Besides, the frequent rains of Scandinavia visit Magellan's region in like abundance.

Both have dense fogs, and, in spring and autumn, winds so fierce that the very vegetables in the fields are frequently rooted up.
A few walks inland would, however, have sufficed to make me recognize that I was still separated by the equator from the waters of Northern Europe.

What had I found to observe in the neighbourhood of Port Egmont after my explorations of the first few days?
Nothing but the signs of a sickly vegetation, nowhere arborescent.

Here and there a few shrubs grew, in place of the flourishing firs of the Norwegian mountains, and the surface of a spongy soil which sinks and rises under the foot is carpeted with mosses, fungi, and lichens.

No! this was not the enticing country where the echoes of the sagas resound, this was not the poetic realm of Wodin and the Valkyries.
On the deep waters of the Falkland Strait, which separates the two principal isles, great masses of extraordinary aquatic vegetation floated, and the bays of the Archipelago, where whales were already becoming scarce, were frequented by other marine mammals of enormous size--seals, twenty-five feet long by twenty in circumference, and great numbers of sea elephants, wolves, and lions, of proportions no less gigantic.