Welcome Aboard! •
Welkom Aan Boord! •
¡Bienvenido Abordo!
We’re interrupting our series of articles about Wulaia and the natives of Tierra del Fuego to bring you a short story about a seagull. As ever, if you want to enlarge the photos you can just click on them; and then you click again, on the surrounding page, to get back to the text. Last week we were walking along a stony spit where the local cormorants, oyster-catchers and seagulls are preparing to nest. As we came near to their…
In the first part of this saga we were introduced to the Yaghan, the hunter-gatherer people who dwelt on the shores of Tierra del Fuego. We now follow the story of how they came to be considered not just as objects of pity but as souls to be saved; and, in this matter, no one played a more important role than Robert FitzRoy. With only 24 years to his back, Robert FitzRoy was an unlikely candidate for command of a…
In June, in the middle of the southern winter, we set out from Puerto Williams with the object of passing through the Murray Strait and into Ponsonby Sound. This body of water lies between the Beagle Channel and the Cape Horn archipelago, and it would be a splendid cruising ground but for the fact that the Chilean navy has declared the whole area off-limits to all foreign vessels. To get round this difficulty we arranged to make the voyage with…
Various friends have written to us in the course of the past few weeks, asking how we’re faring at “the uttermost end of the Earth” now that Spring is in the air. Well… all I can say is, Spring has not sprung! Last week the village of Puerto Williams was once again buried under a foot of snow. I have a dim recollection of crunching my through something similar at about the age of seven. This kind of thing happens…
A couple of days ago we received some terribly sad and shocking news: Our dear friend, Carly Hill, has been lost overboard from the catamaran Oryx. Oryx had recently crossed the Atlantic from Brazil to spend some time in Carly’s South African homeland. During this month-long adventure Carly’s family and friends were quite worried for her safety – and with some justification, I may say, for the passage across the southern end of the South Atlantic is no sunshine cruise.…
Well, we were expecting to see some snow down in Tierra del Fuego; but we weren’t expecting to see quite this much! Mind you, we didn’t even know that it was snowing until we went on deck. Some of the people from the neighbouring boats had joined us for supper, and we were all snug and cosy in the cabin. That’s an Irish fellow by the name of Fiacra in the foreground. Notice that he’s actually wearing shorts! Our little…
FINALLY – after 19 years of faffing around – MOLLYMAWK IS IN TIERRA DEL FUEGO! Wa-hoooooo…! Trrraaa… (and other strange exclamations). Well, this event certainly deserves a trumpet fanfare! Can it really be 19 years ago that we got caught out in that hurricane-force storm and rolled the boat? What a day that was…! And how far-reaching were its effects! There we were – pootling across from Argentina to the Falklands, with every hope of spending Caesar’s fifth birthday in…
One of the few safe havens on the Atlantic coast of Argentina is Puerto Deseado – a bleak, wind-swept rivermouth. Founded as a wool port for the estancias of the hinterland, its nearest neighbour lies 200km (125 miles) away. In our view, the place should be renamed Puerto Desolado, for it is certainly a desolate spot. It was christened by one Thomas Cavendish, an English explorer following in the wake of Sir Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan undertook repairs…
I’m not sure what we expected from the Argentine coast south of the River Plate. Certainly, we knew that it was a windswept place, and we knew that there were few settlements. Having visited it twenty years ago, we knew that Valdez – the peninsula which shelters the famous whale breeding ground – is a waterless wasteland of rock and sand; but what we hadn’t realised is that the whole of the country from this point south is similarly dry,…
We spent more than a week in Mar del Plata before the weather finally changed in our favour and presented us with the opportunity to continue south – but before embarking on the tale of our next little hop, we’d like to share a couple of photos of some of the people who we met in that port. In our last postcard we mentioned an old codger who’s been fishing here since he was 14. Now aged 90, Attilo is…