Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright Page
Introduction
PART I - EXPLORATION
1. BRAZIL - A Chaos of Delights
2: PORT DESIRE - Darwin’s Rhea
3: PORT SAN JULIAN - The Patagonian Myth
4: RIVER SANTA CRUZ - The Terribly Uninteresting Land
PART II - REVOLUTION
5: ENGLAND - One Last Frozen Image
6: SALVADOR DA BAHIA - Beginning and End
7: LA PLATA - In Darwin’s Muddy Footsteps
8: TIERRA DEL FUEGO - Darwin Visited (Near To) Here
9: BAHIA BLANCA - The Gaucho Lifestyle
10: SIERRA DE LA VENTANA - Cerro Tres Picos
PART III - DISCOVERY
11: CHILOÉ - Charming Green Things That Don’t Ooze
12: VALDIVIA - The Apple Story
13: CONCEPCIÓN - Shaken, Not Stirred
14: PISCO ELQUI - Demon Cactuses
15: ANDACOLLO - The Gold Mine
16: BELL MOUNTAIN - From the Pacific to the Andes
17: AMOLANAS HACIENDA - Darwin Slept Here
Acknowledgements
INDEX
For my parents
This edition first published in the United States in 2009 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
WOODSTOCK:
One Overlook Drive
Woodstock, NY 12498
www.overlookpress.com
[for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]
NEW YORK:
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 2009 by Eric Simons
All ri ghts reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without p ermission in writing from the publ isher, except by a reviewer who wishes to qu ote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
PHOTO CREDITS: Frontispiece painting of Charles Darwin by George Richmond; painting on p age 11, HMS Beagle at Tierra del Fuego by Conrad Martens; photos on pages 27, 43, 55, 79, 97, 109, 121, 133, 165, 177, 197, 17, 225, and 241 © Eric Simons
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Book design and type formatting by Bernard Schleifer
eISBN : 978-1-590-20542-6
http://us.penguingroup.com
Following Darwin a Southern South America
INTRODUCTION
The World’s Most Famous Iguana Hurler
Happiest at home with his notebooks and his microscopes.
—INTRODUCTION TO AN EXHIBIT OF DARWIN ARTIFACTS NEW YORK MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, MAY 2006
EVOLUTION HAD DONE THE THING RIGHT. The marine iguana of the Galapagos Islands swam well. Dined well. Lounged well. It basked in the sun, it munched seaweed, it strutted out for an occasional constitution-improving swim, all until one cloudless, sweltering September afternoon in 1835, when a young man stepped ashore and ruined everything.
Charles Darwin had not yet conceived the theory of evolution by natural selection. Five months shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, tall and thin and already distinctively heavy browed, he had not yet acquired a reputation as a scientist, had not yet published a celebrated travelogue about South America (or an influential treatise on tropical corals), and had not yet had a species of ostrich named after him. His visit to the Galapagos came at the tail end of a five-year trip around the world, and it did not act on him as one of those Sistine-Chapel-ceiling, hand-meets-hand kind of moments. But Darwin was in the midst of a travel-induced transformation, combining his childhood love of exploration and biology with an increasingly sophisticated ability to catalogue nature. When he published The Origin of Species twenty-four years later, it was notable for the meticulous observational detail Darwin used to support his theory. For someone who delighted in scientific inquiry, the reptilian megafauna swarming the Galapagos was a scaly, ugly, crawling—and terrific—learning opportunity.
Darwin spent one day studying tortoises, chasing them, riding them, and upending them to see if they could right themselves. He spent another day with the marine iguanas, and it was not a good day to be