As we saw in a previous chapter, Patagonia possesses extreme interest for the geologist. It is a recent formation, for at one period, not very far distant from a geological point of view, it formed the vast Pampean sea. The late Colonel Church[124] has treated the subject in an interesting paper of which the opening remarks are a summary: "I shall try to show that the Plata drainage area was, in a recent geological period, much more extensive than it is to-day; that its most northern limit was in 10° 44´ S. lat., and that nearly the entire waters which now unite to form the Madeira River, the main affluent of the Amazon, once flowed southward into a Pampean sea, which penetrated north over the plains of the present Argentine Republic, to about 19° S. lat." It was probably 1,400 miles in length with an average breadth of 400 miles, and perhaps two-thirds the size of the Mediterranean. The Pampean formation is estimated to have an age of seventy thousand years. Between the history of its geological formation and our own time the record of Patagonia, though picturesque, is not important. It was a no-man's land, abandoned as worthless to savages and only visited by the curious or by those who were making their way to more profitable regions. As is well known, the explorer Magellan was the first to set foot in this country, which he called Tierra de Pantagones from the large footprints which he found in the sand, and many of the places at which he touched still bear the names he gave them. Several Spanish navigators and also Drake visited it during the sixteenth century, but Sarmiento de Gamboa, who made useful surveys, was the only one to add much to our knowledge of Patagonia. He also attempted to settle the country, but without success, for Thomas Cavendish (who named Port Desire after his own ship) saw in 1586, twenty-three famished Spaniards, the only survivors of the city of King Philip, founded by Gamboa on the Straits. These poor creatures were trying to return to the Plate district. Cavendish, therefore, named the deserted settlement the Town of Famine, and it retains the name of Port Famine to this day.[125] In 1590 John Davys found a solitary straggler here, and the bold navigator thus describes his barren experiences[126]: "Here we made a boat of the boards of our chests, which, being finished, we sent seven armed men in the same on land on the north shore, being wafted on land by the savages with certain white skins; who, as soon as they came on shore, were presently killed by an hundred of the wild people in the sight of two of our men, which rowed them on shore, which two only escaped back again to us with the boat. After this traitorous slaughter of our men, we fell back again with our ship to the north-eastward of Port Famine to a certain road, where we refreshed ourselves with mussels, and took in water and wood." The country was long neglected, but in 1670 Sir John Narborough appeared off the coast with several men-of-war, when,