At Cape Horn, Mother Nature has misplaced her maternal instinct. No longer the benign and nurturing parent, she wants you dead. I am standing on top of the southern Chilean island of Isla Hornos, close to a monument dedicated to seafarers who have lost their lives in these seas.
The cape itself is almost invisible, wrapped in a shroud of sleet and low cloud, and the wind is howling. It feels as if it's trying to lift me off my feet, shoving me along, nudging me with little persuasive gusts towards the edge of the hill where I'm standing.
If it wins, I'll end up toppling down towards the sea which is tearing at the rocks below, but for a brief and thrilling moment I am the last person standing on any inhabited continent, the world's most southern man.
At its southernmost extremity the South American continent fractures in a mosaic of islands separated by channels and fiords, an archipelago of mountains and ice trimmed with cedar forests. And, once upon a time, fire. It was the great Portuguese voyager, Ferdinand Magellan, who named this Tierra del Fuego, "Land of Fire", after the night fires he saw on the hillsides, lit by the region's native people.
If you discount the Fuegains who had lived here for about 12 000 years, Magellan was the first outsider to come this way when some of his ships were blown into the strait that now bears his name. It was a happy accident. Rather than the terrifying voyage around Cape Horn, mariners sailing the Strait of Magellan could transit between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in relatively sheltered waters, although navigating the knotted, 570km waterway was still a daunting proposition.
To the 16th century European mind, anything was possible in Tierra del Fuego. It was a land populated by giants, the Patagones, the big feet, who stood three metres tall. In 1556, two Spanish sailors staggered into the city of Concepcion in Chile, 16 years after they were shipwrecked in Tierra del Fuego. They brought with them the story of a fabulous city where gold was beaten into plates, where the houses were built from finely dressed stone, where the inhabitants were immune from sickness - and so the myth of the city of Cesares was born and persisted for another three centuries.
I'm not on the trail of gold or giants, but I expect to be dazzled just the same. I'm on a cruise of Tierra del Fuego aboard the MV Mare Australis, one of two identical ships that cruise company Cruceros Australis operates on three- and four-night itineraries between Punta Arenas and Ushuaia, in Chile and Argentina respectively.
At 70 metres and 2 600 tonnes, she takes small-ship, expeditionary cruising to a new level of luxury. I've never had roomier accommodation on a small vessel than the 15sq metre cabin that is the standard on the vessel, nor a larger picture window.
On board is an alphabet soup of 16 different nationalities - North Americans, Germans, Spanish, Chileans, half a dozen Aussies.
The North Americans are the biggest group, but they're eclipsed in noise, weight, bling factor and sheer Latin brio by a Venezuelan Duracell battery incentive tour group.
From Punta Arenas, the Chilean town on the Strait of Magellan, we sail south along Admiralty Fiord, arriving at Ainsworth Bay to a morning that draws most of the ship's company out onto the top deck, braving the freezing cold. Even brightness has a hard edge in these extreme latitudes, the air scrubbed clean by a scouring wind. Clouds cling to the mountains of the Darwin Range and the Marinelli Glacier dribbles down from its birthplace on the 2 000 metre peaks.
I'm in the first Zodiac and as we speed in towards the shingle spit that is our landing site we pass half a dozen condors, the world's largest terrestrial bird, feasting on the carcass of an elephant seal. By the time I walk back they've risen into the sky with slow beats of their black wings but the prints of their claws remain, almost the size of my own footprint.
Before we walk along the beach and plunge into the forest we're divided into groups, one English speaking, one Spanish. It's a landscape straight from a high school geography book.
Francisco Cardenas, the guide for the gringo contingent, points out the lateral moraines, where glaciers of different eras have scraped their signatures on the valley walls, the boulder dumps of the terminal moraines, the different bands of vegetation where mosses, then shrubs and finally trees have colonised the rock after each glacial retreat. He encourages us to taste the blood-red murtilla berries, to admire the autumn colours of the cedar trees and the football-size clumps of false mistletoe hanging in their branches.
Beyond the forest we slosh into a mushy valley pinned with dead trees like bent coathangers.
Beavers were imported from Canada in the 1940s to form the basis of a fur trade, but the decline in demand for beaver fur has left the region with a resource that nobody wants - a pest that is steadily gnawing its way though the lowland forests of Tierra del Fuego in the absence of any natural predators.
When we get back to the Zodiacs there's a treat - either whisky with glacier ice several thousand years old or hot chocolate, a small luxury that is repeated at the end of every shore excursion. Several times a day we troop into one of the two lounges and sprawl on the couches with a slice of date cake.
Then we listen to a lecture from one of the naturalists on board, which might focus on birds, glaciers, exploration or the Onas and Yaghan, the semi nomadic hunter-gatherers who are the original inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego.
These native people have had a bad press, and it's largely down to Charles Darwin, who did a takedown every bit as robust as Gordon Ramsay. "These were the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld," wrote the great naturalist in The Voyage of the Beagle, and it gets worse from there.
One aspect of Fuegian life that most offended Darwin was their nudity. Even in the depths of winter, the people of Tierra del Fuego went almost entirely naked except for a coating of seal fat - a fact that Darwin disparaged at close quarters, yet which has come to be appreciated at a greater distance as a remarkable feat of adaptation.
Besides Darwin, the Beagle also carried three Fuegian Indians whom the ship's captain, Fitz Roy, had carted off to London 15 months previously from his first South American voyage, intending to moderate their wild ways with the healing balm of British civilisation. Although the three were feted by London society, kept their shoes brightly polished and were even presented at court, the experiment was not a total success. York Minster, the eldest, had been caught raping the female of the group, the 12-year old Fuegia Basket, and both Fitz Roy and the British Admiralty had decided to distance themselves from the looming scandal with a speedy repatriation. Once back in their homeland, the three shed their clothes and resumed their old habits. Jemmy Button, who took his name from the single pearl button that Captain Fitz Roy had paid for him, was later implicated in the slaughter of a group of missionaries.
When sheep were introduced to the region in the 1800s, it was open season on the Fuegians, who regarded sheep as every bit as suited to the barbecue as their own llama-like guanacos. Smallpox and despair accounted for those whom the bullets missed, and today you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of pure-blood Fuegians.
From the Strait of Magellan we sail in a big C-shaped loop around the mountainous rump of Tierra del Fuego that takes us into the Beagle Channel. The Beagle made two voyages through this passage, the first in the company of HMS Adventure.
The Beagle's first captain on that voyage, Pringle Stokes, had fought at Trafalgar, yet so heavily did the scenery weigh on his mind that he locked himself in his cabin, picked up a pistol and pulled the trigger. "In the Strait of Magellan," wrote Charles Darwin, "the distant channels between the mountains appeared from their gloominess to lead beyond the confines of the world."
Beyond the world and straight into the Discovery Channel. Over pisco sours we sail along the Avenue of the Glaciers in Alberto de Agostini National Park, where the ice rivers spill down from the mountains that tower above us while black-browed albatross dip and rise in our wake like flying blades.
Late in the afternoon we make a landing at Pia Glacier. It's a tidal glacier, its terminal face sliding into the sea, and it's calving fast.
From our vantage point on a granite ramp we count more than a dozen explosions as ice topples from the glacier face into the sea, each time with a deep-bellied roar, and sometimes a curling wave that rattles the bobbing ice in the bay between us and the glacier.
Francisco, who is always ready to bring a novelty to any experience, tells us to shout in unison and wait for the answering echo off the mountain face opposite. The effect is completely spoiled by the Venezuelans, who stand 50 metres away creating their own echo. On the way back to the ship a dolphin splashes in our bow wave.
That night we sail south along the Murray Channel and the next morning we're at anchor off Isla Hornos. Visible to the south, the rearing headland of Cape Horn marks a choke point where two great oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific, collide in the relatively narrow gap of Drake Passage, and trouble is the result. Unhindered by any land mass, cyclonic low pressure systems chase one another around the globe, producing fierce winds and terrifying seas that still make the Horn a four-letter word dreaded by mariners. Our morning mission is a landing on the island, possible only when conditions allow, which happens on less than half of all visits. Despite a force 6 wind, the crew considers this a calm day by the extreme standards of Cape Horn.
Our landing site is nothing more than a tiny cove that offers the barest protection from the swell.
We stand off, waiting until a wave lifts the Zodiac and the boatswain guns the engine and rams us into a tiny landing stage. While two crewmen standing thigh-deep in the water in thick wetsuits cling onto our boat we leap off and sprint up the 130 steps that climb the almost vertical cliff face.
At the top a boardwalk threads across the top of the island with the monument at one end and the lighthouse at the other. There are no trees, only grass in tussocky mounds that bend in the wind, and pools of water rimed with slushy ice. Below the lighthouse is a small station with a brick building that serves as the lighthouse keeper's residence, souvenir shop and post office. It's run by a family with two young daughters, and the four-year old, who is pretty beyond words, is practising her English on us. Her mother misses fresh fruit and vegetables, she tells us, which come only every two or three months.
We have to wait for our whisky or hot chocolate option until we get back on board, and as the anchor chain rattles and we prepare to sail around the cape, Francisco congratulates us. We're all hornies now he tells us in his Spanish-accented English, although the grins that he gets in return are probably even broader than he expects.
- For bookings and information, contact Cruceros Australis, www.australis.com