In the height of the squalls in this gale she doused all sail, and this occurred often enough.
After this gale followed only a smart breeze, and the _Spray_, passing through the narrows without mishap, cast anchor at Sandy Point on February 14, 1896.
[Illustration: The course of the _Spray_ through the Strait of Magellan.] Sandy Point (Punta Arenas) is a Chilean coaling-station, and boasts about two thousand inhabitants, of mixed nationality, but mostly Chileans.

What with sheep-farming, gold-mining, and hunting, the settlers in this dreary land seemed not the worst off in the world.
But the natives, Patagonian and Fuegian, on the other hand, were as squalid as contact with unscrupulous traders could make them.

A large percentage of the business there was traffic in "fire-water." If there was a law against selling the poisonous stuff to the natives, it was not enforced.

Fine specimens of the Patagonian race, looking smart in the morning when they came into town, had repented before night of ever having seen a white man, so beastly drunk were they, to say nothing about the peltry of which they had been robbed.
The port at that time was free, but a customhouse was in course of construction, and when it is finished, port and tariff dues are to be collected.

A soldier police guarded the place, and a sort of vigilante force besides took down its guns now and then; but as a general thing, to my mind, whenever an execution was made they killed the wrong man.
Just previous to my arrival the governor, himself of a jovial turn of mind, had sent a party of young bloods to foray a Fuegian settlement and wipe out what they could of it on account of the recent massacre of a schooner's crew somewhere else.