range exceeding several days' journey come here for their supplies and all ship their wool from here, so it can now boast to be the leading commercial centre of the region, having no rival within a thousand miles. Whether it can develop much further may be doubtful, for traffic through the Straits will not greatly increase against the competition of the Trans-Andine railway for passengers and that of the Panama Canal for goods, and most of the land fit for sheep farming has been already taken up. Neither the whale fishery nor sealing is now prosecuted on a large scale.
The town is a cosmopolitan place, in which English, as well as Spanish and to a less extent German (for the steamers of a well-appointed German line call frequently), is spoken; people engaged in the sheep trade come and go from the Falkland Islands, and the ocean liners keep it in touch with the distant world of Valparaiso and Buenos Aires and Europe. It is the same distance to the south of the Equator as the Straits of Belleisle in Labrador is to the north, but the climate here is far more equable. It is never warm, but the winters are not severe, there is little snow, and frosts are moderated by the adjoining sea. The air is dry and healthy with a rainfall of only ten inches in the year. Though the landscape is bare, for trees can with difficulty be induced to grow, and though there is much wind and no shelter, still we found something attractive in this remote and singular spot, for one has a constantly stimulative sense of the vast expanse of sky and sea and the distant plain of Tierra del Fuego, with a touch of mystery in the still more distant ranges of that island which just shew their snowy peaks on the horizon. The light over sea and shore has an exquisite pearly clearness which reminds one of the similar light that floats over the lagoons between Venice and Aquileia. Can this peculiar quality in the atmosphere be due, here as there, to the presence of a large body of comparatively smooth and shallow water, mirroring back to heaven the light that it receives?
Tierra del Fuego, which one had been wont to think of as a land of dense forests and wild mountains, is, as seen from Punta Arenas, and all along the eastern part of the Straits from this point to the Atlantic, a featureless level. Its northern part is flat, like the Patagonian mainland, which is itself the southernmost part of the great Argentine plain. Some parts are arid, but most of it is well grassed, excellent for sheep. Only in the far south are there mountains, the eastern prolongation of the range that runs (interrupted by channels between the isles) southeast from Cape Pilar. Neither along the shores of the Strait nor in those southern mountains are there any signs of volcanic action, but I was told that such evidences do exist at the extreme eastern end of the island, and there are in the Patagonian mainland, a little way north of the Straits, a large crater and a lava stream eighteen miles in length, the last manifestations to the south of those volcanic forces which are visible along the whole line of the Andes northward to Panama. Both in Tierra del Fuego and on the mainland there are left a few Patagonian aborigines. Those who dwell in the island are of the Ona tribe, tall men who, like the Tehuelches that roam over the mainland, answer to the description of the Patagonian giants given by the early Spanish and English navigators. Pigafetta relates that when Magellan's men had, near Port St. Julian, where he wintered, guilefully entrapped and fettered one of these giants, he cried out on Setebos to aid him, "that is," says Pigafetta, "the big devil" (il gran demonio). Shakespeare would seem to have taken from this account, through Eden's Decades of the New World, the Setebos whom Caliban names as "his dam's god" in the Tempest.[73] The Onas who used to come down to Punta Arenas to sell guanaco skins and obtain ardent spirits, are now seldom seen. Strong liquor was too much for them, as it was for Caliban, and has reduced their numbers. It is curious that the far more abject Fuegians, who love tobacco, detest intoxicating liquors. But the chief calamity that befell this interesting tribe was the discovery that the more level parts of Tierra del Fuego are fit for sheep. The ranchmen drove off the Onas: the Onas retaliated by stealing the sheep and when they got a chance, shooting the ranchmen with arrows, for they have scarcely any firearms. The ranchmen then took to shooting the Onas at sight, so that now, out of three thousand who used to inhabit Tierra del Fuego, there are said to remain only three hundred, defending themselves in the recesses of the wooded mountains in the extreme south of the island. They are manly fellows of great strength and courage, and go about clothed only with a guanaco skin. Few guanacos are now left, for they also have had to make way for the sheep.[74]