The Chilean Navy proposed and built the museum in 1974, working from its base on Isla Navarino - which is itself a clue to how few institutions reach this far south. The building is partly made of alerce, the slow-growing Patagonian conifer whose Latin name, fittingly, is Fitzroya, after the Beagle's captain. Across two floors, three halls, and a little over eight hundred square meters, the exhibits trace the natural and human history of the Cape Horn region. The stated goal is plain: to inspire the conservation of the area's cultural and natural heritage. In a place this remote, the museum is not a diversion but a keeper of memory.

For roughly ten thousand years, the Yámana lived in these channels as the southernmost people on the planet - a culture built around bark canoes, sea-lion hunting, and the fires they tended day and night against the cold. Inland roamed the Selk'nam, hunters of the great island of Tierra del Fuego, and to the west the Kawésqar, another canoe people of the fjords. The museum holds their tools, their photographs, the record of their lives. It does not pretend these stories ended gently. They were marginalized, infected, and pushed off their land - and the museum exists in part to make sure that what was nearly erased is remembered honestly, by the descendants who remain and by everyone else.

In the museum grounds stands something strange: a prefabricated house of cast iron, ordered from an ironworks in East London in 1869 for two hundred and sixty-five pounds. The Stirling House was the first European building erected in Tierra del Fuego, named for the missionary Waite Stirling. It arrived unassembled in the Falklands, was built at Ushuaia in 1871, and then never stayed put. Over the following decades it was dismantled and shipped again and again - to Baily Island, to Tekenika Bay on Hoste Island, to Douglas Bay - chasing the shrinking Yámana population the missions hoped to reach and, often, to shield from the gold miners arriving to exploit the region.

The Stirling House watched a tragedy unfold around it. As the missions moved, the Yámana kept dying - of measles, of tuberculosis, of diseases their bodies had never met before Europeans came. The missionaries who lived in the iron house, including Thomas Bridges, recorded the language and tried to ease the suffering even as the people they served disappeared. The last mission closed in 1916. In 2003 the house was declared a Chilean National Monument, and in 2004 it was moved one final time, by sea, from Douglas Bay to the museum at Puerto Williams. It rests there now beside Gusinde's photographs - two kinds of witness, the iron and the image, to a world that ended within living memory.

Martin Gusinde was no ordinary observer. A Catholic priest and trained ethnologist, he made several expeditions into Tierra del Fuego between 1918 and 1924, and what set his work apart was that the people allowed it - the Selk'nam initiated him into the secret Hain ceremony, trusting him to record what no outsider had recorded before. He published his findings in the multi-volume Los Indios de Tierra del Fuego, pairing meticulous description with stark black-and-white plates. Within decades, the Selk'nam as a living culture were effectively gone, hunted, displaced, and decimated by disease during the sheep-ranching expansion. That his photographs survive is a fragile mercy. The museum named for him does not treat these peoples as relics. It insists, gently and firmly, that they were here first, that they endured for ten thousand years, and that some of their descendants endure still.