Shooting out of the
surf, a southern sea lion
bull nabs a southern
rockhopper penguin
(Eudyptes chrysocome)
at Isla de los Estados.
Southern rockhoppers
venture offshore to
catch fish, swimming
together by the hun-
dreds. There is safety
in numbers —for most.
Thetis Bay,
near the very tip
of Tierra del Fuego
in Argentina,
is about as
far south as
one can go in
the Americas.
Few people ever do. “This is but a bad place for
Shipping,” Captain James Cook wrote in his jour-
nal in 1768, cautioning future visitors to keep
clear of the seaweed. But the bay does provide
some shelter from the region’s notoriously rough
seas and battering winds. On a chilly, overcast
day in February 2018, we launched a Zodiac craft
from our ship, the Hanse Explorer, and maneu-
vered it through Thetis toward the shore, careful
to avoid the thick blankets of kelp and the sand-
banks emerging at low tide.
I was there leading a National Geographic
Pristine Seas expedition, in collaboration with
the Argentine government, the regional govern-
ment of Tierra del Fuego, and the Forum for the
Conservation of the Patagonian Sea. With me
was my old friend and colleague Claudio Cam-
pagna, who co-founded the forum in 2004 and
102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC NGM MAPS