PATAGONIA 5 



through the centuries, represented by a few thousand nomad 

 Indians, who in their long rovings followed certain well-known 

 trails, from which only a very rare and venturesome individual 

 thought of deviating. Far outside these paths dwelt, according to 

 the native imagination, dangers and terrors unknown. You can 

 follow the same trails to-day. Picture to yourself a dozen or 

 twenty field-paths running side by side, obliterated by the fingers 

 of the spring, and invisible under your feet, but strangely growing 

 into distinctness half a mile ahead, waving onward towards the 

 pampas. Such is the Indian trail. 



People in England, one finds, are divided into two groups as 

 to their opinions of the Patagonian climate. One group maintains 

 that the country must be tropical, since it is included in the con- 

 tinent of South America ; the other that it is an ice-bound region, 

 for the good reason that it lies close to Tierra del Fuego. Oddly 

 enough, both are in a degree justified, for the summers there are 

 comparatively hot, but the severity of the winter, when snow lies 

 deep on the country, and cutting winds blow down from the frozen 

 heights during those months that bring to us our long English 

 evenings, is undeniable. 



Some day, no doubt, the land will lose its untamed aspect ; it 

 will become, as others are, moulded by the hand of man, and 

 expectant of him. But now the great words of one whose eyes 

 never rested on Andean loneliness marvellously describes it : 



A land where no man comes nor hath come 

 Since the making of the world, 

 But ever the wind shrills. 



The discovery of Patagonia dates from the early part of the 

 year 1520, when that most intrepid of explorers, Ferdinand 

 Magellan, forced his way doggedly down the east coast in the 

 teeth of continuous storms. With his little fleet of five vessels 

 he pushed on in the hope, which few if any of his companions 

 shared, of finding a strait joining the two great oceans, the Atlantic 

 and the Pacific. Upon what foundation he based this belief cannot 

 now be certainly told, but the analogy of the Cape of Good Hope 

 and rumours that obtained among the geographers and seafaring 

 captains of the day, helped, no doubt, to confirm his own idea that 



