STRAITS OF MAGELLAN

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 24, 24 December 1932, Page 10

STRAITS OF MAGELLAN

WORLD’S WILDEST CORNER. “We found, by a niiracle, a strait which wo called the Strait of tho Eleven Thousand Virgins. This strait is 110 leagues long, which are 440 miles, and almost as wide as less than half a league, and it issues in another sea which is called the Peaceful Sea; it is surrounded by very great and high mountains, covered with snow. . . .*1 think there is not in the world a more beautiful country, or a better strait than this one.” So wrote the Chevalier 1 Antonio Pigafetta in 1520, when this soldier of fortune sailed as a passenger with the intrepid Magellan through the straits that are now named after", their discovered

The four centuries that have elapsed since then have witnessed little change in the straits themselves, for the hand of time makes but an infinitesimal mark during such a moment in eternity. The visible change that has occurred is ill the ways of man, that puny adventurer upon the seas of fate, •who now crosses in the comparative safety of sturdy steamers these waters he once so precariously sailed upon at the mercy of the elements and in the ridiculously small craft his ingenuity had up till then devised. To-day, indeed, the journey from Montevideo to the straits may be made by liner, j steaming by way of tho Falkland Is-j lands, those wind-swept and desolate j outposts of Britain, sob amid stormy! seas. Even in tlfe comparative shelter of Port Stanley (writes W. P. Goodwin in the Sydney Morning Herald) the wind often blows at gale force, j but as the little port slowly fades from the right of the beholder on the I departing ship, blotted out by a grey; Piid damp mist, the wind becomes stronger and stronger, charged ’ with a cold made penetrating by its recent contact with Antarctic’s icy wastes; the seas are whipped into huge waves surpassing \ in size the bounds of the most vivid imagination; wherever one looks there is an endless waste of great mountains of water, billowing with incredible disorder, their tops whipped into spray driven m ghostly wreaths before the terrific blast; ali threatening at each instant to overwhelm the throbbing ship. | r rom Port Stanley to the Atlantic entrance of the straits is some 300

miles. As the ship passes Cape Virgins to enter the first of the two bays, shaped not unlike an hour-glass and forming the first half of the straits, the raging tumult- of tho tossing ocean lessens somewhat. Passing, then, into the First Narrows, the waist of the hour-glass, there descends with startling suddenness a seeming peace and calm as the ship persistently churns its obstinate way into the second bay, at tho head of which, on tho mainland side, lies Broad Reach, where to-day ; stands Punta Arenas, or Sandy Point. To tills point from tho Atlantic is about 100 miles, edged with shingle beaches, alternating with bare, sandy headlands in unvarying monotony. Beyond them on the one hand stretch northwards I for nearly 1000 miles the bleak, unrelieved steppelands of Patagonia, and on the other their continuation to the southward through Tierra del Fuego into the dreary, icy sweeps ruled over by that frozen monarch, Mount Sarniiento, to end at Cape Horn.

A CRUDE AND DISMAL TOWN. As the ship drops anchor in the open roadstead beside Punta Arenas, a stiff breeze and the fast-flowing tide drive up a choppy grey-green sea, across which the voyage by small boat to tho moles fronting the grey tin-roofed, dismal town is extremely agitated; its comfort in no way increased by the penetrating cold of the wind. The town contains to-day a population of some 25,000 people, and it is the capital and sole centre of the Chilean Magellan Territory. Its style is for the most part Spanish; it is crudely constructed and badly paved. Its atmosphere is that of an outpost of civilisation, precariously supporting itself as the jumping-off place into the cold and dreary wilderness beyond.

Leaving Punta Arenas the ship quickly rounds Cape Froward, the most southerly point of the South American mainland, and immediately enters the Second Narrows of the Straits, to He borne suddenly into another world of cold and dead austerity where on rare fine days the sunlight transforms the all-embracing snow and ice into dazzling white and diaphanous blue mantles glittering and sparkling with crystalline and adamantine hues. Not a tree, nor a blade of grass, nor even a lichen relieves this hard and forbidding grandeur, unfolding itself in unbroken and severe symmetry as one steadily follows along the narrow passage; nothing but glaciers, icefields and snow and greyish-brown rock set upon the tops of great mountains submerged in ages long ago beneath the engulfing greyisli-green waters now flowing impatiently between them.

UNCEASING TEMPESTS. But rare, indeed, it is to pass along these Narrows during the momentary clemency of fine weather, for it is doubtful whether they have ever known real calm. In the cold splendour of Antarctic winter, or during the moist, warmer days of the short summer they remain ever the same; grim witnesses from year to year, from century to century of the age-old conflict of the elements that has been waged with unabated fury since the world began. Fitly to describe with paltry words the odd 200 miles of this passage, with its unbroken rows of pellucid towers and spires interspersed with tumultuous waterfalls, fantastic snowfields and

dazzling glaciers lit with cold lustre by the radiations of the keen southern light is but futile. Dwarfed by the besieging, hungry waters though they are these mighty peaks perpetuate a brave and long resistance 'grim participators on this wild battleground ol nature. So at last to Cape Pillar, the stormiest headland known to sailors, and worthy sentinel for this dangerous passago, with just beyond it the tliiee rocky islets, the Evangelists, beyond which stretch the vast expanses of the Pacific. Once upon it, and gazing back upon the Straits, one recalls to mind those early, venturing teamen, who ono by one felt their way along the Patagonian coast until they blundered into this uncertain haven. One realises that tho 'only giants of those days of mighty deeds were not those of whose existence they recounted such fanciful tales, but they themselves the men who first gave to us the whole wide world.