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.