Exploration of the Picton Channel. 73 



of this channel, and many were of large size. On the shore of 

 Francisco Bay I saw lower jaw bones which measured eleven feet 

 from condyle to symphysis. I looked, but in vain, for remains of 

 the Ziphioid Whales. 



Some few miles to the eastward of Francisco Bay a deep inlet 

 pierced Wellington Island in a northerly direction. We were 

 anxious to explore it, as we thought it not unlikely that it might 

 prove to be a navigable passage, connecting Trinidad Channel 

 with the Gulf of Pefias. At length an opportunity occurred, and 

 on a fine morning in the month of March we steamed into this un- 

 surveyed inlet. On fairly passing the southern entrance, we found 

 ourselves traversing a lane of water of such glassy smoothness, 

 and bordered by such straight running shores, which were not 

 more than half-a-mile apart, as to seem more like an inland canal 

 than (which it eventually proved to be) a strait leading through a 

 nest of breakers to an inhospitable ocean. Its eastern shore 

 exhibited the kind of scenery prevailing about the Guia Narrows; 

 viz., round-topped hills with great bare patches of rain-worn rock 

 extending from the summits to a talus, which was covered with an 

 uniform mantle of evergreen forest, the latter encroaching upon the 

 sea-beach. But the country to the west presented a more pleasing 

 variety, being composed of low undulating slopes of grassy-looking 

 land, with here and there fissures or landslips exhibiting what 

 seemed to us, as we scrutinized them with our glasses, to be 

 sections of a sedimentary formation. We had hitherto seen 

 nothing like this anywhere among the western channels, and 

 consequently I for one was extremely anxious to land. However, 

 the captain had to make the most of daylight for the surveying 

 work in hand, so that our conjectures as to the nature of this 

 formation remained unverified. When we had attained a distance 

 of twenty-five miles from the southern entrance of the Strait, the 

 western shore was found to be broken up into a chain of low islets, 

 which in time dwindled away into a great arc of submerged rocks, 

 over which the swell of the broad Pacific broke with great fury. 



