On Tuesday, January 6th, we at last got our favourable wind and said good-bye to Hale Cove. It is the usual resort for vessels entering and leaving the channels, but we had lain there for nearly a fortnight in the height of the season without seeing a trace of a ship, a fact which shows how little these waterways are frequented. As we passed out of the Gulf of Peñas we gazed with interest on the unfriendly and barren peaks of Wager Island, where Anson’s store-ship of that name was lost on May 14th, 1740, after the squadron had rounded the Horn. The members of the crew who survived the wreck, one hundred and forty-five in number, were there for five months, at the end of which time they had been reduced by about one-third, chiefly through starvation. Seventy or eighty of the remainder then took to the longboat and cutter, of whom thirty finally reached the coast of Brazil via the Magellan Straits. The rest of the survivors, a party of twenty, including the captain and an officer named Byron, a great-uncle of the poet, made their way northward, and through the aid of Indians four of them managed to reach the Spanish settlements in Chile. The graphic account given by Byron of their surroundings on the island would be equally applicable to-day, and has already been quoted in these pages. CHAPTER VI CHILE Refitting at Talcahuano—Trip to Santiago and across the Summit of the Andes—Valparaiso—To Juan Fernandez—Typhoid on Board—Back to Chile—Juan Fernandez again.