The albatross, that avian symbol of rootlessness and never-ending wandering over the sea, has been part of my consciousness almost my whole life, beginning with a first reading of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” But I never thought I’d see one in my lifetime. Last evening one of the ship’s lecturers held up a rope with knots illustrating the wingspans of the various southern sea birds. The wandering albatross’s span is almost unbelievable; it would literally fill my 11-foot wide office at home. This morning the ship is surrounded with albatrosses – black-browed, I think – wheeling, dipping, and hovering on the strong west wind. They aren’t feeding, which leaves only three alternatives – nesting, floating, or appearing simply to enjoy their friend, the constant wind, who gives them something solid to lean on. Their inscrutable eyes, as they pass close to the big glass windows of the third-deck saloon, seem to ask if we’ll be leaving soon. We will. The swell apparently grows during the day, and no cruise ship crew wants a cargo of seasick landlubbers.

I used to chuckle condescendingly at the poor souls far south of the Equator, who had to endure icy winter weather while the peonies and lupines were blooming in the northern hemisphere. I don’t do that anymore. Billed as “the end of the world,” this tip of Patagonian Chile is as far south as people live. And it’s only 60 degrees from the Equator, the same as Hudson Bay and the northern borders of the prairie provinces of Canada. There’s nobody here to chuckle at.

It’s just into the second half of summer here, and the light lingers much as it does on a July evening in Canada, brightening about 5:30 in the morning and dimming to twilight sixteen hours later. We toured the countryside around Santiago and visited a couple of wineries in the Aconcagua Valley, whose river is fed from the snowfields of the highest mountain in the western hemisphere. New grapes were beginning to ripen on the vines; avocado orchards marched up the barren-looking mountainsides like Himalayan rice paddies; and peach trees drooped with fruit. The wineries, quiet Spanish colonial ranch buildings of beige limestone and hewn beams, sat us at long tables and served little biscuits, country food, and their signature wines. I’m not a dark-red wine man myself, so was inclined to skip it – as it turned out shortly afterward, should have skipped it.

Next day it was south again, to a port on the fabled Strait of Magellan. A bus with a lovely young English-speaking tour guide (probably because of its geographical isolation from Europe and the United States, there are fewer English speakers in Chile than in any other country I’ve visited) took us into a national park surrounding the one thing I wanted to see more than any other – the Torres del Paine, the “Blue Towers.” Separate from and younger than even the Andes, the Torres are a granite intrusion that came up under and lifted with it thick layers of dark sedimentary rock that now form its capstone; they look rather like icebergs topped with chocolate syrup. Spectacularly glaciated, the vertical towers have some of the greatest big-wall climbing in the world. The park is as unspoiled as it can be. Flamingoes dotted the salty lagoons; rheas strutted through the brush like wild turkeys; black-chested buzzard-eagles perched beside the road (my life list was going wild); Magellanic woodpeckers, much like our pileated, hammered at dead Patagonian beech trees; caracaras haunted campsites looking for unguarded groceries; and Andean condors floated like tiny dots far, far up. I couldn’t go on the walk, so I sat in my wheelchair at the hotel and chatted with a couple of German women who bought me a beer and swapped e-mail addresses.

Next day it was off southward again, to our ship, home for the next four days. The ship had the delightful habit of cruising gently all night, so that we arrived in the morning at that day’s place of interest – glaciers, penguin colonies, elephant seals, beaver dams (not very exotic to Vermonters, but a big deal down there, as the beavers – now pests – were originally imported), and a large cave under a cliff where it’s possible that human beings once coexisted with a huge extinct ground sloth called Milodon, whose remains were found there.

The Fuegian archipelago has hundreds of islands, rocks, and reefs, sudden shipwrecking williwaws, and pretty fierce tidal currents. Looking at a map of it, you can see how Magellan, like Columbus 27 years before him, had to wheedle, cajole, and threaten his crews to get them to persevere till they reached their intended goal, the fabled “strait” through the western continent. Sailing down the South America coast, he turned right at each bay until finally one led him through. How he accomplished it, in ships then state-of-the-art, but woefully unwieldy and delicate, is almost incredible; briefly, he was very careful. Darwin’s Beagle, over 400 years later, cruised farther south before turning west, and discovered “Glacier Alley,” with its dozens of mountain glaciers lining what Captain FitzRoy named the Beagle Channel. We cruised the same waters decadently, armed with the latest electronics and dining haute cuisine, experiencing only the mildest rocking as the ship left the Channel to round Cape Horn. But the penguins were the same that Magellan saw 500 years ago, trooping down to the shore to stare comically at us and seeming to ask, “Who are you?”