History Repeats

Like the frontier towns of Alaska, Punta Arenas was built up in the late 1800´s, and shares the same feel of Anchorage: straight grid streets with ocean views, slanted summer light of an extreme latitude, and that certain grittiness of a hard life.
Even though many of the surviving buildings date from the late 1800's, the area of Punta Arenas was being used as a port for a couple hundred of years before that, being at the western end of the Straight of Magellan, and the primary port of call for ships after rounding Cape Horn.

Almost 15 years ago I read Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana's harrowing account of making the trip from Boston to California in 1830 aboard a wooden two-masted schooner, and his account of trying to sail around Cape Horn - and the extreme winds and rough seas - stayed in my mind ever since. There is something mythical about it - but more on that later. Punta Arenas was our port for boarding the Mare Australis, the ship that would take us through the fjords and islands of the Beagle Channel to Tierra del Fuego.