Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [12]
I also tried to think, off the top of my head, of another species named after the Europeans who first ate them, which turned out to be a short list. I stopped looking out the window for a while and looked around at the interior of the bus. The rest of the passengers clearly didn’t share my enthusiasm for the small, dusty-brown bird’s history. Most were shrimpers. They were silent and burly and presumably interested in, well, shrimping. The commercial fishing season had just started, and fish and fishing had occupied the prime real estate above the fold of the Patagonian newspapers for the last week. The land being as desolate as it was, it seemed natural that most of Patagonia’s residents focused instead on what was in the water.
When we arrived in Port Desire, and the shrimpers had trundled off to the area around the wharves, I found that the town that inspired Martens to pack away his paint-brushes for a week was now even less picturesque. Despite its location at the edge of a major inlet, there was almost no public waterfront. All the land along the coast had been given over to fish processing plants, navy bases, and shipping containers. Massive freighters rusted into the water, roped together like yoked oxen in front of storage lots full of Maersk and Hamburg Sur containers.
In the late 1700s, the Spanish tried to settle in the area around Port Desire and, as with many of their settlement endeavors in southern Patagonia, failed for lack of water. When Darwin arrived the city was just a ruin on the edge of a big estuary, crumbling and unpopulated, although many of the buildings kept what the naturalist called their “good style.” “The fate of all the Spanish establishments on the coast of Patagonia, with the exception of the Rio Negro, has been miserable,” Darwin wrote.
Port Desire didn’t fare much better for another seventy years, and not until the beginning of the twentieth century did it become established as a fishing town and naval base. The town today has a population of 12,000 but retains a deserted, Old-West ghost town feel. Wandering down the main drag at noon, it seemed quite possible that I was the only tourist for miles around. Not only was it an out-of-the-way and, frankly, largely uninteresting place, but it was the tourist low season, when most of Patagonia sits back to take a nap and admire the tumbleweeds and rheas drifting across the plains. My hotel, one of a handful in town, was seemingly the social center of the city, full of visiting fishermen who took their breakfast around 5 A.M. and were asleep by the time I returned in the evening.
Posters around town advertised an excursion company called Darwin Expeditions, so with nothing else to do, I called to see if they could help me find a Darwin’s rhea. I hoped that an expert could not only help me positively identify the smaller rhea, but could put them in context, and tell me more about the birds of Port Desire. But in the low season, Darwin Expeditions only ran boat trips around the harbor. Pressed with my request, the guide, Ricardo Perez, offered a seabird-and-penguin watching cruise, but added that the minimum number of people to do a boat ride was four, and that no one had signed up yet, and that the bus I’d come in on—the one that had been full of non-tourist shrimpers—was the only bus of the day to arrive in town. I hesitated, then decided that even the small chance of a boat ride beat wandering around town studying fish processing plants