Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [19]
“I’m Pablo Walker,” he said, shaking my hand. “Can I help you?”
I told him that the woman in the tourist office had provided his name and that I was interested in Darwin and the history of Port San Julian.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m working until 5:30, but come back then and we can talk.”
Pablo Walker was still sitting at the video-editing desk when I returned at 5:30. He came over to the desk where I had parked myself and sat down opposite me.
Unsure where to begin, I asked what kind of professor he was. “History?” I guessed.
“Actually, I’m not a professor. I’m just a lecturer,” he said. “I just read a lot. I’m a fan of history.”
“Walker isn’t exactly a common name in Argentina,” I ventured.
“Well, my great-grandparents were some of the first immigrants to come to San Julian, and they had come originally to Punta Arenas from England. I’m the fourth generation to live in San Julian, and my great-grandparents were among the first thirty people here.”
“Are people here interested in Darwin?”
“People are interested because of tourism,” he said. “But you look at the bigger names, like our street names. Like in the U.S. you have Washington, our streets have names like San Martín. We have a Darwin Street, but it’s a secondary street.”
Walker remarked that until three years ago, he had been the tourist director for San Julian. During that time, he had overseen the building of the replica Victoria. It was a hard-fought battle, he said, to keep other tourism officials from turning the Victoria into a Disney attraction, more cartoonish and less historically accurate.
“Now I have a project to build a replica of the Beagle, for a museum,” he said. “Like the Victoria, except that’s more nautical. This would be more of a science museum.”
“What do people in Argentina think of Darwin?” I asked.
“In Argentina, they accuse Darwin of believing Patagonia to be bad land,” he said. “Darwin saw that there was not much life in the interior, but he didn’t see how much life was in the water. He was focused on geology. The coast of San Julian has 75,000 penguins. There are seals, cormorants, dolphins. It’s a bit strange in the case of San Julian that Darwin focused on geology and the land.”
“And do you study him in school?”
“My classes, or in general? In general, we study him, because wherever you are, he’s on the list of ten most influential scientists. In my classes, I teach a bit of the history, and take people to where he was, so they can see, take pictures and understand things that he saw.”
I asked how much time he spent on Darwin in his classes. He said that a course met twenty times during a typical semester, devoting five sessions each to “the four most important things here”: Magellan, Drake, Darwin, and Floridablanca.
“And which of those is your favorite subject?”
“Darwin.”
“It’s interesting,” I said, “that there’s so much history in this one small town.”
He nodded. “The coast of Santa Cruz is very inhospitable,” he said. “There are only five or six places where they have safe ports: Puerto Deseado, San Julian, Puerto Santa Cruz, Rio Gallegos, and Rio Coyle.” He ticked each port off on a finger.
“Of those, San Julian has the best port. It’s small, but for small boats like the Beagle, or Drake, it was perfect. That’s why the history is so concentrated in such a small area. What’s lacking in San Julian is the history before Europeans,” he continued. “There were people here 8,000 to 11,000 years ago. Patagonia has had people in it for longer than Brazil. It’s sad that for the original inhabitants there is nothing to study.”
There seemed little hope, then, in learning more about Magellan’s Pathagoni. Since I had another full day in Port San Julian, I asked Walker what he would recommend I do on Tuesday. “Come back around noon,” he said. “We’ll go out and see the places where Darwin went.”
The next morning dawned clear and bright, with a rampaging fifty-mile-an-hour wind that made being outside nearly intolerable. I met Walker at the university