These spellbinding stories of adventure and discovery are populated with explorers, fortune hunters, revolutionaries, seafarers, ship's captains, and smugglers. But the undeniable protagonist in all nine stories is nature itself. Southern Chile, the world's end, with its severe beauty—cold, treacherous, desolate—finds its ideal poet in Francisco Coloane. In his stories, this stern landscape rises like a definitive symbol of the elementary and ceaseless drama of human conflict.

Francisco Coloane is a master storyteller, deftly distilling the universal from the particular and the extreme. But no abstraction of this kind can do these tales justice. Their enduring beauty lies in the forceful, gripping narrative and the elements that drive it: men's crimes and passions, and the land's breathtaking glory and murderous wrath.