The plan was born of fear. In 1578 the English navigator Francis Drake slipped through the Strait of Magellan and burst into the Pacific, a sea Spain had treated as its private lake, and proceeded to plunder the unguarded coast of Spanish America. The shock reached Madrid like cold water. If one English captain could do this, others would follow. King Philip II's answer was to seal the strait with Spanish settlers and guns. He entrusted the mission to Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a soldier, cosmographer and explorer who had charted these waters and believed they could be held. A vast fleet sailed from the Spanish port of Cádiz in late 1581 carrying soldiers, settlers, priests and supplies. From the start, the venture was cursed by storms, shipwrecks, and desertion.

Sarmiento founded the first town, Nombre de Jesús, near the Atlantic mouth of the strait on 11 February 1584. Weeks later, on 25 March, he raised a second and grander settlement, Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe, on a sheltered bay. Plans called for a church, a town hall, a royal storehouse, and a Franciscan convent — a real Spanish city at the bottom of the world. But the colonists were drawn largely from Andalusia in sunbaked southern Spain, and nothing in their lives had prepared them for windswept Patagonia. The crops they planted failed in the cold. Reduced to scavenging shellfish and the bark of the canelo tree, they watched their stores dwindle as the southern winter closed in around them.

Nombre de Jesús was abandoned within five months, its people walking south to join the larger town. There they found no salvation, only more mouths than food. The commander Andrés de Biedma finally ordered the settlers to disperse along the northern shore and watch for any ship that might carry them home. Sarmiento sailed for help, but his resupply expedition was beaten back by storms, and in 1586 he was captured at sea by English corsairs. Philip II, his treasury drained by wars with England and the Dutch rebels, sent no relief. The settlers died where they had been told to wait — of starvation, of disease, of despair. Of the roughly three hundred people left in the strait, almost none survived. The historian Mateo Martinic called it the most unfortunate chapter in the human history of the Strait of Magellan.

The story did not quite end at Port Famine. The final known survivor, a settler remembered as Tomé Hernández, was carried off the shore in 1590 by an English ship — the only vessel of a five-ship expedition to reach the strait at all. The failure was so total, so notorious, that for centuries afterward Spain abandoned any thought of settling here. The strait was simply left to the wind. The lesson echoed in colonial offices for generations: this passage could not be tamed by force of will. Modern archaeology is only now recovering the colony's exact footprint — a silver coin unearthed near the site has helped pinpoint where these people lived and died, four centuries after they ran out of food and the world stopped listening.