Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [66]
Josh appeared to need some cheering up, or at least dry socks and a boisterous night out. Back at the hostel that evening, we found a group of recent college grads from Vermont who were celebrating a birthday and talked them into dinner at the Kunstman Brewery—the proud location of the original brewery started by a German immigrant named Philip Andwandter in 1850, where they had been making the best beer in Chile uninterrupted for the last 150 years. The brewery’s menu promised beer that was pure, great-tasting, and “nutritious,” made in accordance with the strict purity laws of Wilhelm IV. We took a taxi.
We ordered two columnas, three-foot-tall lab-style graduated cylinders filled to the 2.5-liter mark with beer. Each had a half-foot-tall wood base and a tap, and measurement markings up the sides.
“Did Darwin visit the brewery?” the graduates wanted to know.
“It wasn’t here when he was here,” I explained. “Although he might have, if it had been.” I shared my conflicting views, which I’d been pondering since Buenos Aires, on Darwin the prude versus Darwin the partier. By most accounts, Darwin was a bit of a boring guy when it came to the social scene. He didn’t like to dance and wasn’t particularly lively or glib. Much more Mr. Darcy than Mr. Wickham. On the other hand, he’d had a sort of unspoken engagement understanding with a girl back in England before he left. She used to write him rather suggestive letters and talk about making a “beast” of herself in the strawberry beds with him. Then he’d sailed away and reached Brazil a few months later where a letter from his sister was waiting for him that said, hey, you know that girl Fanny—guess what? She’s getting married! So Darwin was upset for a while, had a good cry in the rainforest, and then he was single for the next five years. A twenty-three-year-old on a long voyage with frequent city visits in the company of a bunch of sailors. But then, I told the Vermonters, Darwin wasn’t a sailor. He was a gentleman. He was along on the trip primarily because FitzRoy needed another aristocrat to talk to.
“I mean,” I said, “he was English.”
“I had always kind of pictured him dropping his monocle in his wine,” said one of the grads. “‘I say old chap,’ that kind of stuff.”
“He was never like that, I don’t think,” I said. “He walked down the streets of Buenos Aires making jokes about the ‘signoritas.’”
In fact, Darwin did mention drinking in Valdivia. “An old man illustrated his motto that ‘Necessidad es la Madre del invencion’ by giving an account of how many things he manufactured from apples,” he wrote. “After extracting the cyder from the refuse, he by some process procured a white & most excellently flavoured spirit (which many of the officers tasted); he also could make wine.” No hints though as to whether he had dropped his monocle in it and said “I say old chap.”
And once again, apples.
Josh showed little inclination the next morning to face the rain again, so I set off alone to find out what I could about Valdivia’s disappeared apple orchards. The museum guard had told me to come back and ask, but had mysteriously neglected to mention that the museum was closed for the day. I puzzled for a while at the locked doors, thinking, but he told us to return! The locked doors appeared unsympathetic. I started back toward the hostel. As I stumbled across the river bridge in the rain, I looked down and saw the big-top tent of Valdivia’s fluvial market. Sea lions barked and begged for fish at the edge of it, but in the middle, I was fairly certain, there were produce vendors. I wandered in and found a man selling apples, and bought two.
“I read a book that says all of Valdivia used to be covered in apple orchards,” I said. “What happened?”
The vendor stared at me blankly. “What?”
“Where are all the apple trees?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said. “They’re just outside the city now.” He waved off into the distance.
On February 20, 1835, Darwin decided to take a nap in one of those forests in the distance. He settled down and suddenly, the earth started shaking. According