The fort was the work of President Manuel Bulnes Prieto, who feared that without a foothold, other nations might claim the strait. The governor of Chiloé ordered a schooner built for the voyage south. He meant to name her for the president, but Bulnes redirected the honor and had the ship christened Ancud, for the town where her timbers were laid. On May 22, 1843, the Ancud sailed under John Williams Wilson, a British-born officer of the Chilean Navy. Four months and a continent of bad weather later, on September 21, she reached the rocky promontory of Punta Santa Ana.

There was no stone to build with and little time. Williams and his men raised the fort from what the land gave them, mainly logs and bricks of packed dirt and grass, perched on a windswept hill at Punta Santa Ana above the strait. The site was chosen with cold logic: high ground commanding the water, the same shore the Spanish had tried and failed to hold centuries before. It was never meant to be elegant. It was meant to be a statement, a flag made solid, telling Britain, France, and every passing ship that Chile's sovereignty reached all the way to the bottom of the Americas. For that purpose it worked. But a fort is not a town, and the president wanted a town.

The weather would not allow it. This stretch of coast was too brutal, too exposed, to hold a stable population, and after six hard years the experiment was abandoned. In 1848 the governor founded a new settlement at a place called Sandy Point, a little to the north, and named it Punta Arenas. As the settlers drifted there, the soldiers left Fuerte Bulnes behind. Then they burned it. Lieutenant Cambiazo supervised the destruction, and the fort that had claimed a continent's edge was reduced to ash and memory, its purpose served and its hill given back to the wind.

A century later, Chile decided the fort was worth remembering. Between 1941 and 1943 the government rebuilt it as a historic monument, reconstructing the church, the chaplain's quarters, the jail, the powder magazine, the post office, and the stables, so that visitors could walk through a working likeness of the original. It was declared a national monument in 1968 and is run today by a private company within the surrounding Strait of Magellan park. Stand on its hill now, with the strait stretching cold and gray below and Tierra del Fuego dim across the water, and the long story comes into focus: a Spanish colony that starved at Port Famine, a Chilean fort that burned, a city that rose in its place at Punta Arenas, and a country that came back to honor the spot where it first reached the end of the world. Few small forts carry so much history in so few timbers.