ale having abated. I spent a day taking in wood and water;
by the end of that time the weather was fine. Then I sailed from the
desolate place.

There is little more to be said concerning the _Spray's_ first passage
through the strait that would differ from what I have already
recorded. She anchored and weighed many times, and beat many days
against the current, with now and then a "slant" for a few miles, till
finally she gained anchorage and shelter for the night at Port Tamar,
with Cape Pillar in sight to the west. Here I felt the throb of the
great ocean that lay before me. I knew now that I had put a world
behind me, and that I was opening out another world ahead. I had
passed the haunts of savages. Great piles of granite mountains of
bleak and lifeless aspect were now astern; on some of them not even a
speck of moss had ever grown. There was an unfinished newness all
about the land. On the hill back of Port Tamar a small beacon had been
thrown up, showing that some man had been there. But how could one
tell but that he had died of loneliness and grief? In a bleak land is
not the place to enjoy solitude.

Throughout the whole of the strait west of Cape Froward I saw no
animals except dogs owned by savages. These I saw often enough, and
heard them yelping night and day. Birds were not plentiful. The scream
of a wild fowl, which I took for a loon, sometimes startled me with
its piercing cry. The steamboat duck, so called because it propels
itself over the sea with its wings, and resembles a miniature
side-wheel steamer in its motion, was sometimes seen scurrying on out
of danger. It never flies, but, hitting the water instead of the air
with its wings, it moves faster than a rowboat or a canoe. The few
fur-seals I saw were very shy; and of fishes I saw next to none at
all. I did not catch one; indeed, I seldom or never put a hook over
during the whole voyage. Here in the strait I found great abundance of
mussels of an excellent quality. I fared sumptuously on them. There
was a sort of swan, smaller than a Muscovy duck, which might have been
brought down with the gun, but in the loneliness of life about the
dreary country I found myself in no mood to make one life less, except
in self-defense.

CHAPTER VIII

From Cape Pillar into the Pacific--Driven by a tempest toward Cape
Horn--Captain Slocum's greatest sea adventure--Beaching the strait
again by way of Cockburn Channel--Some savages find the
carpet-ta