PHYSICAL FEATURES OF FUEGIA. 425 



Some of the headlands which are now taken for peninsulas may also turn out to be 

 islands. In all these fiords the water is very deep, deeper even than the open 

 seas in the neighbourhood, and this depth itself constitutes a danger for storm- 

 tossed vessels, which have great difficulty in finding safe anchorage under the 

 shelter of the leeward shores. Simpson measured from 70 to 160 fathoms in the 

 Moraleda Channel, east of the Chonos group. 



TiERRA DEL FuEGO. 



Despite the endless diversity of ramifying contour-lines presented by the inner 

 labyrinth of fiords, Tierra del Fuego itself is connected with the other Magellanic 

 lands by an outer curve of singular beauty. This archipelago begins at the 

 western entrance of Magellan Strait with the surf-beaten headland of Cape 

 Pillar (1,755 feet). The long spear-shaped island of which it forms a part 

 has been well named a " Land of Desolation," recalling at the southern extremity 

 of the New World that other " Land of Desolation " which lies at its northern 

 extremity. 



Then follow Santa Inez and Clarence, with their suite of clustering islets, and 

 lastly the great triangular mass, some 20,000 square miles in extent, the Land of 

 Fire, at the extremity of the continent. The expression, Tierra de Hiimos, 

 " Smoke Land," given by Magellan to this great island, would certainly be far 

 more appropriate than the " Fire Land," said to have been suggested by 

 Charlcb V. remarking that " there is no smoke without fire." * The smoke which 

 the illustrious navigator saw at a distance curling .up on the plains, and which was 

 doubtless intended to signal the approach of strange beings in great ships, must 

 have harmonised well with the stern and dreary scenery of those cheerless shores 

 washed by waves of the polar seas. 



Fuegia and its dependent islands offer within narrow limits a succession of 

 diverse zones following from east to west in the South American waters. The 

 western and southern sections, which merge in the archipelagoes of the extreme 

 south, belong to the Cordillera of the Andes. They bristle with steep snow-clad 

 summits, which send down glaciers to the surrounding valleys, and which project 

 seawards in long serrated headlands, with ramifying inlets and deep fiords. 



One of the first mountains in the Andean region of Tierra del Fuego (King 

 Charles South Land) is the superb Sarmiento (6,630 feet), clothed to about an eighth 

 of its altitude with a zone of sombre woodlands and covered higher up with vast 

 snowfields, filling the upland valleys with winding glaciers. Although most of 

 the rocks of this region may be of igneous origin, Sarmiento is certainly not a 

 volcanic cone, nor is even the rock of which it is composed of plutonic origin. 

 " Whether its real form be that of a tower, or that of a ridge with precipitous 

 sides seen in profile, no volcanic rocks elsewhere in the world can retain slopes so 

 nearly approaching to the vertical. It is, I believe, a portion of the original 

 rock skeleton that formed the axis of the Andean chain during the long ages that 



* Popper, Boletin del Instituto Geogrdfico Argentino, 1887, viii. 



