Transcription
Welcome to South America. If we look at its southern tip, we find the enigmatic Tierra del Fuego with nothing further south of it until Antarctica. The waterway between is one of the most feared in the world - the infamous shipwreck causing Drake passage, with its huge swells and high winds.
Zoom in on Google Maps and you'll see little island clusters everywhere. But one particular one caught my eye the other day, sitting lonely and far away from all the others. They are in fact the very last South American landmass. So I wondered, what even happens on this little tuft of Earth in the middle of one of the world's wildest seaways? Has anyone ever been there? On top of that, Google Earth satellite views here are just a blur. I was thirsty to know more and knew there'd be something to uncover. I went digging around to find every last story, tale, and anecdote there is about these far away South American islands. Today we're going to learn all about the Diego Ramirez Islands.
So firing up the maps again on Google Earth. It's just a blur with nothing noteworthy. But we can see that there are two island groups split up by a central strait. The nearest land mass is Cape Horn, over 80 km away - itself far from the South American mainland. Some long shadows tell us that they're somewhat tall. And look at that thick white outline on the shores! Shows just how rough the waves are here in the Drake Passage. Historical view doesn't show much either; mostly a lot of cloud cover. Even on Google Earth's full label mode, nothing.
Luckily, I didn't have to go far to find better satellite images. Bing and Apple Maps have us covered. Most of the islands are just eyelets or stacks sticking just out of the water, too barren and short for anything except maybe some grass or moss. In the south group, there are two big islands. Some interesting wrinkles, dramatic cliffs, more rocky outcrops. No snow or ice though for being so far south. The southmost big island is the most interesting one. There are some structures on it. A white structure on top of a ridge - most likely a lighthouse. A pathway going down to some red buildings on the shoreline. A little yellow square - probably a helipad. No other man-made structures anywhere else, though. MapCarta has some labels here. Each islet has its own name. As for the man-made structures, they are labeled here, but we're going to wait till a little bit later to find out what they all are. First, it's time to get these islands backstory.
As usual, I wanted to find the first mentions of them and their discovery. There are two parallel stories I'd like to tell - the European one and the indigenous one. The Diego Ramirez Islands Wikipedia articles always start with the European discovery, so I'd like to start instead with the indigenous story. While Europeans did discover this place for themselves, it doesn't necessarily mean they were the first human beings to ever see it. Tierra del Fuego was first inhabited for thousands of years by the indigenous Yahgan people. Their ancestors might have been the first Americans who walked from far east Siberia across the Bering land bridge into modern-day Alaska. The Yahgans were nomads with no long-lasting homeland, living mostly in the southmost Tierra del Fuego Islands, as far down as False Cape Horn and Cook Bay. They had family units led by the fathers and traveled in canoes made of Guindo tree bark. The children stoked a fire in the canoes middle for warmth and the men hunted with long bows. The women rode and dove for shellfish and to collect animals that the men shot. They scavenged whale meat and other dead mammals and gathered berries and mushrooms. Like most indigenous peoples, they knew their land and seasons like the backs of their hands. They were incredible seafaring navigators. They apparently had their own domesticated foxes and even had their own religion. Apparently, they were some real tough lads as well. Us Brits like to go out at night with only t-shirts on, but these guys were next level. Despite the damp cold, their clothing didn't cover much of their bodies. Seems silly, but it was likely to keep body moisture out since that speeds up body heat loss, like sweating. They wore sea lion or otter hides draped over their shoulders and made simple leather shoes. But they apparently sometimes just went out fully naked and didn't even seem to react to the cold. To help keep warm, they used rock formations as shelter, covered themselves in animal grease, and rested in a deep squat. Some Chilean researchers claimed they had evolved higher body temperatures than the European average by at least one degree.
So the key question then did the Yahgans actually live on the Diego Ramirez Islands? Well, it's complicated. The Yahgans were always on the move, never settling for long, and had navigated all of Tierra de Fuego. Remains like campfire hearths and bone tools have been found as far south as Cape Horn, 20 km away from the nearest land mass. It's therefore not unreasonable to think that they might have sailed out enough to see the Diego Ramirez Islands. In the late 1800s, an Austrian ethnologist called Martin Gusinde studied them and their spoken histories. Martin Gusinde said that some of their spoken histories involved canoe trips to the Diego Ramirez Islands. Unfortunately, no one has ever found hard archaeological evidence of their presence there, so we can't say for sure if they ever did truly land there. Martin Gusinda's work on the Tierra del Fuego people is really fascinating. There's an anthropology museum dedicated to his research in Puerto Williams, the world's southernmost museum. We'll find out what happened to the Yahgan people a bit later in the video, but first, let's move on to the European story.
All of the Diego Ramirez Islands Wikipedia articles point to the 1619 Garcia de Nodal expedition as their discovery - but this doesn't explain why. I wanted to know why this expedition was even sent out there so far in the first place... so I went digging for the backstory. Firstly, we need to go back 600 years to 1400 Spain and Portugal. While the Yahgan people were canoeing about Tierra de Fuego, Europe was putting together its own South American story. There are two things here that are paramount to our story. Firstly, at this point, the Reconquista had been happening for a few hundred years. This was basically the Christian, Spaniards, and Portuguese taking back land from Muslim kingdoms who had ruled it for about 800 years. Secondly, there was the spice trade. Back in the 1400s, spices were luxury goods and a status symbol only the wealthy could afford. Spices came from India and the spice islands transported across multi-layered trade networks through the Middle East, Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Italy, etc. Each middleman handling them added markup, so when the spices reached Iberia, it cost an arm and a leg. The Spanish and Portuguese were a bit fed up of paying top dollar, so they went looking for ways to buy cheap right to the source. It would also make them very politically powerful since they would control the route. How is this relevant to the Diego Ramirez Islands? Well, if you know your South American history, you might be able to guess. If not, stick with me and you'll find out.
Portugal took the lead looking for new trade routes in the early 1400s with a guy called Prince Henry the Navigator. He had done a lot of work for Portugal in Ceuta in Morocco and became fascinated with the trans Sahara and trade routes. In the early 1400s, he set up a sailing school in Sagres and sponsored sailors on seafaring expeditions to West Africa. At this point, anywhere beyond southwestern Morocco was unknown to Europeans, literally uncharted and thought of as land's end. Sailors were superstitious of it, thinking that sea monsters live beyond. Henry wanted to know for sure though. The Portuguese had developed advanced ships called caravels at this time which could travel better into winds unlike previous ships and thus could go a bit further than before. In 1460, Prince Henry himself died. But by 1462, his sailors on their caravels had got all the way down to about Sierra Leone, successfully flanking around the Trans Sahara trade routes, bringing back gold, ivory, and slaves without any middlemen, making Portugal very rich. Prince Henry is buried in the monastery of Batalha in Portugal. And if you go to Lisbon for a visit, you'll probably see the Discoveries Monument in Belem, which he's on. He never went anywhere near the Diego Ramirez Islands, but he is the first piece in the story. Portugal got richer bringing goods back from the West African coast, but hadn't yet found a full route to the spice trade source like they wanted. Because of this, Portugal's king Joao II commissioned explorer Bartolomeu Dias to find a sea route around Africa's southern tip. Bear in mind back then they didn't even know if Africa was a big land mass that went all the way down south or if it had open sea below it. King Joao also wanted to find the legendary Prester John's Christian kingdom, believed to be somewhere in Africa or the east. Prestor John was a mythical Christian priest king believed to rule a huge wealthy utopian Christian kingdom surrounded by pagans and Muslims full of wonders, gold and exotic beasts. Around July 1487, Bartalomeu and his crew set sail lugging carved stone crosses called padroes to mark important landfalls. In March 1488, Bartalomeu's crew made it as far as Boesemann's River in modern-day South Africa. They had explored much more African coastline than the other expeditions and had rounded Africa's southern tip, proving that there was indeed a possible route to the Indies round Africa.
The next piece of the puzzle is a name you probably already know - Christopher Columbus. In 1476, 11 years before Bartolomeu Dias' expedition, he moved to Portugal at the age of 25, where he started seafaring on the Portuguese African coast and Atlantic islands. Portugal was pushing eastwards under Africa, but Columbus was getting a bit restless with the slow progress. He'd also been pondering over nautical maps, namely one from Florentine cosmographer Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, which showed a route westwards to Asia with no major landmass in the middle except for the Antillean Islands. Columbus did some calculations to find out roughly how long it would take to get to Asia along this theoretical route, which came out to be only about 4,500 km to Japan. This wasn't much longer than the distance Portugal had been sailing around the West African coast, but obviously we know it's much further than that. His calculations were way off, but Columbus thought it to be true - and if it were, he'd be the spice trade king if he could get to Asia by just sailing 4,500 km west across the Atlantic. He first pitched it to Portugal in 1485, but they weren't having it. Bartolomeu Dias had already found a good enough route and they also thought Columbus' calculations were off. This didn't stop him though; frustrated with Portugal, Columbus decided instead to put the idea to the next big kingdom over - Spain. Spain initially also told him no because of the risks and his flawed calculations, but after they united their Spanish kingdoms and finally toppled Granada, ending the centuries long Reconquista in January 1492, they had the motivation and funds to agree and sent Columbus on his way. On the 3rd of August 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos de Frontera with three ships and about 90 men, funded by the Spanish crown. Of course, most people know that they discovered the Americas. It's a great story and there are many videos telling the story much better than I can. Columbus didn't go anywhere near the islands himself and he didn't discover a westward route to the Indies either, but he had successfully discovered a new continent which straight away started up conflict between Portugal and Spain. Columbus actually got blown to Lisbon by a storm on his way back and had to dock there and bragged about his discovery which riled up the Portuguese king. Portugal and Spain had signed the Alcacovas treaty a few decades beforehand in 1479. Long story short, they had drawn a horizontal line under the Canary Islands and said anything underneath it was Portugal's. King Joao argued that the American islands Columbus had discovered were underneath the line and so were rightfully Portugal's. Spain came back and said, "Well, you didn't want to know when Columbus told you about his idea. We funded him, so they're Spanish now, fair and square." A bunch of negotiations followed. Even the pope got involved to help out, but the Spaniards and Portuguese eventually agreed to meet in Tordesillas to sort it all out. In the end, in 1494, they signed the Tordesillas Treaty - another line splitting the world in half, this time vertical. East of it was Portugal's, west of it was Spain's. The treaty prevented a full-scale war, allowed Portugal to protect its eastward spice routes around Africa, and gave Spain its American discovery. Spain straight away started sending people westwards to colonise America. Meanwhile, Portugal finally found and established its eastward route to the Indies with Vasco de Gama who finally rounded Africa and reached India in 1498. Portugal didn't just ignore the Americas though - they actively exploited their own claim to the land given to them in the Tordesillas treaty. They sent out another explorer - Pedro Alvarez Cabral - who discovered Brazil in 1500. Both countries were basically spamming expeditions to colonise the new lands, but Spain, in particular, was on a mission to find a way through or around the Americas to get to the Indies. Spain still didn't have its own and couldn't use the Portuguese one without violating the Tordesillas treaty and getting on Portugal's nerves. They were starting to push southwards, closer and closer to our little Diego Ramirez Islands. Spain's Juan Dias de Solis had reached as far as Rio de la Plata looking for a western passage through South America, but still - no dice.
However, now we come to another big piece of the Diego Ramirez puzzle - Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan thought that the westward route might end up being quicker and easier than Portugal's established eastward route. He also likely wanted to beat the Spanish to it and claim the rewards for himself. He first put his idea to Portugal's King Manuel in the early 1500s, but was told no. The king was happy with the Eastwood route. On top of this, after Magellan had come home from some voyages, he was accused of unlawful trading and the King Manuel had grown suspicious of him. Magellan found it hard to find work after these accusations and grew so annoyed with Portugal that he renounced his Portuguese nationality and moved to Spain. He pitched his plan instead to Spain's King Charles I and dangled the carrot a bit to him, telling him that the Spice Islands were so far east that they actually sat on the maps west and therefore were rightfully Spain's for the taking, not Portugal's. Spain were all about it and funded Magellan's five ship 270 man fleet, which set sail in September 1519. Portugal's King Manuel was pretty cheesed off by all Magellan's double crossing monkey business. Once again, Portugal only wanted it after Spain paid. He tried to sabotage the ship's preparations and even sent out ships to catch the fleet, but failed. They got to South America, sailed down its eastern coast for 3 months, and got all the way to Puerto San Julian. They had to stay for the winter because of the weather conditions, but afterwards they went back out. After 3 days, they finally found Magellan's Strait. They'd done it - they finally found a way through South America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and therefore a westwards sea route to Asia from Europe. Spain straight away sent more expeditions out to Magellan's Strait, the next one being the 1525 Loisa expedition. They got down to Magellan's Strait, but the weather was absolutely dire. One ship captained by Francisco de Hoces got blown far southwards where he cited what he called a land's end roughly where Cape Horn is. This is why Spanish sources often say it was Francisco de Hoces who discovered the water body underneath South America, which you'll see as Mar de Hoces on some Spanish maps. Unfortunately for these sailors, the weather stayed treacherous on the Pacific side; one ship reached Mexico, another one reached the Spice Islands, and the other two drifted far out, dying on far away islands, with some of them, being killed or enslaved by the natives. For a few decades, Spaniards were sent back and forth through Magellan Strait, trying to colonise it to defend it against invaders. No one went further south to the sea underneath because there was no need - Magellan's Strait was good enough. They were inching nearer to the Diego Ramirez Islands, still sitting undiscovered.
In the 1560s, we bring in another puzzle piece - Francis Drake, an English navigator. Spain had been busy colonising both American coastlines, and the new world was well underway. English ships started trading with the New World Spanish. The Spanish there liked the English merchants because they offered cheap prices; the problem was that mainland Spain considered this trading illegal because of the Tordesillas treaty saying this part of the world was theirs and theirs only. Eventually, Spain had had enough and sent ships to San Juan de Ulua in Mexico where six armed English merchant ships had been traded. The English fleet had anchored there to resupply and fix their ships after a storm. They agreed on a truce allowing both fleets to anchor there peacefully... but the Spanish were secretly plotting to break the truce with an attack. They ambushed the English, heavily damaging their ships, and 320 English men were killed for only 20 Spaniards. Francis Drake took part in the battle, but left with his ship midway to get back to England. He ended up hating the Spanish and Catholics in general. In revenge, Queen Elizabeth secretly commissioned Francis Drake for an expedition against the Spanish on the American Pacific coast. In December 1577, seven ships and 170 men set sail from Plymouth. They got to South America and made it to Magellan's Straight, which they crossed in 16 days - much faster than anyone else had done it before. As they got out to the Pacific Ocean, huge storms blew Francis Drake's ship southwards, just like Francisco de Hoces. He saw a wide open sea passage underneath South America. He got back to Plymouth in September 1580 and confirmed the Drake Passage existed and that South America was not a non-ending landmass. He was so close to the Diego Ramirez Islands, but still, they sat undiscovered. We're almost there, though! The Spanish quickly realised that their American empire was now open to attack from the unprotected South American southern tip and scrambled to colonise it ASAP to thwart any incoming threat who wanted to repeat Francis Drake's actions. In 1581 they sent out explorer Pedro Sarmento de Gamboa to put up some settlements in Magellan's Strait but they were short-lived. The settlers were ill-prepared for life in such a cold and windy place, being from warm sunny and Andalusia. Another English explorer - Thomas Cavendish - went to Magellan's Strait in December 1587 and found the Spanish settlement Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe. It was ruined, starved, and frozen, so he mockingly nicknamed it Port Famine. You can still see some remnants there, like the church built by the settlers. His crew rescued the last known survivor, Tome Hernandez, who told them the settlement's gruesome and sad story. At this point, everyone decided to more or less leave behind the idea of controlling Magellan Strait; It was just too treacherous and not profitable enough.
In the early 1600s, the Dutch were starting to restart the Drake Passage story. At this point, the Portuguese king died without an heir, and Spain's Philip II took the throne, creating the Iberian Union. Dutch merchants used to buy spices in Portugal for distribution in Northern Europe, but the Dutch and Spanish had a bit of beef, so, King Phillip blocked them from doing it. Just like everyone else, the Dutch repeated the same idea in response. Make it too hard for us to get hold of the cash and we'll just go straight to the source to cut you out. They put together the Dutch East Indian Company - the VOC - and gave it a monopoly on all East India trade. Some Dutch merchants were quite annoyed with the VOC monopoly, though. They wouldn't listen to investors, delayed profits, and were too strict. One such businessman, Isaac le Maire, got pushed out in 1605 under accusations of withholding receipts and malpractice, and made to swear he wouldn't meddle with the VOC in Asian trade. Isaac was really displeased with this and eventually decided to repeat exactly the same process. Make it too hard to get the cash, we'll go to the source and cut you out. He picked up the old Spanish idea -find a new southern Pacific route to the Spice Islands that wouldn't violate the VOC's rules nor use their eastward routes. In June 1615, Isaac's son Jacob le Maire along with navigator William Schouten set sail from Texel. They got down there, passed by Magellan's Strait, and went down to the Drake Passage, where they sighted the Cape Horn Islands, named after William Schouten's birthplace, Hoorn. News quickly spread through Europe of this new found route; Spain got wind of it, and quickly drew up a plan. They wanted to verify the Dutch's findings, map the Drake Passage thoroughly, and see how much of a threat it was to their Pacific American colonies. A Spanish expedition was sent out, led by two brothers from Pontevedra - Bartolome and Gonzalo Garcia de Nodal - with navigator Diego Ramirez de Arellano. They set sail from Lisbon in September 1618, mapped and explored the islands in the straight of Le Maire and did the same thing at Cape Horn. Because it was such a thorough survey mission, they went further south into the Drake Passage than any European had ever gone before, looking for further dangers, and they found our little rocky islands. They claimed them for Spain and named them after their navigator. They also named the two main islands and the passage in the middle of them after the brothers. Gonzalo Island in the south, Bartolome Island in the north, Paso Nodal in between. The islands were the southernmost land mass ever discovered by Europeans at the time. The Spaniards took no action; they now knew that colonising that part of the earth was expensive and really dangerous, and they had other priorities. They likely knew that other European countries would feel the same, so Tierra del Fuego was mostly left alone.
For the next 156 years, there are barely any records of anyone going to the Diego Ramirez Islands or near them. They simply sat on maps as the world's southernmost land masses. They lost this title, though, when Captain James Cook discovered the South Sandwich Islands in 1775. I did find some newspaper articles about some visits to the Diego Ramirez Islands: The Boston Courier has an article detailing some whaling ship there in May 1836. The Knoxville Daily Chronicle talked about a shipwreck in May 1895. Another article here from the Boston Transcript about a visit in 1893.
The next documented event happened there in 1902. By the 1800s, Spain's empire in South America had collapsed because of independence wars. Chile had become a republic and began actively asserting sovereignty over its faraway and remote southern lands, mainly because at this point countries were going after Antarctica. In December 1902, a businessman called Pedro Pablo Benavides was granted the exclusive right to the Diego Ramirez Islands for fishing and sealing. The lease required Benavides to build a lighthouse, a naval station, and a fishing school. He never ended up doing it and in 1904 it was transferred to two other businessmen, Jules Koenigswerther and Jose Pasinovich, under exactly the same terms. Dutch Wikipedia says the buildings were built and then demolished, but I don't see any source for that. It seems in reality the treaty was never fulfilled; the extreme isolation, fearsome weather, and lack of safe anchorages made any long-standing development unprofitable. Eventually, in 1957, the Chilean Navy established a weather station and lighthouse on Gonzalo Island. They also wanted to make the water safer for shipping, so building a lighthouse was the logical next step. The timing wasn't just a coincidence either - 1957 to 1958 was the International Geophysical Year, an 18-month, 67 nation scientific collaboration to study Earth and space. This Chilean weather station and lighthouse are the structures we see on satellite view. The Chilean Armada website has some photos of the place! The guys who go out to work there spend 6 months on the islands at a time.
Around 2018 to 2019, they made the islands an important bird area and created the Diego Ramirez and Drake Passage Marine Park. They're really interested in keeping them protected since the islands are one of the most intact sub Antarctic ecosystems on Earth, having never had mamalian predators like rats, cats, and mice, which is extremely rare. You can't just land on them as a tourist, but a few cruise ships do pass by close. These are usually Antarctic cruises or bird watching expeditions. You can check a travel blog here that visited the islands. They saw albatrosses, seals, even penguins. They also went to Cape Horn. In 2022, scientists discovered a new bird species there - the subantarctic rayadito, endemic to the Diego Ramirez Islands. You can see on the map that all of the islands have names - usually people's names like Ester, Santander, Cabezas. I couldn't find any source on where these names came from. Only Pontevedra makes sense to me because that's where the Nodal brothers were from.
I promised I'd tell you what happened to the Yahgan people from earlier, and sadly, their story after Europeans arrived is not a very happy one. When the first European ships began coming to Tierra del Fuego, they were about 3000 Yahgans, but they were brought down quickly by European diseases they had no immunity to. On top of this, settlers, gold miners, sheep farmers, and sealers took over their hunting and gathering grounds. One of the most famous stories involved a young Yahgan guy called Orundellico. He became known in England as Jemmy Button. In 1830, Captain Robert Fitzroy of the HMS Beagle either bought or straight up kidnapped four Yahgan people, including Jemmy - then about 14 - and took them back to Europe as a civilising experiment. They were dressed in good clothes, taught English and Christianity, and even shown to King William and Queen Anderaid like some kind of zoo exhibit. Three years later, Fitzroy brought them back to Tierra de Fuego along with none other than Charles Darwin himself. He later became a suspect (though he was never proven guilty) in the 1859 killing of a group of missionaries at Wulaia Bay. By the early 20th century, there were only a handful of Yahgan survivors. The last known full-blooded Yahgan, Cristina Calderon, died in 2022 at the age of 93 along with the Yahgan language. Today, there are only a small number of people with partial Yahgan ancestry still left, mostly around Ushua and Port Williams. There are some modest efforts to preserve what's left of their language and oral history and to bring it back to life.
And that's it for the Diego Ramirez Islands! A tiny cluster of rocks you can barely even see on Google Maps until you zoom in, sitting alone in one of the wildest seas on Earth, right at the heart of one of the biggest European adventure stories. Honestly, I recommend reading about all the expeditions I mentioned and also about the Yahgan people and their story, which is just as important. I've linked the Wikipedia articles in the description. Thanks for coming down the rabbit hole with me. Once again, if you know anything about the islands, if you've ever been lucky enough to sail past them, if I missed anything, or if there's another hidden little corner of the planet you want me to dig into next, let me know in the comments. And see you all in the next video.