The Beagle Channel

We had heard rumour of a cargo boat from Puerto Williams to Punta Arenas on the Saturday, so we decided to move on. We chartered a boat to take us across the Beagle Channel, and we entered Chilean territory at Puerto Navarino where an official stamped our passports with about as much interest as a bus ticket. We were transported to the naval base of Puerto Williams, which legitimately claims (over that of Ushuaia) to be the southernmost settlement in the world outside Antarctica. Like Leonard Cohen sings in ´Suzanne´, all men are sailors in this bleak little town of about 2200 souls, where long guns in the Plaza point provocatively back across the channel to Argentina. The world´s southern most yacht club is located in a naval ship scuttled near the shore where sleek round-the-world racers and salty old sloops moor alongside. Chatwin came as far as Puerto Williams to seek out the last full blooded Yaghan Indian who lived here, and his description of that meeting is so evocative that I must include it here.

¨The last of the Yaghans lived in a row of plank shanties at the far end of the base. The authorities settled them here so that they should be closer to a doctor. It was drizzling snow and smears came down to the shore. It was high summer. Behind the settlement the trees disappeared into the clouds. The water was smooth and black and across the Channel were the ribbed grey cliffs of Gable Island. The old man said I could come in. The hut was full of smoke and my eyes smarted. He sat in a pile of crab pots, baskets and boat gear. He was hardly taller than wider and his legs were bowed. He wore a greasy cap and had the leathery face of a mongol and black unmoving eyes that registered no expression or emotion. Only his hands moved. They were fine hands, agile and netted with dark grey veins. He earned a little money making toy canoes to sell to the tourists. He made them of bark and withes and sewed them with sheep sinew. In the old days, fathers made these canoes for their sons. Now there were no sons and still very few tourists. I watched him whittle a miniature harpoon shaft and bind it on to a tiny bone harpoon. ´Once I made big harpoons´ he said.¨



The last full blood Yaghan died in 1999. Today only one elderly speaker of the Yaghan language remains Cristina Calderón of Ukika Village on Isla Navarino, though their language was one of the first recorded in Tierra del Fuego, as early as 1898 by Thomas Bridges an early settler who made it his life´s work to construct a dictionary of the language. Charles Darwin, who was appalled by the Fuegians and could not believe ¨how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man; it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal...¨ derided the Yaghan language which ¨...scarcely deserves to be called articulate. Captain Cook has compared it to a man clearing his throat, but certainly no European ever cleared his throat with so many hoarse, guttual and clicking sounds.¨ Chatwin however is more discerning;

¨the language reveals a mariner's obsession with time and space. For, although they did not count to five, they defined the cardinal points with minute distinctions and read seasonal changes as an accurate chronometer... What shall we think of a people who defined 'monotony' as 'an absence of male friends?' Or for 'depression', used the word that described the vulnerable phase in a crab's seasonal cycle, when it has sloughed off its old shell and waits for another to grow? Or who derived 'lazy' from the Jackass Penguin? Or 'adulterous' from the hobby, a small hawk that flits here and there, hovering motionless over its next victim?

Here are just a few of their synonyms:

Sleet — Fish scales
A shoal of sprats — Slimy mucus
A tangle of trees that have fallen blocking the path forward — A hiccough
Fuel — Something burned - Cancer
Mussels out of season — Shrivelled skin - Old age

Some of their linkings were beyond me:

The fur seal — The relatives of a murdered man

Others seemed obscure then came clear:

A thaw (of snow) — A scar - Teaching...

The Yaghans had a dramatic verb to capture every twitch of the muscles, every possible action of nature or man.¨

Chatwin´s fascination with indigenous languages was carried through with ´The Songlines´ 1987, an exploration of the song cycles of Australian Aboriginals - a book I am trying to hunt down, without much luck in South America.

We however, back in Puerto Williams, were had encountered our own ´hiccough´. Our berth on the cargo boat had not been confirmed and we had no idea where the office of the ferry company was located. After wandering around aimlessly for an hour or so and asking a few bewildered locals, we made enquiries in the station of the Captain of the Port, and were directed to a broken down house on the waterfront, with peeling pink paint and only a scrap of paper taped to the window advertising its location. A chainsaw rested on a pile of lemons in the hallway, and a scruffy fellow clenching a cheroot between his teeth confirmed our berth, and waved us down to the harbour to have a look at our vessel, the Fuegino departing the following morning.

At the concrete boat ramp, a crab boat had just pulled in, and the crab-men were unloading its live catch of a tonne or more of horny crabs. Men with thick arms in yellow plastic overalls heaved huge crates seething with crabs from the boat onto the ramp and then onto the back of a lorry, with little regard for the breaking of crab and claw. A few lucky dozen crabs managed to scuttle off the ramp back into the water, but others met their end under a heavy crunch of the crab-man´s boot. The Fuegino was moored nearby, a vehicle-carrier about 150ft long, with front and back loading ramps, and two long thin two decks.

We left the following morning at 0800 with a few other fellow cargo-boaters, an enormous refrigerator container full of the crab catch of the previous day, glassy water and a fine sunrise at our backs. We steamed west back past Ushuaia, and by the time the ship´s chef (in full chef´s whites and hat) had served us a hearty cazuela stew for lunch, a headwind had whipped up the waters of the Channel, and the ship made a jolting passage forward in the chop. By mid afternoon, we reached the point were the Channel splits into North and South Channels, and taking the north which is more relatively protected, we sailed under the shadow of the Cordillera Darwin, a mighty range which is the last great range of the Andes before it descends into the Atlantic Ocean. Ever since I built a large dioramic model of glacial geology in year nine science, I have been fascinated by glaciers, and this was my first view of really big glaciers. That afternoon we saw half a dozen giant glaciers descending into the sea from the thick ice cap which mantles the Darwin Range, scooping out great valleys and rounded bowls from the sides of the high mountains. The water issuing from the snout of these glaciers is milky blue, and does not mingle with main current, forming a distinct line against the deep blue of the main Channel. We stopped in a cove after lunch, and met a caretaker of Ian Kiernan´s old ´Spirit of Sydney´ which is being sailed back to Australia. What with all the excitement of glaciers, I left one of my new gloves on the beach. Jumping around like a jack in the box and very glacier-happy for the remainder of the day, until dusk settled, and we settled down for an upright night on the soft seats. The ship lunged on through the night as we slept, out of the Beagle Channel, through the Canal Ballenero (Baleen Whale Channel), past the Penisula Brecknock and the Isla Basket (former home of Fuegia Basket, a Yaghan Indian taken to England by the first Beagle voyage and returned there by the second voyage) and across an open stretch of the southern Pacific Ocean.

The next morning dawned clear, and as we turned into the Cockburn Channel, Mt. Sarmiento presented a fine view against the morning sky, a huge glacier curling round its flank like a muscled arm. Calm waters passed under us, as albatross see-sawed across the wake of the ship, sooty petrels swooped in for a closer look, and flightless steamer ducks paddled in their curious way. Seals popped up to inquire regularly, and Dale was lucky enough to sight an Austral Doplhin (as large as an orca and similar in shape) breach beside the ship. The ship straightened course for Punta Arenas as we entered the Straits of Magellan, passing Cabo Froward, the southern most point of the South American mainland, crowned by a 30m high steel cross, erected by some mad bishop. We arrived in Punta Arenas, or Sandy Point, about 6pm, having completed 560km in 32 hours, at an average rate of 7.9 knots per hour, or 17.5 km per hour. And the crabs had started to smell.