From the northern boundary to Concepción, the coast line is generally uniform and indentations are rare. There are only a few bays of any considerable size, and only an occasional cape or promontory. From Chiloé to Tierra del Fuego is a stretch of coast five hundred miles in length, which a glance at the map will show is a perfect network of islands, peninsulas and channels. This is the Chilean Patagonia. It provides scenery as grandly picturesque as the famous fiords along the coast of Norway, and greatly resembles that broken and rugged coast. The bays and gulfs cut into the shores to the foothills of the Andean range. They are of great depth. The Gulf of Las Peñas furnishes an entrance to this labyrinth at the north, and the Straits of Magellan at the south. Some of the passes are so narrow that they seem like gigantic splits in the mountain ranges—grandly gloomy and narrow. Through these openings in the rock the water rushes with terrific force owing to the action of the tides. But, once within, the opening broadens out into little bays, where the waters are as calm and serene as a mountain lake. These channels are a vast Campo Santo, or God’s Acre, of wrecked vessels. Numerous as the disasters have been the sight of a stranded boat is rare, for the grave is usually hundreds of fathoms deep. In every case, however, the wrecked vessel has given her name to the rock that brought disaster, and the official charts are dotted with the names of rocks, which thus form eternal headstones for the unfortunate vessels. One writer has given the following account of these channels:—
“If one can imagine the Hudson River bordered continuously by verdure-covered mountains descending precipitously into the water, and jutting out here and there in fantastic buttress-like headlands, one has some idea of Messier Channel. But add to this a network of long, thin cataracts threading their way thousands of feet down through gullies and alleys from mountain crest to water edge. Far up the mountain sides they are so distant as to seem motionless, like threads of silver beaten into the crevices of the rocks; but near the water their motion can be both seen and heard as they fall amid the rocks to reach the sea.”