Magellan's Strait, and, after passing the two narrows, he anchored the ships and proceeded to explore in his boat along the shore. Presently he saw two men waving to him from a rock. He pulled in and took one of them into his boat. The man turned out to be one of the survivors of Sarmiento's colony, and he told a harrowing tale. Nearly all had died of starvation. For months they had lived on shell-fish picked off the rocks. Fifteen were still alive about a mile distant, including two women. The man's name was Tomas Hernandez. Cavendish promised to take them all on board, but a fair wind springing up he made sail and left them to their fate. Hernandez was the only one who escaped to tell the tale. Cavendish visited the deserted town called Felipe which the colonists had built. They had abandoned it when their provisions came to an end, and had hoped to maintain life by scattering themselves along the shore and living on shell-fish until the long-deferred succour arrived; and so they perished slowly, the weakest first. The English commander called the place Port Famine.
Hernandez was frequently consulted by Cavendish, especially on the occasion of an encounter with the natives near Cape Froward, the most southern point of America — so named on this occasion. After entering the South Sea, Cavendish sailed northwards along the west coast of South America, and anchored at Quintero, a little bay near Valparaiso, for wood and water. Hernandez landed with the watering party, as a guide, several horsemen having been seen on the hills. Through his treachery the party was surprised, and a dozen English sailors were taken prisoners and hanged at Santiago, Hernandez escaping behind one of the horsemen. Sir Richard Hawkyns tells us that retribution overtook the treachery of Hernandez. In the fight with the Dainty, he served on board one of the Spanish ships and was severely wounded. Three years afterwards Sir Richard saw him begging on crutches, and in such a miserable state that he had been better dead than alive. He lived afterwards at Lima, and, in the days of the Viceroy Prince of Esquilache (1620), he made a deposition giving a full account of the sufferings of the colonists in the Strait of Magellan, of his rescue by Cavendish, and of his treachery at Quintero.
Touching at Arica, Cavendish, with his little squadron of three vessels, made his way to the island of Puna in the Gulf of
