THE STRAIT OF MAGELLAN. 293 



very far from Stanley — one at Kidney Island, on the southern 

 side of the entrance to Berkeley Sound, and the other at 

 Sparrow Cove, off Port William. Circumstances did not, to 

 my regret, permit of my visiting either of these, but I extract 

 the following short account of that at Sparrow Cove from 

 Captain Mayne's Journal : — " The rookery was in a sort of 

 small cove, the sides of which, though not perpendicular, were 

 very steep, and about 100 feet high ; the entrance to the cove 

 was narrow and steep, with rugged bluff rocks on either side, 

 the whole making a kind of rugged amphitheatre, with water 

 for the pit. All the sides were rugged, with projecting knobs 

 of rocks jutting out in all directions, and every part of the 

 whole of this was covered with penguins. My estimate of the 

 number was the lowest made, and I guessed it at 20,000 ; 

 but there might have been any number between that and 

 50,000 or 60,000." 



On the 21st I walked with a companion to Mount 

 William, a remarkable rugged hill eight hundred feet high, 

 about five miles distant from Stanley. The upper part of the 

 Mount is formed of a mass of gray quartz lichen-incrusted 

 strata, inclined at a very high angle, and broken into great 

 fragments apparently by some subterraneous upheaval ; and 

 streams of stones flow down the sides. The summit commands 

 a very wide view of the East Falkland, and we thus gained an 

 excellent idea of the characteristic desolate scenery ; deep 

 inlets, wide plains, and rugged hills ; quartz cropping out 

 everywhere, in some places in broken ridges like the spinous 

 processes of the vertebral column of some huge buried animal, 

 the combined effect reminding one of old pictures of the 

 appearance of the earth immediately after the deluge. In a 

 crevice in the rocks we found some good specimens of a fern, 

 Aspidium mohrioides, which had previously occurred to us 



