from the walls, waiting for some one to attack him. Why he did not march in and occupy the town no one seemed to know. At the close of our fortnight's stay in the harbor he had not moved; and so far as we could learn did not intend to do so.

Southward still, leaving Montevideo with its finished civilization in manners, customs, streets, shops, and police regulations, we steamed down the eastern coast of Patagonia. On the 23d of May we entered the Strait of Magalhaen.

Opening winter, in a region as near utter desolation as any thing on earth, met us fairly in the face. We left the familiar Atlantic in the gloom of a sky heavy and black with stormclouds. By the aid of a few sketches I propose to tell the story of our singular cruise through the Strait, and the almost unknown regions of inland water beyond.

Do many people know that the Strait of Magalhaen has a governor? At Sandy Point-a hundred miles from the Atlantic-there is a village of some fifty houses, where he lives and holds almost absolute rule over his little garrison of one company of Chilinean infantry, and a vague number of Patagonian irregulars. Sent there by the Government of Chili, which country claims the barren heritage of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, he is now serving his third term of three years. I introduce him with great pleasure. Governor Schutz, a Danish gentleman, of rare scientific ability, more widely known in Europe than America; who knows Patagonia, the Strait, the neighboring islands, and the inhabitants of these regions better than any one else; and who will, I trust, some day give the world the results of his tedious residence and studies at Sandy Point.

resulting in an average height of between five feet eleven inches and six feet.

From Sandy Point to Port Famine, thirty miles further. Here we anchored in a driving snow-storm that would have been creditable to New England in January. In an hour afterward the storm cleared away. The harbor of Port Famine, even in winter weather, is one of the loveliest spots that I ever saw. One singular fact, unnoticed so far as I have seen in any description of the country, is the absence of any deciduous tree in Patagonia, even in midwinter. Not that the ordinary evergreens of the North form the mass of the forests. On the contrary, a great variety of all sorts of trees, among which are duplicates of the maple and oak of our own country, outnumber the spruces, pines, and

cedars, common in the higher latitudes all over the world. Grass grows fresh and green beneath the snow, and I gathered butter-cups in a temperature of 32° Fahrenheit, in the old cemetery on the bluff above the harbor mouth at this point.

With sunshine and fair weather we went ashore. Port Famine has a historical fame. Centuries ago a colony from Spain perished wretchedly here from want of food. Some twenty years since a Chilinean settlement for convicts met its death by a revolt of the prisoners-who rose on their guards, murdered men, women, and children, captured a trading schooner at anchor in the harbor, massacred its crew, and sailed away. It is pleasant to know that these convict pirates were afterward punished. At Ancud, in Chiloe Island, the place is shown where they were pulled in pieces by horses; in the same style in which a certain King of France put the supposed assassin Damiens to death. Ruins of frame-houses crown the high land on the northern side of the harbor. A square inclosure, surrounded by a half-decayed fence of wooden pickets, shows the plaza of the convictvillage, afterward the burial-ground of the victims of the massacre. A wooden cross stood in its centre a few years ago. Visitors to the place, though very few in number, have hacked this away till a stump, a yard in height, is all that remains of it. Graves are scattered thickly around. An old earth-work, with two or three corroding guns, overlooks the cemetery and the ruins. The story of the misfortunes of Port Famine was told to me by Governor Schutz, while I sat in his comfortable library at Sandy Point.

The view from the window took in the broad expanse of the Straits, with the snow-covered mountains of Tierra del Fuego on the southern side. A scene of desolation. A region without house or hut in sight, beyond the fifty or sixty that made the Governor's village. Sitting there at ease, in a room whose appointments were the same as those of any similar room at home, smoking a choice cigar and tasting very fine old sherry meanwhile, it was hard

to realize that only two mails in a year were possible for the Governor, so far removed is his house from the outer world.

More than a hundred mountain peaks are within range of vision from the plateau where the ruins of Port Famine stand. A vast inland lake terminates thirty miles to the southward in the entrance to Magdalen Sound-a passage to the southern Pacific, cut through the mountains of Tierra del Fuego. Narrow, twisted, walled in by high cliffs, a channel whose waters have never seen the sun, it is filled with shoals and sunken rocks; round and over which the breakers beat unceasingly. The naturalist Darwin says, very truly, that it resembles an avenue to another and a worse world.

From Port Famine to Port Gallant; rounding the southernmost point of the main land of America, Cape Froward, a black and weatherworn rock, a thousand feet in height, in a strong gale from the south. Port Gallant was the first of the many harbors of the same kind in which we were destined to pass dreary southern winter nights before entering the open ocean again. They seem like sunken craters. A crevice in the side admits the ship into a well whose walls are mountains. Hardly one of them is large enough to hold more than one or two ships at a time. As harbors they are perfect. The fiercest storms outside leave their surface unruffled. Their silence at night is something unnatural. In some of them, cascades of pure and cold water come down from thousands of feet above, in dust-falls, shivered into spray far up in the air. In others the strange "side-wheel" duck paddles through the darkness, alarmed by some movement on the vessel. The utter stillness of these little bays was broken by such sounds only.

The "side-wheel" ducks made their first appearance as we entered the Strait. I believe they are found only in Patagonia. Discarding their wings as instruments for flying and their feet as paddles, they use their wings as wheels; never rising from the water even when pursued, but rushing ahead at great speed, leaving wakes

ed too closely they dive. I never saw one leave the water, or make any attempt to fly.

Leaving Port Gallant on Sunday morning, our route for the day lay, straight as if drawn by rules, down the middle of a majestic aisle, sixty miles in length, with side-walls of mountain headlands and cliffs. They met in the clear distance in perspective. This superb channel, with a constant succession of the wildest Alpine scenery on either side, snow-capped mountains, deep ravines, high precipices, and immense glaciers, that filled long gorges, and spread out into seas of ice at intervals, is known as "Crooked Reach." The name seemed to me very illy given.

Borgia Bay, Port Tamar, and the Strait of Magalhaen itself were left behind in two days more. The strange portion of our cruise began.

BORGIA BAY.

From the Strait to Tres-Montes Peninsula, through six degrees of latitude, a series of intricate inland channels lie among the Patagonian islands. Their general course is northward. They are known in succession as Smith's, Sarmiento, and Mesier channels. These principal passages have many connections, short cuts, and intermediate channels, making a somewhat labyrinthine tract of water that is seldom traversed by any other vessels than sealing schooners, and by these at long intervals. The surveys of Admiral Fitzroy, of the English navy, are the basis for the charts of these inland waters; and even those are so far from correct at some points, that our steamer, traveling by day. light only, had to feel her way, sometimes for miles, by the lead-line. We had passed a week in the Strait of Magalhaen, and headed north again for our next port, Valparaiso. An old custom exists among the voyagers of the Strait, of leaving the names of their ships, with some records of their cruises, at the different anchorages. At Borgia Bay was a large collection of records of this sort, painted boards nailed on the trees. Among them the names of the United States ship Decatur, which staid in the Strait weather-bound for two months, about ten years ago; and the Resolucion, one of the Spanish vessels that seized the Chincha islands. One captain had recorded his command as a "whaling skuner."

INSCRIPTIONS AT BORGIA BAY.

At two or three points we found excellent opportunities for hunting the guanaco, a species of lama, valued for its flesh, which resembles beef, and its fur. The Patagonians (literally, "men with large

PATAGONIAN BELLE.

feet") make robes of the guanaco skins, sewing several together, using them for winter clothing. As the men have no beard it becomes difficult to distinguish the sexes when both are seen in company. An intense plainness and similarity of feature characterize the nation. One female of eighteen years that I saw with her mother might have been almost any age or of either sex, so far as any appearance of face, dress, or figure was concerned.

At

We hunted guanacos and ostriches. They both abound in the more level country at the eastern end of the Strait. They are very shy, and we met with no success in our hunts. Sandy Point the natives offered finished robes for sale. I found one an admirable bed-covering in the winter weather.

I use the term "we" in the plural number. The officers of the ship were twenty in all. Eight of us, more nearly allied by a common residence in the ward-room and its eight tributary state-rooms, were the chief explorers and sportsmen. The captain, well known in the service as an expert and daring navigator, led us all, however. Neither cold nor exposure seemed to daunt him whenever, in our numerous anchorages, any signs of game worth securing were seen. He and a young relative who shared his cabin, as ardent a sportsman as the captain, furnished us in the ward-room with many a meal of unknown fowls in the dreary days when cold and impending scarcity of food made the fowling-piece or rifle our only hope.

Twenty officers and one hundred and eightysix men thrown upon their own resources for amusement in a long voyage find under most favorable circumstances some trouble in realizing any. For some of us in the ward-room it was a first cruise of any length. My own pre

vious sea-going had been wholly on the blockade. Four of the eight had but just entered the naval from the merchant service. Three of us were in the regular service, and five in the volunteer. This mingling of the two branches, far more in the navy than the army, becomes unfortunate. Officers on ship-board are necessarily thrown so much more together than those on shore, and small jealousies have so much fairer a field in which to work. Yet the evil is insurmountable in such a war as ours, and will perhaps work its own cure in time.

With us affairs went on with tolerable smoothness. A punning man, two common-sense men, a careful man, a talkative man, an eccentric man, and two negative men were sufficiently distinct in personality to give some zest to conversation. Then one of the common-sense men was an inveterate rumbler, and afforded enjoyment to the others from that peculiarity.

I ought not to leave the Strait without speaking of its oldest living habitué, Captain Smiley, of the Falkland Islands. The Captain is a remarkable example of the fact that sailors may sometimes live to advanced age and keep in perfect health. He acknowledges a residence of fifty-five years in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere; but an old gentleman of Montevideo told me he had known Smiley personally for over seventy years, and that when he first saw him he was a full-grown man. Smiley's age must, in that event, be nearly ninety. His appearance and actions are those of a well-preserved and active man of fifty years or thereabouts. He is known by every one, civilized and barbarian, from Uruguay round to Chili. I was assured by a captain, who was wrecked on the eastern coast of Patagonia, that Smiley scented the disaster six hundred miles away, and came with assistance. His services to ship