Voyaging Southward From the Strait of Magellan
by . New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1924. 4to. Illustrated, xv+ 184 pp. $7.50.
AN ancient map of Tierra del Fuego, with ships, penguins, and dolphins, lines one cover of Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan; a map by the author, decorated in characteristic humor and the ancient way with a ‘Fuegian cannibal devouring young clams,’ lines the other. Navigators are warned: ‘Do not attempt to navigate by this chart. . . . It is merely better than that other herewith published over the advertisement exactissima delincatio.' But the reader of his book may here follow Mr. Rockwell Kent’s journey from Punta Arenas on the Strait almost to Cape Horn and back again. Mr. Kent, artist, adventurer, seaman, and, by bis own phrase, ‘pagan on the quest of happiness,’ seems to have been the first navigator to think of following these tortuous water-lanes. But the prevailing wind was against him, and the tale goes on foot as well as by water. He painted and drew as he went; and so the book comes generously illustrated with black-and-white woodcuts whose eerie quality presents often a nightmare beauty, if one may so term it, as of landscape and seascape unfamiliar, terrifying, and yet beautiful.
The world in general knows little about Tierra del Fuego; and here is little space to indicate what Mr. Kent tells of it in his book, a companion to Wilderness, which had to do with Alaska, Who reads will not be surprised that the author tends to go to extremes. ‘This hour,’ writes Mr. Kent, contemplating the impulse that set him voyaging, ‘you are bound by the whole habit of your life and thought; the next, by an unerring impulse of the soul, you are free.’ He went by freighter from New York to Punta Arenas, making acquaintance on the way with Ole Ytterock, a Norwegian of the Seven Seas, who became his partner in making over and outfitting an old whaleboat for the Southern cruise. ‘The number of his desertions,’ says Mr. Kent, ‘the catalogue of foreign seaports with which the debaucheries of his stolen freedom had made him familiar, have escaped my memory.’
He quotes from his diary:‘November seventh. — It is late at night as I begin to write. For two hours we have sat here in the darkness of the cabin. The firelight shines through the grate, casting a faint glow about the room. The wind blows in terrifying squalls upon us, howling, careening us — and then for a few minutes it is quite still. The boat rocks gently, the little waves gurgle pleasantly against the sides, the clock ticks loudly; there is no sound in the world besides. Then again, far off, the forests of the mountainside begin to roar — nearer comes the sound and louder. Suddenly the gurgling water and the ticking clock, the little sounds that were so loud, are lost as the wild uproar of the wind engulfs us.’
No, the reviewer does not care to journey on Admiralty Sound, but he is glad Mr. Kent went there, and got safe back with his text and pictures.
It was not all like that. There were impressive pampas, luxuriant forests, mountains at once ‘a glory and a horror,’ and among the settlers everywhere a heartening hospitality. And also Mr. Kent himself and his mate Ole, interesting studies in humanity for thoughtful readers.
RALPH BERGENGREN