The long series of groups of islands beginning with Chiloé, about two-thirds of the way down the coast, is said to be nothing more than a partly submerged section of the Western Cordillera. Above the surface of the water, for a distance of about eighty miles, they still have an average elevation of about two thousand feet. Embraced in the Chonos Archipelago, between Chiloé and the Taytao Peninsula, are more than a thousand small islands, rocks, and reefs, and then come the large islands of Wellington, Madre de Dios, Chatham, Hanover, Queen Adelaide, King William’s Land, etc., each fringed by groups of little ones and all following the mainland in a graceful curve and separated from it by the Messier, Sarmiento, and Smyth Channels, which, together, extend for three hundred and sixty miles, from the Penas Gulf to the Strait of Magellan. As the steamer glides through, at times so straight are they and such is the uniformity of the shore line on either side, one fancies one’s self in a wide river in the interior of the continent; at others, when openings among the islands appear and the water stretches for miles toward the sea or far into the recesses of the Cordillera, it seems more like a great lake. The fjordlike formations recall the more celebrated channel off the coast of Norway leading to the North Cape. Indeed, it is generally agreed by those who have seen both that there is little to choose between them, for, in both, the indentations and mountains of the coast and islands are similar in character; if there is less variety in the Chilean one, if the rainstorms are more frequent, to compensate for it there is a much greater and more attractive wealth of vegetation. From the water’s edge to a height of fourteen or fifteen hundred feet, the slopes, and even the smaller islands, are covered with an unbroken mantle of beautiful, dense, green forest that presents an astonishing contrast, in this inhospitable region, to the bleak, gray rocks and bluish-tinted ice sheets above and the pure white snow caps on the summits beyond. In the country from Valdivia south to Smyth Channel, many of the trees, particularly in the ravines and sheltered places, are tall and shapely and their trunks and lower branches are incrusted with mosses and entwined with flowering creepers and vines, many with a sort of mistletoe that has clusters of dark-red blossoms; one of the creepers, called angel’s hair, is delicate and filmy and hangs from the branches like threads of lace, and there is an undergrowth of ferns and shrubs and bamboo. These last often shoot up as far as the tops of the trees and seem to mat them together so that they form arbors over the pathways between. Farther south and in the region of the Strait, these woods lose something of their mysterious beauty; here they are composed principally of antarctic beech, gnarled and bent by the winds, and the thicketlike undergrowth is somber and forbidding.