Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/11



T was in January and February of the misty Antarctic summer that we lingered for a month along the seven hundred miles of Magellan Strait and Smythe Channel. The delicate flowers of a December springtime were passing out of bloom giving place to flowers of longer duration, and young land birds were all out of their nests.

The uneven plains of eastern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego were green with grass and low shrubbery and the mountains along the western channels dark with unbroken forests of evergreen beech. Our course along salt-water passages was marked by somewhat gustier weather than would have been found a short distance inland, but it was not uncomfortably chilly for explorations ashore in daytime, and days are long in summer at fifty-three degrees latitude, both south and north. It was in fact pleasanter in the straits than we had found it shortly before at Montevideo and Buenos Aires—a thousand miles nearer the tropics—where "pamperos" had been blowing wildly along the great river.

It was pleasant to escape from the unfriendly South Atlantic and enjoy the easy progress of a vessel on even keel. Still more agreeable was the panorama of passing shores and the abundant animal life of the channels and their islands. Best of all were the intimate observations of the aspects of nature, permitted by our daily explorations on land, the Albatross always within reach as a home camp, anchored in some protected harbor.

To the naturalist a voyage of exploration through the Straits of Magellan is a rare privilege, not only on account of the strangeness of its animal and plant life and the wonders of its scenery, but also because of the records of scientific discovery associated with it. We were following in the wake of Darwin and the Beagle, although more than half