Before Punta Arenas there was Rey Don Felipe, and it ended so badly that its nickname swallowed its name. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a Spanish navigator, soldier and chronicler, first sailed the Strait in 1579–80, sent from Peru after Francis Drake had slipped through it. He took possession for Spain and pressed the king to fortify it.
He got his way. Early in 1584 he founded Nombre de Jesús, near the eastern mouth, and on 25 March the town of Rey Don Felipe, on the Brunswick Peninsula. Storms drove his ships away, and in May he sailed off in the last one to fetch help. He never came back: in 1586 English ships captured him and took him before Queen Elizabeth I, and on his way home through France he was held for years while his ransom was raised.
The roughly 300 settlers he left behind died of hunger and cold. In 1587 the English corsair Thomas Cavendish found the ruins and a few survivors, and named the place Port Famine: Puerto del Hambre. The ruins, a national monument, lie about 56 km south of Punta Arenas, beside Fuerte Bulnes.
