I finally woke up feeling a bit better after a fair night of sleep, although it was interrupted by an hour or so of rough seas when the ship left the Strait of Magellan and was exposed to waves from the Pacific before entering the Beagle Channel. The weather had changed and the wind and rain that prevail here had arrived.
It was a good morning to sit by the window and watch the little chunks of ice float by.
The guides on board gave a presentation about the European discovery of Tierra del Fuego, the Strait of Magellan, and the Beagle Channel and also about the natives who lived in the area beforehand. The main points of the presentation were:
1 – Archaeological evidence has been discovered of land nomads in the area as far back as 18,000 years. Evidence of sailing/paddling nomads has also been discovered as far back as 6,500.
2 - At the time European explorers began making contact with peoples in the area, there were four different general groups / cultures living here:
3 - Between exposure to European diseases, and the resource extraction industries the Europeans began, almost none of the natives survived more than a few decades after the settlers arrived. If the natives were seen as competitors in hunting sea lions (which provided oil for the Europeans), or began eating sheep when their usual guanaco quarries were pushed out to supply England’s textile mills, they were simply murdered. In other cases they were recruited and “employed” to trade fish or sea lions for liquor. Various religious organizations arrived and tried to indoctrinate the natives in both religion and culture (notably clothing the naked Yagan) but these efforts did not actually help. One can imagine the Yagan, accustomed to paddling the waters independently with a small fire in their canoe, being congregated wearing damp, likely used (and thus bacteria-carrying) clothing, quickly spreading almost any disease among themselves.
In the afternoon we first cruised up a narrow fjord to see a glacier that is not usually part of the cruise, Guilcher Glacier. We arrived in the rain, but then, just as the ship began turning around at the end of the fjord, the sun came out.
Then we continued to our scheduled destination: the Pia glacier. The Stella Australis’ sister ship, the Ventus Australis, was already anchored there.
The zodiacs had to push their way through a lot of small, floating ice in order to get to shore.
In this outing we hiked up a small hill, which was bedrock rounded off by the glacier, covered by only an inch or two of soil which supported the bushes and small trees which, in turn, helped anchor the soil. The guide spotted a couple of tiny carnivorous plants.
At various points along the trail we could see the Pia glacier and its adjoining other arm. Once again we were very lucky with a break in the weather. From the top we got a great view of the glacier and the bay where the Stella Australis was anchored.
Once our zodiac pushed its way back through most of the ice chunks we heard a great boom and turned around to see a wave forming after a large chunk of the glacier had calved.
Back aboard the ship we left the fjord and began traveling the “Glacier Alley” portion of the Beagle Channel. Various of the glaciers are associated with explorers of various nationalities, or just named for the country. The dinner wait staff came up to the top deck bar and served national-themed snacks and drinks as we passed the various glaciers: sausage and Pilsner beer as we passed the German glacier; red wine and pizza near the Italia glacier; champagne and brie for the Francia glacier, and they played nationality-themed music as well.
I was stunned by the volume of melt-water that was flowing down from the Romanche Glacier.
These glaciers (Guilcher, Pia, glacier alley ones, and even the Morelli glacier that we saw the day before) are all ‘draining’ the Darwin Icefield. The Darwin Icefield covers almost nine hundred square miles of the Darwin mountain range which, despite being on the island of Tierra del Fuego, is part of the Andes range.