In the meantime the Duncan was proceeding at a remarkable rate. She cut the Tropic of Capricorn, and her prow was headed toward the strait of the celebrated geographer. Now and then the low shores of Patagonia were seen, but like an almost invisible line on the horizon. They sailed along the coast for more than ten miles, but Paganel's famous telescope gave him only a vague idea of these American shores.
The vessel soon found herself at the head of the strait, and entered without hesitation. This way is generally preferred by steam-vessels bound for the Pacific. Its exact length is three hundred and seventy-six miles. Ships of the greatest tonnage can always find deep water, even near its shores, an excellent bottom, and many springs of water. The rivers abound in fish, the forest in game, there are safe and easy landings at twenty places, and, in short, a thousand resources that are wanting in the Strait of Lemaire, and off the terrible rocks of Cape Horn, which are continually visited by storms and tempests.
[Illustration: Sometimes the tips of her yards would graze the branches of the beeches that hung over the waves.]
During the first hours of the passage, till you reach Cape Gregory, the shores are low and sandy. The entire passage lasted scarcely thirty-six hours, and this moving panorama of the two shores well rewarded the pains the geographer took to admire it under the radiant beams of the southern sun. No inhabitant appeared on the shores of the continent; and only a few Fuegians wandered along the barren rocks of Terra del Fuego.
At one moment the Duncan rounded the peninsula of Brunswick between two magnificent sights. Just here the strait cuts between stupendous masses of granite. The base of the mountains was hidden in the heart of immense forests, while their summits, whitened with eternal snow, were lost in the clouds. Towards the southeast Mount Taru towered six thousand five hundred feet aloft. Night came, preceded by a long twilight, the light melting away insensibly by gentle degrees, while the sky was studded with brilliant stars.
In the midst of this partial obscurity, the yacht boldly continued on her course, without casting anchor in the safe bays with which the shores abound. Sometimes the tips of her yards would graze the branches of the beeches that hung over the waves. At others her propeller would beat the waters of the great rivers, starting geese, ducks, snipe, teal, and all the feathered tribes of the marshes. Soon deserted ruins appeared, and fallen monuments, to which the night lent a grand aspect; these were the mournful remains of an abandoned colony, whose name will be an eternal contradiction to the fertility of the coasts and the rich game of the forests. It was Port Famine, the place that the Spaniard Sarmiento colonized in 1581 with four hundred emigrants. Here he founded the city of San Felipe. But the extreme severity of the cold weakened the colony; famine devoured those whom the winter had spared, and in 1587 the explorer Cavendish found the last of these four hundred unfortunates dying of hunger amid the ruins of a city only six years in existence.