We’re interrupting our series of articles about Wulaia and the natives of Tierra del Fuego to bring you a short story about a seagull. As ever, if you want to enlarge the photos you can just click on them; and then you click again, on the surrounding page, to get back to the text. Last week we were walking along a stony spit where the local cormorants, oyster-catchers and seagulls are preparing to nest. As we came near to their…
In the first part of this saga we were introduced to the Yaghan, the hunter-gatherer people who dwelt on the shores of Tierra del Fuego. We now follow the story of how they came to be considered not just as objects of pity but as souls to be saved; and, in this matter, no one played a more important role than Robert FitzRoy. With only 24 years to his back, Robert FitzRoy was an unlikely candidate for command of a…
In June, in the middle of the southern winter, we set out from Puerto Williams with the object of passing through the Murray Strait and into Ponsonby Sound. This body of water lies between the Beagle Channel and the Cape Horn archipelago, and it would be a splendid cruising ground but for the fact that the Chilean navy has declared the whole area off-limits to all foreign vessels. To get round this difficulty we arranged to make the voyage with…
Various friends have written to us in the course of the past few weeks, asking how we’re faring at “the uttermost end of the Earth” now that Spring is in the air. Well… all I can say is, Spring has not sprung! Last week the village of Puerto Williams was once again buried under a foot of snow. I have a dim recollection of crunching my through something similar at about the age of seven. This kind of thing happens…