Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [20]
Outside the wind was making things miserable, but from inside the van, it had the effect of clearing the air and opening the view. We could see across the harbor to the cliffs on the other side, where Darwin had “geologized.” Walker pointed out the different sedimentary layers and told me the age of each.
“The point is called Punta Asconapé,” he said. “Point Shingle.” His English was good—he spoke it fluently—but for whatever reason, he chose not to talk to me in English unless it was directly relevant to his lesson.
“I think this point was named by FitzRoy after talking to Darwin,” he said. “Darwin wrote while he was here about the accumulation of pebbles from the Andes on the plains, called shingle. FitzRoy named that Point Shingle, for Darwin.”
Walker was unafraid to offer his own opinion about the city’s history. I had gathered from reading newspaper stories about the Victoria replica that this did not always make him popular—he was inevitably labeled “the revisionist historian Pablo Walker”—although when I asked him about this, he shrugged and said it was mostly politics.
We drove around the base of Monte Wood. I told him I’d climbed it on Sunday and he said he also had climbed it, a few hours after I had. “Windy up there,” I said.
“And it was calm in town on Sunday,” he agreed. “Today, you wouldn’t be able to stand.”
“It makes sense that Darwin climbed it,” he added, without prompting. “It was the highest point. If he wanted a view, he would have climbed it.”
He slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. “See the penguins?” he said, pointing at an island in the bay. Small groups of six or seven penguins stood around, wings slightly raised in a gesture that—and here I could be anthropomorphizing just a little bit—indicated confusion.
“In the right season, there are 75,000 penguins on that island,” Walker said. “Right now, the only ones who are still there are the ones with problems. Maybe they’re sick. But if they’re still there in a few days, it’s very likely they’ll die.”
The island appeared on maps as Cormorant Island. Walker suggested that it was the real Island of Justice—and that the place that bore the label of Isla de la Justicia was not. He suggested that the English captain George Anson mixed up the map of the harbor, confused some of his compass directions, and so reversed the islands.
“When the tide is high, Isla de la Justicia is very small,” he said, as evidence. “It’s only about fifty meters across. There’s almost nothing there. But look at this island, it’s much larger.”
“But can’t you find Drake’s rock on Isla de la Justicia?” I asked, referring to the rock on which Drake had carved a Latin inscription to commemorate the execution of the mutinous sailor.
“If that actually was the real Isla de la Justicia, which I don’t believe it is, yes, you might,” he said. “But no one has. And it’s been five hundred years now.” Walker said he remembered Bruce Chatwin, the author of the famous travelogue In Patagonia, visiting San Julian in the 1970s. Chatwin devoted a paragraph to his own unsuccessful search for Drake’s rock. (Chatwin, not a Darwin aficionado, wrote succinctly, “I passed through three boring towns, San Julian, Santa Cruz, and Rio Gallegos.”)
Leaving historical mysteries aside for the moment, Walker again stopped the van at a small rocky point called Cape Curious. We got out and walked along the rocks, which were overflowing with fossil mussels and small shells. “These rocks are about 40 million years old,” he said, pointing out different layers in the cliff. We walked along the cliff, peering at different kinds of fossils, for a few minutes. The wind picked up speed and blew the tops off the breakers, sending a plume of spray forty feet into the ocean. Sand got in my eyes even though I was wearing sunglasses. I felt it stick to my ears and neck.
When we got back in the car, I grunted. “The wind