Tierra del Fuego by Francisco Coloane

Author:Francisco Coloane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa
Published: 2011-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

PASSAGE TO PUERTO EDÉN

Man’s capable of anything if you don’t keep an eye on him!”

The words were spoken by Dámaso Ramírez, skipper of the schooner Huamblín, as he turned the ship’s wheel.

“It’s not as bad as that,” Seaman Ruperto Alvarez replied, not having quite understood what the skipper was talking about. “Look what happened when the Taitao went down. One man saved the lot of us!”

“No,” the skipper corrected him, “I’m talking about Villegas . . .”

“When you said ‘man,’ I thought you were talking about men in general . . .”

“No, I meant the cook. He’s left us without meat again. When the divers find out, there’ll be hell to pay . . .”

“Didn’t he buy meat when we left Puerto Montt?”

“No, he says the butchers were all closed by the time we weighed anchor.”

“He just did it to annoy us. He must be in one of his moods again.”

“That’s what I think. The man’s evil inside. If we don’t keep an eye on him, God knows what he’s capable of.”

The Huamblín, a sixty-ton schooner, was sailing against the wind on its auxiliary engine, close to the Desertores. This group of six or seven islands at the very end of the Chiloé archipelago is the last inhabited place you encounter before you enter the desolate regions of the southern seas, and is located at the entrance to the Gulf of Corcovado, which always promises ships a rough ride as they pass through its tempestuous waters.

A day and a half had passed since the schooner had left Puerto Montt and headed for Puerto Edén, a deep-set natural harbor on the other side of the Angostura Inglesa, in the middle of the Magallanes channels, and, whether through negligence or deliberate malice on the part of the cook, they found themselves at these latitudes without a single piece of meat for the four crew members and the three divers they had with them for fishing mussels in Puerto Edén. It was mid-autumn, and the schooner would be spending the whole winter plying the channels, coves and fjords near that remote spot.

Her mission was to find the mussel boats scattered around the Puerto Edén area, put the mussels into sacks and transport them in her hold until they could be transferred to the coasters that put in at Puerto Edén on their way north.

“There’s nothing we can do but sail straight to the Desertores,” Ramírez said, feeling the first big waves from the gulf. Then, changing the subject, “Tell me about the Taito!”

“It happened years ago, skipper. It was a four-master, very well equipped. Not a piece of junk like this Huamblín. We ran aground on the rocks on the island of Huapi, near San Pedro. One of the sailors managed to swim to the coast with a rope tied to his belt and secured it to something there. The captain stood on a bare rock shaped like a table, held the other end of the rope tight and saved all of us.

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