The prize was a doorway between two oceans. In the nineteenth century, before the Panama Canal, the Strait of Magellan was one of the only ways to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific without rounding the deadly waters of Cape Horn. Two young republics, Chile and Argentina, both claimed the cold lands at the bottom of South America, and for decades they fought over them not with armies but with letters, surveys, competing maps, and a strange contest for the loyalty of the Tehuelche people who actually lived there. The struggle would end at a negotiating table in 1881, but the years before were a slow, tense, and very human standoff.
The dispute reached deep into the lives of the Tehuelche, the indigenous people of the southern steppe, whose allegiance both nations courted. Chief among them was the cacique Casimiro Biguá, who allied with Argentina and was given a military rank and a salary for his loyalty. When the governor of Punta Arenas offered him nine ounces of gold to declare himself Chilean, Casimiro refused, answering that he was not Chilean but Argentine. The competition turned almost theatrical. When a group of Tehuelche arrived at Punta Arenas flying an Argentine flag, the irritated Chilean official took it from them and handed over a Chilean one instead, telling them it was prettier. Behind these small dramas lay a hard truth: the Tehuelche were being drawn into a contest between newcomers over land that had been theirs long before either flag existed.
Argentina's cause in the strait rested heavily on one determined man, the sailor Luis Piedrabuena. With little official backing, he sailed his fragile ships into the storm-lashed channels again and again, trying to plant Argentine settlements at San Gregorio Bay. In 1869, after furious storms kept him from landing a beacon at the strait's entrance, he was met at Punta Arenas by the Chilean governor Óscar Viel y Toro, who warned him not to settle and reminded him that Chilean artillery stood ready to enforce the point. Piedrabuena tried anyway, raising a wooden hut as an observatory, only to have it dismantled on Viel's orders. He never received the official authorization he waited for; Buenos Aires, wary of war, kept holding back. He died in 1883 at the age of forty-nine, his southern dream largely unrealized, his wife having succumbed years earlier to tuberculosis contracted in those harsh winters.
Much of the dispute was waged on paper. Surveyors from both sides charted a land so poorly known that maps could barely agree on its features, and rival cartographers redrew the border again and again through the 1870s. The contest even named a glacier twice: a Chilean captain christened it for a naval official, while an Argentine surveyor later named the same ice Bismarck, after the Prussian chancellor; today the world knows it as the Perito Moreno Glacier. The tension drew in famous figures. In 1878, the Chilean naval officer Arturo Prat, who would die a national hero in the War of the Pacific the following year, was sent to Buenos Aires as a spy. He reported that Argentine public opinion favored war over eastern Patagonia, believing it rich in resources, even as he judged Argentina's actual military strength to be weaker than its mood suggested.
Chile had powerful reasons to settle. By 1879 it was entering the War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia, and it could not afford a second front in the south. A resolution would keep Argentina from joining that northern alliance. The breakthrough came with the Boundary Treaty of 1881, signed in Buenos Aires on July 23 by representatives of both nations. Argentina recognized Chilean sovereignty over the entire Strait of Magellan, while Chile recognized Argentine sovereignty over the Atlantic coasts of Patagonia and the eastern portion of the great island of Tierra del Fuego. The border was fixed along the highest Andean peaks and the watershed down to the 52nd parallel, and the strait itself was declared neutral forever, open to the ships of all nations. The treaty drew the line that still separates the two countries across the bottom of the world.
The 1881 treaty ended much of the quarrel, but not all of it. The two nations went on disputing the meaning of its words for more than a century, and the rivalry over the islands south of Tierra del Fuego eventually hardened into the Beagle conflict, which brought Chile and Argentina to the edge of war as late as the 1970s. For the Tehuelche, the outcome was harsher still. As colonization advanced and sheep ranches spread across the Magellanic coast from 1878, their world contracted. Casimiro Biguá had died around 1874, and the chiefs who followed, including his own son Papón, ultimately bound themselves to Chile in exchange for salaries and rations. Within a few decades, disease would claim many of them; Casimiro's grandson, the cacique Mulato, died of smallpox in 1905. The line drawn in 1881 secured the borders of two republics, but it was sketched across a homeland whose original people paid the steepest price.
This history is anchored near 52.47 S, 69.53 W, along the eastern reaches of the Strait of Magellan in Chile's Magallanes Region, close to the Argentine border and the modern crossings between Punta Arenas and Río Gallegos. From the air the strait is the dominant feature, a broad sea passage separating mainland Patagonia from the island of Tierra del Fuego, with the flat, tawny steppe stretching inland on both sides. Key historic anchorages such as San Gregorio Bay lie along the northern shore. The nearest major airport is Presidente Carlos Ibáñez del Campo International at Punta Arenas (ICAO SCCI); Piloto Civil Norberto Fernández International at Río Gallegos, Argentina (ICAO SAWG) lies to the north. Expect the strong winds and fast-changing visibility that made this passage so feared by the sailors who once fought over it.