Previous posts have emphasized the value of rutters as a documentary source for the study of the Early Modern natural world. Today I wanted to call attention to a very concrete example, reported by Juan Ladrillero in the rutter of his 1558 voyage through the Strait of Magellan:
“But they should be warned [...] if they see snowy mountains, that [...] they should stay away from them, because in many parts of them there is so much snow that the mountains have five, and six, and seven, and eight, and ten fathoms of snow, and more and less. And it seems that it must have been accumulated for a long time, and when the mountains are heavily loaded with it, the snow breaks and comes rolling down, breaking into pieces [...]. And it comes with a great noise, like a thunder, crashing down the mountains; and hits the channel broken into many pieces the size of ships or houses, and almost as big as plots of land [...], and they hit the water and are as hard as a rock, so hard that there would be no fortress or other building that would not be thrown to the ground or to the seabed. And since the channels are very deep, many times the ships go close to the land, where great damage could come to them [...]. Those masses [of snow/ice] were on top of the water, like islands, some of which had three or four stades under the water, and others the same [dimension] on top of them [...].”
The southern latitude of the Strait fascinated Europeans with geographies and natural phenomena that did not exist in the Old Continent. In this case, Ladrillero describes in detail the snow avalanches that, from the high peaks of the Fuegian region, rushed over the waters of the channel. A testimony to equal parts of admiration and fear in the face of the unbridled force of nature. [José María Moreno Madrid]
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