No more lovely Indian summer day was ever seen than the first day of the Antarctic winter, June 1, of the year 1894, as enjoyed by the passengers and crew of the Argentine naval transport _Ushuaia_, as she steamed out of the east end of Beagle Channel and headed for the Strait of Le Maire, bound to St. John harbor, in the east end of the Antarctic Staten Island. The air was soft and warm, the water dimpled, the leaves on the waving trees ashore flashed in the sunlight, the distant snow-capped mountains rose through a dreamy haze. And so the conditions remained until the sun went down and the slender arc of the new moon appeared among the luminous mists of the western sky. To the passengers the prospect of a delightful night was all that could be asked, but the old salts shook their heads. "You just hold fast all till midnight," said one to whom a passenger spoke enthusiastically of the weather. "To-night is the change of the moon, eh?" and he nodded his head toward the west. [Illustration: GOVERNMENT STATION AT ST. JOHN. FROM A SKETCH BY COMMANDER CHWAITES, A. N.] Sure enough, by midnight a northwest gale fit to twist the life out of a ship was roaring over the water, and the little _Ushuaia_ was pitching and tossing along like a Newport catboat in a cross sea. She was then in the Strait of Le Maire, and a worse current for a contrary wind can probably be found nowhere in the world. It is a rush of broken water hurrying along at from five to six and a half knots an hour, while the tide rips, formed by the eddies off the capes on both sides of the strait, are something to make a seaman gasp. Luckily for us, we had a seaboat of a model fit even for a maelstrom, and with scarce a sea on deck we labored through the worst of it, and at daylight next morning the outline of "the rugged inhospitable Staten land was visible amidst the clouds" on the starboard bow. Thereafter we cruised along, heading to the east, for several hours within a very few miles of the coast, and the passengers gathered on deck to gaze on such landscapes as only those who travel out of the usual way may enjoy. And certainly it was a view worth all the discomforts of a long and stormy voyage, for here is found the end of the mountain system of all the Americas. Cape Horn Island is, in a sense, the south end of the Americas, but the backbone of the hemisphere bends to the east at Mount Sarmiento on Tierra del Fuego, and running along the shore of that great island is broken by the Strait of Le Maire, as it was broken by the Strait of Magellan, only to appear again beyond the narrow water in the cliffs and ridges and gulches of Staten Island. It is not until one has been on or around Cape St. John, on the east end of this island, that he can accurately say he has rounded the southern end of the American continent.