USHUAIA, Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina -

In 1946, someone in Gen. Juan Domingo Peron's navy came
up with the idea of colonizing Tierra Del Fuego with 25 pairs
of beavers from Canada to promote the local fur industry.
Half a century later the Peronist innovation has taken a
Malthusian twist and gone seriously awry.
Today, this snowy archipelago on the tip of South America
is being overrun by the beavers.   

Source: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram Date: 08/09/1998

Ed. Note: These beavers have crossed the Beagle channel and
are over-running the hundreds of Islands of Tierra Del
Fuego with their priceless Beach tree forests.
These forests are suffering a big loss from the killing of trees
from the beaver dams.
Anyone want to start a beaver fur business?  


Beagle Channel looking East from Puerto Williams,
the world's most southern town.


Cruising:

Beyond the world's end Tourism may have moved
beyond Tierra del Fuego, but it still feels like being on
the edge, as Sophie Campbell discovers on a voyage around
the extremiti of South America.

The world is changing for Tierra del Fuego, the final
vertebra in the coccyx of South America and an island that
has always styled itself "The Uttermost Part of the Earth".
The frontiers of tourism have slid beyond its peat bogs and
snaggle-toothed mountains, and crossed 600 miles of the
Southern Ocean to Antarctica, leaving the once remote island
as much a handy jumping-off point for visitors clutching
guidebooks to the White Continent as a destination in
itself. What endures, though, is its sense of being on the
edge. The port of Ushuaia, on the Argentine half of the
island (the other half belongs to Chile), has the air of a
settlement rather than a town. Its surviving wooden houses,
tin-lined and decorated by convicts, still have a pioneering
feel - even if they do include a video shop. And the
duty-free status that fills its shops with electronics and
trainers gives it a rakish, trading mien. Fueginos call the
museum beside the bay El Museo del Fin del Mundo and can
still claim to be one of the world's southernmost
communities.    Source: The Daily Telegraph London Date:
12/11/1999

The Beagle Channel from Navarino Island looking West
with the snow capped peaks of the Island of Tierra Del Fuego
in the background

Australian Pre-History.

A recent anthropological study found that, of all peoples on Earth,
the physical characteristics of the original Australians
were most like the people of Tierra Del Fuego, at the
southern tip of South America. The researchers drew the
conclusion that the same people had been the first
inhabitants of the whole area stretching around the Pacific
rim. This people had spread from Asia south to Australia,
west across the Bering Strait and south throughout the
Americas. After the last major rises in sea level other
peoples replaced them in Asia, North and South America,
leaving Australia and Tierra Del Fuego isolated.  Whether or
not this theory is correct, the Australians are certainly an
ancient people. They have inhabited their lands longer than
any other indigenous people. They are generally considered
to be the oldest culture on Earth. For example, the
ancestors of Native Americans arrived in North America from
Asia 30,000 years ago, Venus of Willendorf -earliest work of
art representing a figure was sculpted 25,000 to 30,000
years ago. Early Australian rock art 20,000 years old. The
cave paintings of Lascaux, France painted 13,000 years ago.
Most anthropologists believe that the Aborigines migrated
from Southeast Asia at least 40,000 years ago. At this time
low sea levels reduced the length of the necessary ocean
crossing by boat, and increased the size of the Australian
coastal 'target'. Aborigines, however, consider that they
have always been in Australia, that they came from the land.