Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [21]
“Probably sixty or seventy kilometers per hour,” Walker said. “It can reach up to one hundred.”
The ocean was heaving and looked remarkably like the picture that the Beagle’s ship’s artist, Conrad Martens, had drawn of the harbor. The idea of being out on a small boat in that wind didn’t appeal to me at all, and I can imagine Darwin’s sensitive stomach finding it quite disagreeable. Darwin didn’t mention seasickness, although his entry from January 15 reads: “A heavy gale of wind from the SW; several breezes from that quarter have reminded us of the neighborhead of Tierra del Fuego.”
Walker and I continued driving around the cape to an Atlantic beach, where the remains of British carbon mines still stood in the cliffs. Walker pointed out carbon on the beach; long stretches of black rock that broke off easily. “It’s not very good quality,” he said. “But the rocks here are very metallic. Feel how heavy this is.” He picked up a rock and handed it to me, and my arm sagged under the weight. When I dropped it, it made a metallic plink on the other rocks.
We walked along, looking at more fossils. “This is the oldest formation here,” Walker said, pointing out to the end of the beach. “Seventy-five million years old.”
I could see Darwin walking the same beach, delighted by the profusion of fossils. We saw football-sized mussels, long-since extinct. We saw sand dollars—“these are also forty million years old,” Walker said, “but you still have live ones in North America, right?”
The cliffs were lined with fossils up to heights of forty or fifty feet. We walked out to the point, Walker leaping between rocks and striding purposefully across the beach, each time with a specific thing in mind to point out. He had obviously given this lecture a few times before.
Finally, we came to the end and looked out at the raging ocean and up at the fossil cliffs.
“Sadly,” he said, “that’s all the time I’ve got today. Back to work.”
He drove me back to the university and there he gave me a short historical paper he had written. With nowhere to go, and relieved to have some human company in an otherwise lonely town, I stuck around and started to read his history, while Walker and another professor hunched over a plastic model airplane, which they had positioned in front of a beige sheet under a set of bright camera lights. They had a small camcorder on a tripod pointed at the airplane, and they turned this on and filmed for a while. Then they moved the camera over to an editing station where Walker cut the plane out and inserted it into a video shot earlier at the Port San Julian airport. The second professor pulled out a thermos and started passing around tea while they settled in to watch the finished product on a pull-down screen. The screen went dark, then flashed the title, “Pilotas de las Malvinas.” And then dramatic action music started, a mix that sounded suspiciously like the theme to Hollywood action blockbuster The Rock. A quick zoom caught a heroic pilot walking across the tarmac in his jumpsuit. Another zoom captured his manly jaw and hard, squinting black eyes. He looked determined as he walked past a set of warlike planes parked in the hangar—a live action male striding purposefully past the plastic model that Walker had inserted only a few minutes ago. I looked at the raised canopy on the parked planes and then over at the raised fake-glass canopy on the model at the other end of the room.
This was weird, the kind of thing I used to do when I was twelve years old, not the kind of thing I had expected in an academic setting. But there was a huge qualifier: This was a film about the Falkland Islands War. And when the Falklands are involved, in Argentina at least, normal feeling doesn’t really enter into it.
A brief historical diversion concerning the small island group off the coast of southern Argentina: On March 1, 1833, the Beagle arrived at Port Louis, in the Falkland Islands, after a long journey through Tierra del Fuego. “The first news we received was to our astonishment, that England had taken possession