Big bad surf

Almost every coast of the world is visited periodically by violent surf, but there are some that have never known the sea in its milder moods. "There is not in the world a coast more terrible than this!" exclaimed Lord Bryce of Tierra del Fuego, where the breakers roar in upon the coast with a voice that, according to the report, can be heard 20 miles inland on a still night. "the sight of such a coast," Darwin had written in his diary, "is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, and shipwreck."

-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 123