Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [23]
4: RIVER SANTA CRUZ
The Terribly Uninteresting Land
Already is the change of weather perceptible. Every one has put on cloth cloathes & preparing for still greater extremes our beards are all sprouting. My face at present looks of about the same tint as a half washed chimney sweeper. With my pistols in my belt & geological hammer in hand, shall I not look like a grand barbarian?
—FROM A LETTER TO SUSAN DARWIN, JULY 1832
FEW TRAVELERS ARRIVE IN RIO GALLEGOS intentionally. The last mainland stop before the Strait of Magellan to the south, and the capital of Argentina’s far-southern Santa Cruz province, Rio Gallegos huddles around one main street, named after the minister of war who carried out a ruthless extermination campaign against the Indians. (His name and title, General Julio Roca, makes him the intimidating-sounding “General Rock.”) It receives a steady flow of visitors who stop there only to leave again, usually a few hours later. In my small residential hotel, instead of the standard introductory “Where are you from?” exchange, waylaid guests greeted one another with: “And where are you going tomorrow?”
Normally, the answer referenced one of three places: Glacier National Park to the east, Tierra del Fuego to the south, or Buenos Aires to the north. From the look of the woman in the Avis rental car agency, the road along the River Santa Cruz was a novel choice. She stared at me like I’d just told her I wanted to drive from Tulsa to Omaha for the scenery.
“Why?” she asked. “There’s nothing there!”
This is why. A few months after leaving Port San Julian—months filled, as usual, with more coastal surveying—Darwin and a crew of sailors from the Beagle journeyed up the fast-flowing river cutting through a roughly 150-mile swath of Patagonia. The river wasn’t then and isn’t now an obvious destination. The previous Englishman to try exploring the river had made it only 30 miles before running out of food. “Even the existence of this large river was hardly known,” Darwin wrote, and it’s still absent in guidebooks—or at least, in the Lonely Planet and Rough Guide I carried with me. As I read the footnotes in my edition of the Beagle diary, I found that Darwin and his shipmates had gone further up the river than any previous European explorers, and had nearly discovered its source, a huge and now touristy lake in the glacier-lined mountains near the Argentine border with Chile. Since then, while the lake had boomed, adding an airport and a major highway that connected it back to Rio Gallegos to the southeast, the area along the river had been sectioned off into expansive, open sheep ranches. Based on my map, the finest I had been able to find at the nearby gas station, the road running along the river’s edge seemed in places to be entirely theoretical and was marked mostly as unimproved dirt.
Before he actually arrived there, Darwin thought this great open spaces thing was, well, great. His preconceptions of Patagonia as a wild, unknown land fired his imagination, and his letters home scarcely concealed his excitement. “I long to put my foot where man has never trod before,” he wrote to his sister Catherine, “and am most impatient to leave civilized ports.” In a similar note to his sister Susan, he wrote that FitzRoy had proposed a “glorious scheme” to journey up a previously unexplored river. “I cannot imagine anything more interesting,” he concluded.
In August 1832, Darwin’s correspondence halted abruptly as the Beagle explored the Atlantic coastline south of Buenos