The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and PatagoniaSpears, John Randolph
History
The Gold Diggings of Cape Horn: A Study of Life in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia
Spears, John Randolph
Patagonia (Argentina and Chile) -- Description and travel
There are glaciers that lie in hollows on the mountain side, and here
and there push little moraines before them in their heavy course down
the valleys to the water. A couple reach to the water's edge and throw
off tiny icebergs that go drifting about with the tide and wind. Better
yet, if one really loves nature, are the storms. Seen from a
sailing-vessel in danger of drifting on the rocks that are a hundred
leagues from help, the storms are fearsome; but when seen from the deck
of a well-found steamer, when wrapped in water-proofs and furs, they are
magnificent. The gale goes roaring up the mountain, carrying the snow in
fluffy masses to the very crest and hurls it thence in smoky, quivering
tongues, 1200 feet into the air. The same phenomenon may be seen on the
coast of Greenland, but in the Beagle Channel the mountains are nearer
at hand, their sides more precipitous, and the winds fiercer. And then
there are the "williwaws" the whalers tell about, the whirling squalls
that pick up the water, as the sand is picked up on the plains of New
Mexico to form writhing columns a thousand feet high. There is something
in the whizz and swish of wind and water, as one of these passes the
ship, that stirs the blood as nothing else in nature, short of a tornado
or live volcano, can do.
American art students go to Europe to complete their education by
copying old-time paintings of apostles--apostles standing erect in a
boat not large enough to accommodate their feet without pinching--and
then come home to gabble about the beauties of nature. The picture of a
saint, regardless of surroundings, may inspire the soul with religious
fervor and teach the struggling youth to put that fervor on the canvas,
but if one would paint a landscape that will at once thrill the soul
with terror and awake it to an appreciation of the wildest scene in
nature, let him make studies of the williwaws in the Cape Horn region,
with frozen volcanoes vomiting flames of snow for a background.
The _Ushuaia_ sailed out of Buenos Ayres on Wednesday, April 18th. She
arrived back on Saturday, June 23d. I should say there is probably no
other voyage in the world that a tourist could make in which he would
suffer more physical discomforts. The most of these as I saw them were
due to the wretched design of the remodelled lighter, but some were
inseparable from such a voyage because due to the climate and the
distance one goes from civilized communities.
Nevertheless, the liking for North Americans which the Argentines
everywhere professed, their hearty efforts to make me comfortable
because I was a North American, the delights of visiting the old-time
ports and waters of which one reads in the thrilling tales of early
exploration, these, with many other things that come to mind, combine to
crowd from the memory everything disagreeable, and I can think of the
voyage, as a whole, only with the greatest pleasure.
INDEX.
A
Aborigines of Cape Horn, story of, 47 _et seq._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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