Martillo Island is barely 1.5 kilometres of gravel, tussock grass and peat, and no one has ever lived on it. Each austral summer roughly four thousand pairs of Magellanic penguins dig burrows into its low spine. A smaller gentoo colony nests on the exposed shingle.
In some years a single king penguin — a species whose nearest breeding ground lies some 1,500 kilometres east, on South Georgia — stands among them, conspicuous and alone. The island is a provincial nature reserve, and its entire human population is seasonal, arriving by water.
The Beagle Channel takes its name from HMS Beagle, which surveyed these waters between 1826 and 1834. Charles Darwin sailed on the second voyage and recorded the Yámana, who had navigated the channel in bark canoes for some six thousand years, carrying fire in the hulls. Every Ushuaia Penguin Watching Tour by Catamaran now follows a version of that survey line eastward. Eight kilometres from the island stands Estancia Harberton, founded in 1886 by the missionary Thomas Bridges — the first estancia in Tierra del Fuego, still held by his descendants.
That family connection explains the island's present arrangement. Harberton controls the mainland shore facing Martillo, and access to the colony is regulated through the estancia rather than through the port alone. A single licensed operator may set foot on the beach; other catamaran cruises to Isla Martillo observe from the water, holding a fixed distance offshore. The estancia also houses the Museo Acatushún, a working research collection of marine mammal and seabird skeletons assembled from Fuegian strandings since 1978. Commerson's dolphins, southern sea lions, petrels: the specimens catalogue the same channel the boats cross, and students prepare them each summer in an unheated workshop.
The route matters as much as the destination. Vessels leaving the Ushuaia waterfront pass Les Éclaireurs lighthouse, built in 1920 on a red-and-white banded islet, then the haul-outs of Isla de los Lobos and Isla de los Pájaros, where imperial cormorants nest in dense ranks against the rock. Penguin colony catamaran tours from Ushuaia therefore read as a transect of the whole channel rather than a single stop. What Ushuaia Penguin Watching Tour by Catamaran tours ultimately document is a shoreline that has changed remarkably little since the Beagle's officers first drew it.
5 hr
