158 PATAGONIAN EXPEDITIONS I NARRATIVE. 



after leaving Sandy Hook, we sighted land but once, at Pernambuco, 

 until our arrival at the eastern entrance to the Straits of Magellan. On 

 December eleventh we came to anchor in the roadstead at Sandy Point 

 and the following day disembarked with our cargo, taking quarters at a 

 hotel in the town, until such time as we should be able to procure horses 

 suitable for the prosecution of our work. 



After a few days we succeeded in purchasing a pair of work-horses and 

 with these we left Sandy Point and established a camp in the forests 

 some four miles above the town on the Rio de las Minas (River of the 

 Mines). At this camp we remained for nearly two weeks. Mr. Colburn 

 found the woods about our camp excellent collecting ground for birds, 

 while my own time was fully taken up with the flora of the region and in 

 studying and collecting fossils from the extensive and excellent geologi- 

 cal section afforded by the walls of the canon through which the river 

 flows. Several hundred feet of Tertiary deposits are exposed in the sides 

 of this canon, in which are represented a number of different and quite 

 distinct horizons. For the most part, they are quite fossiliferous, and from 

 these I secured a considerable series of invertebrate fossils. The beds are 

 marine throughout, with the possible exception of certain coal-bearing 

 horizons toward the middle and top of the series, which may possibly in 

 part be of brackish or fresh-water origin. In the middle and upper series 

 there are a number of veins of very pure lignite. These veins of lignite 

 vary in thickness from a few inches to ten or twelve feet. A twelve-foot 

 vein, which crops out on the left bank of the river about five miles above 

 the town, was opened up and worked somewhat extensively about thirty 

 years ago, when an attempt was made to make of Sandy Point a coaling 

 station for steamers passing through the Straits. The attempt proved 

 unsuccessful, however, and had to be abandoned on account of the low 

 calorific properties of the lignite and the difficulties and loss sustained in 

 attempting to coal steamers from open lighters in an unsheltered harbor 

 like that of Sandy Point. Though finally abandoned, it was not until after 

 a railway had been constructed from the port to the mines and a drift 

 driven some three hundred yards into the latter. At the time of our visit 

 the railway had long suffered from disuse and much of the original road 

 bed was entirely washed away, while the locomotives had been disman- 

 tled and the other rolling stock was in a most dilapidated condition. An 

 attempt, however, was then being made by a wealthy Chilian firm to re- 



