After midnight the steamer left Punta Arenas for the Atlantic. Rising at daybreak I saw the eastern half of the Straits, than which nothing could be less like the western half. After traversing for some distance the wide basin between the mainland and Tierra del Fuego, on the west shore of which Punta Arenas stands, we reached the part of the Strait called the Second Narrows, where the passage, between low bluffs of hard earth on each side, is only a few miles wide, and then emerged from this into another large basin. Twenty miles further come the First Narrows, narrower than the Second, and then a wide bay, which in its turn opens into the Atlantic between two low capes, that on the north being Virgenes, and that on the south Espiritu Santo. Here it was that Magellan anchored while his two small ships went ahead to explore. The space between the capes, which is the eastern mouth of the Straits, is about ten miles wide. The coast here, as well as both shores of the Straits all the way from Punta Arenas, is perfectly flat, with a very slight rise of ground some miles back on the Patagonian side. Clear as was the air, no hills were visible in the distance, neither those in the south of Tierra del Fuego nor those westwards behind Cape Froward, where the Andes end. Over all this vast plain not a dwelling or sign of life could be discerned save the lighthouse on Cape Virgenes, where the boundary line between Chile and Argentina strikes the sea. The northeastern part of Tierra del Fuego belongs to the latter, the southwestern part to Chile. From below the cape, a low point runs out into the sea, to which British mariners have given the familiar name of Dungeness from its similarity to that curious shingle bank which the tides of the English Channel have piled up on the coast of Kent. It is, however, much shorter than our Dungeness and the pebbles of the shingle are smaller.
Before I close this account of the Straits, a few remarks may be added on their general physical character, which some of my readers may have pictured to themselves as very different from what one finds them to be. I had myself done this, fancying them to be a channel long and narrow all the way from ocean to ocean, a channel between steep, dark hills, covered with dense forests, with volcanoes, more or less extinct, rising behind. Nothing could be further from the reality.
Magellan's Straits are unlike any other straits in this respect, that the physical aspect of the two ends is entirely different. The character of the shores on each side is the same in each part of the channel, but both shores of the eastern half, from the Atlantic to Cape Froward, are unlike those of the western half from Cape Froward to the Pacific. The former has low banks, with smooth outlines, slopes of earth or sand dipping into shallow water, and a climate extremely dry. The latter half is enclosed between high, steep mountains which are drenched by incessant rains. The eastern half is a channel, narrow at two points only, leading through the southernmost part of the vast Argentine plain, which has apparently been raised from the sea bottom in comparatively recent times. The western half is a deep narrow cut through the extremity of a great mountain system that stretches north for thousands of miles, forming the western edge of South America, and the rocks on each side of it are ancient (palæozoic or earlier). The western half is grand and solemn, with its deep waters mirroring white crags and blue glaciers. The low eastern half has no beauty save that which belongs to vast open spaces of level land and smooth water over which broods the silence of a clear and lucent air. A more singular contrast, all within a few hours' steaming, it would be hard to find. Unlike, however, as these two halves of the Straits are, they are both impressive in the sense they give of remoteness and mystery, a passage between two oceans through a wilderness most of which is likely to be forever left to those overwhelming forces of nature, rain and wind and cold, which make it useless to man.
Magellan's discovery of the Straits and circumnavigation of the globe was an event of the highest geographical significance, for it finally proved not only that the earth was round, and that the western sea route to India, of which Columbus dreamed, really existed, but also that the earth was immensely larger than had been supposed. A few years after Magellan, Pizarro and his companions, sailing southward from Panama to northern Chile, proved that the "South Sea" discovered by Balboa stretched so far to the south that it must be continuous with that which Magellan had crossed to the Philippines. Thereafter, not much was done in the Southern Hemisphere until the discovery of New Zealand and Australia two centuries later. But no great importance, either commercial or political, belonged to a long and narrow strait which it was extremely difficult to navigate against the prevalent west winds, so when it was presently discovered that there was an open sea not much farther south, it was round Cape Horn and not through the Straits that most of the English and Dutch adventurers made their way to plunder the Spaniards on the Pacific coast; and when the trade restrictions Spain had imposed finally disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century, commerce also went round Cape Horn, tedious and dangerous as was the passage to those who had to face the prevailing westerly gales. Even in the days when Charles Darwin sailed in the Beagle under Captain Fitzroy, hardly any merchant vessels traversed the Straits. It was the application of steam to ocean-going vessels that gave to this route the importance it has since possessed.[75] It is now threatened, as respects passenger traffic, with the competition of the Transandine railway; as respects goods traffic, with that of the Panama Canal, and it may possibly retain only so much of the latter as passes between Pacific ports south of Callao and Atlantic ports south of the Equator.
The morning was brilliant with blue wavelets sparkling under a light breeze as we passed out to the east and saw the low, flat bluff of Cape Virgenes sink below the horizon. But the wind rose steadily, and next morning the spray was dashing over the vessel when we caught sight, through drifting clouds, of the shores of the Falkland Isles. They were wild and dreary shores bordered by rocky islands and scattered reefs, no dwellings anywhere visible on land, nor any boats on sea. In the afternoon, having passed, without seeing it, the mouth of the channel which separates the East from the West Falkland, we anchored in the deep bay which forms the outer harbour of Port Stanley, the chief harbour and village of the islands. The wind was still so strong that our careful captain decided not to take his vessel through the very narrow passage which leads to the inner harbour, so we got into the tiny launch which had come out with the mails, and after a tumble in the waves and a run through the narrows found ourselves in a landlocked inlet, on the shore of which stands the capital city of this remote and lonely part of the British Empire, a place of a few hundred inhabitants. Here was Government House, a substantial villa of grey stone. Indoors we found a cheerful little drawing-room with a cheerful blaze in the grate, a welcome sight to those who had not seen a fire during three weeks of almost constant cold. There was a tree beside the house, the only tree in the islands, and a conservatory full of gay flowers, looking all the prettier in such a spot. And from the top of its tall staff the meteor flag of England was streaming straight out in the gale. The village—it seems to be the only village in the colony—consists of one street built mostly of wood and corrugated iron, with a few better houses of stone whitewashed, and reminded us faintly of the little seaside hamlets of Shetland or the Hebrides, though here there was neither a fishlike smell nor any signs of the industry which dominates those islands. All was plain and humble, but decent, and not without a suggestion of internal comfort. The only colour was given by some splendid bushes of yellow gorse in full flower, an evidence that though it is never warm here, the thermometer never falls very low. The climate is extremely healthy, but the winds are so strong and incessant that everybody goes about stooping forward.
The isles were uninhabited when discovered, a fact creditable to the aborigines of South America, for a more unpromising spot for a settlement of savages could not be imagined; no wood and no food either on the land or on the sea. At present there are about two thousand three hundred inhabitants, nearly all of British origin, including a good many Scots brought hither as shepherds, for the colony is now one enormous sheep-farm, probably the biggest in the world, and lives off the wool and skins it sends home and the living sheep it exports for breeding purposes to Punta Arenas. Wild cattle, descendants of a few brought long ago by the earlier settlers, were once numerous, but have now almost disappeared; and the tall tussock grass, which was such a feature in the days of Sir James Ross's Antarctic Expedition (1840), has vanished, except from some of the smaller isles. Poor is the prospect for an agriculturist, for the climate permits nothing to ripen except potatoes and turnips with a few gooseberries and currants. As in most oceanic islands, the native land fauna, especially of mammals, is extremely scanty, and, what is stranger, there are, so one is told, so few fish in the sea that it is not worth while to face the storms to catch them. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, meant to justify the laziness as timidity of those who won't go out. Certain it is that the sea is always rough, and there are no fishing boats about. Neither are there roads; the population is so thin that they would cost more than its needs justify, and locomotion, even on horseback, is hindered by the bogs and swamps that fill the hollows.
One naturally asks in the spirit which fills us all to-day, whether anything can be done to "develop the place," i.e. to find some resources for the people and help them to make something more of the islands. Well, there are the seals which frequent the coast. They belong to a species different from that of the North Pacific, but with an equally valuable fur. Some are now taken by the few whaling vessels which still resort to these tempestuous seas, but nothing is done to prevent their destruction within territorial waters or to preserve a land herd, and it would no doubt be difficult to exercise effective control on such a wild and thinly peopled coast. Yet what one heard on the spot seemed to suggest that steps might be taken by international agreement for the protection and utilization of these and other large marine mammals both here and in the other islands in this part of the ocean. Some of the rarer species are threatened with extinction.[76] The arrangements recently made by a treaty between Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and Japan, for the benefit of the North Pacific sealing industry constitute a useful precedent.
There are ports enough to furnish all the west coast of South America with harbours of refuge, but no use for them, for few ships come this way, and, as has been said, nobody goes fishing. Yet far out of the world's highways as they lie, and slight as is their economic or political value, the Falkland Isles have had a long and chequered history. An English navigator, Davis, discovered them in A.D. 1592, and they were afterwards explored by a French voyager from the port of St. Malo, whence the name of Iles Malouines, by which the French still call them. In 1764 Bougainville, one of those famous seamen who adorned the annals of France in that century, and whose name is now preserved from oblivion by the pretty, mauve-coloured flower which grows over all the bungalows and railway stations of India, planted a little colony here, with the view, fantastic as it seems to us now, of making this remote corner of the earth a central point from which to establish a transoceanic dominion of France in the Southern Hemisphere to replace that which had been lost at Quebec in 1759. The Spaniards, desiring no neighbours in that hemisphere, dispossessed these settlers. An English colony planted shortly afterwards, presently driven out by the Spaniards, and then re-established, was withdrawn in 1774. Finally, in 1832, the British government resumed possession of the islands, then practically uninhabited, for the sake of the whale fishery, and in 1843 a government was organized. In its present form, it is of the type usual in small British colonies, viz. a governor with an executive and a legislative council, the two bodies nominated, and consisting almost entirely of the same persons.
These political vicissitudes have left no abiding mark, except in a few remains at the station of Port Louis which the French made their capital, for there never was any population to speak of till sheep-farming began. The Pacific liners call once a month on their outward and inland voyages, and steamers go now and then to Punta Arenas, but there are no British possessions nearer than Cape Colony to the northeast and Pitcairn Island to the northwest, thousands of miles away.
We walked with the Acting Governor to the top of a hill behind Port Stanley to get some impressions of nature. There were as yet only two or three flowers in bloom, and what chiefly struck us was the resemblance of the thick, low mats and cushions of the plants to some species that grow on the upper parts of the Scottish Highland mountains. Among these, there was one producing a sweet berry, the dillydilly, from which excellent jam is made, the only edible wild product of the country. The prevailing strata are quartzose schists and sandstones, which rise in two mountains to heights exceeding two thousand three hundred feet, and as there is no trace of volcanic action anywhere, the islands are evidently not a link between the great Antarctic volcanoes and those of the Andean system, but perhaps a detached part of the older rocks through which those volcanoes have risen.