By Nick Casey

Nick Casey/Special to the Town Crier The Strait of Magellan proves not to be the monstrous waterway of myths and calm enough for children to play nearby.

This is the second of two articles describing Casey’s trip to Tierra del Fuego. Part one appeared in the June 7 issue of the Town Crier.

If I had been anticipating rocky chasms, shipwrecks, spindrift or tidal waves, then I was to be sorely disappointed: the infamous Strait of Magellan had about as much turbulence as a bathtub. In the days before the Panama Canal offered a shortcut to travelers, sailors seeking California by ship had two options: either (a) round the windy spews of Cape Horn and risk being blown into the open sea by squall or (b) brave the narrow - and I had thought quite treacherous - reaches of the strait. Apparently, it would be option (b) for me today.

Meanwhile, the strait continued to lap quietly at my feet like someone’s whimpering dog. Abandoned Coca-Cola refuse grounded the scene even further, along with two Chilean children determined to build a castle out of what seemed more like pebbles than sand.

Magellan was gone; there were no gold doubloons to be had. And yet this was the kind of morning where disappointment simply wasn’t an option: it was the first clear daybreak in a week, the waterway was a divine calm and the faint outline of a landmass floated on the other side: Tierra del Fuego.

This was week three, my last in Patagonia. My goal had been to make it as far south as possible with the time left (Antarctica excepted), and it looked as if I just might be successful. My destination: Ushuaia, Argentina. Ushuaia is a mid-sized town with a population of 45,000 - or so Lonely Planet had said - but the guidebook had also assured me that Ushuaia held a recognized claim to being the southernmost city in the world. Another draw: it had some of the world’s best king crab.

King crab has always been one of the great sea monsters in my mind ever since my mother first described them to me when I was a child. Her chosen anecdote was absolutely terrifying: earlier in life, she had worked as a chef onboard a cargo vessel sailing the Aleutians when the crew caught two of the colossal crabs, hoping she would stew them for the evening’s dinner. When she went for a look, the crabs were gone. Apparently they had only been incapacitated by the crews’ blows: the shellfish revived and now had to be fought with baseball bats before they could be butchered.

10 a.m.: I crossed the strait in a bulky white ferry and the crabs, scuttling across the ocean floor like mutant spiders out of a sci-fi movie, came to mind. I held my breath and peered down again. No crabs could be seen, but a flock of penguins were swimming in formation, feasting on fish stirred up in the vessel’s wake. Excited, I pointed them out to an old Argentine man. He smiled a big, toothy grin, but he was clearly nonplussed: penguins out there are as much a spectacle as pigeons are in New York City.

Bruce Chatwin - who wrote the definitive travelogue of the region, “In Patagonia” - once described Tierra del Fuego as the “uttermost place on earth.” And in this windswept landscape of huddled lambs and bent trees, a disoriented traveler might sooner guess he were in a re-creation of Scotland than at the tip of South America.

It’s no wonder that the first European settlers weren’t the Spaniards but rather the British, who turned the rainy climate of 19th century Tierra del Fuego into one of the world’s leading wool producers. Not only the sheep remain - there are also traces of the settlers’ surnames: Carlos McIntyre, Juan Williams, Vicente Johnson, Fernanda James. Aging tombstones carved in English recall the pre-Hispanic time. “Here Lies Morris Durham,” reads one, “A Gentleman of Lovely Derbyshire: May He Rest in Peace at the End of the Earth.”

But Anglophilia has met its decline in recent years - Great Britain today is a kind of Argentine adversary, if not an outright enemy. As my bus sped through the flat landscape, a giant billboard whirred by reading in large block letters “Las Malvinas Son Argentinas” (”The Malvines Are Argentine”).

Americans typically know the Malvinas by their British name, the Falklands, a pair of tiny islands off the eastern coast of Tierra del Fuego. The sleepy isles - home to several hundred British herdsmen and their flocks - became an unlikely theater of international war in the 1980s.

Neither Britain (which claimed it as a colony) nor Argentina (which claimed the islands by proximity) had given either island much attention until the leader of the Argentine military government, General Leopoldo Galtieri, invaded them both with his republican army, announcing annexation. Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges likened the ensuing battle to “two bald men fighting over a comb.”

Indignant, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent the full force of the British navy. Galtieri would not back down. Thatcher opened fire, and many Argentineans perished.

As the billboard passed into the distance, I was reminded that even these near-forgotten places have rich histories, ranging from Magellan’s dangerous and tragic circumnavigation to Darwin’s voyages through the nearby channels.

And so Tierra del Fuego remains a land of enchantment for travelers past and present: a land of glaciers and penguins, open tundra and watery sounds.

As evening settled, I could see the faint glow of a town’s lights in the distance. Ushuaia at last: the port of departure for Antarctica.