Speaker Mr Colin Anthony Argentina & Chile
Meeting 15-Mar-2012 TRAVELLING IN A LAND OF EXTREMES
– THE VOYAGES OF COLIN ANTHONY & HIS WIFE IN THE SOUTH OF SOUTH AMERICA
A talk given to the Club on 15thMarch 2012 (as noted by Mike Horrigan and elaborated by Dick Palmer) C olin Anthony
had previously talked to the Club in October 2011 about his trip to Burma and was introduced once again by Michael Kehr, Colin’s topic this time being his travels to Argentina and
Chile lavishly illustrated by his extraordinary photographs of this wild but beautiful land
C
olin began by talking about Tierra del
Fuego and the Straits of Magellan which were then thought of as ‘the end of the world’. In 1517 the Straits were discovered by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese mariner of renown who was sent out by the King of Spain on a Spanish ship and crew to discover more new worlds for Spain. When Magellan came across the large Island at the far south of the mainland, he named it Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire, from the ring of flaming volcanoes that bordered the island.
S
ubsequently Magellan and the Spanish sailors generally called this whole area Terra Austrialis after the Greeks who used the
word ‘austrialis’ to mean the South of South- ern part of the World. (it’s for this reason that, once the Spanish had dropped using the name Terra Austrialis, Australia, itself even farther south and east, was given its present name by the British from the late 18th century onwards, replacing the earlier names of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land). The Americas as a whole were named after Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1512), an Italian born Spanish explorer whose recounted explorations were put on Dutch maps of the known world at the end of the 16th century].
D H
espite Magellan’s early discovery of what we now
call the Straits of Magellan, the ferocious weather and storms deterred all but the hardiest of mariners from entry, and it was left to Sir Francis Drake in 1577 to discover a safe(ish!) way through the Straits which, he and other English mariners, kept secret for the next hundred years.
aving found what was in effect the South West
Passage, Drake wanted to find the North West Passage, and in
1507 he sailed on up the west coast of the Americas and reached as far as what was to become Vancouver, hoping, but failing, to find the North West passage – a quest constantly defeated by ice, and only now, with global warming and consequent ice melt, becoming a possibility.
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