MAP OF THE CAPE HORN REGION.

The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn

A STUDY OF LIFE IN TIERRA DEL FUEGO AND PATAGONIA

BY

John R. Spears

ILLUSTRATED

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK
27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET
LONDON
24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND
The Knickerbocker Press
1895
Copyright, 1895
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London
The Knickerbocker Press, New Rochelle, N.Y.

TO ALL WHO LOVE THE RED ABORIGINES OF THE AMERICAS
AS GOD MADE THEM.

PREFACE

I am impelled to say, by way of preface, that the readers will find herein such a collection of facts about the coasts of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia as an ordinary newspaper reporter might be expected to gather while on the wing, and write when the journey was ended. It was as a reporter of The Sun, of New York, that I visited the region described. And instead of giving these facts in the geographical sequence in which they were gathered, I have grouped them according to the subjects to which they relate. So it happens that the work is what may be properly called a collection of newspaper sketches rather than the conventional story of a traveller. I make this explanation the more freely for the reason that book-buyers as a rule, so book publishers have repeatedly told me, do not take kindly to newspaper sketches bound in book form. They resent as an attempted imposition, it is said, the masking of such writings in the garb that belongs to literature, just as they would resent the sale of cotton-seed oil under the name of lard. However this may be I am bound to avoid even the appearance of any such deceitful intent.

On the other hand there are people who depend almost entirely on the newspapers for their reading matter. They seem to prefer the style of the newspaper writers. Perhaps a book that is avowedly the work of a reporter will meet their approval. At any rate I should be particularly sorry to have any of them think, when the book is offered to them by the bookseller, that it is anything different from what it is.

Then there is the pleading of the baby act in literature—the offering of apologies for shortcomings and asking for the leniency of the reader. I do not think I ought to do it. It is as if a dairy farmer, while asking full price for his butter, should say: "I've a realizin' sense that the smell haint just right. The dinged cows was eatin' leeks afore I know'd it, but I done my best at the churnin' an' I hope ye'll make allowances." If a buyer is looking for a book with the odor of flowers and new-mown hay in it I do not think it is becoming to ask him to take one flavored with garlic instead. Save for the matter manifestly from books and records I obtained the facts herein by observation and interviews; and I am willing to abide by the press law that a blunder is inexcusable. It is, of course, the honest intent of the news-gatherer to write his facts so that they will not be ignored or misunderstood or forgotten, but when he fails to reach that standard he loses his market, and he ought to lose it. And the man who essays the creation of something permanent ought not to ask that he be judged by a lower standard than that of the writers for "ephemeral publications."

I am under great obligations to many of the people whom I met in the course of the journey, for assistance in gathering facts, but of the whole number Mr. E. L. Baker, the American Consul at Buenos Ayres; Herr Bruno Ansorge, of the Paramo Mining Company; Mr. Adolph Figue, a merchant at Ushuaia; and Revs. John Lawrence and Thomas Bridges, missionaries, were at especial pains to help me. I should like to thank them again for what they did. And were I not prohibited from doing so I would include one other name—that of the runaway sailor boy from New York whom I found in the desolate harbor at the east end of La Isla de Los Estados.

Having said this much I can very cheerfully face the inevitable—the fact that the work will be judged by its merits. If it succeeds I shall be glad, of course; if it fails I shall know better what to do next time.

J. R. S.

CONTENTS.

PAGE
CHAPTER I.
AFTER CAPE HORN GOLD [1]
CHAPTER II.
THE CAPE HORN METROPOLIS [27]
CHAPTER III.
CAPE HORN ABORIGINES [47]
CHAPTER IV.
A CAPE HORN MISSION [79]
CHAPTER V.
ALONG-SHORE IN TIERRA DEL FUEGO [107]
CHAPTER VI.
STATEN ISLAND OF THE FAR SOUTH [137]
CHAPTER VII.
THE NOMADS OF PATAGONIA [151]
CHAPTER VIII.
THE WELSH IN PATAGONIA [168]
CHAPTER IX.
BEASTS ODD AND WILD [183]
CHAPTER X.
BIRDS OF PATAGONIA [201]
CHAPTER XI.
SHEEP IN PATAGONIA [215]
CHAPTER XII.
THE GAUCHO AT HOME [228]
CHAPTER XIII.
PATAGONIA'S TRAMPS [250]
CHAPTER XIV.
THE JOURNEY ALONG-SHORE [260]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE
MAP OF THE CAPE HORN REGION [Frontispiece]
GOLD-WASHING MACHINES. PARAMO, TIERRA DEL FUEGO [14]
PUNTA ARENAS, STRAIT OF MAGELLAN [30]
YAHGANS AT HOME(1) [48]
THE MISSION STATION AT USHUAIA(1) [92]
USHUAIA, THE CAPITAL OF ARGENTINE TIERRA DEL FUEGO(1) [108]
AN ONA FAMILY(1) [128]
ALUCULOOF INDIANS(1) [134]
GOVERNMENT STATION AT ST. JOHN. (FROM A SKETCH BY COMMANDER CHWAITES, A.N.)(1) [138]
A TEHUELCHE SQUAW(1) [158]
TEHUELCHES IN CAMP(1) [166]
GAUCHOS AT HOME [228]
AMONG THE RUINS AT PORT DESIRE, PATAGONIA [270]
SANTA CRUZ, PATAGONIA(1) [276]
THE GOVERNOR'S HOME AND A BUSINESS BLOCK IN GALLEGOS, THE CAPITAL OF PATAGONIA(1) [282]

Note 1: Reproduced by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, from an article, by the author of this book, in Scribner's Magazine, entitled "At the end of the Continent."

THE GOLD DIGGINGS OF CAPE HORN.

CHAPTER I.

AFTER CAPE HORN GOLD.

If any of the readers of this book have an unrestrainable longing for wild adventure, with the possibility of suddenly acquiring riches thrown in as an incentive to endurance, let them pack their outfits and hasten away to the region lying between Cape Horn and the Straits of Magellan to dig for gold. Neither Australia nor California in their roughest days afforded the dangers, nor did they make the showings of gold—real placer gold for the poor man to dig—that have been, and are still to be found in Tierra del Fuego, and the adjoining islands. Nor is the gold in all cases too fine to be saved by ordinary rude sluices, for "nuggets as big as kernels of corn"—the ideal gold of the placer miner—have been found by the handful, and may still be had in one well-known locality if the miner is willing and able to endure the hardships and escape the dangers incident to the search.

But because of the hardships and dangers it is a veritable tantalus land. There are many more skeletons of dead miners than authentic records of wealth acquired in Tierra del Fuego, while those who have now and again struck it rich and gotten clean off with the dust usually have gone no further with it than Punta Arenas in the Straits of Magellan, for Punta Arenas is to this region what San Francisco was to California and Virginia City to the deserts of Nevada.

The story of the Cape Horn gold diggings is especially remarkable in this, that the gold there should have remained undiscovered during the centuries that passed after the first navigators landed in the region. Consider that Magellan first saw Patagonia and the strait that bears his name more than 350 years ago. Consider further the character of Magellan, and the host of explorers that followed him. They were all admirals, or bore other titles of high rank, and we call them famous, but they were almost to a man notion peddlers—men who started out with stocks of gewgaws and trifles which they were to swap for valuables. Magellan went out, not to make himself famous as a navigator, but to reach the Spice Islands by a shorter, and therefore more profitable, route than that by the Cape of Good Hope. He was out for fortune, and the fame of making discoveries was an incidental matter. And so for the rest. They were not very particular or nice as to how they got gold to ballast their ships. They plundered harmless people on the African coast and elsewhere; robbed ships found under other flags than their own; even sacrificed innocent human lives in their thirst for gold. Not one of these greedy sailors and pirates but would have gone almost wild with joy at the finding of a mine of gold.

And yet here, in the streams that empty into the Straits of Magellan, even in the streams near Port Famine, where Sarmiento's colony starved to death, and in the sands of the coast of Patagonia, were gold diggings—the genuine placer diggings, as said. These navigators sailed along with their eyes on the gold-bearing shores. They even filled their water casks in the gold-bearing streams. It is likely that the time came when scarcely a day in the year passed when some sailor's eye was not on land in the Cape Horn region where gold could be found, but not until the latter half of the nineteenth century was gold actually obtained there.

Then, when gold was found, comes another curious feature of the story. It probably took twenty years after the finding of the first dust—twenty years, during every one of which, some gold was found in the region—to create anything like a stir in the matter. I say probably twenty years because the actual dates are not known.

The story of the Cape Horn mining region begins on the mainland of Patagonia north of the Straits of Magellan, and it is at the beginning a very hazy story. I could not learn definitely either the name of the first man who found gold in the vicinity of the strait, or the exact locality in which it was found. I talked with miners and merchants of the region on the subject, but no one knew anything about it worth mention. An Official Memoria General on the subject of Mines, printed in Buenos Ayres in 1889, says that "several years before 1867 it was known that gold existed on the east coast of Patagonia, and also in the little streams that run from different points of the Andes. This fact has been confirmed in various places and at different times by Chilean miners and shipwrecked seamen." And that is the best information I could get on the subject.

Early in 1869 Commander George Chaworth Musters of the English navy, visited Punta Arenas, en route for a journey across Patagonia with the Tehuelche Indians. In one of the stores of the town, where he stopped for the purpose of "purchasing tobacco and other necessaries," he found some nuggets of gold. He speaks of them incidentally along with the Indian weapons, girdles, and other curios, that the store contained, but a Yankee sailor from the schooner Rippling Wave, who happened into the store while Musters was there, became enthusiastic over it and said:

"Ah, that's the stuff we used to grub up in a creek in Californy. I guess if the old boat lays her bones on these here shores, I'll stop and turn to digging again."

In 1877 and again in 1878, Don Ramon Lista, an Argentine explorer and writer, visited Punta Arenas, and on his return to Buenos Ayres he printed his experiences in a pamphlet. In that he says:

The creek called Las Minas that bounds the settlement on the north abounds in grains of gold; and from 1866 until 1877 many natives of the island of Chiloé have lived well on the daily product of their labors in washing the gold-bearing sand.

In the year 1876, a small schooner engaged in the seal fishery, and commanded by a noted Argentine sailor, Don Gregorio Ibañez, was stranded near Cape Virgin, the extreme southeast corner of Patagonia. The crew, without exception, had the good fortune to escape to the land with some provisions and other valuables, including a shovel. The shovel may seem to be a novel tool for shipwrecked seamen to carry through the surf, but Don Gregorio knew what he was doing.

Patagonia is a desert region very much like certain parts of the United States. One may travel hundreds of miles without seeing a drop of sweet water, and yet with a shovel water a-plenty may be had by him who knows where to dig. Don Gregorio, having landed his provisions, put a man at work digging in the sand not very far from the surf in search of water. Whether he found water or not tradition does not tell. The story tellers all forget about the water as they relate how, when the digger had gotten down about three feet, he began to throw out a layer of black sand such as no one of the crew had seen before—a black sand that was dotted all over with little and big dull yellow particles. That was such an odd-looking sand that Don Gregorio and the digger and all hands had to take a proper look at it. And when they had taken this look, they almost went crazy with excitement, because those yellow particles were pure gold.

But, as I said, neither this discovery nor the gold that was dug from Las Minas creek at Punta Arenas, nor the stories of these doings which were carried to England and to California by ships passing that way, had any effect in creating a rush to the diggings near the straits.

In explanation of this indifference, it may be said that the diggings, even of Las Minas creek were, on the whole, rather lean. Instances of considerable finds are mentioned by the old timers of Punta Arenas. Men cleaned up the stuff by the ounce, in spots, but the run of what men got was "mere day wages." The find of Don Gregorio's sailors was not considered of any importance—the tiny nuggets were supposed to be a stray deposit, and not indicating any bed of gold-bearing sand. The stuff lay in the sand of the beach, and who had ever heard of such a thing as placer diggings in the sand along the shore?

In 1877 as many as 120 men worked the sands of Las Minas creek and made day wages at it. In the United States the fact that 120 men with hash bowls could wash out even "mere day wages" would create a rush to the region, while the finding of an occasional nugget "of the weight of 300 grammes," as occurred in Las Minas creek, would create a stampede, of course, but in the Spanish-American countries the conditions and the people are different.

However, a time came when even the people of Punta Arenas got excited. The steamship Arctic of one of the lines running through the strait was, in 1884, wrecked on Cape Virgin very near the place where Don Gregorio's sealing schooner went ashore. Like the inhabitants of the Bahama Islands, the people of Punta Arenas used "to thank God for a good wreck." The Arctic was a remarkably good wreck, for she was a well-found, handsomely fitted passenger ship. A motley crew of men hastened from Punta Arenas to the beach at Cape Virgin, some to get what they could from her lawfully, and some to get what they could in any way. It is said now that some one of the number was familiar with the story of what Don Gregorio's sailors found when digging for water, and so the old story of gold discoveries there was retold as the gang smoked and talked and sorted their plunder. Thereat some of them went digging "just for luck," and found something more exciting even than the silk fittings, chronometers, cordage, and anchors which they had taken from the Arctic—they found gold.

One Fred Otten cleaned up seventeen kilos (37.4 pounds) of gold in the course of two weeks, they say, and that sort of luck was enough to rouse even the phlegmatic wreckers of the Straits of Magellan.

Here, then, at the wreck of the steamship Arctic, is found the real beginning of the story of the Cape Horn gold diggings. In those days Punta Arenas was a supply depot for a fleet of sealing schooners that eventually destroyed the rookeries of the region to the south. The sealing sailors took a hand in with the gold washers. They did more than that. They had, as they would have said, a severe look at the ground round about as well as at the layer of sand in which the gold was found. The lofty banks—in fact, everything in sight from the beach—was what geology sharps would call an alluvial formation. The lofty precipices were composed of layers of clay, sand, pebbles, shells, the débris of prehistoric seas and floods. In one of these layers—a layer that cropped out under the tide waters—was gold galore. Jack couldn't explain it, and he didn't want to; but when he had helped to skin the gold-bearing layer from the clay as far as he could reach, he remembered that he had seen just such beaches with banks behind them elsewhere—on Tierra del Fuego, on New Island, on Lennox, on Navarin, on Wollaston, on Hermit, on Cape Horn itself. He had seen those lofty banks from the decks of sealing schooners, and he was game to go to them to see if there was gold in the sand along the shore there as there was at Cape Virgin. Why shouldn't there be? And there was.

Nor were the citizens of Punta Arenas the only ones excited by this find of gold dust in the sand at Cape Virgin. The Argentine Government sent an engineer to examine the region, and the opinion formed by the engineer was that "the gold-bearing sands of Patagonia are richer than those of California and Australia." So says an old public document. Further than that, "there was much agitation in Buenos Ayres among speculators in mines who had great hopes that grand fortunes might be obtained easily in Patagonia. A great number of persons solicited from the government concessions of mines of gold. But as the greater part of the solicitors had never been in Patagonia, and were obliged to gather their information from others as to the desirable points, it happened that much confusion arose."

"Much confusion" just describes what happened. Many concessions were not only issued on overlapping claims, but on the same claims, and there were many heart-burnings and feuds over patches of sand that were not worth anything.

One Don Gregorio Lezama, with a capital of $70,000, organized an expedition, and sent it out with sluices and wind-mill pumps to supply the sluices. They reached the diggings and set up both sluices and pumps. Then they found that when the wind did not blow the pumps could not supply the sluices with water, and when the wind did blow the men could not supply the sluices with gold-bearing sand, because that sand was found only where the waves would then prevent the work of the men.

So the wind-mill outfit was abandoned and another pumping arrangement to be worked by mules was sent out. The record contains this paragraph as to the subsequent doings:

The company continued its operations for more or less months, and obtained some pounds of gold; but the general outlook was not very encouraging, the work was suspended, and the company liquidated itself.

So it happened, of course, to the majority of people who went in the rush to Cape Virgin diggings. They eventually suspended operations and liquidated themselves. Nevertheless a number had "struck it rich," and that, as said, started the search for the precious metal along the stormy coasts and under the towering precipices of the islands away south to Cape Horn.

My first view of a Cape Horn mine camp was obtained on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego. I had taken passage on an Argentine naval transport that was bound on a voyage with supplies for the officials and troops at various stations which the Argentine Government has established in recent years throughout the region. To promote the development of its territories the government carries prospectors and their outfits at very moderate charges, considering the kind of navigation. Accordingly this transport had on board four men and about three tons of provisions and other supplies to be landed at El Paramo, the first mine camp established on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego.

Paramo is a Spanish word meaning desert. It is a very good name for the camp. When one has heard the story of this desert camp he will have gained some idea of the life of a prospector and miner in the Cape Horn region.

The founder of El Paramo was one Julius Popper, one of the pioneer prospectors of Tierra del Fuego. He was, in fact, the first prospector to make a journey across the island, though missionaries, of whom a curious story will be told at another time, had explored it on another quest. Popper was an engineer of rare attainments—a civil, mechanical, and mining engineer—good in all three branches: an astronomer; a linguist who spoke and wrote a dozen languages fluently. He could with equal grace and precision conduct a lady to dinner or knock all the fight out of a claim jumper. Unfortunately, when just beginning to realize on his investments in Tierra del Fuego, he died at the hands of murderers. He was poisoned in Buenos Ayres by men whom he had offended in the south.

In the year 1886 the Cape Virgin diggings were so far worked out that no more than day wages—a paltry $5 a day, as the miners call it—could be had. Only the plodders would remain there, and Julius Popper was never a plodder. So an exploring company of eighteen was gotten together, with pack horses and a mining outfit, together with arms, ammunition, and a permit from the Argentine Government to use them whenever necessary.

The landing was made at Future Bay, opposite Punta Arenas. It was in the month of September, the spring of the southern latitude. Snow lay so deep on the mountains that a track had to be cleared with shovels for miles. Then the brush was elsewhere so thick that axes had to be used to open a passage for miles, but after five days' labor they got to Santa Maria River, where they found eight men at work on a sluice taking out about 700 grains of gold a day. This was mere day wages, and they pushed on until they reached Useless Bay, and then took an easterly course which they held clear across the island, reaching the coast at the north of San Sebastian Bay.

Here, in a tongue of sand that encloses the northeast side of the bay, they found the gold they were looking for in a layer of black sand, exactly like the layer that had been found at Cape Virgin, although there was no bank of any kind behind the beach.

Having staked claims here they went away south, discovering and naming capes, rivers, and ranges of hills, with here and there more placer gold. It was an open prairie country, with a species of sagebrush on it such as is found in Patagonia, but instead of a desert they here found plenty of water everywhere, and sometimes too much in the shape of swamps; but, unfortunately, the gold was usually found where there was not a running stream within miles. It was apparent that all sluices would have to be supplied by means of pumps.

Eventually they fell foul of the Indians. A shower of arrows came at them from the brush, but all fell short. The number of Indians was estimated at eighty, armed with bows. The eighteen white men turned loose Winchesters in reply, the Indians lying down while the fire lasted, and jumping up to discharge their arrows when it slackened. By the time the magazines of the rifles were empty the Indians abandoned the fight. One gets an idea of the quality of the white fighters from the fact that but two of the Indians were killed, and the further fact that when the fight was over Mr. Popper posed his men in the attitude of troops repelling a charge, took a position himself astride one of the dead Indians, and then had the outfit photographed for subsequent use, on the cover of a pamphlet in which he described the journey he had made.

To the camp called Paramo, that was established in consequence of Popper's expedition, came, as said, the Argentine naval transport, bringing four men and some tons of supplies, on the morning of May 12th.

Considering its age, the number of men employed—from thirty to forty—, and the fact that it is also a government station, having a prefect, a chief of police, a schoolmaster, a secretary to the prefect, and a squad of soldiers to maintain the dignity of the officials, it was a remarkable camp. There was just three buildings in sight—a boarding-house for the miners, a home for the mine bosses, and a combined stable and storehouse. The camp of the government was said to be located two leagues back in the country. The buildings were of wood, roofed with corrugated, galvanized iron. They were huddled together so that they looked from the ship as one building. They were on the usual mine-camp model of North America—one story high, box shaped, and with small windows and no superfluous doors. A barbed wire corral stood at one side of the buildings, which were located so near the beach that a high surf at spring tide was sure to send the foam quite to the foundations on which they stood. Indeed, one of them was protected from the surf by a sort of a wooden sea wall.

Beyond the houses stretched a low yellowish grassy plain that was very like a Nebraska prairie in appearance, and a league away to the north rose a low range of treeless hills.

The diggings lay right in the beach. When Popper first discovered the claim the black sand that contained the gold lay in a bed of from three to four inches thick, that was for the most part under a layer of coarse gravel two to three feet thick, though in some places the black sand was found free of any cover at low tide.

Of the richness of the diggings in the early days it may be said that the mine was discovered in September, 1886. Popper had to return to Buenos Ayres and organize a company to work the deposit as well as perfect his title to the claims according to Argentine law, and then ship a steam pumping plant with sluices and material for the camp to the locality. This all took time, and it was not until the end of the following antarctic winter that he got his plant in operation. He was then able to pass an average of fifty cubic yards of sand through his sluices per day. From this he cleaned up in the course of the first year, after the discovery, 154 pounds (weight avoirdupois) of pure gold.

As another indication of the richness of this territory, I can say that we took on a government official who had been at the station two leagues back considerably less than a year, but he had cleaned up enough gold to satisfy him. He was going home to Buenos Ayres, rich. He had worked diggings outside the Paramo claim, using common sluice boxes.

While this easily-obtained gold-bearing sand was being worked off, the miners observed that the supply was renewed somewhat by every storm that raged, and further, that when a storm happened to come at the time of the spring tides, a very much larger quantity of gold-bearing sand was washed up by the waves than in ordinary storms. This had happened, too, at Cape Virgin, but the renewal of the gold supply by the storms was not so notable there. However, it appears that eventually a time came when the miners at Paramo were able to work off all the black sand between storms. So it happened—so it happens in these days that the miners sit down and smoke their pipes till the storm comes and goes. After the surf of the storm is gone and the tide runs out, a fresh layer of black sand is found with gold in it. The miners say the sand is washed up from a streak that crops out somewhere below low tide. They think that this layer could be reached by sinking a shaft near the buildings, but they can't sink a shaft profitably on account of the water coming in. The black sand lies on clay, and all the layer, and the other layers above it, are, so to speak, afloat with water. So they work only after a heavy surf. The weather, on the average, keeps them busy about half the time.

The land is controlled by a German-Argentine corporation, of which Herr Carlos Backhausen and Herr Bruno Ansorge are superintendent and foreman. The men work the sand on shares, and do so well that, paradoxical as it may seem, there is difficulty in keeping a full gang of men at work. The trouble is, that, as soon as the men get a few ounces of dust to their credit, they must take it and go away to Punta Arenas and swap it for such joys as may be had in that tiny metropolis.

At Paramo, on the beach, they now use a combination of wooden sluices and a copper-plate machine with which all gold miners are familiar, but which could not be briefly described here. The riffles in the sluices save the coarser gold, while the mercury on the copper plates takes up the flour gold as it drifts away over the plates. Water for all the machines is pumped from the sea, and it is worth while telling that experiments there show that some pay streaks can be profitably worked with salt water when fresh water fails to save a satisfactory return.

Geologists find this gold-bearing layer of black sand (it is a magnetic iron sand) a most interesting study. They say the deposit at Paramo is a continuation of that found at Cape Virgin, and that deposit is found at intervals on the Patagonia coast to the Gallegos River. The geologists are even confident that it crops out at intervals for over a thousand miles along the Patagonia coast—always below the water line. Of course, this bed of sand was deposited where it is now found by the action of water, and it must have existed at one time in the form of a reef or vein a thousand miles long in some prehistoric range of mountains. What a lead that would have been for some lone prospector!

GOLD-WASHING MACHINES. PARAMO, TIERRA DEL FUEGO

Returning north from Paramo on the east coast of Tierra del Fuego, the transport entered the Straits of Magellan and went to Punta Arenas. From Punta Arenas we went down through Cockburn Channel to the Antarctic Ocean, and then, turning east, cruised through Brecknock Pass, Desolation Bay, Whale Sound, Darwin Sound, and Beagle Channel via the Northwest arm. Thence we coasted along east and up through the Straits of Le Maire on the north side of Staten Island, which we followed to St. John Bay on the east end. These are positively the wildest, most dangerous waters in the world. As will be told, the hidden reefs and the whirling tornadoes formed combinations that made experienced travellers look serious, although in a steamer that was as good a seaboat as ever floated. And yet the prospectors of Punta Arenas have sailed all over that route, summer and winter, in twenty-five catboats, looking for gold.

At Ushuaia, the capital of Argentine Tierra del Fuego, a small village in Beagle Channel, I fell in with Harry Hansen, a Punta Arenas prospector, who for six months had been cruising about the islands to the south of the channel, and was on his way home very much disgusted with the life of a prospector. He, with a brother, had faced every kind of a storm known to the Cape Horn region. They had been obliged to live for weeks, as the Indians do, on limpets and clams only. Their only home had been the tiny cabin of a 25-foot sloop. As a result of the six months of hardship and work they had about twenty-five ounces of gold dust. So they sold their sloop and took passage with us for the Gallegos River. As we steamed along they told stories of gold hunting around Cape Horn.

Lennox Island is just now the centre of interest in that region. Lennox has high banks and sandy beaches, exactly like those of Cape Virgin, and the gold is found in a layer of black sand that crops out below sea level, and is washed up within reach by the waves. But, according to the Hansens, the best of the diggings there were worked out. There was no longer any fresh, unworked ground, with its layers of dust that could be scraped up with a table knife at the rate of three kilos a day, and so Lennox was not worth the attention of any enterprising prospector. The plodders who were willing to carry mercury to put in the sluices, and to sit down and wait for the storms to bring up fresh sand could make a couple of guineas a day easily enough, but the Hansens did not want any such wages as that.

Under the point of New Island, very appropriately called the Asses' Ears, a wide beach was pointed out as the location where an extraordinary find was made. A party from Punta Arenas had landed there, and had sunk a wide shaft several feet into the sand, looking for the gold-bearing layer, but without finding it, although the indications along shore were good. They abandoned the spot after a day or two and went away. Then another party came along some time later, and just for luck concluded to sink the well a little deeper. That was the luckiest conclusion they ever came to.

Within one foot they struck pay dirt, took out over 100 pounds weight (48 kilos) within a month, and sailed away content. Their story, when told at Punta Arenas, sent a host of eager fellows down there to get what was left, and, singular to relate, about every man who went there among the first three boat-loads did well. But when I was passing this point only the smoke of the camp-fire of one lone gold-digger could be seen faintly beneath the Asses' Ears. He was the last of the plodders, according to the Hansens, and was likely to become as rich and as mean as some folks they knew in Punta Arenas—men willing to get rich by saving and scrimping out of a paltry $10 a day.

And then there was the little bay on the Tierra del Fuego mainland, called Port Pantaloons. No man of any experience ever thought of landing there to look for gold. One glance was sufficient to show that no gold could be found there. So everybody supposed, at least. Instead of steep banks, showing the well-known layer formation of Cape Virgin, was a gentle, grassy slope, with a brook that came splashing down a woody ravine. It was a pretty enough place—in fact, the scenery was probably what made a party of seven greenhorns from Punta Arenas, out with a little schooner, put in there and land.

Did I believe in the old saying "A fool for luck"? Well, if I didn't I would after living in Punta Arenas a while. These seven greenhorns made a camp and went washing for gold at Port Pantaloons. At the end of five weeks to a day from the time they left Punta Arenas they were back again, and had exactly four kilos of gold (say nine pounds) each. And every man of them took the first steamer for Europe, intending to settle down and live on the interest of his money instead of having a good time in Punta Arenas, as he might have had.

Of course, there were a lot of people at Punta Arenas who made haste to go down to Port Pantaloons to clean up what these greenhorns had left; but, remarkable to tell, when the experienced miners came to wash where the greenhorns had been, there was found nothing left to clean up. The greenhorns had found a pocket, and had cleaned it themselves.

And then there were the Cape Horn group and New Year's Island off the north coast of Staten Island. The Hansens had visited both localities and had found, as they said:

Plenty of the stuff, but it was too fine for our sluices without mercury. Besides, we didn't have a proper ship for these waters. She was only a ten-tonner. If you want the gold you can have it, but nobody from Punta Arenas will help you get it. It takes too much capital to set up copper-plate machines there, and those that have the capital haven't the pluck to face the sea in these waters. I suppose you could average fifteen grammes a day without mercury if that would satisfy you.

But of all spots in the Cape Horn region, Sloggett Bay, on the south coast of Tierra del Fuego, about forty miles west of the Strait of Le Maire, is the most tantalizing. More expeditions have been fitted out in Punta Arenas to go to Sloggett Bay than to any two gold diggings besides. Almost every expedition has gotten gold, and yet never did an expedition there pay the outfitters. Indeed, more lives have been lost trying for Sloggett Bay gold than at any two points besides. And that is saying a good deal.

There is a man now in Punta Arenas who went down to this bay in a well-built little schooner, which was manned by fourteen men all told. They had heard of the gold found there—gold "in nuggets as big as kernels of corn"—, and nothing should stop them in the work of getting it, they said. They moored their little craft with long cables and chains, and made everything as snug and safe as the most experienced sailors and sealers could suggest. Then they went to work, stripping off the six-foot layer of gravel that overlies the gold-bearing sand and carrying the latter up out of reach of the waves; for they had to work at low tide. The gold is all under water at high tide.

They were a hardy lot and enthusiastic. They worked all of every low tide, and ate and slept during high water. They got on well with their work, for a time, but they made a terrible mistake. They slept in their schooner and kept no lookout—trusted to their moorings to hold them fast. One night they went to sleep, as usual, well-tired from hard labor. Then came one of those fearsome gales that characterize the region. With a speed and power that are beyond description, it picked up the schooner on the crest of a wave and dashed it into kindling wood on the beach—dashed out the lives of thirteen of the men as well. One only was left alive, and, curiously enough, he was entirely uninjured.

"The first I knew that there was a storm," he said, "was when I woke up lying on the beach, with the wreckage around me."

This man did just what might be expected, they say, of any one of the Cape Horn miners. He camped on the beach, and worked away at the pay streak as best he could, until rescued by other prospectors; and he is still a gold seeker in the Cape Horn region.

Sloggett Bay is really no bay at all. It is a roadstead with sheltering walls on the northerly and westerly sides, and a very good bottom to hold an anchor. It is about as much of a harbor as a ship would find on the bar off Sandy Hook, save that there are mountains along shore instead of low, sandy beaches. For a northerly or westerly gale the shelter is as good as any one could wish, but the waves from the southeast drive in with appalling fury. Indeed, any southerly gale is dangerous, for the whirling squalls slew a small boat around until broadside to the combers, and then the end comes before the unfortunate gold hunter has time to think twice.

The gold of Sloggett Bay is marvellous gold. It is, as said, nugget gold as distinguished from gold dust. The traditional "nuggets as big as kernels of corn" are to be had there. I have seen them myself, and when one has seen a handful of such stuff he does not wonder that prospectors keep trying again and again, in spite of the fair certainty of death.

The pay streak at Sloggett Bay lies under water, as it does elsewhere throughout the Cape Horn region, but it is harder to get, because it can hardly be said to crop out at all. One must strip off about six feet of sand and gravel at low tide, and then shovel out the pay streak, carry it up clear of high tide, and there wash out the gold. Of course, when the tide comes in again the space stripped of the covering sand is recovered, and stripping must be done over again at the next low tide. That is very discouraging work, but no form of coffer dam yet devised by the miners has saved it.

They all agree that there is only one way in which the Sloggett Bay field can be worked, and they think that that way would probably fail too. The ideal Sloggett Bay outfit would be a big steam dredge, fitted to scoop up sand, gravel, and pay streak all together, and after running the stuff over the sluices and copper plates, to discharge the débris in a lighter, that could be towed away and emptied in water too deep to work. If such an outfit could hold on for a week, they say it would pay for itself. If it could hold on for a month it would make its owners rich. That it might hold on for a week or two is reasonably probable, but the chances are that it would become a mass of wreckage even before it reached the bay. The prospectors say that no dredge ever built for harbor work could stand a southeast gale there for an hour, and yet the sailors among them say that a dredge built specially for the work on the lightship model, with proper ground tackle for mooring fore and aft, could stand the gales there as well as the storms on the Georges Bank of Massachusetts are weathered by the lightship.

Among the stories the miners tell of the luck they have had is one that, whether true or false, is interesting, for even if false it shows that the man who told it was an original liar; as a matter of fact, I have no reason for doubting the story. Mr. Theo Benfield, whom I met in Punta Arenas, said that during a journey from the strait up the coast he stopped one day under one of the vertical earth banks called barancas in that country to pick out a fossil that he saw protruding. The relic proved to be a part of a mastodon's lower jaw, having two teeth still in place. It was in bad condition, and he was about to throw it away, when he saw that in a split in the top and side of one tooth was a bit of some foreign substance to which he applied his knife. He found that it was gold, that had, as he believed, been deposited there in fine grains by the action of water, and that the grains had united as deposited. The gold, as he says, was in a split in the tooth evidently made there when the jaw was broken. He related the story in support of a theory in regard to the origin of nuggets which he held, thus: Gold, as it comes from the broken-down quartz veins is usually very fine, but as the grains are carried along by the water they fall into little cavities, where, by the action of chemicals in the water, they are united. The split in the old tooth had at some time been lying in a place where gold dust had silted into it until it was about full, and the particles uniting had formed a curious nugget. Unfortunately Mr. Benfield was more interested at that time in getting gold than in questions relating to the origin of nuggets, and so smashed the tooth to get the stuff. He got, he says, over eight grammes from the tooth. If his story be true, he might have obtained many times the value of that much gold for the relic intact, but he did not think of that at the time, and so we have only one man's word in relation to the matter.

It is a remarkable fact that, in spite of all the prospecting done, no gold-quartz veins have yet been found. Louis Figue, a merchant at Ushuaia, in the Beagle Channel, showed me a specimen of nickel ore that had yielded a remarkable per cent. on the first assay; but the only bit of gold ore I saw or heard of was a small piece of free-milling stuff belonging to Bruno Ansorge of Paramo. It was rich, but where the vein was none could tell, for it was from a bit of drift rock called float by the miners, and had been picked up between Useless and San Sebastian Bays.

Very likely the placer gold found in all the streams of Tierra del Fuego (stream gold as distinguished from that in the beach), and that in the streams emptying into the Straits of Magellan, comes from veins yet to be found up in the mountains where the streams rise. Very likely systematic search would discover the veins. But the search would have to be made under circumstances that would make the fair-weather prospectors of Colorado and the grubstake eaters of the Mojave desert gasp. The mountains of the Cape Horn region are snow-topped the year round. The cold is not so intense as the early travellers would make one believe, but there is a strength and a twist to the gales—especially a twist—that is beyond description. And the gales come every day in summer and every week in winter. Expeditions have traversed Tierra del Fuego with horses, but the cheapest and the most comfortable way (in spite of the danger) to prospect the region is from a well-found boat. Moreover, every land expedition must contain enough men to keep up a military guard, because of the hostility of the Indians, while two well-armed, sober men, can defend a well-found boat from the savages, and if skilful and cool can usually escape the danger of storms.

But neither from boats nor from a land expedition has any one as yet been able to explore the higher parts of the mountain sides. Indeed, where nothing else prevents it, the tropical luxuriance of the evergreen beeches and magnolia brush heads off the hardy prospector. It is hard work climbing up rocky gulches and declivities under the most favorable circumstances, but when one must face fierce gales of wind and at the same time hew his way through a solid mass of brush covering the whole space to be explored, the task becomes too great even for a Yankee prospector. It never has been accomplished, and possibly it never will be accomplished; but, as they say very often down there, who knows?

There is not a mine camp in all the Cape Horn region south of the strait, though Paramo, with its three buildings, and say thirty men, is known as a camp. The placers, as found on almost every sandy beach of the region, are all soon worked over, and thereafter pay only day wages. So no camp or village springs up, as would happen were a rich true fissure vein to be found. But Ushuaia, in the Beagle Channel, the capital of Argentine Tierra del Fuego, has three stores and a small mixed population, besides the troops that maintain Argentine dignity, and, with its occasional Indian visitors, its happy-go-lucky architecture, and its heaps of empty bottles, is not unlike a North American mine town.

The headquarters of the Cape Horn miners will be found at Punta Arenas. The peculiarities which makes Punta Arenas at once one of the most interesting, and one of the most disappointing towns in the world, will be described in the next chapter but it may be said now that miners' supplies—picks, pans, clothing, and food—are cheaper here than at any other miners' supply town in the world. But while a man may get these things at a low price, he has to buy a boat instead of the burros he would buy in the States to carry his outfit. A couple of burros cost say $35 in Colorado, but here he must buy a sloop or a catboat, and he ought to buy a schooner fifty feet long instead. Now any kind of a boat fit to carry even the amphibious prospector of the Cape Horn region costs at least $100 in gold, and must be fitted out at a cost of from $25 to $100 more, not to mention the mining outfit proper.

The prospecting sloop of the Cape Horn region is usually of the model of the little oyster sloops to be found about the harbor of New York. The hold is stowed full of provisions, tools for mining, and lumber for sluices. Naturally these prospectors carry a much better supply of food than prospectors elsewhere do. The Rocky Mountain prospectors with their burros must needs be content with meal, beans, bacon, and, perhaps, coffee, but in the Cape Horn region they carry a great variety of stuff in tin cans and Chili claret by the half barrel. All this costs money, but it is none too good for that climate. And even the best-provided outfits are sometimes away from home so long that the supplies are exhausted.

They sail away south feeling quite certain that they will be back soon with their vessel ballasted with gold, but the shortest time spent away from port by any party I heard of was that of the seven who returned from Port Pantaloons in five weeks. The Hansens were away eleven months in 1892-93.

Every year some sail away, and the sail disappears beneath the white peak of Mt. Sarmiento, plainly seen from the water front of Punta Arenas. After three or four months the "White Wings outfit" or the "Mary G. outfit" is casually mentioned by the bar-room groups as one that should be heard from before long. Two or three months later the outfit is mentioned frequently and with ominous looks and shakings of the head, while an anxious-faced wife or mother is seen hurrying to the beach whenever a sail appears in the south, to learn if it be the one she thinks of as she lies awake every night listening to the Cape Horn gales. She goes down quickly, but she comes back slowly and with a dry throat as she learns that it is neither the White Wings nor the Mary G.

The region seems but a narrow space as one looks at the maps, but it is a wide one with labyrinthian channels and hidden bays, the ports of many a missing sloop and catboat of which never a trace will be found to tell the tale of disaster. It is a region where no man with a wife or other person depending on him should enter, but for the young and independent fellow, who can gain vigor and courage in facing the mad freaks of an Antarctic gale, there is no place better than that beyond the Straits of Magellan. He may not get rich—the chances are that he'll be glad to work his way north in the stoke hole of some steamer—but he will have had an experience that will make him contented to live thereafter in the milder region of Uncle Sam's domain, and will, moreover, fit him to make his way there better than he could have been prepared in any other way.

CHAPTER II.

THE CAPE HORN METROPOLIS.

This is the story of what may be called the Cape Horn metropolis, for it is the story of a town which, though a village in population, is the business centre of the region extending from Port Desire, on the Patagonia coast, to the little island whose southern angle is called Cape Horn, and from the Falkland Islands on the east to the limits of the islands on the west coast of the southern continent. Moreover, it is a town whose characteristics are absolutely astounding, even to an experienced traveller who visits it for the first time, and, curiously enough, the more he may have read and heard about it the more he is likely to be astonished when he at last sees it himself.

"La Colonia de Magallanes," as Punta Arenas is styled in the public documents of Chili, is more than fifty years old, and that, to the traveller looking at it from a ship's deck, is one of the most astonishing statements made about the town. On "the 21st of April, 1843, the Government of Chili planted the tri-color banner in the ancient port of Famine, thus taking possession, in the name of Chili, of the Straits of Magallanes," as the Chilian record says.

It is tolerably easy to guess that the Chili Government did this act more from a sentimental desire to hold possession of the territory that had been famous in history, than from any expectation that the region would be worth the expense of holding.

Besides the desire to hold ground with historical associations, the government wanted a penal colony that would be a very long way from the capital. A penal colony, it was argued, would not only hold troublesome convicts, but would serve as a place for employing members of the army suspected of plotting a revolt against the government.

This colony at Port Famine depended entirely on supplies of food from Valparaiso, and as navigation in those days was much more uncertain than now, the settlement sometimes well-nigh repeated the experience of Sacramento's colony, that in the sixteenth century starved to death there. Because of their sufferings, the convicts rose up one day and took possession of the settlement. The Governor was killed. Then a ship happened along and the mutineers boarded it and compelled the crew to sail on, but a Chilian man-o'-war overtook them, whereat the convicts were for the most part hanged to the yard-arms. It is said that a man was seen hanging from every yard-end on the warship, and she was a full-rigged ship—had twenty-four yard ends to hang men to.

The buildings at Port Famine having been burned by the convicts, the government decided to re-establish the colony just south of a long tongue of sand made by a mountain stream emptying into the strait some miles north of Port Famine. The new settlement was named from the old one—La Colonia de Megallanes—but because of that tongue of sand it was nicknamed Sandy Point by English-speaking seamen and Punta Arenas (which means Sandy Point) by all others, and so the town is called by everybody in the region.

As said, this was a place far out of the way. The life which the unfortunates there had to endure may, perhaps, be imagined by those who understand human nature, but not fully realized. Here were men condemned to live shut off from all civilized associations because of crimes of which they had been convicted. They were put in charge of men suspected of trying to commit other crimes. In most cases keeper and prisoner were guilty as charged, but in many cases both were innocent. In all cases the keeper was an absolute monarch with the power, if not the right, to take the life of any convict under him; and, for that matter, the officers could shoot the soldiers without very great risk of adequate punishment.

"It's coolish like the year round," said an old sailor there who had known the town twenty-five years ago, "but when I saw the colony first it wasn't a cable's length from hell."

That the colony did not remain a mere penal settlement with a mental atmosphere like that of sheol was primarily due to the enterprise of a Yankee from Newburyport, Mass., Mr. William Wheelwright, who founded the steamship line called the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. This company began running steamers through the Straits of Magellan in 1868, and they all stopped at the colony perforce, because it was a convenient place to take on coal from hulks that were kept there for the purpose. It was natural that a trade in fresh meats and vegetables should grow out of the coming of the steamers. And that trade was to Punta Arenas what a long drink of Chili claret is to the wayfarer from the Patagonia desert. It brought a new life to the place. On the day the first steamer called the population was 195 souls. In 1872 it numbered 800.

Then other elements of growth appeared. There was the gold, for instance, as told in the last chapter. The gold did not bring a stampede, but it affected the population in a curious fashion.

"Men don't have to slave it for a boss in a gold camp. When they get out of grub they can take a pick and shovel and go dig some gold," said Mr. H. Grey, a Yankee merchant there. As the abundance of food affects the increase of wild animals, so the certainty of earning a living affects the growth of a human population.

But Punta Arenas grew from one cause that had nothing natural about it, save as some seafaring people seem to be naturally of a devilish disposition. One of the most prominent promoters of the growth of Punta Arenas was the hard-fisted Yankee skipper—he who commanded the sealer and whale ship fitted out in New London or New Bedford to skin the rookeries of Staten Island and others farther south. Not that the skipper deserved thanks or praise from the people of Punta Arenas or any other people in this matter. He did not do it intending to promote the prosperity of Punta Arenas or its people. The skipper who helped the growth of Punta Arenas was an infamous scoundrel, who got sailors to toil and drudge for him until they had filled his ship with skins and oil, and then by cruelty that is shocking to consider drove them ashore at Punta Arenas that he might rob them of their hard-earned wages. Some other sea captains than Yankees have driven sailors ashore there, too, but the Yankees have done the most of it.

PUNTA ARENAS, STRAIT OF MAGELLAN.

Nine tenths of the population with whom I talked had been sailors. Not all had been hazed from ships, but the majority had.

Last of all came the one industry that was to make Punta Arenas the antarctic metropolis. Mr. H. L. Reynard, an Englishman living in Punta Arenas, rented Elizabeth Island early in the seventies, and brought some sheep there from the Falklands. The sheep took kindly to their new home, and increased so rapidly that Mr. Reynard soon had to move some of them to the mainland. They say he now owns over 100,000 sheep, besides horses and cattle galore, and enjoys—really enjoys—an income of not far from £400 per week.

The people of Punta Arenas did not wait until Mr. Reynard became rich before following his example. They began to invest in sheep as soon as they saw that sheep were profitable, and so far as I could learn every man there who had gone into the business and had given it ordinary care had made money. So the sheep spread far and wide over the region, and men came to care for them and Punta Arenas was the point to which all these men came for supplies. And, as has happened elsewhere, so here the rearing of cattle and horses goes along with the rearing of sheep.

It appears that during the early years the garrison in charge of the convicts numbered on the average sixty soldiers of the line. Besides these the government employed a lot of men to hunt the guanaco and the cattle that ran wild in the Cordilleras, in order to keep the garrison supplied with meat, and, incidentally, to help the soldiers hunt runaway convicts of whom not a few were found brave enough to face the terrors of the Patagonia desert for the sake of liberty. Such tales as may be gathered of the doings and sufferings of these runaways are almost beyond belief. To follow the beach to the Santa Cruz River, a journey of from two to three weeks, subsisting on the few raw fish that might be cast up by the sea, and passing two days at a stretch without water, were matters of common experience. To wander inland and perish miserably while striving to reach a mirage lake often happened.

However, it was not so much for the love of liberty that men fled from the Punta Arenas prison, as it was because they could not endure the sufferings peculiar to their situation. It was because officers as well as soldiers of the line and convicts were in exile, and because the worse instincts of the officers were brought out by the hardships they endured. In such a penal settlement as that was matters naturally went from bad to worse, and a second mutiny was inevitable.

On the night of November 10, 1877, the soldiers and convicts united to take the town, and succeeded. And for three days they held it. They caught the commander of the garrison and revenged the cruelties of which he had been guilty by cutting off his nose, cutting out his tongue, putting out his eyes, hacking off his limbs, and last of all severing his head from his body, and setting it upon a pole at the prison gate. With equal animosity they sought the Governor and the chaplain, but both had fled in time, the former deserting his wife and children that he might save his own skin whole. Then the mutineers sacked the town and lived riotously until a Chilian man-o'-war appeared in the offing, when they gathered their plunder together and started away, according to one account, 180 in number, and, according to another, in a mob numbering 120. Incredible as it may seem, these mutineers, although they had forty horses in all, took not one scrap of food with them. Instead of food they loaded themselves and the animals with clothing, bales of dry goods, fancy cutlery, bric-à-brac—almost anything and everything the town afforded that would be of no benefit in the journey that was before them.

The Chilian authorities made no pursuit worth mention, though a handful of men well armed and mounted could have rounded up the whole company. Unmolested they marched away. The first night they killed three horses for food. The next night and the next and the next they continued to kill horses. They kept at it till all were gone. Other horses were captured from incoming Gauchos, but these did not suffice. Many mutineers were killed in murderous quarrels, but more died because of the hardships of the route. They found freedom on the desert pampas, but hunger and thirst overtook them, and crawling beneath the scant shelter of the thorny bushes growing there, they died, and the foxes and vultures ate them.

At the end of three months a company of forty reached the Welsh settlement on the Chubut River, and these were carried to Buenos Ayres by the Argentine Government, and were there eventually turned loose.

With the burning of the prison an incubus that had weighed upon Punta Arenas vanished. The town was free to rise and flourish as the exuberant fancy of its people might dictate, for the prison was never rebuilt.

I first saw Punta Arenas on the 15th of May, 1894. I was on the deck of the Argentine naval transport Ushuaia, and the reader should remember that May there corresponds to November in the North, while the latitude of the Magellan region is precisely that of the coast of Labrador. With these geographical facts in mind, the appearance of things about Punta Arenas was astonishing, for it was a waterside settlement, backed by grassy, rolling hills, above which rose mountains green with verdure that never fades. Indeed, but for the snow-capped peaks away back in the Cordilleras, one would have had hard work bringing himself to realize that this was the Magellan of which the early navigators drew such bleak pictures. And yet Port Famine, where Sarmiento's colony starved to death, was but a few miles away to the south,—in sight, in fact, from the masthead. The general aspect of the scenery beyond the settlement was very much like that to be found in the Adirondacks after an early snow has whitened the higher peaks, leaving the foot-hills showing darker and greener by contrast.

But the similarity to an Adirondack picture ended at the village limits. There is nothing in the New York wilderness, nor yet in the camps that are found in the Rocky Mountains, that may be compared to Punta Arenas as it appeared from the water. Four streets ran from the beach up over the gentle slope—streets yellow with sand, then black with mud and glistening bright with pools of stagnant water. A stirring population kicked up sand and mud and splashed through the water. Between these streets and facing them were massed, of course, the houses—wall after wall and roof after roof, almost every wall of wood and every roof of corrugated iron, the exceptional walls being made of iron, like that in the roofs. But more singular still was the fact that every building appeared new—a shining mass of pine boards and zinc-white iron, save in those cases where paint had been used, and these houses looked more conspicuous even than the rest, for the prevailing color of paint was a brilliant pink.

The harbor, which is simply an open roadstead, was by no means uninteresting. A great line steamship, as trim looking as a man-o'-war, was at anchor discharging and taking in cargo from big lighters alongside. A great German bark lay beside a big hulk, into which it was discharging coal brought from Cardiff. A handsome little man-o'-war of the cruiser type floated the tri-color flag of Chili above her quarter deck. And besides these a whole fleet—a score or more of schooners, sloops, and catboats, the trading and prospecting fleet of the region—bobbed about and tugged at their cables under the impulse of a smart wind from westward, while lighters and small boats were passing to and fro among the vessels at anchor.

One of the small boats came alongside with a grocery salesman seeking orders, and when it went away I went along. It was a clean-lined yawl, with able seamen at the oars, but it could not travel fast enough to please me.

I had seen mine camps in the Rockies, and in the deserts of California—Creede and Death Valley; I had camped with cowboys and shepherds in Jackson's Hole beyond the Teton Mountains, on the plains of No Man's Land, and in the forks of the Red River of the South; I was acquainted with the life of lumbermen in the Adirondacks and the wilds of Nova Scotia; and I had sailed from the Arsuk fiord in Greenland to Chicago. But here was a town with pink roofs that sheltered at once the miner, the prospector, the cowboy, the lumberman, and happy-go-lucky Jack. What might not one expect in the way of wild life in such a town as this?

A long wood-and-iron pier furnished a landing for passengers, and at the head of this stood a new wood and iron hotel, two stories high, and having a bar-room in the corner next to the pier. I registered there under the eye of the clerk, who also served as bartender. My observations of this man were encouraging. He was talking French to one customer and Spanish to another as I entered. He addressed me in English when I came in, and then a moment later opened a door behind the bar and called for hot water in German. Judging from what I saw later still, when a pretty girl passed, I should say he was not unfamiliar with the sign language. He also knew how to mix hot whiskeys. After a little talk about the variety of people in the population of the town, I determined to take a look at the gambling-houses of the place by daylight, so I said:

"How many sporting houses in town?"

The barkeeper smiled blandly.

"A plenty," he said; "you'll find the best looking girls in the second house beyond the postoffice right up this street."

"I meant gambling-houses," said I, "but since you've mentioned sporting women, how many dance-houses does this place support?"

"One. It's the house I mentioned. Both the girls like to dance, but of course one of them has to furnish the music. They've got one of these—how do you call them—pianos that turn with a crank, eh? It's a fine instrument, I tell you. Of course, if you want to take a chum along you can get a boy to turn the crank."

"Wait," said I. "What was the number of the biggest gang of cowboys you ever saw come to town?"

"I suppose as many as twenty."

"Did they have any money?"

"You bet they did."

"And did they spend it?"

"As quick as the Lord would let 'm."

"How many men have you seen coming from the diggings with dust?"

"Half a dozen, maybe. Why?"

"Did they blow in the dust?"

"Well, rather."

"And yet there is only one dance-house in town and that has but two women in it?"

"That's just the size of it."

"Let us return to the subject of gambling-houses. How many have you?"

"One."

"Do they have big play there?"

"That's what they do—sometimes."

"Where is it? I'd like to see it."

"Um—"

The barkeeper hesitated a moment, and then went to the door and looked up and down.

"I don't see a member anywhere," he said, "but some of them will be in at dinner, and I'll introduce you."

"Does one need an introduction to get in?"

"Certainly."

"What! Police watch it in a town like this?"

"Police? No. It's a private club, gentlemen, eh? They would admit you on your card, I dare say, but it pleases the army and navy members to observe the usual formalities. Did you think it was run like a saloon?"

As was said, Punta Arenas is a town whose characteristics are absolutely astounding, even to an experienced traveller. Cowboys, shepherds, lumbermen, miners, and sailors gather there to waste their substance in riotous living, and do so waste it, but there is not one public gambling-house in town, and the one lone dance-house there has but two girls in it and a hand-organ for music.

"How long have you been in this town?" said I to the drink mixer.

"About twelve years."

"Professional gamblers ever come to town?"

"I think so—one came. He was a Yankee, they say."

"What made you think that?"

"Well, we were up in Bray's billiard saloon. Bray is the boss billiard player of this town, and he was showing us some fancy shots, when a stranger dropped in and had a drink, and then we sat around and chatted. But Bray wanted to play billiards, and so pretty soon he asked the stranger to take a cue. The stranger said he liked to play billiards, but it was not worth while to play against the boss player of the town.

"'Never mind that,' said Bray. 'We'll play for the drinks and see how we match.'

"So they began. The stranger was a pretty fair player, and pretty soon Bray had to do his best, though by doing his best he managed to beat the stranger. I think it was thirty-two or thirty-three points. The stranger showed interest in the game, but was going to put down the cue, when Bray said:

"'I'll just give you thirty points and beat you for ten dollars.'

"The stranger showed eagerness at once, and putting up the cash went at it. That was a right pretty game, let me tell you, for both men played well, but at the last Bray ran out, although the stranger had but one point to make. The stranger looked excited when Bray ran out, and taking out a wad said:

"'I'll bet you one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred you can't do that again.'

"'I'll go you for three hundred,' said Bray. It was just what Bray had been aching for.

"It was Bray's first shot, and he made a string of nine. Thereat the stranger took his cue, chalked it, winked at the crowd, and ran out his string without a break. Then he picked up the cash, stuffed it in his pocket, and started out, whistling Yankee Doodle. We judged by that circumstance that he was a Yankee."

I was in Punta Arenas four days, and talked with a variety of people, but that was the only gambling story worth telling that I heard. I asked if fights and bloodshed were known to the town since the convict mutiny. They replied that fights were not unknown, but were rare.

"Do the fighters never kill each other?"

"I fancy not," said the barkeeper.

"Ever had cold-blooded murders for money?"

"Not in my day, anyhow."

"Then you've never lynched anybody here."

The barkeeper laughed.

"That's just like a Yankee," he said. "The only lynchings I ever heard of took place in the States. The government keeps soldiers here, and everybody is afraid of them."

This last statement explained why the town was peculiar. The government is monarchial in fact, though nominally republican. Chili is ruled, as all Latin-American countries are, by the army. Punta Arenas is ruled by an army officer sent from Santiago. The town ordinances are backed by bayonets. The Texas town marshal in all his glory could not keep the peace as soldiers can. The government has decreed that there shall be no gambling-houses in Punta Arenas of the style found in United States mine camps. Neither shall there be dance-houses. Instead of these, drinking saloons are permitted in unlimited numbers, and one or two young women can get a license for a saloon as readily as a man can.

There are almost one hundred licensed bars in Punta Arenas. They are found scattered everywhere about town. The young women who own saloons commonly sit in the doorway knitting or sewing in the daytime. One who saw them said their trade would probably be larger if they remained behind the bar or wore veils. A more wretched-looking lot of women was never seen in the saloon business. It is in little wooden shanties, with corrugated iron roofs—utterly barren, squalid shanties—that the riotous living of Punta Arenas is found, and there is not one bright or picturesque feature about it to give excuse for its existence.

After leaving the bartender at the hotel, I started out to see so much of the town as could be observed in walking the streets. It is a town laid out on the checkerboard plan, and like all Spanish-American towns has a plaza or public square. The streets are unpaved. This means that near the beach, where there is sand, the wheeling is pretty fair, save in the driest weather, and elsewhere is pretty bad when fair on the beach, and good when it is bad on the beach. But one can find much deeper mud even in the outskirts of New York city than is found in the streets of Punta Arenas.

The sidewalks are peculiar. Under a village ordinance every such walk is edged with a six-inch square timber. Between this timber and the front wall of the house could be found, in a few places stone, in fewer tile brick, in some well-packed beds of sand, but in the majority of cases little narrow lakes of water securely held in place by the timber sea-wall. The plaza showed a rich black loam and nothing else.

Facing the plaza was the old official residence of the Governor. It was one of the few buildings remaining from the early days. It was a wooden structure that had originally had a shingle roof over all, but the moss-grown shingles had rotted away in patches, and had been replaced with odds and ends of board, tin, and sheet-iron. The contrast between the Governor in his gorgeous uniform and his official house was something stunning. The home was the only real shabby building in town.

The traveller who lands in Punta Arenas and fails to climb the hills behind the town makes a mistake, because the picture is wonderfully beautiful and striking as well. The yellowish hills of Tierra del Fuego rise up in the east beyond the broad waters of the strait. The snow-capped peaks of Mt. Sarmiento and its neighbors appear above the horizon at the south, while in the west the evergreen mountains rise boldly up from the water's edge. And then, right at the foot of these dark-green mountains lies the zinc and pink town, the most absurd foreground to a magnificent landscape that ever was imagined.

The lower hills to the northwest of the town have been chopped over in part and are covered with dead trunks of trees, giving the landscape the appearance of what the early settlers in the forest districts of the United States called a deadening. The trees seemed to have been killed by some kind of an epidemic. They say in the town that the trees were killed by lightning, but I did not see any marks of lightning on the trunks. However they died, the landscape there is wild enough to please an insane artist.

The only manufacturing industries of the place are the saw-mills and a brick-yard. The saw-mills are located some distance from the village, and are not novel, but the brick-yard is right at hand. I examined the brick, and found a product that I had not seen equalled since I saw the courthouse in Greer County, Tex., which had crumbled under a summer squall. Even the hardest burned brick in this kiln could be broken with the naked hands.

A worse industry than brick-making, however, was started some years ago in the town. What they called a vein of coal was discovered some five miles from the beach, and, after some talk, a company was formed to exploit it. A pier was built at the beach, a railroad laid thence to the mine, and rolling stock brought out from England. This done, they found that they had a lignite instead of a coal mine. The pier has gone to pieces, and the old locomotive could be seen partly buried in the sand not far from the head of the ruined pier. This is the coal of which all the writers who have visited the strait speak enthusiastically.

However, the town is going to have more industries, and there is to be still more business done by the traders. The increase in the number of sheep will soon compel the traders to establish a freezing establishment there in order that their surplus sheep may be shipped to market. Just now they sell their surplus to men wishing to establish ranches up country, but there will soon be no more room for new ranches up country.

Then Punta Arenas may yet manufacture goods from its wool, and it could very profitably tan its products of hides and skins. The region produces a bark so rich in tannin that it could be profitably exported to the States, but still more profitably used on the ground. The Chili Government will make liberal concessions to any man who knows the tannery business and has the capital to establish it there. But one must have the knack to get along comfortably with odd people if he would succeed in any business there.

The sales of merchandise in the town are naturally large in certain lines, and they are particularly satisfactory to the merchants, for the reason that many original packages are called for. It is a wholesale trade to a remarkable degree. Moreover, the merchants deliver goods to customers by means of sailboats instead of by wagons, as New York merchants do. But, one scarcely need add, there is no free delivery by boats. The navigation of the straits region is hazardous, and therefore expensive. Only the hardiest sailors will undertake the handling of a 25-foot catboat where, to quote Capt. Samuel Wallis, one of the early navigators, "even in midsummer the climate was cloudy, cold, and tempestuous."

The business feature of the town that interests travellers most is that of the dealer in Indian-made goods and curiosities. Indians from the pampas and from the southern islands come to Punta Arenas to sell skins, furs, feathers, baskets, arrow-heads—what not. The dealers find sale for more stuff, in fact, than the Indians bring, so they have some goods made to order in the town. The goods are all sold as genuine Indian-made things, and in a way so they are. There are squaws in town who make a living doing work of this kind. I saw one of them deliver an armful of rugs made of guanaco skins to one of the dealers. She was dressed in a tailor-made suit of good material; she had gold jewelry a plenty, and her hair was banged across her forehead. The dealer said she was a half-breed Tehuelche, and I did not doubt it, but when one buys Indian-made relics he does not suppose that the Indian wore a tailor-made suit and bangs. I asked Luis Zanibelli, who was formerly a Maiden Lane jeweller in New York, and is now in the relic business there, how to tell goods made in the wilds from those made by half-breed squaws with bangs.

"That's easy," he replied. "Smell of the goods. The genuine Indian goods from the pampas or the islands always smell bad."

The club of which the barkeeper had spoken as a gambling resort is an oddity in name, if in no other way. It is called the "Cuerpo de Bomberos," and that translated into English means the body or society of firemen. There is a neat little red club-house, built somewhat on the model of ancient colonial mansions in the States—that is, with pillars in front. There is a yard full of flower-beds in front of that, and there are flowers there in May, at least, if not later. The house is furnished as club-houses are elsewhere, except that it has no kitchen. The annual dues amount to less than a dollar a month gold, and for this the members have a remarkably pleasant resort. The barkeeper thought the play was heavy; this is interesting as showing what is considered heavy play at Punta Arenas. The heaviest loss of which I heard was 400 paper dollars—a trifle over $100 gold. The favorite game is baccarat, but the seductive influences of draw poker are not unknown. The list of members includes the merchants, sheep-owners, and officials living in the vicinity or stationed there by government, and in Punta Arenas the word vicinity covers a territory a hundred leagues away from the centre.

Speaking of the flowers in front of this club-house reminds me that Punta Arenas is the greatest town for flowers I ever saw. Every house has window gardens, and many houses have bays and rooms set apart for great masses of potted flowers and shrubs. It has many more flowers in proportion to the population even than the tropical cities like Rio. Flowers grow wild there in great profusion, too, among which the wild fuschias make the most profuse display, while the ferns and lichens are something to delight the eye of even the least observant.

For the rest, Punta Arenas claims a population of 3500. It is not unlike some United States towns in the matter of a local census, but after making due allowances for local pride and enthusiasm, it still is found a live and growing village. Lots in the business part of the town now sell for pounds sterling where paper dollars would have sufficed ten years ago. Indeed, a lot was sold while I was there for £500 that changed hands in 1886 for $400 national currency. The old settler goes about the street bewailing the fact that he didn't buy when he first came, and saying it is too late now. But those who buy now point to the growing traffic through the straits, and refer to the line of huge steam tugs now building in England that will tow sailing ships through the narrow waters and against the winds that vexed and baffled the early navigators; they speak confidently of the spread of sheep ranches on Tierra Del Fuego, and the apparently unfailing discoveries of new gold-fields among the islands to the south; they talk of the increased demand for the wood of the straits. They balance against the frosts and cold rains of midsummer the many Indian summer days of winter, and tell stories of invalids regaining health that would make both Denver and Los Angeles green with envy. They find, in fact, no end of signs of future prosperity for their austral metropolis, and if somebody does not dig a canal from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific they are very certain to find these signs well founded. Even if such a canal is made, only one element of the prosperity of the place will be injured—the traffic through the straits—and that probably will not be wholly destroyed, while the other elements can scarcely fail to improve continually.

Mr. Julius Popper wrote in 1888 of Punta Arenas, that it was "a town that opened its doors at 11 a.m., and was more concerned about picnics and dances than business." Mr. Frank Vincent said in 1889, that it was a community scarce one of whom "would be willing to stay if he could get away." The people there say these remarks were libellous when written. I am bound to say that in 1894, if a man wanted to get to windward of a Punta Arenas man in the matter of business, it was necessary to get up in the morning before crow peep. And as for the people wishing to get away, one would have hard work to find a citizen there who could be driven away with a shotgun.

In spite of its climate and its government, it is a blooming and booming community, and because of the enterprise of its citizens it deserves all the prosperity the free pastures of the pampas and the waves of the sea are bringing to it.

CHAPTER III.

CAPE HORN ABORIGINES.

This is the story in part of one of the most interesting and most unfortunate tribes of Indians known in the history of American aborigines—interesting because of their remarkable qualities of mind and body, and unfortunate because they have been almost exterminated by changes in their habits, wrought by Christian missionaries. It begins with what was said of them and their country by the early explorers, and it ends where the missionaries began what was intended to be the work of civilizing them. It tells of the race as God made it. What the white man did for it will be told later.

The Cape Horn Archipelago, as the islands south of the Straits of Magellan may be called, contained when discovered, and still maintains, three distinct tribes of Indians. One tribe occupied the island of Tierra del Fuego to the north and east of the coast range of mountains, of which Mts. Darwin and Sarmiento are the chief peaks. It was a land tribe; that is, they rarely if ever built canoes, and they subsisted almost entirely on such products as the land afforded. Another race occupied the islands to the west of Cockburn Channel. They were always, so to speak, a race of sailors; they built canoes, cruised about their region as fancy or the prevalence of food dictated, and were very little dependent on land beasts for food.

Last of all, we come to the tribe that lived and now exists among the islands lying south of Tierra del Fuego and along the very narrow south beach of that great island itself—a tribe that might well be called the Antarctic Highlanders, since they live further south than any other known people—and the land they occupy is but a succession of mountain peaks. These people are known as the Yahgans.

The known history of the Yahgans begins in the stories told by the early navigators of the region—a brief matter—merely the record of what the early navigators saw of them—but it is worth printing in part here because it is interesting, and because the reading of the mistakes made by the early travellers will help to impress on the memory the peculiarities of this remarkable tribe.

Darwin, the naturalist, under date of December 25, 1832, wrote of the Yahgans:

While going one day on shore near Wollaston Island, we pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld. On the east coast the natives, as we have seen, have guanaco cloaks, and on the west they possess sealskins. Among these central tribes the men generally have an otter skin, or some small scrap, about as large as a pocket handkerchief, which is barely sufficient to cover their backs as low down as their loins. It is laced across the breast by strings, and according as the wind blows it is shifted from side to side. But these Fuegians in the canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water together with the spray trickled down her body. In another harbor not far distant, a woman who was suckling a recently born child came one day alongside the vessel and remained there out of mere curiosity while the sleet fell and thawed on her naked bosom and on the skin of her naked baby! These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. At night five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals. Viewing such men one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures and inhabitants of the same world.... There is no reason to believe that the Fuegians decrease in number.

YAHGANS AT HOME.

Quotations might be multiplied but two or three brief ones relating to the land in which the Yahgans lived will suffice: King says that "the vegetation is magnificent in some places, and under the shelter of the great forests some plants are found that would be considered delicate in England." Captain Cook agrees with this, and describes the wild celery as among the delicate vegetable productions, but he concludes that "it is the most savage country I have seen. There is no place in the world which offers such desolate landscapes." To this may be added the testimony of Admiral Anson, who said emphatically that it was "the most horrible country which it was possible to conceive."

On the whole, it appears from reading the stories of these early navigators that the land of the Yahgans, while lacking the eternal ice of the Eskimo land, was bad enough, and in the matter of storms it was worse even than the region of Baffin's Bay. As for the difference in the people, it is apparent that the Yahgans were believed to be far more wretched than the people of the North, because the Eskimos were clothed in the warmest of furs and lived in huts, which, if made of ice and snow, were still perfect shelters from the furies of the storms, while the Yahgans went naked and often slept unsheltered from the snow and the freezing sleet that fell in every month of the year.

The islands on which are found the homes of the Yahgan Indians are almost without exception mountains that rise from the depths of the Southern Sea. As one sails among them the idea that here is a mountain chain that at some time long past was suddenly submerged in the sea is irresistible. For miles and leagues one may coast along without finding a beach wide enough to furnish a foothold, not to mention a place for hauling up a yawl. That the mountain is as precipitous below the water as it is above is easily proved, for soundings with the deep-sea lead line often give 60 to 100 fathoms within 100 feet of the shore line.

Rising to the height of 1500 to 2000 feet, these precipitous mountain peaks are lacking in nothing to make them grand and impressive. That they seemed desolate to the early navigators none need doubt, however, for the old-time sailors had a ship wretchedly unfit for such stormy seas, and he was ill-clad, half-fed, and homesick. No mountains seen through riffs in storm clouds and between marching columns of freezing rain could seem pleasant to them.

But wherever there is shelter from the prevailing gales a narrow beach is found commonly. Above this grows a forest of trees, of which the greater number are the antarctic beech, and nearly all the rest are species of magnolia. Some grow to a diameter of two feet and a height of fifty. Nearly all of the trees are green the year round, and the magnolias are of a particularly bright and beautiful green.

As one climbs the mountains the trees are seen to be of smaller and smaller sizes until at from 1000 to 1500 feet above the sea mosses take the place of trees. Above the mosses come barren rocks and eternal snows. In many parts of Beagle Channel, and especially at the east end, there are fairly level spaces bordering the water, with foot-hills that are rolling instead of craggy. Even at the foot of Mount Misery, on the east end of Navarin Island, a mountain that got its name from the severity of the gales that come from its gulches, the scenery is anything but desolate and horrible. Indeed, natural grassy meadows and green groves so alternate with park-like beauty over the undulating ground, that one scarcely can resist the idea that all those open spaces in the woodland are the work of man. The eye involuntarily seeks for farm-house and barn, while the sight of the red-haired guanaco makes the scene all the more pastoral, for the wild beasts seem in that picture very like domestic animals.

My own view of the picture was under peculiarly favorable circumstances, for, although in the month of May, which corresponds to the November of the North, the sun was bright and warm, the water sparkled, and a breeze sweet and gentle just stirred the grass on the lawns and lifted the green-leaved boughs of the trees. Seen on another day, when whirling snow-laden squalls came down from the mountain to rip open the sea and hurl its foam five hundred feet into the air, the picture would have had a different aspect, but no landscape which contains green meadows and green trees the year round can be called "desolate."

As to the meteorological condition among the islands the experience of the missionaries there during twenty odd years has cleared away many myths. Some of Captain Cook's men nearly froze to death in the land of the Yahgans, but it is a fact that even the confined waters (salt) do not freeze over often or remain frozen for any long time, while a prolonged storm, during which the thermometer ranged from 10° to 15° Fahrenheit, is mentioned in the missionary records as an unusually cold spell. At the worst, the thermometer at Ushuaia has not gone lower than 12° below zero, Fahrenheit, and Ushuaia is about the coldest spot in the region, because it stands under lofty, glazier-covered mountains that shut out the rays of the sun for nineteen hours out of the twenty-four during the short days of winter.

One white man at Ushuaia told me that it was a climate in which winter and summer alternated every week, and that describes the matter fairly well. That it is better than people elsewhere suppose may be inferred by the fact that the white men now there, while admitting the frequent recurrence of boisterous storms, invariably said it was "the healthiest climate in the world," and a few said they liked it better than any other.

Having considered the Yahgans' country and its climate, we now come to their homes and home life. Of the Yahgans as architects and as tailors, I am bound to say that they have been well described by the old-time explorers. The hut was a structure made of poles and a thatch of brush and grass that was of about the shape of a Yankee haycock, and only a little larger. It was open on the lee side, the thatching, such as it was, covering two thirds of the circumference to windward.

The fire was built just within the door or opening, and the inhabitants sat on grass or moss that partly covered the earth floor. It was sometimes customary, where the Indians expected to live for some time in one place, to scoop out the earth of the bottom of the wigwam and heap it up against the brush wall, thus making a saucer-shaped cavity for the floor, the brim of which rose high enough to serve somewhat as a wind break. Moreover, the limpet and other shells gathered by the squaws were commonly piled to windward of the hut. But even then, if judged by any white man's standard, the Yahgan house was as bad as any in the world.

So, too, of his dress. He wore a single guanaco or sealskin across his shoulders, holding it in place by thongs that crossed his breast. This was the best he wore. They were often stark naked, save for a breach clout, and the children were always so. The traveller who visits Hermite Island, in the immediate vicinity of Cape Horn, will find them so at this day. Living thus, "shelterless and naked in a land of fierce and freezing storms," one need not wonder that even scientific observers believed the Yahgan "the most miserable specimen of humanity to be found on earth."

And yet all who thought him either physically or mentally uncomfortable when in his natural state were entirely wrong. On the contrary, he was about the healthiest and happiest savage that ever smashed the head of an egotistical, meddlesome white man.

The Yahgan was built for the climate where he was found. He was in one respect like the whale that lived in the waters about him. He had a coat of fat under his skin that was very much better for him than the best of flannels and blankets. Besides, he had a custom that at once protected him from the cold and rendered him offensive to his white discoverers. He greased himself all over frequently with any oil at his command, and that is a custom worth remembering by people who may be cast away or lost in cold climates. Had the early explorers imitated instead of despised the Yahgan, they would have had fewer tales of suffering to tell. In these later years, sporting men of the United States have learned that when about to enter long-distance swimming matches they can endure the cooling effects of a race through the water much better if they coat themselves thickly with some such grease as vaseline. The Yahgan used whale oil as we use vaseline. The explorers spoke of his "filthy greasy skin," but the scientific sporting man of New York now imitates the Yahgan, even though vaseline gathers during a swim any flotsam that comes handy by. The Yahgan was "shelterless and naked in a land of fierce and freezing storms," but he did not freeze; he did not even shiver in ordinary Cape Horn weather.

However, one can understand why the explorers did not perceive the real condition of the Yahgan. They were cold in spite of thick flannels, and it was but natural that they should judge others by themselves.

But one cannot so easily understand how the explorers fell into such errors as they did about the ingenuity and the mechanical skill of the native. The results of Yahgan handicraft were everywhere visible. He could not make either a good house or a broadcloth suit. In his hands a white man's coat was ripped to pieces and the strips used for decorations. But there were his canoes and his weapons—especially his canoes. The Yahgan boats are mentioned slightingly, if at all, by nearly every traveller who has visited the region.

"The boats are unwieldy and logy, and the Indians seem to have no knack of propelling them at any sort of speed," says a latter-day writer, who saw a canoe of the kind in the Straits of Magellan. This was the writer's judgment in the matter. But along with his judgment he gave the dimensions of the boat. It was "about twenty-five feet long, four feet wide, and three feet deep, with comparatively sharp ends." The facts as I saw them are so, save that the ends seemed to me to be extremely sharp.

Now let any civilized canoe expert imagine a boat of those proportions with lines in an exact arc of a circle, and then let him say whether he knows of any superior model among either civilized or savage nations—a model better adapted for combined speed, safety, and capacity than this. My own experience with Indian canoes includes the kayaks and oomiaks of the Eskimos in Greenland, the dugouts of old Providence Island in the Caribbean Sea, and the bongos of the Bay of Panama, but I am bound to say that the most graceful canoe, as well as the strongest, I ever saw was made by the Yahgan.

However, one fact about these canoes will convince any one who knows what Cape Horn storms are that the Yahgan canoe is of a remarkable model. The Yahgans used them in navigating the waters of the Cape Horn Archipelago. Further than that, both the Rev. Thomas Bridges and the Rev. John Lawrence, who for twenty years have been familiar with the Yahgans, told me that they never heard of a Yahgan being upset in his canoe until in these later years, when the possession of axes and the teachings of the missionaries led the Indians to substitute dugouts of an entirely different model for the canoes they had made in the old days.

Judged only by his house and his clothing, the Yahgan was of a lower grade of intelligence, or at least was worse off, than many brutes. Judged by his canoe, he was a naval architect who produced a model to which the designers of yachts in the United States and England are in these days of "spoon" bows approaching, but have not yet equalled.

When the Yahgan would build a canoe he stripped wide pieces of bark from the tallest and smoothest tree trunks he could find, using shell axes, in the old days, to cut the trees. The bark was stripped from the trunk with a wooden tool, something like a chisel, and of the very shape found most advantageous by the white men who, in Pennsylvania and the Adirondacks, supply hemlock bark to the tanneries. Having his bark off the tree, the Yahgan cut the strips into such shape that when sewed together they would form a canoe with a midship section, say four feet wide by three deep, that was almost the arc of a circle. From this section the model tapered away almost on the arc of another circle. It had a sheer at once pleasing to the eye and well adapted to ride the most tempestuous seas in the world.

To brace this bark sheathing the Yahgan made ribs of split saplings that looked like hickory barrel hoops—ribs at once strong and light—while the rails and beams were made of round wood. The bark strips were sewed together with whalebone taken from whales stranded on the beach. The ribs, rails, and beams were lashed in place by sinew, usually guanaco sinew, for that curious animal is found on several islands of the Yahgan region.

Into the bottom of this canoe the Yahgan put an inverted sod perhaps two by three feet large, and on this his squaw built a small fire for warmth. Forward and aft of the fire were put little layers of brush and grass. The man squatted on the grass forward of the fire, and his favorite squaw, if he had more than one, was just aft of it, the terms forward and aft being used to indicate only the direction in which the canoe travelled, for both ends were alike. The other squaws and the children were distributed further from the fire. A squaw with an infant would keep it in her lap. The squaws paddled, the men used the weapons.

But one may doubt whether the Yahgan canoe shows greater ingenuity than Yahgan weapons and implements for obtaining food do. Mention has been made of the shell axe. It was made of a five-inch clam shell, or one larger. A rounded stone was lashed with sinew to the hinge side of the shell to give weight and make a good hand hold. Then the opposite side was ground to a cutting edge by rubbing away the softer inner or convex surface on a smooth rock. Yahgan chips made with this tool were small, but to see the rapidity with which an old Yahgan makes the blows, or better still, to see the wavy surface of a strip of wood dressed with a shell axe—a paddle, for instance—is a matter of interest almost worth a journey to the region. With this tool the Yahgan felled trees, or fashioned his harpoon, or stripped the blubber from a stranded whale, or trimmed his o'er long bangs, as occasion required.

When compared with the stone axes used by aborigines who knew not iron, this shell axe is a striking illustration of noteworthy differences between the Yahgan and the other tribes. The shell axe was frail, but keen-edged. It required a quick but delicate hand to manipulate it. The stone axe was blunt and heavy. Impelled by a rude hand, it smashed its way through whatever opposed its progress. With the shell axe in hand, we begin to perceive somewhat of the mental habits and character of the Yahgan Indian—to see, at least, that he preferred to accomplish certain ends by delicate means rather than by sheer brute strength.

Then there were his harpoons. I have one of which the head, made from a whale rib, is twenty-five and one quarter inches long. To make a diagram of it let the reader place a dot on a sheet of paper to represent the point, and then draw from this dot two straight lines that shall diverge from each other only one inch and three quarters when twenty-one inches long. That will give an idea of the beautiful taper of the weapon. It has a single barb, at once deep and strong. It is secured to the shaft in such a way that when a seal was struck the harpoon head dropped from its place in the shaft, or handle, after which the handle was towed broadside on through the water by the wounded beast. Of course, towing the harpoon shaft in this fashion impeded the animal's flight more than towing it end on would do.

Another harpoon that I have is twenty-one inches long, and but one inch wide and a half inch thick at the base, but instead of one heavy barb near the base it has a series of twenty-six small ones along one side. These barbs hook back like shark's teeth, and are about as keen-pointed. Nothing of better shape to hold fast could be devised by a fish-hook maker. Indeed, the turtle hunters of the West Indies, who have a steel harpoon of a similar shape, do not make as well-formed barbs. The harpoon of one barb is for seals, otters, and small whales (large whales were never attacked unless stranded), while the other form was for the various kinds of birds found in the region.

For fish spears the Yahgan lashed two or three of the bird harpoon heads to a shaft in such a manner that the points were spread out; the harpoon heads formed a V or a tripod, as the case might be, and the barbs were all on the inside. The fish were speared at night by the light of a torch. By having two or more of the harpoon heads on the shaft the chances of hitting the dimly seen fish were of course increased, and, moreover, a fish caught between two of the harpoon heads and impaled by a third, was held no matter how it struggled or what its strength.

Nor were the spear and harpoon handles merely saplings cut in the forest. The Yahgan used a perfectly round handle for one harpoon and a six-square handle for the other, and both were worked from solid wood with his wonderful shell axe. I speak now, of course, of the original native weapon, and not of what the modern Yahgan buys of white traders.

If any reader owns one of the old specimens of Indian workmanship let him keep it with great care, for the workmen who could make them are dead and their art is lost forever.

Less showy but equally remarkable were the peculiar wooden chisels with which the squaws stripped limpets from rocks six feet under water and brought them to the surface, although they were as heavy and as ready to sink as stones.

For gathering shell-fish the squaws made baskets of rushes. These baskets were of the shape of the plain earthen cooking jars found in the old ruins and cave dwellings of New Mexico and Arizona.

For a long-range weapon the Yahgan used the sling. He saw the Ona Indians with their bows and arrows. The Onas also used the bolas, which are the favorite weapons of the Patagonian Indians. With the Ona Indians the bow and the bolas were used with great success in killing the fleet-footed guanaco. Now the Yahgan, as said, found the guanaco in his own proper country as well as when he went visiting the Onas on the borderland, and he must have fully appreciated all that the Onas could do with their bolas and bows. Some of the Yahgans even learned to use these Ona weapons, but they never adopted them. The reason is not far to seek. The Yahgan sling had a much greater range. The missionaries tell about Yahgans killing birds afloat at a distance of two hundred yards. To hit any wild fowl at that distance with a rifle would be called right good shooting. The guanaco was knocked down and stunned by heavy round pebbles at ranges up to one hundred yards.

Why, then, did not the Ona adopt the sling? The answer is an interesting one for the student of anthropology. The home of the Ona was on the prairies of Tierra del Fuego, where round pebbles are not to be found, but material for bows and arrows is abundant. The Ona could not burden himself with pebbles for a sling when journeying across these prairies. On the other hand, the Yahgan lived on the beaches, where rounded pebbles were forever at hand, and when he travelled it was not afoot, as the Ona did, but in a first-class canoe, where he could carry as many pebbles as he wanted.

The Yahgan sling was made of a piece of raw hide, to which were attached strings of braided sinew that always ended in fancifully wrought knots.

The Yahgans did not fish with hooks, because they could catch more fish without. The squaws caught the fish. They paddled to the fishing ground in the morning and at night, when for an hour each time, the light being just right, the fish would bite. The line was a strand of seaweed, which may be had there, slender and strong, of any length up to a hundred fathoms, perhaps. Bait—meat—was tied to one end of the line, which was loaded with a sinker of stone rounded to a shape to sink swiftly. The fish swallowed the bait and the squaw drew it gently but quickly to the surface. Then she snatched the fish into the boat and the bait from its gullet with a motion that Georges Bank codfishermen understand, and then let her bait run quickly down again. Some fish, too large to land thus, were speared when they came in sight. The time for fishing was so short that the squaws had to improve it to the utmost advantage, especially as there were many days when the storms prevented all fishing. They had no time to waste in removing hooks from the gullets of fish. It is a fact that when hooks were given them by seamen they never used the things for fishing. The Yahgan squaws did not know the joys of taking four-pound trout with a seven-ounce rod, but they had just as much fun as do the New Yorkers who go out to the fishing banks every summer day, and they caught more fish, too.

The Yahgan household utensils were few in number and of the simplest character. He made neither pots, nor kettles, nor cups, nor basins, nor any sort of receptacle for liquids. He never boiled his food, and when the missionaries came to the Yahgan land the Indians found the spectacle of a pot full of boiling meat a most entertaining one. And yet the Yahgans tried out the oil from whale blubber and other fats, and stored it away for future use. The fat was impaled on a stick that was then thrust into the ground close to a bed of coals. The oil was tried out thus, and it dripped down into the shoulder blade of a guanaco kept for the purpose. When the hollow of this bone was full, the oil was poured into a bladder or into the bladder-like leaf of a seaweed that can be found everywhere in the region. Moreover, there were large clam and other sea shells on every beach. These served every need of the Yahgan in the way of cups and basins. What he needed to make he made with unusual neatness and skill, but he knew when he had enough and worked for nothing whatever beyond.

If, now, it has been demonstrated that the early explorers looked at the Yahgan products through prejudiced eyes, the reader will pass with increasing pleasure to a consideration of the habits of thought and mental capacity of this Antarctic highlander. I quote Darwin in this matter, because he was the most eminent of all who have seen the Yahgans, and should have been less liable than others to make errors.

Darwin had on his ship a Yahgan called Jemmy Button, who had been carried to England and taught some of the English language. Of this Yahgan Darwin said: "I should think there was scarcely another human being with so small a stock of language."

The Rev. Thomas Bridges, who now lives opposite Gable Island, in the Beagle Channel, has for nearly forty years made a study of the Yahgans and their language. He has made out of this study a complete grammar of their language, and has written what is practically a complete Yahgan-English lexicon. Fully to appreciate the facts that appear in these two manuscript books, one must not only be something of a linguist, but must have knowledge of other aboriginal tribes. For instance, it is helpful to know that Ensign Roger Wells, Jr., U. S. Navy, working in Alaska, prepared an Anglo-Eskimo Vocabulary of 2263 words, and an Eskimo-English Vocabulary of 2418 words. To quote from a pamphlet issued by the Alaskan Bureau of Education in 1890, Circular of Information No. 2, the most important contribution to a knowledge of the Eskimo language is in process of preparation by L. M. Turner, in his observations made in 1882-84, at Point Barrow. "It will contain a vocabulary of the Koksoagmyut of over 7000 words."

Cruden's Concordance of the Bible gives 7200 words exclusive of proper names; Cleveland's Concordance to the Poems of Milton gives Milton's Vocabulary as 17,377 words, while Shakespeare himself had a vocabulary of about 24,000.

But the Yahgans, despised by many as "savages of the lowest grade," pitied by a few as "most abject and miserable creatures"—these Yahgans had a language from which has been compiled a vocabulary of over 40,000 words.

As I have said, this is a story in part of one of the most interesting American tribes. How small is the proportion of the story that I can give may be inferred from what has just been said about their language. Where did they get or develop all those words? Are those 40,000 words the remains of a language which, under other circumstances, was greater, or is the vocabulary now at its greatest state of perfection? How does it happen that such a remarkable mental development was found in a people that lived as these Yahgans did? Questions multiply, but no answers are found.

Anthropologists suppose that the peoples living at the ends of the earth under adverse circumstances are "conquered races, exiles, or criminals." It is guessed by some who have read of the Yahgan that he comes from some ancient Peruvian or Brazilian civilized tribe, and fled in war time to Cape Horn. But the Yahgan language is not that of Peru or of Brazil, or even that of the lost tribes of Israel. There is in it nothing to connect it with any of the other great languages of the world. Why, then, should we think incredible the possibility of the Yahgans having originated where they are? In the alluvial beds of Patagonia and of Tierra del Fuego are found the petrified remains of the opossum, the kangaroo, and the monkey. The ostrich and a modified camel (the guanaco), now live on the desert plains of Patagonia. Who, then, shall say positively that the Yahgan race has not lived through the cataclysms that destroyed the opossum and the monkey and left the ostrich and the camel?

Some years ago the Chili Government sent an expedition to explore the Yahgan country. The report made by the commander on his return refers to the Yahgan language as "nasal and harsh; it sounds like the barking of a dog," but all who speak the language agree that it is as soft and sweet to the ear as a love-song in French.

To make a study of the construction of this language here would be impossible for lack of space, even if I knew the facts, but something of the way the Yahgans talked to one another will be interesting, because it gives an insight into their character. Let it be remembered that this was a tribe of so-called savages, and that among savages the squaw is supposed to be a wretched slave. To the casual observer the Yahgan squaw was a slave. She paddled the canoe "while the man sat in the bow holding his weapons." But the Yahgan squaw's life was certainly not without its amenities, if one may judge by the language.

Thus the Yahgan man never spoke to his squaw of any property in the family as "mine." He said "ours" instead. He even said "our harpoon." He never gave orders directly to either squaw or child. If he wanted something done he would use an expression that meant "Tell to do"; it was as if he said to his squaw, "Have some one do so and so." More remarkable still, there was no such word in the language as "obey." They said instead, "Oblige me by," "Make me the favor of," "Would you be pleased or be so kind as to do this or that?" Even when the Yahgan was angry and wished to drive away an offensive person he used a polite sentence.

As among civilized people certain terms and names may be used between man and wife, or when talking to a physician or between two men talking alone, without incurring an accusation of using indecent language, so among the Yahgans there were certain forms of expression for use in private and others for society. In short, it was a modest race; in this respect it was, perhaps, the most remarkable of all the American Indian nations.

They had poets and novelists and historians. They knew, for instance, how to tell in the most delicate fashion those sly stories in which the point was found in the thought of the listeners, and not in the words of the speaker—where the speaker's words suggested but did not say the thought. No people in the world enjoyed well-told stories of the kind more than they, but only the skilful—the literati—were permitted to tell them. A gross expression was never permitted in company. It is a lasting pity that none of these tales has been preserved for study. The missionary taught the Yahgans that their soul's salvation was imperilled by such thoughts, and the remnant of the race has become so degraded in every way that the best of this wonderful oral literature has been lost.

They had songs, but no music as civilized people understand that word. Their songs were what travellers call "monotonous chants." However, they danced to some songs, and their words were poetic if the song did lack jingle and varied intonations.

"Food was abundant in the old days," said the Rev. Thomas Bridges, "and life was easy with them." Hence the Yahgans had abundant leisure to sit about the hut fire and talk to one another. Their conversation is best described by the word bright. They were as quick-witted—as quick and brilliant at repartee as the Irish or French. They also made many puns. They were what may be called a "clubable race," to borrow a Johnsonian expression. The missionaries say that within their limits of knowledge they were ready and logical thinkers. Sarcastic remarks and cynical observations abounded in their fireside conversations, as well as flashes of kindly humor.

In politics and religion they were almost equally interesting. They had no form of government—neither chief nor legislative council—but public opinion ruled with an iron hand. Theirs was the simplest form of a republic. When men violated social usages, as sometimes happened, the guilty were ostracized, and such was the habit of thought among them that this ostracism drove the guilty one away to live by himself. Occasionally several families were thus driven into exile together, but I did not learn of the existence of any such colonies of outlaws as that found below St. Lawrence Bay on the Siberian coast or the Kevalinyes, whose home is back of Point Hope in Alaska.

Crimes against property were rare. As to the property of white men they were called thieves and robbers. Fitzroy is particularly severe on them in describing their lax notions about property. It seems to me, however, that the Yahgans and all aboriginal tribes, for that matter, have been unjustly condemned in this matter. That they took things that seemed of infinite value to them, which did not belong to them, is not denied. But this act was not morally what the same act on the part of a civilized man would have been. Among the aborigines—especially among the Yahgans—there was much property held in common. It was no harm among them to take of a neighbor's fuel; his paints were freely divided; his wood for use in making paddles or spear-shafts was practically common property. All food taken was equally divided, and when chance threw a prize, say a wrecked ship, in their way, all shared the valuables found. So when they saw among white men a superabundance of good things, the taking of what they saw did not seem the evil thing that it would have been to the conscience of a white thief. They were, in short, socialists rather than thieves.

Crimes against the person were avenged by the injured one or his relatives, so that feuds and vendettas led families to hunting each other, hither and yon, across stormy seas and into wild and secluded nooks and inlets. But the Yahgan did not delight in open warfare or bloodshed. Warfare with neighboring tribes was almost unknown. The nearest approach to it was when some Yahgan family went hunting some family of a neighboring tribe to avenge an injury suffered by some member of the aggressive family. On rare occasions other families in both tribes took up the quarrel.

The Yahgan could work himself into a foaming passion—he literally frothed at the mouth in his rage—but he preferred to make even murder a fine art. He would plan and scheme for months in order that he might revenge himself without making an open attack. It is said that even the strong and influential in a clan would work in this fashion when seeking revenge on the weaker ones, who might have been crushed by a blow at any moment.

A favorite way of killing an enemy was found in the practice of gathering the eggs of the sea fowl. In the Cape Horn region the sea fowl make their nests on the faces of precipices that literally overhang the stormy seas. There is but one way to reach the nests. The egg gatherer must be lowered by a rope from the brow of the cliff. The Yahgans had an excellent rope in the long stalks of seaweed common in the region, and the egg harvest was for most of them a time of rejoicing. It was also the time for bloody revenges. The one who sought revenge would ask his enemy to go seeking eggs, and that was an invitation not to be declined. Even when the invited one suspected a sinister motive in the cordiality of the request he must needs accept, because a refusal would be construed by his neighbors into an acknowledgment that the other had cause for seeking revenge. And such an acknowledgment would justify the other in more open means of revenge, and would stamp the refuser as a coward also.

So the invited one would smilingly accept the invitation. With his heart sinking within him, he would follow the leader to the crest of the awful precipice, look down five hundred feet to the crags at its foot, and then without a word suffer himself to be lowered over the brow at the end of a rope that he knew would soon be chafed until his weight would break it.

These Yahgans had no knowledge of God or of a life to come. That they should have faced certain death in a frightful form thus calmly when they were young, and life was still sweet, and a loved wife and children would be left to other hands, is one of their most interesting characteristics.

Although about all the crimes known to Yahgans grew out of the relations of the sexes—although there was almost invariably a woman in every case—it is a fact that the grossest crimes of passion known to civilized races (such as incest) were unknown among Yahgans.

Marriage was a matter of purchase and sale; wives were sold, sometimes, by husbands, and daughters were invariably sold by fathers. The marriage ceremony consisted in painting the girl in a certain fashion for several days before she was delivered to her husband. A new canoe was very often the price of a girl. It is a curious fact, illustrative of Yahgan society, that a father sometimes sold his girls to men whom he did not really like. A man of influence could have any girl he wished; her father would rather let the transfer be made than offend the man of influence, and that, too, when the influential fellow already had a wife or two. But there were forms and methods in the marriage negotiations that were dear to the Yahgan heart. The dicker for a wife as conducted amounted to what would be among civilized people at once an intrigue and the negotiating of a treaty. It was because of this delicacy of feeling among the Yahgans that the brutal white whalers and seal hunters that came to the region were unable to do any serious damage to this race previous to the year 1870. The Yahgan would not tolerate the rude lasciviousness of the white seamen, and until taught that it was wicked, stood up, man fashion, and fought in defence of his wives and daughters.

In religion the Yahgans were oddities, though not unique. They knew nothing of God, and had no word expressive of such an idea. To the great grief of the missionaries, there was nothing in the Yahgan language by which the idea of an everlasting, all-powerful God who must be obeyed could be adequately conveyed to Yahgan listeners, nor had they any word for or thought of a future life.

But the Yahgan's mind was not wholly material. He believed in spirits or supernatural and invisible beings, but these were invariably terrible. There was a spirit of the forest, and another of the water, and another of the kelp. Crouching over his tiny fire by night, the Yahgan heard weird voices among the waving trees on the mountain side above him, he felt the breath that scattered the embers of his hearth, he saw the deluge that drowned out even his brightest flames, and all these were manifestations of a power that was ill-defined in his mind, but nevertheless real. The Yahgan mother in this fearsome presence clasped her babe more closely to her bosom, not that it was cold, but to save it from some grasping hand that was always expected, but never came.