The Admiralty Pilots, published by the Hydrographic Office, are the seafarer’s Baedekers. Totalling seventy-seven volumes they cover the world’s coastlines, oceans and seas. Inside their sober navy-blue cloth covers they contain sage advice on dangers, safe anchorages, reefs, and currents; and when paraded on a chart-room bookshelf, their gilt-lettered spines on show, they make for an impressive display of hard won nautical information.

The South American Pilot has this to say regarding a small island on the Chilean coast some 500 nautical miles north of Cape Horn:

A few lines later the Pilot also mentions that a cove, Bahia Speedwell, is ‘difficult to approach’ and that Canal Cheap ‘is deep throughout.’ A few miles north of Wager Island the Pilot details the Islas Marinas (Marine Islands) comprising Crosslet, Hereford, Smith, and Hales Islands. Such English sounding names in a Spanish speaking country pose a question, and perhaps to the curious they also hint at a story. The curious would be right.

The story is an eighteenth-century melodrama set in a ferociously inhospitable climate and along one of the world’s more remote and dangerous coastlines. The South American Pilot is brutally explicit on the climate: ‘The area covered by this volume is exposed to an almost unbroken series of depressions which move E across or to the S of it. Except in regions sheltered from the prevailingWwinds, the weather in all seasons is predominantly cold and stormy with much cloud and rain.’ As to the location, a glance at any map or chart of South America’s dangling, scorpion-like tail, shows a deadly, fractured coastline of reefs, islands and channels. ‘One sight of such a coast,’ wrote Charles Darwin, having sailed in the Beagle between reefs known as the Furies and looked out on a sea so covered with breakers that it was known as the Milky Way, ‘is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about shipwrecks, peril, and death.’