With the Battle Fleet Part 16

It is comparatively easy to take one or two ships through the straits.

Two or three hundred skippers perform that task with success every year.

Time and again have our warships, singly and in groups of two or three, gone through with ease. But here were sixteen monster ships that had to go through in single file and within about 400 yards of one another, with no place to anchor and without the possibility of stopping, buffeted by swift tides and currents, in danger of running into the sheer cliffs of mountains or of striking hidden rocks in fog or possibly snow. If any serious mishap had occurred there was nothing to do but go right on. You couldn't lay to in these waters. If fog hid the way you must keep on and trust to picking up headlands here and there, and you must maintain your sustained speed of ten knots, because each vessel would then know where its immediate predecessor or follower ought to be.

Certainly it was a difficult performance, one fraught with great danger and grave responsibility. The chief point is, however, that the fleet got through without the slightest mishap. It was done as easily as entering the harbor of New York. There was not the slightest manifestation of undue concern by any of the officers of the fleet, but it cannot be denied that every one was keyed up to his best and all were glad when the roll of the Pacific was felt. When it was over all hands looked at one another and said, in the French expression, "It is to laugh."

But you want to know all about it? Is there an impatient call for details of this much-heralded trip of dread, a breathless demand to know how many close calls and narrow escapes there were from hitting sunken rocks, gliding against precipices, sc.r.a.ping the paint from the ships'

sides, dodging w.i.l.l.ywaws? You want to learn how many men were nearly swept from the decks by overhanging cliffs and limbs of trees, how often icebergs choked the narrow places, how many times the treacherous Fuegan Indians, "the lowest form of humanity on earth," lit their fires as signals that there would be fine plunder and good eating of humans when one or more of these ships went on the rocks; whether it was true that the officers and crews went without sleep or food until all dangers were pa.s.sed?

Well, if you guessed any or all those things you must guess again. None of 'em happened. Of course the winds blew fiercely at times, but they do that every day in the year in the Magellans. Of course the tide rips caught the ships at certain critical places and twisted and turned them somewhat. Of course the rain fell occasionally and now and then shut out from view a most beautiful glacier or snow field just when you wanted to see it most. Of course the clouds obscured the mountain tops from time to time. Of course the currents and tides swept through the various reaches like mill races. Of course a w.i.l.l.ywaw or two came out and smote us, and of course there was fog.

But if you want to know how easily the pa.s.sage was made let it be said the last thirty miles of it was in a mist that thickened into a dense fog, obscuring the land on both sides completely for hours and only now and then lifting for a moment's revelation of some rock or headland.

Yes, the American fleet not only went through the dangerous pa.s.sage, but it actually sailed through miles and miles of fog in doing so, and it was done in as smart a fashion as if the ships were on the high seas and not in the most fearsome strait in the world, intervals and speed being kept perfectly. After all, even if the men on the fleet pretended to make light of it, the performance was a fine piece of navigation.

Admiral Evans has just reason to be proud of it and so have the American people. It couldn't have been done better.

There was reason for dread. Hadn't all the timid folk spoken of the terrible risks to be run? Hadn't the superst.i.tious lifted up their voices and pointed out that in the fifty-two wrecks that had occurred in the strait in, say, the last twenty years, exactly twenty-six had been of vessels beginning with the letter C? Didn't we have the Connecticut to lead us? And worse than that, wasn't it the Chilean cruiser Chacabuco which had been sent to Punta Arenas as a national compliment and to act as escort about half a mile in front of the Connecticut? One ship beginning with C was enough, but here were two. That surely was wilful defiance of all the high signs and deep portents. And, then, didn't we start out from Punta Arenas on Friday night at the eleventh hour? Hadn't the moon just gone down, and who knows but that a darky had failed to catch a rabbit over in the graveyard on the beach yonder and so had missed having his left hind leg in his pocket (or whatever the details of that superst.i.tion are)? And so there was no adequate guarantee from escaping death and destruction. Certainly it was ticklish business, a task for the ignorant or the foolhardy.

But, speaking seriously, what the maritime world thinks of this region is revealed best probably by the nomenclature of the various headlands, islands, bays and capes. A study of the charts presents such names as these: Desolation Island, Point Famine, Famine Reach, Point Mercy, Delusion Bay, Dislocation Harbor, Useless Bay, Disappointment Bay, Spider Island, Corkscrew Bay and Cormorant Island, to say nothing of Snow Sound and Snowy Inlet. Why, the very contemplation of the chart was sufficient to give a landsman the shiverees!

The Strait of Magellan is 360 miles long and the width varies from about a mile and a half in the narrowest part to twenty-five miles. The strait is in the form of a letter V with the right part curved down a little at the top and the left part extended above what would be the correct proportion of a well-shaped letter. The short end reaches out into the Atlantic and the long end into the Pacific. The short right end is barren of fine scenery, the grandeur of the hills being reserved for the long or western end. Down at the point of the latter is Cape Froward.

Coming from the eastern end there is about fifteen miles of rugged scenery before you make the turn to the northwest. Punta Arenas, or Sandy Point, as the English call this hustling, modern city, is about two-thirds down the eastern side on a broad stretch of water known as Broad Reach. Opposite is Useless Bay, probably so called because it is useless to go over there to find an exit from the strait.

It is desirable, almost necessary in fact, to make the run through the strait in daylight. To do this you enter, say, from the east as early in the morning as possible so as to make Punta Arenas by night. Leaving that port you start at night, about midnight. You have about forty-five miles of broad deep water with no difficulties in navigation to Cape Froward, which you reach by daybreak. After that you can go through the western end of the strait by daylight and reach the Pacific about nightfall.

The strait has half a dozen lights in it, but in time of fog or fierce snowsqualls these are of little value unless by accident you happen to pick them up. Again the tide races through the strait at the rate of never less than three miles an hour and in some of the narrow places it has a speed of from five to six miles. Where the tides of the Atlantic and Pacific meet there are cross currents and disturbances that catch even the most high-powered ship and swing it here and there, despite careful work of the helmsman.

Still hundreds of steamships go through safely every year and a close study of the chart revealed only three places which occasioned anxiety to the fleet officers.

One of these places is Sarmiento Shoal that juts out into the Atlantic for miles from Cape Virgins, the Argentine headland, 135 feet high, that marks the beginning of the eastern end. It really is no more dangerous to cross, for example, than the shoals of Nantucket. The fleet came down to the shoal about noon. There is one place where there are nine fathoms of water and it has a width of only four or five miles. The task is to fix the place of crossing from bearings and then to cross it. When the exact spot was reached a fierce black cloud came up and obscured things. With it came a strong southwest wind that made things choppy.

Over the narrow part of the shoal the ships headed. Once or twice, perhaps because the looks of the water or the lead may have given warning, the flagship made short turns. But in half an hour it was over and the fleet turned to the northwest, past Dungeness light, five miles below Cape Virgins, and marking the real entrance to the strait, which is now under the entire jurisdiction of Chile. From the mast of the Chilean signal station there fluttered flags which said, in the language of the international code:

"Enter Chilean waters; welcome distinguished American seamen; pleasant voyage."

The fleet voted the sentiment all right, even if the verbiage was somewhat unusual. There was a quick run up into the broad waters of Possession Bay, close to the entrance of the First Narrows. There are two narrows on the run to Punta Arenas and here is where the tide runs strongest in the strait. If the tide is against you it is better to anchor and wait for the turn. There is a good anchorage in the bay and about 4 o'clock of the afternoon of January 31 the mudhooks were dropped in a boiling sheet of water that in its actions resembled the lower part of Chesapeake Bay in a storm.

At daylight the next morning the fleet was under way again with a favorable tide. The First Narrows are ten miles long, two wide and have water forty fathoms deep. There was no trouble in just skimming right along. Then the ships entered another big bay, Philip Bay, and after about twenty-five miles of deep water came to the Second Narrows, twelve miles long. This pa.s.sage also has a swift tide, but the waterway is about three miles wide and very deep, and no one had any concern about getting through. It was as easy as rolling down hill.

Then came the waters of Broad Reach, the wide sheet of water that stretches clear down to Punta Arenas. At the very beginning there is one of the two really difficult places in the strait to navigate. The reach has extensive shoals. Santa Magdalena Island, with a lighthouse on it, faces an oncoming ship and there are two channels, one to the north and the other to the south. Small vessels usually take the north pa.s.sage, called Queen's Channel, but larger ones take the other, known as New Channel. There are two buoys which indicate dangerous places from tide rips and shoals.

Well, the fleet officers were a little nervous as they saw those tide rips. Soon it became evident that the current was dangerous. It was difficult to keep exactly on the course. Twice the Connecticut made turns to overcome the sweeping effect of the tide and keep well clear of shoals. The long line of ships kept zigzagging here and there, but in less than half an hour all the dangers of the first leg of the strait had been pa.s.sed. There was nothing but fine deep water all the way to Punta Arenas, where we dropped anchor about noon.

All the experts of the fleet, the men who had been through not once but several times before were unanimous in declaring that the worst was over with the pa.s.sage of New Channel and it made every one feel good. If that was all there was to going through Magellan, why on earth had there been such a big scare about it all? It didn't compare with navigating the Chesapeake in a fog or a storm and it seemed farcical to make so much fuss about it.

The fleet lay at Punta Arenas for six days, taking on coal, giving liberty and the officers going through a round of official receptions and other courtesies that made the stay one day longer than was expected because of the unusual courtesy on the part of Chile in sending a cruiser down to Punta Arenas to greet the fleet bearing a Rear Admiral, our Minister to Chile, Mr. Hicks, and our Consul at Valparaiso.

The departure of the fleet at night was set for 11 o'clock. Before that time slow-moving lights in the harbor showed that the Chacabuco had changed her station to be near the head of the procession when the start was made. Other lights had revealed that the six torpedo boats of our flotilla had been taking up cruising positions on the right and left flanks of the line that was to be formed. Just before 11 o'clock the signal had been made from the flagship to prepare to get under way. The ships had hove short. At the stroke of 11 the red and white lights flashed from the flagship and they were answered from all the ships. At once anchor engines began tugging at the chains, and soon on every ship the officer in charge of the fo'c'stle sang out:

"Up and down, sir!"

That meant that the anchor was directly under the bow of the ship and was leaving the mud, the chain being straight up and down. In a moment or two the call was:

"Anchor's aweigh, sir!"

That meant that the ship was now swinging with the tide and bells were jangled in all the engine rooms to go ahead slowly. It was all still, only a few lights on each ship were showing and soon the harbor presented the appearance of twenty-five or more craft slowly moving in one direction as if stealing away down the broad Famine Reach softly so as not to disturb the slumbers of the town. But the town wasn't asleep.

Half the population was out to witness the departure. The thousands of electric lights showed that. As you drew away from the place it looked as if you were leaving the north sh.o.r.e of Staten Island and going up New York Bay, so thick were the lights on the land.

The Connecticut was quite close in sh.o.r.e and headed toward it. She made a sharp turn, and the Kansas, Vermont and Louisiana and the others fell in quickly. There were gaps in the line for the ships that had sought better anchorages, and these were filled in when the proper time came.

Gradually the line became compact and within fifteen minutes one long column of American warships was gliding southward at a speed of ten knots, the Chilean flagship off the starboard bow of our flagship, all silently stealing away in the beautiful starlight night from hospitable and attractive Punta Arenas. The start was made as smoothly and easily as in broad daylight. There was no fuss about it. The fleet had gone about its business in a businesslike way. That business was to get through the rest of the strait in the easiest and safest manner.

You went to bed at midnight leaving orders to be called at 4 A. M. so as to come on deck and see the flagship turned toward home at Cape Froward, the lowest continental point of land in the world. You got out just abeam of Cape San Isidro, with its flashing white light, and you found yourself in the midst of rugged scenery. The sky was overcast and a strong wind, like that which churned Possession Bay when the fleet entered the eastern end, was blowing. Bare mountains and rocks stood out in the gloom. Soon the shadows began to purple the hillsides and rocks; there was visible a strip of green which you made out to be trees reaching half way up the black mountain sides. Then the clouds lightened; everything stood out clearly in a gray light and you knew it was time for sunrise.

The clouds broke to the east and suddenly there shot through them six great shafts of crimson light as if they were the rays of an enormous searchlight in the east, rays colored by pa.s.sing through bright red gla.s.s. You stood on the bridge fascinated and almost enthralled. Then you saw the edge of the snowfield of Mount Sarmiento far to the south.

The clouds hid its brow but as they broke occasionally you could catch a glimpse now and then of a glacier gripping the mountain sides with the strength and permanence of the ages and you knew that truly you were looking at G.o.d's country, not the country of home, as most folks the world over call G.o.d's country, but one that revealed the majesty of creation.

So on and on you went in the narrow channels bordered by rock-faced hills and mountains, green from the water half way up their sides. Some of the mountains were entirely of stone with abrupt sheers like the sides of the precipices in the Yosemite. Waterfalls leaped from cliffs here and there and now and then one could see a stream rushing down the hillside, foaming and roaring, its waters madly dashing to complete obliteration in the swirling sea where the immutable laws of gravity sent them. It seemed a pity that a thing so white and pure should find an ign.o.ble end, but the power of the sun's rays had set the forces of perpetual motion in those leaps and bounds and the same streams will dash down to the sea doubtless as long as the sun's power lasts to heat the edges of the glaciers and try to rob them of their strength. You saw great peaks and short ranges. Every one had a different light upon it; every one differed from another in formation.

But this is an account of navigation rather than a description of scenery. The ships went along in the slack water easily and smoothly and again you wondered at the stories of the difficulty of steaming through this wide deep strait. You pa.s.sed through Froward Reach into English Reach, and miles away, straight ahead, you saw the Thornton Peaks, where Jerome Channel cleaves a way into the large mysterious and only half explored Otway Waters, a body of water like one of the Great Lakes at home. You saw no channel ahead.

As you approached these mountains it was like the turn in the Hudson up in the Highlands, where you seem to be headed for the rocks with no way of escape except by turning back. You knew from the chart that you were then approaching Crooked Reach, that runs beside the island called Carlos III. Soon you saw a bend toward the left and then you stiffened yourself a little, for you knew that in less than half an hour you would be in the one dangerous place of navigation in the western half of the strait. It is necessary to make an S curve in Crooked Reach, something like the one in the Subway at Fourteenth street, only it is one six or eight miles long and not of a few hundred feet.

Just before you reached the line running from Jerome Point to the upper end of the island of Carlos III. you saw black lines in the water running from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, now only a little more than a mile apart.

These lines were foam-crested and they marked the meeting place of the tides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. The officers had no time now to look at scenery. Here was serious work. The Connecticut crossed the first one and so intent were you in watching preparations to cross on your own ship that you scarcely noticed her movements. But what was the matter with the Kansas, directly astern? She was swaying off to starboard violently. Then she made a swoop to port. Queer kind of steering it seemed! Perhaps it was the Connecticut that had swayed this way and that. Wait a moment.

Soon the Kansas got fairly straight with the Connecticut and then the Vermont took to dancing sidesteps this way and that. The helm was being shifted constantly in the endeavor to keep in the middle of the road. It was the Louisiana's turn next. Standing on the bridge you scarcely noticed any deviation, but when you looked at the line of ships behind you knew that the Louisiana was having its troubles keeping straight and when you saw the quartermaster twisting the wheel about, now this way and now that, you knew that this ship had been doing fancy stunts far from home.

Then you looked at those behind. On they came, and that straight line, the pride of any one who has seen it from day to day, went zigzagging, twisting and turning, thrust here and there until it resembled the twists of a snake crawling along the ground rather than a fleet of majestic ships sailing in a straight line. Once again a similar performance of the fleet occurred and you began to realize what the dangers of navigating Magellan meant. You realized that with high-powered vessels such as these ships it was easy to correct the swaying of the tides and currents, but you understood what smaller ships had to contend with.

We were going through at the most favorable season of the year, but you shuddered to think what it must be to be caught here in the winter, perhaps with darkness coming on, no place to anchor and a blinding snowstorm or a fog hiding the way and your steamer having hard work even to hold its own against the terrific current that might be running against you. Oh, yes, then you knew what a task, a dangerous task it was to brave the perils of Crooked Reach and you were glad you were on a warship with strength enough to scorn nature's effort to hurl it against the rocks.

You pa.s.sed dangerous Anson Rock and you soon glided out into Long Reach, an arm of the strait that runs for fifty or sixty miles to the northwest almost as straight as a taut rope, and you then took up your gla.s.ses to look around. You saw the little island just off Borja Bay, where the famous post office of the strait was situated, a place where sailors rowed ash.o.r.e to leave their letters to be mailed and their newspapers months old to be read by those who followed them. You could see the signs nailed to the trees giving the names of ships that had called, the dates and the ports to which they were bound. All that is done away with now that Punta Arenas looks after the mails and gives hospitable welcome to sailormen, but those signs, some of them a half century old, told tales of hardship, of shipwreck, of misery to many a man who could read what they really meant.

Then you began again to watch the mountains. Far down Snowy Inlet you saw the sloping sides of Mount Wharton and a magnificent blue glacier sloping down its broad reaches. It had teeth all over the lower part where it had cracked under the sun's rays, but back for miles and miles, as far as the eye could reach, the blue ice extended until it hid itself in the vast snowfields of the mountain's top. You were glad that the sun's rays came out from time to time to show you a patch of the top of the mountain, for then you understood what Darwin meant when he compared some of the glaciers in the strait to "a hundred frozen Niagaras." You knew that you were looking at one of the greatest accessible ice patches in the world outside of the ice cap of Greenland.

The wind began to strengthen and black outbursts of it were seen coming toward you from time to time. Then at last you began to realize what a w.i.l.l.ywaw is. It is a fierce blast that comes down from these mountains with well defined limits like the ray of a searchlight in the night. One moment you do not feel it and then you shoot into it and it tosses you about, churns up the waters, roars and barks at you and you feel that a demon from the hills is trying to tear you to pieces. Half a dozen times one of these w.i.l.l.ywaws got started for the fleet and then the sun came out, the clouds broke up and the blast was dissipated. You could see it all with your eyes, you didn't have to imagine it. It was as if some big policemen had scattered a crowd that had begun to torment a procession and had said "G'wan!" It g'wanned all right. Finally a big one gathered force that laughed at the policeman, and it fell upon us. With it came mist and dashes of rain. It spat in our faces. It wrapped our coats about our legs in knots. It shrieked and howled at us, and when we staggered through it it laughed at us, as if to say:

"You may be a great fleet of warships, but I'm not afraid to tackle you, just like any other ship or set of ships. I have fun with every ship that goes through here, and if I don't one of my rough brothers does the business. No one who goes through here can escape a w.i.l.l.ywaw. How do you like being tousled up? Ha! Ha!"

All that the writer of this cares to say is that w.i.l.l.ywaws are rude things, the rudest kind of things he has ever met, and he's glad that you can find them nowhere else in the world than in Magellan Strait.

Like the man who made a mistake in matrimony, he is willing to sing hereafter the old song:

"Once was enough for him!"

When you got past that w.i.l.l.ywaw you began perhaps to speculate on the height of the mountains and you were surprised to learn that they are not high, as snow-capped mountains go; that they varied in height from 3,000 to 4,500 feet with occasionally a monster in the distance from 5,000 to 7,500 feet tall. They looked like the Alps or the Canadian Rockies. You soon realized that it was because they rose directly from the water and there was no slope to them before they began to shoot upward, as is the case in the great mountain ranges of the earth. The fact that they were snowclad, like all the other great mountains, also made you feel as if they were as high as such elevations.

As hour after hour pa.s.sed you saw why it was that one writer had said that if you had taken the Himalayas, the Andes, the Alps, and had moved them all here and had submerged them up to their necks you would get scenery like that which the strait presents. As you looked at the mountains and saw the bays here and there you began also to realize what another writer meant when he said that a hundred Lake Comos, Lucernes and Genevas could not present the lordly beauty of some of these bays and inlets. Perhaps you compared the trip with that of the Inland Sea of j.a.pan. If you did you could only say:

"This is grand; the Inland Sea is beautiful."

And when we began to reach the end of Long Reach and to get into the wide open waters of Sea Reach and the fog shut us in completely many a person then was not altogether sorry, for he had been surfeited with it all. We went down to dinner just as the ships began to feel the Pacific's swells. The wind from the northwest began to blow violently and soon after 8 o'clock word was pa.s.sed that we had pa.s.sed Cape Pilar, where no shipwrecked mariner ever escapes, and that the fog had lifted and those on the bridge had caught a glimpse of it. There had been thirty miles of fog navigation in the strait itself. Two hours later as the ship was plunging and careening in the gale--they always have a gale or extremely heavy swells at the Pacific entrance to Magellan--we heard that the Evangelistas Islands, four rugged rocks with a light on one, had been seen, and then we turned in, knowing that in an hour or so the fleet would be headed due north, every turn of the screws bringing us nearer home. On the whole, every one was glad that if the fog was to be it had shut off the view of the mountains and glaciers and bays just after it had been finest. We had seen the strait at its best and there was not a man who did not feel something of awe over it, believing as he did that he had been in sight of the grandest handiwork of the Creator that the earth presents.