A True and Sad Story about Fuegia Basket and Captain Fitzroy

P. M. Borodin

Once upon a time, almost two hundred years ago, on an island far far away, lost at the very end of the world there lived a little girl named Yokcushlu. The island was situated in such a nasty place - couldn't be worse. To tell the truth, the girl had no idea about it, for she had never seen anything but the place.

The world's end is a relative thing. If you take a look at a British map, you'll find Korea and Japan somewhere in the backyard, and Great Britain right in the center of the world. But a Japanese map would tell you a different story: Japan in the middle, and Great Britain hard to find. However, no matter what map you take our girl's home archipelago, Tierra del Fuego, is at the edge of it. Only Antarctica is further, and nobody lives there but penguins and polar explorers.

Tierra del Fuego is the name given to the archipelago by the first round-the-world traveler Ferdinand Magellan. When he was passing the islands by the future Strait of Magellan, our girl's tribe lit fires: they must have been hoping to be finally discovered. But Magellan did not even stop to talk, slipped by the strait of his into the Pacific, and was gone in a flash.

More information on these and other subjects you can find in the printed version of our journal.