Traveling to Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego (“Land of Fire”) can be a unique and exhilarating experience. Nowadays, as it has always been, the only way to see the fjords of the island of Tierra del Fuego is by water. The early European explorers discovered Tierra del Fuego when they arrived by ship after a long journey across the Atlantic Ocean. They learned that the aborigines also found the waterways to be the most convenient way to travel to the island, its fjords and surrounding archipelagos.
You can reach these waterways from the north by the Strait of Magellan and from the south by the Beagle Channel. The latter separates the main island of Tierra del Fuego from the southern islands of Hoste and Navarino. These days there is a newly opened channel (for commercial navigation) between these two islands, called Murray, that gives direct access to Cape Horn from the Beagle Channel. This is precisely what the Yamana Aborigines used to do when they visited Cape Horn on their nomadic trips in search of new food supplies.
The early explorers that ventured in this region were mostly financed by Spain and Britain, which were interested in conquering this part of the world. In the first expedition, Ferdinand Magellan, on behalf of the Kingdom of Spain, was looking for a new route to the Orient. Magellan, ended up discovering the strait that now bears his name and crossed the Pacific to die in the hands of natives in the Philippines.
Francis Drake, with support from the British Crown, followed Magellan’s steps and achieved the goal of circumventing the globe. Others followed, such as Juan Ladrilleros, who proved the strait was sailable from the Pacific to the Atlantic; Pedro Sarmiento who wanted to secure the strait as a passage for the Spanish Crown’ and Thomas Cavendish, another British corsair who eventually discovered the Falkland Islands.
First Encounters
The first recorded encounter between Patagonia natives and European explorers happened with the Magellan expedition in 1520 in Bahia San Julian, at the entrance of the great Rio Santa Cruz, which connects Lago Argentino to the Atlantic Ocean. These aborigines were surely Tehuelches (they called themselves Aonekink) from the northern part of Southern Patagonia. Because of the nature of their environment, these natives were dependent on the llama-like guanaco and other land animals that roamed what is today Los Glaciares and Torres del Paine national parks and surrounding areas. These two parks are so close together that on a clear day, you can see both Fitz Roy and Paine Macizo (most important sets of mountains on both parks) from some Estancias near El Calafate, Argentina.
Myth and reality blend when the story is told of why Magellan called the people in this part of the world “Pataghoni.” The myth says the aborigines were so big that the Spaniards called them pata gones in reference to their big feet. A more likely explanation is that the Spaniards got the name from a popular chivalric tale of the time called Primaleon, in which a character called Patagon belonged to a tribe of “wild men who ate raw meat, dressed only in the skins of the animals they killed and were born of animals that lived in the mountains”.
Although these first uneventful meetings were characterized by cordiality and trusting curiosity, they were later followed by violent clashes provoked by the European mistreatment of natives and defensive reactions of the latter. Examples of these were recorded between 1578 and 1599, and were instigated by such famous explorers as Francis Drake and others in the Strait of Magellan and northern part of the island of Tierra del Fuego.
The southernmost habitable region of the world is a mixture of islands surrounding Tierra del Fuego, the largest island of an archipelago that hosted five important indigenous cultures: Yamanas (Yahganes), Onas, Selk’nams, Haush and Alacalufes. In general, these five cultures were nomadic family bands that mainly survived collecting foods from the sea.
First Inhabitants
There is consistent archaeological evidence that the ancestors of five important groups arrived in the region about 8,000 B.C. although there have been hints that they could have arrived as early as 10,000 B.C. Between 10,000 and 13,000 B.C., the geological configuration of the Strait of Magellan and surrounding lands was that of retreating glaciers. This resulted in an increasing flora and fauna that made ideal conditions for the intrusion of the first inhabitants after 9,000 B.C. Furthermore, results of recent research indicate that crossing to Tierra del Fuego from the mainland was possible during several periods between 14,000 and 8,000 B.C.
The Yamanas and the Haush were almost strictly dependent on sources of food from the sea: sea mammals, mussels and sea birds. They roamed mainly in the islands around the Beagle Channel and southern shore of Tierra del Fuego. There are several locations in Tierra del Fuego and Navarino Island where accumulated discarded shells can be identified as former mussel gathering sites. The Yamanas apparently recognized the need for conservation and would move on to other locations once the yield of the mussel colonies at a particular location diminished.
The groups that inhabited further north in the island of Tierra del Fuego and closer to the mainland, the Onas and Selk’nams, had a more diversified subsistence pattern because they split their time between hunting and fishing. Thanks to their hunting skills, these two cultures characteristically wore guanaco skins, as did their northern cousins, the Tehuelches. There is less data available to study the Alacalufes but they are known to have lived in the archipelago northwest of the Beagle Channel along the coast of Chile as far north as the Golfo de Penas.
Wilhelm Schouten and Jacques LeMaire completed the next significant expedition. These Dutch sailors set sail to prove that Tierra del Fuego was not an extension of the southern pole and that, indeed, another east-west passage existed. Once they sighted Tierra del Fuego on January 23, 1616, they continued south until they found Cape Horn and the merge of the oceans south of the Cape on January 29. They named it Cape Horn in honor of their departing city of Hoorn in the Netherlands.
Myth and reality blended again as Cape Horn’s discoverers attempted to keep its new passage a secret from other countries in an attempt to maintain its control. They tried to convince potential conquerors that the legend of Terra Australis, which claimed that anything south of the Strait of Magellan was part of the Antarctic Continent, still held truth. But as the truth was revealed, an explosive series of expeditions took sail at the beginning of the 18th century. (There was a price to pay for all this interest in the region. The confluence of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans creates the most dangerous navigational waterway of the world. An estimated 700 to 800 ships are buried in these waters.)
Darwin and the Fuegians
The 19th century’s most important set of expeditions into Tierra del Fuego, headed by Britain’s Fitz Roy, brought back four aborigines to England in 1827. After five years in England, these individuals were returned to Tierra del Fuego on the HMS Beagle, an exploration ship that was carrying a head scientist named Charles Darwin. During this journey, Darwin described the Fuegian aborigines negatively, calling them “savages and resembling the devils,” among other things. Years later, Darwin retracted these statements.
The 19th century also brought missionaries and ethnographers, like Martin Gusinde and Alberto D’Agostini, whose objective was to help the small number of descendants of these cultures survive. These efforts were not successful as the preceding explorers had introduced European deceases that had reduced native populations to the point of near extinction. These missionaries contributed in recording data of the natives for further study. Anthropologists and historians in their research and study of these cultures have used much of this data.
Sailing the waters surrounding Tierra del Fuego can be viewed as both a cultural and ecological experience. To access the ice field called the Darwin Mountain Range, a vessel must be able to sail inside fjords as long as 25 miles and as narrow as 600 meters (2,000 feet). Once you approach the ice field, you can see some of the most beautiful landscape in Patagonia: a combination of snowy peaks (the southernmost of the Andes), magellanic forests of beech and monkey puzzle trees, and canyons formed when the glaciers retreated more than 13,000 years ago. Gorgeous cascades release water from the glaciers, giving the limited audience an incomparable show of nature.
Visiting these sites can be rewarding as you can reflect back to the times when the aborigines traveled freely in search of subsistence. Today all we find is the regional fauna that has been left to live freely around these islands. Among the animals that can be appreciated are colonies of elephant seals, penguins, cormorants and sea lions. Also along these beautiful waterways passengers can enjoy dolphins and other sea mammals, including a few whales that find their way inside the strait.
Sailing the fjords of Tierra del Fuego is a perfect complement to visiting the national parks north of the Strait of Magellan. Torres del Paine in Chile and Los Glaciares in Argentina are only a few hours and a land transfer away. Today, there is even a way to fly from Ushuaia, the Argentinian city on the shores of the Beagle Channel, 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest into El Calafate, the main town near Los Glaciares, making it easier to combine both ends of southern Patagonia.
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