Arrival: Ushuaia
Arrive into Ushuaia around midday, check in, and take the afternoon to rest before heading out. The first proper stop of the afternoon is the Museo Marítimo y del Presidio, housed in the building of the former national prison — a structure whose five radiating cell-block wings were built between 1902 and 1920 largely by inmate labour. The prison closed in 1947 and was declared a National Historic Monument in 1997; the museum that now occupies it opened in 1995 and has expanded steadily since.
The building contains four distinct collections. The Presidio museum occupies the original cell blocks, where visitors can walk through the narrow individual cells and read about the conditions faced by the roughly 600 inmates who at one point occupied a facility designed for 386. The prisoner history is specific and detailed: the Ukrainian-born anarchist Simón Radowitzky, who assassinated Buenos Aires' chief of police in 1909; the writer Ricardo Rojas; the serial killer Cayetano Santos Godino, known as el petiso orejudo. The labour regime — which included felling timber in the surrounding forests, for which the world's southernmost narrow-gauge railway was built — is reconstructed with particular care, and the locomotive sits in the courtyard. The maritime collection covers five centuries of shipbuilding through a large collection of scale models, alongside exhibits on the Yagán people's bark canoes, the wrecks and expeditions of the South Atlantic, and the seal-hunting and ranching eras. A full Antarctic wing documents the southern expeditions of Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, and Nordenskjöld. An art gallery occupies what was once the prison bakery. The entrance ticket is valid for two days, which removes any pressure to see everything at once.