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By Root 665 0

scene—a deep blue harbor surrounded by wind-tormented desert plains. The ship’s recently hired artist, a friend of Darwin’s named Conrad Martens, found himself with little to sketch as the Beagle lingered. “The country is bare and desolate in the extreme,” Martens wrote in a letter to his brother. Wood for fires was hard to come by, and worse still, the water was brackish and so full of bacteria that Martens felt the need to purify it “with certain proportions of brandy.” Putting down his sketchbook, Martens picked up his shotgun and strolled out most days to exercise the local wildlife—simultaneously killing time and animals. Part of the benefit of his activity was to provide some food for the rest of the crew. The Beagle diet generally consisted of anything caught or found that tasted better than salted beef and pork, and at Port Desire this alternative menu included gulls, shags (cormorant-like birds even less appetizing than gulls), sharks, mussels, limpets, and land crabs.

The other benefit was scientific. Martens could bring his animals back to Darwin for inspection, and if they piqued the naturalist’s interest, he would send them back to England for classification. It was on a run-of-the-mill January afternoon meal-seeking excursion that Martens unwittingly handed Darwin one of his greatest finds.

Locals had told Darwin several times of a smaller version of the South American ostrich, or rhea, which supposedly roamed the plains of southern Patagonia and which Europeans had never seen before. (The northern plains were full of regular ol’ “greater rheas.”) Darwin r e cognized that finding this “avestruz petise” would be a major feather in his species-hunter cap. He also knew that the French government had recently dispatched a man named Alcide d’Orbigny to collect animals in South America, and Darwin worried in letters home that this s i nister competitor would “get the cream of all the good things” before he did—most especially the small rhea.

Martens knew nothing of this Anglo-Gallic battle for ostrich-discovery supremacy. Upon seeing a small bird while pacing the plains, his first thought was that no one from the Beagle had successfully hunted an ostrich of any kind, and so, meaning to become the first, he tracked it, snuck up on it, and got his shot. The rhea fell and Martens grabbed it, slung it across his shoulder, and headed back to camp to hear his praises sung. Not only had he brought back the first ostrich, he had brought back an undeniably tasty dinner.

Darwin, like the other crew members, was pleased. He had sampled rhea before and compared the flavor and texture to beef, and after a cursory examination of Martens’ bird he absentmindedly concluded it was your typical large rhea, only a juvenile variety. It was “skinned and cooked before my memory returned,” he later wrote. When he realized his error he managed to gather “the head, neck, legs, wings, many of the larger feathers, and a large part of the skin,” and shipped these back to England, where naturalist John Gould confirmed that these bits and pieces constituted a new species and gave it the name Rhea darwinii. “M.A. d’Orbigny,” Darwin observed dryly when he got home, “made great exertions to procure this bird, but never had the good fortune to succeed.”

In this small matter, though, Darwin was wrong. D’Orbigny (who Darwin hailed in The Voyage of the Beagle as an “indefatigable” collector) had, in fact, not only apparently discovered the smaller rhea—he had already named it the Rhea pennata, which is the scientific name used today. But by virtue of Darwin’s greater status (or possibly just to avert another hundred years war), the bird is still commonly known as the Darwin’s rhea.

The Darwin’s rhea story was the first story that made me see how much humor, irony, and brilliant accident there was in The Voyage of the Beagle. Imagining Darwin’s “transport” as he rushed about gathering dismembered bird parts in order to keep them out of the cooking fire made me laugh the first time I read it, at a hostel dining room table in Chile, and again