Chile today and tomorrow

The First Navigators: Magellan, Sebastian del Cano, Loaysa, Alcazaba.—Sarmiento.—The City of Philip.—Cavendish.—Port Famine and Punta Arenas.

Thinking of Chile, one sees a picture of southern orchards and wheat fields, of cattle pastures, of pine forests; of copper mines in the inhospitable heights of the mountains; or perhaps of the great, burning nitrate pampas of the north. Rarely is a thought given to the southernmost city in the world, Punta Arenas, with its tributary sheep-raising plains, its beech woods and fisheries, coal and gold mines, and its extraordinary rise from misery to immense wealth in the course of a few years.

Nobody, probably, could have wrested wealth from such a region but the people whose attention was drawn to it after the discovery that much-abused Patagonia was a fine sheep-raising region. It was the hardy Falkland Islander, hailing from the islands north and west of the Scottish coast, who made, and speculated on, this chance, invading the plains and grassy hills east of the Andes after he had staked out Western Patagonia, and adding Tierra del Fuego presently to his conquests. He was swiftly followed by energetic traders and by another sheep-herding mountaineer, the Jugo-Slav; between them they have done what the unfortunate Spanish settlers of Pedro de Sarmiento could not do: they have created a city in the wilderness, strongly-rooted, sturdy, with the spring of life from within.

The tale of settlement of the Straits of Magellan, today an accepted achievement, is built upon gallantry and tragedy. The thriving regions of Patagonia and Magellan Territory have been erected upon the ashes of the most cruel suffering.

The efforts of the Spanish crown to find a way to the golden East by way of the West which led to the discovery of the Strait of Magellan were but extensions of the hunt for Cathay that inspired the greedy fanatic Cristobal Colón. He died asseverating that he had found the coast of the Indies, and although the more level-headed navigators knew better the eyes of Spain continued to be fixed upon a route to the Spice Isles rather than upon the Americas per se. Reached from the west, Spain could lay an anti-Portuguese claim by virtue of the famous Bull of Pope Alexander VI of May 4, 1493, which, placing a line 100 miles west of the Azores, acknowledged all discoveries eastward as Portuguese and all westward as Spanish.

Fernão de Magalhães, as Captain-General, with Estevan Gomez as Chief Pilot, sailed in the Trinidad, of 110 tons, from San Lucar on September 12, 1519. Four other smaller vessels completed the expedition of discovery—the San Antonio, the Victoria, the Santiago, and the Concepción. The latter was commanded by Gaspar de Mendoza, with, as master, Sebastian del Cano, destined to be the first circumnavigator of the globe. Magellan, Portuguese-born, shipped a large number of his countrymen in defiance of the orders of the King of Spain; Sebastian del Cano, a Basque hidalgo, took eight other Basques in the Concepción. Quarrels quickly broke out, and an outbreak off the Patagonian coast resulted in the murder of Mendoza, the execution of Quesada, the marooning of another commander and a too-active priest. The Santiago had been lost at the entrance of the Santa Cruz River, and with the remaining personnel and vessels captained to his own liking, Magellan proceeded south.

On October 21 he sighted and named the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins, at the opening of the Strait. Here Estevan Gomez, now on board the San Antonio, overpowered the captain and persuaded other men equally disapproving of Magellan’s actions to turn back; they sought, vainly, the men marooned at San Julian, and sailed back to Spain. Meanwhile Magellan navigated the stormy waters of the Strait, emerged into the boisterous Pacific, made for the Philippines and there was killed in a native feud; the slaughter of thirty-nine others of the expedition made it necessary to get rid of another vessel, the Concepción, while the two remaining vessels made their way to the coveted Spice Islands. Here magnificent cargoes of spice were bartered from the Kings of Tidore and Gilolo, and, leaving the leaking Trinidad to be careened, Sebastian del Cano after building storehouses for spices at Tidore, sailed on westward in the little Victoria and reached San Lucar as the first circumnavigator of the globe.

Del Cano with thirty-five men were the chief survivors, for the Trinidad never returned, and only a few of her crew reached Spain years afterwards. It was to find her and rescue the members of the expedition left in Tidore that the second expedition to Magellan Straits was despatched. The great merits of Sebastian del Cano as organizer and navigator were, meanwhile, greatly applauded in Spain, and the coat of arms granted bore a globe as crest, with the motto Primus circumdedisti me.

Portugal was roused by the exciting story of the Victoria’s feat and her return laden with cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, mace and sandalwood. To understand the feeling roused it is necessary to remember the extent to which mediæval Europe was dependent upon spices for rendering foods palatable. Sugar was not then in general use, and honey, scarce and expensive, was the chief sweetener. Meat was preserved with salt, and its untempting quality was redeemed by Eastern spices. Puddings were saturated with the same heavy aromatics; wearing apparel and beds were perfumed with them. It is a taste that has yielded before the skill of the distiller and the synthetic chemist, and the general development of a “sweet tooth,” but it was sufficiently enthusiastic during the Middle Ages to warrant international disputes.

Following Sebastian del Cano’s exploit, therefore, need for a decision as to the ownership of the Moluccas became acute: finally, the King of Portugal and Charles I of Spain arranged the Conference of Badajos to settle the matter, taking the evidence of the best navigators, cartographers and pilots. Meetings began in early 1524, continued for five years without result, and were ended when Charles V sold his claim in April, 1529, to the Portuguese for 350,000 ducats. This sale worked a hardship upon the plucky Spaniards engaged in trying to uphold the Spanish flag in the Islands, for meanwhile a new expedition under the Comendador Garcia de Loaysa, with Sebastian del Cano as second in command, was fitted out to follow the same course as Magellan’s to the Spice Isles and to rescue the survivors of the Trinidad. They set sail from Coruña in July, 1524, reached Cape Virgins in January, encountered the usual terrible gales off the Strait, lost a ship, and saw tall Patagonians, dressed in guanaco skins, with headdresses of ostrich (rhea) plumes. They noted the laurel-like leaves of Winter’s Bark, with its sweet scent. In bad condition, with the small boats destroyed, they went north to the Santa Cruz River; repaired them, returned to the Strait, and finally got out into the Pacific in May, 1526. Besides the wreck of the Santi Spiritus they had now been deserted by two other ships, so that only the flagship Victoria, the caravels Lesmes and Parrel and the pinnace Pataca reached the South Sea. Of these, the Pataca found her way to Mexico, and the Lesmes disappeared.

Broken down by hardships, Loaysa died at sea on July 30; and six days later the great navigator Sebastian del Cano also died. When the survivors reached the Moluccas at the end of the year they had buried 40 men in the Pacific since leaving the Strait, 105 remaining to carry on unsupported contest against the Portuguese in the islands. In 1532, when the abandonment of the Spanish claims was definitely known, the Spaniards surrendered to their rivals and a few survivors did eventually get back to Spain, including the able captain Andres de Urdaneta, whose careful report was made to the king.

The next expedition to the stormy Strait was that of Simon de Alcazaba, a Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain who asked for and obtained a grant of land in what is today South Chile. The territory of which he was nominally made Governor was to commence immediately south of the strip allotted to the Adelantado Diego de Almagro, Nueva Estramadura, and to extend 300 leagues. Alcazaba’s grant included the present Argentine Patagonia, and was called Nueva Leon; the narrative of the Veedor Alonso has been preserved and tells of the misfortune, crime and suffering that seemed to pursue every expedition to the troubled waterways.

With two ships, Alcazaba set sail from San Lucar in September, 1534, reaching the entrance of the Strait four months later; the weather was threatening, so after stocking up with 300 penguins they sailed north to parallel 45, and anchored in the Puerto de Leones, which Alcazaba considered as in the middle of his land grant, and from which he proposed to march overland. They started on March 9, marched some thirty-six miles in inhospitable country “desert and uninhabited, where we found neither roots nor herbs to use as food, nor fuel to make a fire, nor water to drink.” The Governor, stout and old, had to turn back with a captain, while the rest went on until having marched 300 miles in twenty-two days, with nothing but desert still in sight, they decided to return to the ships. They had lived on the roots of big thistles, wild celery and fish.

During the return journey two captains, Arias and Sotelo, mutinied, and the expedition straggled back in disorder, losing more than fifty men on the way. Arias and his friends reached the coast first, swam to the flagship, murdered the Governor and pilot, then seized the second ship and robbed both. Quarrels broke out between the two ringleaders, Arias wishing to turn the flagship into a roving privateer while Sotelo^[4] preferred to go north and join, at the Plata, the expedition of the Governor Pedro de Mendoza; the loyalists were able to turn the tables on them, retake possession of the vessels, and to appoint new officials. The latter tried and sentenced the mutineers; some were hanged at the yardarm, others thrown overboard with weights round their necks, and others “banished on shore for ten years.” At last, with provisions exhausted, they set sail in July for Brazil, reached Bahia, where a ship was wrecked and eighty men killed by the natives, the survivors reaching Santo Domingo in September, 1535. So ended the first Spanish official attempt to colonise the extreme south of Chile.

With the Spice Isles definitely abandoned, the route to the “South Seas” discovered by Magellan was still valuable as offering an all-sea route to the coast of Peru, and the next expedition was sent from Spain at the instance of the Viceroy of Mexico, Antonio de Mendoza, in 1539. At this time, and for many years to come, the chief route to Lima was by the fever and pirate infested Isthmus of Panama, and the vessels seen in the Pacific were brought in pieces and set up, or, later, built of native timber, chiefly at Guayaquil.

The new mission was headed by Captain Alonso de Camargo, who lost his flagship in the first narrows of the Strait; another vessel lost touch, wintered in a bay of Tierra del Fuego, and then sailed back to Spain; Camargo succeeded in getting the remaining vessel through the storms of the Strait, and reached the Bay of Valparaiso at the time when Captain Pedro de Valdivia was pushing south against the Araucanians. But he did not return to Spain, was killed in the Almagro-Pizarro feuds, and the chief result of his journey seems to have been discouraging; for a long time no attempt was made by Spain to use the Strait. Juan de Ladrilleros, sent in 1557 from Chile to examine the Strait from the Pacific side, discovered Chiloé and the Chonos Archipelago and surveyed as far as Cape Virgins. Including the leader, but three men returned to Valdivia to report to the Governor, Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza.

Sarmiento

In 1579 the West Coast was electrified with the appearance of Francis Drake in the Golden Hind, and when it was said that he had entered the Pacific by way of Magellan Strait the Spanish determined to fortify and close the passage to all foreign vessels. It was still believed that south of the strait lay a great continent, divided from Patagonia only by narrow waterways.

With a view to shutting the channel, the Viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, equipped an expedition under the command of Captain Pedro de Sarmiento de Gamboa, to survey the southerly regions and sail through the Strait to Spain. Sarmiento was a fine seaman, with the discovery of the Galapagos Islands already to his credit, an acute observer, good historian, and a tireless and resourceful leader. He remarks, in the beginning of his narrative, that it was then “held to be almost impossible to discover” the entrance from the Pacific side, “owing to the innumerable openings and channels which there are before arriving at it, where many discoverers have been lost who had been sent by the Governors of Peru and Chile.” Even the people who entered from the North Sea (Atlantic) “never succeeded. Some were lost, and others returned, so tossed about by storms and uncertain of what could be discovered, that there was a general dread of that navigation.” The viceroy’s object now was to dispel that fear, and to find the best means of closing the Strait; Philip II’s suggestion of a stout chain was no doubt considered.

Two ships were selected and fitted; the crew of 112 was collected with difficulty, for “nobody wished to embark, and many ran away and hid themselves,” but the expedition set sail on October 11, 1579, from Callao. By November 11 they had sailed 573 leagues, and were off Chiloé; ten days later Sarmiento formally took possession of land off what is today called Wolsey Sound; and, climbing to the top of a very rugged mountain, often found it easier to “go along the tops of the trees, from branch to branch, like monkeys” until, reaching the top, they counted 85 islands in the broken archipelago below. Deserted by the second ship, Sarmiento found, in the flagship, Nuestra Señora de Esperanza, his way into the Strait on Feb. 2, 1580, after much experience of bad weather when surveying the westerly channels, and next day made another formal landing and proclamation of possession. They got into touch with Indians, who told them by signs of the visit of other bearded strangers, probably the men of Drake’s three ships; it was not until February 9 that they encountered the big Patagonians of the east, users of the bow. On the 13th they passed Cape Froward and the Bay of the Natives, “Bahia de la Gente,” where the little river San Juan was named, and where two years later the ill-fated City of Philip was founded. Sarmiento took possession and set up a cross at this spot, leaving a letter with orders for the missing ship, the Almirante, in case she came that way.

Six days later they passed the Second Narrows, and the First Narrows on Feb. 23, coming out of the Strait on the next day; they reached Spain, after a number of adventures, on August 15. Here Sarmiento reported to the King of Spain, and it was determined that a well-provisioned fleet should be sent to the Strait, with stores, building materials, guns, and 100 married and single colonists, the former taking their families with them. Two forts were to be constructed in the First Narrows, each garrisoned with 200 soldiers. With the expedition also went the new Governor of Chile, Alonso de Sotomayor, taking 600 married and single men as settlers. Twenty-three vessels, carrying 3000 people, comprised the imposing fleet that sailed from San Lucar on Sept. 25, 1581. Sarmiento himself went as Governor and Captain-general of the Strait, with command over the forts and settlements; but until they arrived the chief authority lay with Diego Flores de Valdes, commanding the fleet, an unfortunate choice on the part of the Crown, for Flores would not work with Sarmiento, and seems to have been a coward. The ruin of the expedition was certainly attributable in part to his actions.

Ill luck dogged them from the start. A storm assailed the fleet outside San Lucar, and five ships, with 800 men, were lost; of these, 171 were settlers, out of 357 who set out for the Strait. Another frigate was lost as they left Cadiz on December 9, and on the voyage to Rio de Janeiro, where they were to winter, 150 people died. During the fleet’s stay in Rio, from March to November, 1582, another 150 died, and others deserted; an unseaworthy ship had to be sunk here, 16 vessels eventually sailing south, in poor condition. A few days later a large ship, the Arriola, sank with 350 people and quantities of stores, and the Santa Marta followed her; and from this time Diego Flores almost openly tried to impede a farther voyage southwards. He insisted on leaving three ships, with soldiers, settlers and stores, behind at Santa Catalina Island; another vessel was lost on leaving the port; and the next loss of help was occasioned by Alonso de Sotomayor’s decision to disembark at the River Plate and march overland to Chile, instead of aiding with erection of forts and settlements in the Strait. He took three ships and many of the diminishing stores intended for the new colony; and when the Strait’s entrance was reached at last there were left only five vessels of the twenty-three that sailed from San Lucar. When strong winds and currents were encountered, Diego Flores put his ship about and frankly fled, signalling to the other ships to follow him back to Brazil. Arrived in S. Vicente (Santos) they found two of the three ships that had been left at Catalina Island, the Begoña having been sunk by English pirates, while the officials were openly selling the Straits stores in the town and the wretched intended settlers were bartering their clothes for food. Sarmiento saved what he could, was rejoiced to find four vessels fresh from Spain with new provisions for the Straits, and, after Diego Flores had definitely refused to go south again (sailing north with a large quantity of provisions and all the men he could induce to desert), Sarmiento left Rio on Dec. 2, 1583, with five vessels, and again set his course for the Strait. He reached the entrance on Feb. 1, 1584, met with fierce winds and currents, lost anchors and many cables, and was driven out of the Strait again. The Indians of the mainland “made such a smoke that it concealed sea and land.” Nothing daunted, Sarmiento went ashore as soon as he could anchor under the low land of the Virgins Cape, on February 5, taking a cross which they planted on a “large plain clothed with odoriferous and consoling herbs.” Soldiers, settlers and stores were landed, tents set up, 300 people housed; five springs of water were found three-quarters of a mile away, and the colonists began to search for food, having little but mandioca flour from Brazil and a small amount of biscuit. They found “roots sweet and well-tasting, like turnips” and others as pleasant as conserved pine nuts; and quantities of small black berries, probably the fruit of the berberry (Empetrum rubrum) or the myrtle (Myrtus nummularia) that still abound on the mainland and islands of the region. The ephemeral settlement was bravely named the “City of the Name of Jesus,” with due ceremonies of sod-turning, and the burial of coins and witnessed documents; an altar was set up and the litany sung by a procession. Streets and plazas were marked out by Sarmiento, and huts of grass and poles, earth-covered, built; beans, vines, fruit trees and seeds from Spain were planted near the sweet springs. Meanwhile the settlers had to subsist partly on the inadequate fish they could catch. The ships lying at the mouth of the Strait were a constant anxiety, driven out repeatedly by gales, and at last the Trinidad ran ashore and was lost. Alarmed, the admiral, Diego de la Ribera, took three of the remaining four vessels and fled north, carrying the remainder of the provisions, and many settlers. Ribera made no farewells and did not wait for the formal despatches of Sarmiento for the King; it was a mean desertion of gallant countrymen.

Sarmiento rescued the stores from the Trinidad, put the colony into a fair state of defence, with a rampart, arquebuses and guns, against the audacious natives who frequently attacked with arrows, and then sent the remaining ship, the Maria, into the Strait with instructions to make for Cape Santa Ana, while he took a part of 100 soldiers by land to the same spot in order to found a second settlement.

They set out on March 4; two weeks later their track was to be followed by a party of thirty or forty others. It was a hard journey through utter wilderness, and Sarmiento remarks that in forty leagues they saw neither a human being nor signs of fire, although when he had traversed the Strait on his voyage from Peru the plains were full of smoke. They saw deer, skunks, and vultures, found berries, and at the coast obtained shell-fish and edible sea-weed, but were short of fresh water, as the streams flow under the sands when approaching the Strait; at the First Narrow Sarmiento found a suitable spot for a fort, with nearby pasture land “very pleasant to behold, with grass suitable for sheep” an observation which was proved correct three hundred years later. They noticed whales’ bones in a bay beyond the first Narrow, and quantities of large, nourishing mussels.

Tall natives, naked, armed with bows and arrows and accompanied by fighting dogs, met them near Gregory Cape, pretended friendship, but later tried to ambush the Spaniards. Several Spaniards were wounded, and one killed, but Sarmiento killed the Chief with a sword thrust and the attackers fled. After seventy leagues’ marching they reached the wooded country, where the “small people” lived. But the expedition suffered from hunger and fatigue, and several men, discouraged, ran away to the woods and were never seen again. On March 24 the limping, half-starved party reached Santa Ana and met the Maria’s boat, sent to look for them. The ship’s company were camped in a nearby bay. Here they found large deer, plenty of shell-fish that they stewed with “wild cinnamon” (Winter’s Bark), and saw flocks of green parroquets. It was decided to found the second settlement at this spot, and on March 25, 1584, the formalities were carried out, the “tree of justice” was erected and the municipality was traced out, and named the City of the King Don Felipe. A church was built; next, the royal storehouse, large enough to hold 500 men, and the precious provisions secured; they had but 50 casks of flour, 12 of biscuit, 4 of beans, and a little salt meat, dried fish and bacon. At the end of April, clay-coated huts were ready for the approaching storms of winter; vegetable seeds had been planted, the city palisaded and defended by 6 guns, mounted on platforms. On May 25 Sarmiento embarked in the Maria with thirty men, arrived outside the City of the Name of Jesus on the same night, sent to and received messengers from it, but was driven out to sea by a furious twenty-day storm before which he was forced to run north. He could not return, and reached Santos on June 25, with all food long exhausted and the starving men, some of whom were blind and frostbitten, gnawing their sandals and the leather of the pumps.

He left for Rio on July 3, got help from Governor Salvador Correa and sent a ship laden with flour to the Strait; went to Pernambuco and Bahia, where his ship was wrecked and he got ashore on a couple of planks. The Governor received him kindly, gave him a ship of 160 tons, and a load of mandioca flour, cloth and provisions for the settlement. With this ship he sailed to Espirito Santo (Victoria Port), got dried beef and cotton cloth, and proceeded south in mid-January, 1585, to visit his settlements. But in 33 degrees of south latitude a frightful gale burst upon them, most of the sheep, flour, etc., had to be thrown overboard, and the battered vessel made her way back to Rio after fifty-one ruinous days, finding here, as a final blow, the ship despatched to the Strait with flour in December, put back on account of terrible weather. At the end of his resources, and unable to get further help from the well-disposed Portuguese Governor, Sarmiento determined to go to Spain to report; but on his way he was captured (August, 1586) by the little fleet of Sir Richard Grenville returning from Virginia, and taken to England. Here he was received by Queen Elizabeth, who conversed with him in Latin for two hours and a half, with Lord Burleigh, and was specially well treated by Lord Howard and Sir Walter Raleigh, who gave the old sailor a present of 1000 escudos and helped him to obtain a passport. He was, in fact, used most kindly, and probably carried conciliatory messages to Philip II. But his ill-luck followed him relentlessly; while crossing France in December, 1586, he was imprisoned, and a big ransom demanded. Sarmiento was compelled to appeal to the King of Spain, and when the 6000 ducats and four select horses had been provided he was released, in October, 1589, grey-haired and crippled, after nearly three years’ confinement in fetid dungeons “in infernal darkness, accompanied by the music of toads and rats.” His first act was to make his report to the Crown, begging for help to be sent to the settlements in the Strait.

The City of Philip

But, long before Sarmiento was released from the French prison, none but ghosts walked in the City of Philip. Their fate would be wrapped in darkness had it not chanced that in the year 1586 an English captain named Thomas Cavendish threaded the Strait, was hailed from the shore by a half-naked band of eighteen people, of whom three were women, and picked up one Tomé Hernandez. This man afterwards made a deposition before the Viceroy of Peru, but this did not occur until the year 1620, when all chance of rescue had long passed. The statement of Hernandez, then sixty-two years old, displays no feeling; it is a matter-of-fact narrative, and it is remarkable that none of the interrogatories put to him denote the least concern regarding the fate of the settlers, but bore solely upon topographical points, questions of winds and currents, products of the regions, etc. But reading between the lines of the declaration, the tale is heart-rending. It was made by order of Don Francisco de Borja, Prince of Esquilache, the son of a canonised father, and himself a poet, scholar, and excellent Viceroy, the founder of a college for noble Indians.

Hernandez gave an ingenuous and straightforward account, from the soldier’s viewpoint, of the objects and fortunes of the expedition, of the founding of the City of Philip and the departure of Sarmiento to fetch the colonists of the first settlement, an attempt from which, so far as the settlers of the second city were concerned, “he never more returned,” as Hernandez simply said. Two months after Sarmiento had gone, the people from Nombre de Jesus came to join the City of Philip. It was then August, and they told of the storm that blew Sarmiento’s ship out to sea. Andres de Viedma was now in charge, and he tried to provide for the hunger of the settlers by organising 200 soldiers into a band of shell-fish-hunters.

During all the winter and the following summer they waited, hoping for help, and with no food but the wild berries and such sea-food as they could secure. Then they built two boats, and the survivors, fifty men and five women, started out towards the eastern end of the Strait. But, no sailors, they could not navigate well, and one boat ran ashore and was lost; the surviving boat could not carry all the people, so some returned to the City of Philip and the rest scattered along the shore to pick up shell-fish to preserve their lives during the winter.

When summer came, Viedma assembled the survivors, fifteen men, and, astonishing witness to mental and physical endurance, three women. “All the rest had died of hunger and sickness.” They agreed to return to the first settlement, as nearer possible rescue, and began to make their way by land, finding many dead bodies of their comrades by the way. Twelve miles beyond Cape Geronimo they saw four ships, which they thought were Spanish, but which were actually the boats of Cavendish. A boat came off to the beach, and the settlers were told the nationality of the ships and offered a passage to Peru; the men on shore replied that they were afraid of being thrown overboard, getting the response that they might well embark, as those on the ships “were better Christians than we were.” After some parleying Hernandez was taken aboard, to Cavendish himself, who, upon hearing that these folk were survivors of the settlement, said he would take them all in his vessels. But this, in the end, he did not do, taking advantage of the rare good weather in the Strait to go to Penguin Island for birds, which he salted down in casks. He sailed thence to the abandoned City of Philip, stayed there four days taking on wood and water, and brought away the six pieces of artillery that Sarmiento had placed there for the colony’s defence. Storms met the ships at the western end, Valparaiso was missed in the fog, and when a landing was made at the port of Quintero, the rescued Hernandez was sent ashore to pretend to the Spanish that the ships were from Spain. But Hernandez gave secret warning to his kinsfolk, and next day when the English went ashore they were ambushed, some being killed and others taken prisoner. The latter were sent to Lima and there hanged.

Cavendish has been blamed for leaving the survivors of Sarmiento’s ill-fated colony in the Strait, but if any excuse were needed besides the fact that he did not know their desperate plight, it exists in the ungrateful conduct of the one man he took away, whose thanks took the form of sending a number of his helpers to the scaffold.

Of the fate of these last members of the large band of settlers who had set out from Spain with such high hopes, we know only that in 1590 one man signalled to the Delight of Bristol, was taken on board, and died on the way to Europe, without leaving his name or story. But whether they died of starvation or were taken into the roving camps of Indians, their blood was lost, although traces may have been mingled with that of the natives, who were not invariably hostile. Hernandez, answering his questioners in Lima, stated that for three months a Spanish woman, captured on the seashore by the Indians, was kept by them, but that then she was sent back. Savage nomads, perpetually short of food, the Indians of the Straits had nothing with which to hold nor help the unfortunate Europeans.

Port Famine and Punta Arenas

A brief side-light is thrown upon the settlement by the records of Cavendish’s expedition. He was in “King Philip’s Citie” on January 9, 1586, and gave it the name of “Port Famine” by which the spot was ever afterwards known. The town was full of dead people, the bodies lying clothed in the houses, and the explorations of his sailors resulted in finding only “muskles and lympits” for food, with a few small deer. In 1600 the Dutchman, Oliver Noort, came this way and saw Port Famine, but Purchas’ account says that “heere they found no footprints of the late Philip-Citie, now liker a heap of stones.”

Yet today, a few miles to the northward, stands the prosperous city of Punta Arenas. Its sturdy existence justifies, after three and a half centuries, Sarmiento’s belief that this stormy region was neither unhealthy nor unproductive, and that a colony of white men could live there securely were it properly supported.