Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [14]
We drifted by the cliffs and then motored over to an island in the middle of the estuary, where Perez estimated there were 25,000 penguins hanging out. Magellanic penguins on land are some of the world’s most ridiculous creatures; they waddle, they flap their wings futilely, they cock their heads and look at human intruders with expressions of such confusion and incomprehension that you can’t help but burst out laughing. (There’s a rumor that if you stand in front of a penguin’s path as it’s trying to exit the water you can seriously harm it, because it will just stand there, stumped, until you move out of its way, by which point it will be suffering from the cold.) Perez beached the boat and the passengers all wandered off in different directions in the pinguinera, poking around in the grass, stalking penguins with cameras, and sitting on the beach having tea while birds strutted around us.
When we got back into the boat, I resumed my Darwin focus with an examination of the area geology. Numerous small inlets and dry creeks snaked up from the estuary, lightning-bolt shaped cracks in the pink rock. Beyond the water’s edge it was fairly desolate, with acres and acres of wasteland dotted with small thorn bushes, yellow clumps of prickly grass, and a howling wind that whipped across the land and turned the water into froth.
As we motored back toward town, Perez started clandestinely pointing out Darwin sites to me, taking his opportunities while the others gazed the opposite direction at birds. Perez swung around to face the distant head of the inlet, where Darwin and others had camped while exploring a maze of pink-rock cliffs. Closer to town, in a patch of sapphire water in mid-estuary, he idled the motor and identified the spot where the Beagle had anchored. “The ruins of the fort that Darwin mentioned would have been right about there,” Perez said, pointing landward at a flat mound of rock rising behind rusted fishing boats. I watched a group of dockworkers tossing silvery fishing lines off the back of an industrial ferry. The estuary glittered around them under a glaring, cloudless sky. Perez paused for a moment. “Of course,” he said, “now it’s all gone.”
I was disappointed, and it wasn’t until quite later that I realized that I’d got it all wrong. I’d felt separate, even smug, about looking for Darwin sites on a boat full of missionaries, and disappointed when those Darwin sites turned out to be mostly gone, and I’d forgotten the point of my trip. Instead of celebrating my evolution-enlightened superiority, I should have talked to the missionaries about what we all—including my long-dead naturalist—had in common: a love of nature, exploration, and travel, and a desire for the thrills that all people find in chasing white-legged-something-or-others. That’s not just a way to bridge a gap between a 20-year-old skeptic and 60-year-old evangelical, it’s a way for everyone, religious or not, to better understand the real Darwin. Who, if he had been along with us on the boat ride, would have been down at the end of the boat with the missionaries, checking out the birds.
3: PORT SAN JULIAN
The Patagonian Myth
Port San Julian was the dramatic site of the most notable acts of first contact between the white man and the Argentine land, and in its barren beaches was written, with the blood of natives and Europeans, the first pages of the dark prologue of Argentine History.
—PABLO WALKER, PUERTO SAN JULIÁN, ORIGEN DEL MITO PATAGÓNICO
THE BEAGLE’S CAPTAIN, ROBERT FITZROY, had decided in 1833 to hire a second ship to help speed the survey of the Patagonian coastline. After several months of hard work he was getting antsy, and he had come