TERRORS OF THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11520, 3 November 1900, Page 2 (Supplement)

TERRORS OF THE STRAITS OF MAGELLAN.

FUEGAN WRECKERS BECOMING MORE DARING. In the track of multiplying American commerce with the Far East—their boldness growing with the number of ships that pass, and holding the doorway from the Atlantic to the Pacific a pirate tribe as treacherous and cruel as the worst of the rovers who sailed the Spanish Main, Worse, indeed, they . are than the Malay marauders of Oriental seas. They find their shield in darkness, yet fire is their most potent weapon. . Mariners who have shunned the wild waters that meet at Cape Horn and sought a more peaceful passage from ocean to ocean through the Straits of Magellan for more than a year have been bringing to San Francisco wild tales of savage cutthroats and robbers. More like the yarns of the forecastle than naratives of truth they have sounded. Dark brown men, with matted hair, and armed with huge spears and knives; lights that flitted about in dark coves and on the face of the waters like the will-o'-the-wisp in the bog, have been the visions that vigilant lookouts have reported. Men disappearing from decks where they had been set to watch, and with them all that could attract a savage eye, have been phenomena of peaceful nights in the still waters under the shadow of the mountains that line the Straits.

Mixed in with these tales, too, have been others of more dire import. A Chilian gunboat, armed with modern guns and bearing a modern searchlight, was mysteriously set afire there not more than a year ago and all the members of her crew were slain. Some of the bodies found afterwards bore evidence to the work of man in this catastrophe. Schooners and ships have disappeared in late years after leaving Sandt Point, in the Straits, and after having been at anchor further along under the hills, and partly burned hulks have been reported to indicate how they have met their fate. Even big steamships have narowly escaped similar fortune, for burning brands havo'.bcen thrown into portholes Avhile the crews were asleep, and when the men have rushed to fight the flames on another part of the ship wild men of the woods have appeared and attacked them from behind, and, besides loss of property, left death and wounds as a remembrance. " Dynamite Johnny" O'Brien, pilot of a score of daring filibustering expeditions in the days when the Cubans were receiving arms from the United States wherewith to continue their fight against Spain, learned to respect the terrors of the Straits a fewweeks ago. He entered the sheltered waters in the steamer Dolphin, noted old boat of New York waters, on his way to San Francisco.

When he was at Sandt Point, after entering the Straits, he was warned to beware of perils further along, and an accident and delay to his vessel introduced-him to them. One dark night, when the lookout was vigilant, he saw lights glimmer all about the ship, but far away. He could detect nothing in the water alongside, but suddenly a burning brand was thrown on the deck, and it was found that another had been thrown into a porthole. Fire started in both places, and while one part of the crew were engaged in fighting the flames the other part had its energies "fully employed in beating off a score of invaders who were hurrying to the side of the ship in craft whose progress could be traced by the lights they bore. The invaders were beaten off, and then modern appliances were used to protect the ship. All the iron railing on it was connected with the dynamos in the enginerooms, and a sharp cry the next night told of a discovery by a savage of the current which protected the vessel until it was ready to proceed. The schooner Carrier Dove, recently arrived in Seattle after a journey in which the crew suffered hardship lor lack of food, supplements the tele of pirates. The vessel had an accident to her rudder while trying to beat out of the Straits during one of the storms that sometimes sweep down from the Pacific and lash the waters around the Horn. She was compelled to put back and lie in one of the sheltered coves of the Straits until she could be repaired. No less than three attacks were made upon her during the nights she remained under the mountains, and once the crew were compelled to fight fire and savages at the same lime.

It is the Fuegan Indians who are responsible for these terrors of the only doorway to the East pending the construction of a Nicaragua canal. In the bleak mountains and valleys of Terra del Fuego and. on the islands that stretch along the west, cut up by scores of channels, they have lived as far back as the memory of the mariner extends. It was not so many years ago that they were still unacquainted with the white men, and that the white men were unacquainted with them. In the olden times mariners would now and then see a canoe hurrying across some channel or catch a glimpse of a moving light on the waters at night, or an arrow would come aboard a small craft as a sign of hostility. But the people were seldom seen, except by those who might be shipwrecked on the islands, and they never lived to tell about their discoveries. Scientists went there to study the phenomena of nature and tried to learn about the denizens of the place. But they found they would best approach one of the tribesmen with a gun ready to shoot and keep a sentinel over their camps at night, at the same time being ready always to use a gun to aid in defence. They could get no information from, the Indians. Civilisation, however, finally came to the tribesmen in one way. Some of the bolder ones found they could venture out to the ships that came through and could appeal to the generosity of the white men so effectively as to get food and trinkets, of which they had never known before. With their success others ventured, and now no ship can cast an anchor in the coves west of Sandt Point without being surrounded in daylight by canoes filled with dishevelled brown warriors and their squaws, all crying out plaintively, " Yammer schooner!" It is a plea for bread, or beads, or money, or anything else that could take the eye of untutored man. The winding channel of the Straits and sometimes the sea itself furnished them place for range for their craft of logs. How many of them there are no white man knows, but when the channel, leaving Sandt Point, ends its southward course and turns to the northwest, they are found, and almost to the mountains that guard the entrance to the Pacific their canoe fires can be seen burning. Tales have come of a white leader in this savage fold—one in whose veins flows the blood of the Caucasian, but who has turned his mind to savagery and led his companions to more cruel work than they had ever thought of doing. " Black Pedro," Spaniard, once a trader of the coast, but murderer and outlaw, is known from one end to the other of the Straits. Sometimes he approaches the ships of the white men and remembers his Spanish again, and sometimes his long, matted beard has been seen among those who have sought to slay and steal in the night. He, it is believed, is, now leading the new pirates in desperate attacks, and the mariners hope for the time when a gunboat will go down among the savage Fuegans and blow their leader and a few score of them out of the water as a warning to their fellows.