When I wrote this title in 1979 due to our first expedition to the Staten Island, Ushuaia had a population of 10.000 inhabitant and some cars, today it has 45.000 inhabitants and 14.000 cars, the panorama is the same, fascinating, but logically a lot of things have changed, there is an essential change in the Communications, specially in the air Communications, with a new landing strip, it has almost two miles long and its airstation with two aviation sleeves, now they looks as if they were luxury, but from now on they must be enlarged in order to give place for the future traffic.

            Ushuaia is not the one it used to be, like those time, the Capital of the National Territory, today is the Capital of the Argentine Province called "Tierra del Fuego e Islas del Atlantico Sur", its distance from the Staten Island is 250 kms on an air line (45 48’- 17’W).

Staten Island

            It is separated from the Great Island of "Tierra del Fuego" by the Strait of Lemaire and Shouten, they sailed to the Cape Horn, name given by them because it was the name of the Holland harbor, where they came from. It is supposed according to the documentation of those time, the Spanish Francisco de Hoces in 1540 out of his route due to a tempest, could have a view of this island of 60 Kms long and a variable wide from 300 miles between the Cook and Vancouver bays to 6 miles between the Cape Kempe and the Cape San Antonio. The island is rough with mountains of 800m height, big fiords, with mountain side and levels ground covered by boggy wet turf, woodlands of small trees called "lenga" (shorted and combed by the wind) totally putrid, and also a great variety of plants like clump of rushes and moss, making a big vegetable conformation, the animal life consist of goats, huge deers with big horns, birds like black eagle, condors, the beautiful sea bustard, sea wolfs and penguins. The sea climate is windy, cold and wet with low atmosphere clouds, everything together propitiate a lot of rain the whole year. The island is really difficult to travel, so difficult than a sea travel could become from a day trip to a week long, it depend on the sea weather, the same who whip the Cape Horn shore with waves of several yards height, apart of that the choppiness of the sea, guilty of most of the shipwreck.