Ferdinand Magellan dropped anchor here on 31 March 1520, leading a Spanish expedition in search of a passage to the Pacific, and stayed five long months waiting out the southern winter. The waiting frayed his crew. Within weeks his captains mutinied at midnight on Easter Sunday, and Magellan moved with ruthless speed to break them - executing the ringleaders, among them the captain Gaspar Quesada, and marooning another conspirator on the empty coast when the fleet sailed on. These were terrifying months of cold, hunger, and fear at the edge of the known world, and the men who died here died far from home for a strait no European had yet found. Magellan finally left on 21 August 1520. Two months later, on 21 October, he reached the eastern mouth of the passage that still bears his name.

It was here that Magellan's crew met the native people of the coast, the ancestors of the Tehuelche, and here that one of the most enduring names in geography was born. The expedition's chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, described the people as giants - tall and striking to Europeans who themselves averaged little over five feet. The name 'Patagón' most likely came not from any local word but from a monstrous character in Primaleón, a wildly popular Spanish chivalry novel of 1512 that Magellan is said to have loved. Seeing people dressed in skins and eating raw meat, the sailors reached for the fiction they knew and called them Patagonians - and an entire region took its name from a European misreading. The travel writer Bruce Chatwin later traced the word to a Greek root meaning a roaring or gnashing of teeth, echoing Pigafetta's claim that the people 'roared like bulls.' Behind the myth were real human beings, seen through the distorting lens of men a world away from home.

On 15 June 1578, Francis Drake brought his own circumnavigation into this same bay and chose, like Magellan, to overwinter - finding the old Spanish gallows waiting on the shore. Drake too was struggling with dissent, and he turned on Thomas Doughty, a gentleman and a personal friend, charging him with treachery and inciting mutiny. A trial convicted Doughty on the mutiny charge alone, but Drake insisted on death, and Doughty was beheaded on 2 July 1578. The execution did not buy the peace Drake wanted. With tension still simmering between sailors and gentlemen adventurers, he gathered his men for a sermon and laid down a single rule: from now on, there was one commander, and it was him. In August the expedition pressed on to the Strait of Magellan and, beyond it, around the world.

Centuries later the harbour drew a very different kind of explorer. In January 1834, the young naturalist Charles Darwin arrived aboard HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy, and while the ship surveyed the coast, Darwin went poking through the cliffs near the bay. He found fossil bones - part of a spine and a hind leg of 'some large animal,' he guessed, 'I fancy a Mastodon.' Back in England, the anatomist Richard Owen recognized something far stranger: a giant extinct creature, camel-like and long-necked, which he named Macrauchenia. The find became one of the threads that led Darwin toward his theory of evolution. The same shore that had tested Magellan's and Drake's command of the living helped Darwin make sense of the dead.

The drama eventually settled into ordinary life. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, San Julián and its surrounding 'camp' had become important sheep country, and the Swift company built a frigorífico - a great freezer plant - along the coast north of town to process the wool and meat. Many of the area's early settlers were British subjects who had come over from the Falkland Islands to work the flocks. That history turned painfully ironic in 1982, when the Falklands War made San Julián, one of the nearest points to the islands, an Argentine air base; squadrons of Daggers and A-4 Skyhawks flew 149 sorties from its airfield against the British. Today the town of roughly 12,000 sits quietly on its famous harbour, capital of the surrounding department, its waterfront holding the memory of nearly every great voyage that ever reshaped the world.