Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [17]
After the dump, the road devolved into a standard Patagonian gravel rut. The air was so dry I could feel my lips cracking after about twenty minutes and the dust from the road settling in my mouth and around my teeth.
On January 11, 1834, Darwin and FitzRoy and crew set off into the same terrain in a search for fresh water, using an old Spanish map. They walked all day but couldn’t find a drop, and FitzRoy became dangerously fatigued. Darwin, who was more accustomed to long hikes, lit out for a lake a few miles in the distance but found to his “great mortification” that the lake was nothing more than “a field of solid snow-white salt.” Upon receiving this news, the crew decided they could do nothing else but return to the ships. FitzRoy, however, could not make it. “About dusk I could move no farther, having foolishly carried a heavy double-barrelled gun all day besides instruments,” he wrote. “So, choosing a place which could be found again, I sent the party on and lay down to sleep; one man, the most tired next to myself, staying with me. A glass of water would have made me quite fresh, but it was not to be had.”
Darwin struggled back to the Beagle with the others and sent back help for FitzRoy and friend. “Towards morning we all got on board,” FitzRoy continued later, “And no one suffered afterwards from the over-fatigue, except Mr. Darwin, who had had no rest during the whole of that thirsty day—now a matter of amusement, but at the time a very serious affair.” Darwin recorded a slightly different version of the day’s events—“I was not much tired,” he wrote in his diary—but he quickly contracted a fever and was consigned to bed for the next two days.
In analyzing the difficulties of that abortive walk, Darwin concluded that the climate had done them in: “as we were only eleven hours without water, I am convinced it must be from the extreme dryness of the atmosphere.”
Someone had erected a fence about twenty yards below the summit, but since there was no one to object, I crawled under the barbed wire and quickly hiked the rest of the way up to the wind-blasted peak. With nothing to shelter behind, I worried that my fifteen-pound backpack would blow away and balanced by hunching at a slight angle into the wind.
The giant metal cross I had glimpsed from the harbor below was made of a steel lattice, and the wind whistling through it made a sound like a subway train passing through a tunnel. I could see all the way down to the town and across the bay to what was purported to be Magellan’s Gibbet and Island of Justice.
I wondered if Darwin had climbed the same hill. It seemed to me almost inconceivable that he would not have, although he never mentioned it by name in his journal (the name Monte Wood was already being used by that time, which we know because FitzRoy mentioned it as the landmark he used for finding the harbor). Darwin did mention climbing two hills while in Port San Julian, the first when he found the wooden cross, and the second where he and FitzRoy first glimpsed the salt flats. Either could have been Monte Wood. Darwin might not have recorded the name in his journal simply because the hill, I had to admit, was not particularly impressive.
The next day, Monday, was a holiday, and I wandered aimlessly around town for a while, hoping mostly that a grocery store would open and allow me to buy my favorite budget traveling meal, bread and cheese. But with the doors still locked and barred at 11 A.M. I gave up and moved on, making a note to think about trying again when the out-of-town buses arrived after midnight. Next, I tried the city history museum, and it was locked, and then I tried the archaeological museum, and that was locked. I tried the tourist information office, where a woman