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.