Be in the Land of Fire

Be in the Land of Fire

At the storm-whipped tip of South America lies a group of island; the largest is called Terra del Fuego – the Land of Fire. Discovered by Magellan in 1520, they were by-passed thankfully by the marines who rounded Cape Horn under sail. But, though they are bleak and inhospitable, there is a haunting beauty in their desolation.

The squall line fled away to the north-east, the sea smoking dark below it, soon water and sky, which had been one, separated. From the south-south-west the waves marched by, six to the mile, forty feet from trough to crest, capped by seven feet of breaking water, which the wind seized as it rose from the shelter valley and hurled ahead in glittering sheet. The smudge on the horizon took shape as a black, uncompromising island cliff: Cap Horn.

Rain, Hail, fog, wind, snow – these are normal here, at the southernmost tip of South America. Here the Andes founder in a wreckage of island, peninsulas, channel, bay and sounds. Clouds sit low on the mountain and waterfalls pour out of them. It is a land where penguins hobnob with ostriches, glaciers runs into the sea, and raspberries grow in the turf; and all this no further south of the Equator than Lincoln is to the north of it. The Royal Navy did most of the early surveying, and the chart abounds with such names as Brecknock, Cockburn, Skyring, Darwin, Admiralty, Otway.

The last of the mainland is called Patagonia. The largest of the islands to the south is Terra del Fuego. All this is divided between Chile to the west and Argentina to the east. Southward, past the Beagle Channel, past Hoste and Navarino and the Wollastons to Horn Island, all is Chilean. In this dangerous labyrinth, in the worst weather in the world, working in small old ships, the Chilean Navy learns and practices its craft, by necessity absorbing an unsurpassed seamanship.

Three tribes of Indians used to live here – Alacalufs in the channel on the Pacific side; Onas on Terra del Fuego; Yahgans to the south. They paddled about in the falling snow in dugout canoes, stark naked, eating raw mussels. The old Coastal Pilot reported that the dastardly Onas even ‘manifest great repugnance to entering into relations with the whites’. The kindly missionaries, turning the other cheek, gave these savages blankets to keep them warm hide their indecencies. The blankets had not been disinfected from measles cases.

There are few Alacalufs left now, Fewer Yahgans, and no Onas.

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