The Uttermost Part of the Earth

Instead we slept like rocks, with very little rolling, and at dawn there it was, just off the starboard bow: Cape Horn, near latitude 56 degrees south and longitude 67 degrees west. Bits of pink and blue in the clouds heralded our miracle -- clearing skies and mere breezes, with wavelets too small to mention. Jubilant, we bundled up in our life jackets like orange penguins and were loaded into the Zodiacs to be shuttled to the rocky shore. Hurry, hurry, the crew said, while the weather holds. It wasn't yet 8 a.m.

From the beach, we climbed 130 wooden steps to the edge of the cliff and then raced along a rickety boardwalk over the scrub grass to the Cape Horn Memorial at the top of the island. At last! Located on the most psychologically important spot, 1,300 feet above the surf, this rusting sculpture of dubious beauty was erected by the Chilean Brotherhood of the Captains of Cape Horn in 1992 to honor those lost in these waters. Willem Schouten, who first sailed around the point on Jan. 29, 1616, named the little island after his birthplace, the Dutch town of Hoorn. A granite marker displays a treacly poem by Chilean poet Sara Vial: "I am the albatross who awaits you at the end of the world. I am the forgotten soul of the dead seamen . . ."

The nearby lighthouse was closed for repairs, and construction materials littered the barren tundra. We photographed each other looking toward Antarctica. We dawdled on the compass engraved in concrete. We congratulated ourselves for getting here. Then we trooped back to the ship for breakfast. Was that all? No, the best was yet to come.

After checking the forecast, the captain announced that ours was the one in every seven trips that has really good weather luck -- we would round the Horn and head up its western side! We lined the rails to watch. And there, making the trip with us, was a sailboat. My husband sighed with envy, but consoled himself: "The weather's so good they're probably almost disappointed," he said. I, however, was not.

We feared an anticlimax after that, but we had much yet to learn. That afternoon we disembarked at Wulaia Bay just south of Ushuaia, where the Bridges family hunted the area's six types of seal and sea lion, and hiked past old Yahgan Indian encampments that Darwin had visited, up to a high slope with a stunning view over the Beagle Channel. The guides invoked a minute of silence; the only sound was the very distant generator humming on the ship, a speck far below. We felt very intrepid until that evening, when we watched an after-dinner movie about the legendary British explorer Ernest Shackleton and the 1914-16 Antarctic voyage of the Endurance.

The next day, we motored slowly though the Avenue of the Glaciers, five glowing blue-white claws groping down from the Darwin Cordillera mountain range, all breathtaking. At the huge Pia Glacier, we had another muddy, slippery climb to high vantage points on an adjacent island, shouting over rushing waterfalls. Was the summer melting heavier than usual? The guides shrugged as they poured us whiskey or soda on chips of glacier ice. "I hope not," one said.

We got even closer the next day in the Cockburn Channel, on the western edge of Tierra del Fuego. Shivering in the Zodiacs, we maneuvered slowly through ice floes the size of refrigerators toward the face of the Piloto and Nena glaciers.

Fifty yards away, the guide cut the outboard and the dozen of us fell silent. Only the rain pattered. Suddenly the glacier made a sound that resembled a rifle shot, then a car wreck. Nothing moved. A few nearby cormorants called and flapped, and then, with a hissing crash, a house-size ledge of ice sheared off from the glacier's face and plunged into the sea. A one-foot wave rolled toward us. "Hang on," the guide said, without urgency, and we bobbed gently. Then came a mournful moan, a high creak, distant thunder and another cascade of ice. Just as suddenly, the rain stopped, the sun appeared and the glacier changed to brilliant turquoise.

The thing about glaciers, once you get close enough, is not their awesome size or their otherworldly colors, or even the mini weather systems they hurl down around you. The thing about glaciers is their song. Like ice cubes in a household crusher magnified a zillion times, they groan and shriek from the pressures of squeezing themselves through rocky canyons toward the sea. We stayed in the boat an hour until, numb with cold, we turned reluctantly back to the ship.

* * *

We wanted to hear that song again. The next day we walked a long, stony beach to the looming hulk of the Aguila Glacier, perhaps the trip's most spectacular in its size and colors -- gray and white and every shade of blue. We tried to reach a huge ice cave melted out on one side, but had to halt at moraine-like sandbars and ponds at the glacier's base. Alas, we could hear only running water: Global warming has ended this ice river's tortured writhing through the mountains, and it is mostly silent in its slow retreat.

Our cruise concluded with a visit to Magdalena Island in the Straits of Magellan, sunny and brown and fragrant with 120,000 braying Magellanic penguins. Smaller than the Emperor penguin stars of the "March of the Penguins" documentary, these were just as busy digging nesting holes and lining them with bits of grass. They were fearless, as curious about us as we were about them. One braved the roped-off trail to peck at my boots, hoping for lunch.

With regret, we disembarked at Punta Arenas, a small Chilean city of lovely Victorian buildings left over from the burgeoning steamer trade that brought riches at the turn of the century, only to vanish when the Panama Canal opened in 1914. We raised a final toast to Tierra del Fuego, our mission accomplished. Then, like Magellan, we headed back north.

Joanne Omang last wrote for Travel about ranches in Argentina.