Though well after 11 p.m. on a night in late spring when the plane from Santiago landed in Punta Arenas, dusk lingered. Shops were still open. People laughed loudly in the streets.
A hotel, considered one of the best in town, was overheated, with musty, 1960s decor. Room service sent up soggy salmon sandwiches. But the next morning, the Strait of Magellan sparkled outside the window, as much “just another” watery vista as the queen of England is just another woman. And on the horizon was the silhouette of Tierra del Fuego (“Land of Fire”), named by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan because he saw smoky fires ringing its shores.
Magellan discovered the waterway that now bears his name in 1520, but it had long been known to the Yamanas and other natives who had lived in this area for more than 10,000 years. The Strait spans Patagonia, a 300,000-
square-mile region ending at Cape Horn.
Patagonia is divided politically between Chile and Argentina, but it is a place unto itself of vast pampas and glacial lakes, rugged fjords and capricious channels between strings of islands.
Punta Arenas is one of two points of departure (the other is Ushuaia, Argentina) for the M/N Mare Australis and M/N Via Australis – sturdy ships with 63 and 64 cabins respectively, that take visitors through the Strait of Magellan, the Beagle Channel and other passageways down to Cape Horn.
Other ships can stop at Punta Arenas, (the southernmost city on the South American continent), Ushuaia (the southernmost city in the world), Puerto Williams (the southernmost settlement in the world) and Cape Horn, the tip of South America. But only the small, maneuverable, Chilean-owned Mare and Via Australis have permission to traverse the narrow Gabriel Channel or to let passengers explore the rocky beach and dense forests of Wulaia, where even the nomadic Yamanas sometimes lingered and where Charles Darwin stopped during his circumnavigation of the globe (1831-1836) aboard the HMS Beagle.
The Mare Australis departs from Punta Arenas in the evening, leaving much of the day free for its passengers to look around the city. Two museums are good primers for the upcoming trip.
The native way of life
The Museo Regional Salesiano Mayorino Borgatello was founded by Salesian priests who came to Patagonia from Italy in the 1880s to “civilize” the naked natives and teach them the gospel. Among other things, the museum contains shrunken heads from Ecuador and excrement from a giant sloth that lived in Patagonia around 10,000 years ago.
Dioramas and cases of artifacts show the native way of life, before and after the arrival of the missionaries. The world’s largest bird, a wandering albatross, known to travel as much as 9,000 miles in a single foraging trip, hovers over an assortment of other stuffed birds and animals.
The Braun-Menendez Regional Museum, meanwhile, sports baronial rooms filled with gilt furniture, crystal, mirrors, stained glass, silver, and elegant china – the appointments of a European palazzo spirited in the early 20th century to a then-rowdy frontier town.
On a map, Punta Arenas looks like it might be the end of the world, but it isn’t. The Mare Australis would reveal more.
When the ship leaves Punta Arenas, it enters a realm of mountains, ice, snow, and water that belongs to the creatures who live there: 2-ton elephant seals, playful dolphins, indefatigable beavers, sea lions, Magellanic penguins, condors, petrels, gulls, geese, ducks, eagles, and albatrosses, among them.
The weather is unnervingly changeable. A placid, bright day may become suddenly stormy with savage winds. A light rain may give way to sun. Flower- strewn meadows are too warm for coats and hats, which are barely adequate to withstand a glacier’s piercing cold.
The sun and the moon put on an ever- changing show: the sun on the water, the sun behind the clouds, the sun over the mountains, the sky orange at sunrise or sunset, streaked with long rays of light, the moon preternaturally bright, burning a highway in the water or flirting with clouds, shining through mist.
No human presence
For days on end, there is no human presence other than the ship and its occupants, no electricity, no traffic, no airplanes flying overhead, no passing ships. Everything is pure and clean.
After three days in the wilderness, the lights of Ushuaia are startling. This city of 50,000 on the island of Tierra del Fuego was founded as a coast guard station and penal colony. Now, the buildings are painted in bright colors and the city looks cheerful, even in a persistent rain.
Near Ushuaia is the end of the road – the end, that is, of the Pan-American highway that stretches, with a few watery interruptions, from Argentina to Alaska. People arrive by the busload to see this particular patch of macadam and have their pictures taken next to the sign that marks the spot.
But though Ushuaia is the end of the road, Puerto Williams is on the southern side of the Beagle Channel. The Mare Australis puts in at the tattered settlement of around 2,000 where most of the buildings are made of corrugated iron and there seem to be almost as many stray dogs as people.
Half of the inhabitants are with the Chilean Navy and are posted there temporarily. Some of the remainder are remnants of the Yamana nation. Now, one elderly woman is the only full-blooded Yamana on the planet.
In Ukika, a neighborhood of Puerto Williams where most of the Yamanas live, native women sell bulrush baskets and miniature bark canoes, like those their ancestors once used to travel through the Fuegian archipelago. A small museum displays 19th-century photographs of the Yamanas, showing how they hunted and fished and went naked summer and winter, sheltering themselves in disposable log structures covered with leaves and vines.
Continuing southward, the Mare Australis pulls into the Murray Channel, which opened to commercial navigation just a few years ago. As the sun sets, the ship crosses Nassau Bay, heading for an early-morning rendezvous with Cape Horn.
The ship pitches and rolls. It’s 2:30 a.m. The forward lounge on the third deck is deserted. Huge waves break across the prow of the ship as it presses forward.
A ghostly white shape appears in the darkness on the port side of the ship. It comes nearer, the ship’s lights reflecting off its huge, white wings. It banks and circles, its wings the length of the prow. It turns again, then flies in front of the ship, as though it were leading it toward Cape Horn. It circles again and then disappears in the darkness. It is a wandering albatross.
In the morning, the ship’s captain, Fernando Carvajal Martinez, who has been sailing these waters for 45 years, said, “Wandering albatrosses are the souls of dead sailors.”
There are many who have lost their lives exploring this region, battling their way through the gale-force winds and 65-foot seas that can surround Cape Horn. As the Mare Australis approaches, the rock is wreathed in rainbows. Rickety wooden steps lead to the top.
A small, snug house shelters a Chilean lighthouse keeper and his wife, who have been there a week and will be stationed there for a year. Several dogs and cats live permanently on the rock, from keeper to keeper. A supply boat visits every few months. Other boats pass on their way to Antarctica. There’s a tiny chapel with a large cross outside, tethered to resist the wind. Several marble markers commemorate the dead and a large, metal sculpture of a wandering albatross stands at the end of a wooden path. Beyond it is the ocean, and beyond that, Antarctica, 600 miles away.
The ship’s passengers sign the guest book in the lighthouse keeper’s living room. It’s time to head back. Two days later, the Mare Australis docks again in Punta Arenas, which now seems oppressively crowded and full of cars.
Terese Loeb Kreuzer, editor of Travel Arts Syndicate, is the author of “How to Move to Canada.”
