Puerto Madryn to Falkland Islands

Day at Sea. Basically, a lecture day. Before breakfast, Lee did 10 laps (4 km) on the promenade deck, again battling the wind on the port bow. We met for breakfast and then off to the 11:00am talk to outline tomorrow's Falkland Islands tours.

At 12:30 we went to the pool deck for lunch. The cover was over today, and it was a very warm 29 C. We had a light lunch and then Don went to the cabin to edit some notes and I stayed on deck editing some of our earlier notes. I debated whether to go for a swim but ended up just basking in the sun.

At 4:00pm we headed to the Star Theatre for a talk on the Hubble Space Telescope. It was an informative talk with lots of humour included.

We had a half hour break and the next talk was on the history of the Falkland Islands and how Argentina and Britain fought over the islands. In 1982. Margaret Thatcher sent 124 vessels along with 3 aircraft carriers to take back the islands. The war lasted for 74 days and there were a lot of casualties on both sides. There is still much discussion on the Argentinian side about wanting the Falkland Islands back, but the inhabitants of the Falklands do not want to be taken over; they want to stay as British residents.

We had another ½ hour until the next lecture about Darwin, so Lee went up and got a plate of sushi and Don got 2 glasses of wine. We ate this in the theatre while waiting for the next talk. Gord and Vickie thought this was such a clever idea that Gord also went and got a plate of sushi.

The lecture by Dr. Richard Bates was about Darwin and the HMS Beagle. Charles Robert Darwin was born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England and died April 19, 1882 at Downe, Kent. His mother died when he was 8. Darwin stood in awe of his overbearing father; whose astute medical observations taught him much about human psychology. He hated the rote learning of Classics at the traditional Anglican Shrewsbury School, where he studied between 1818 and 1825. His father sent him to study medicine at Edinburgh University. There was no better science education in a British university. He was taught to understand the chemistry of cooling rocks on the primitive Earth and how to classify plants by the modern “natural system.” At the Edinburgh Museum he was taught to stuff birds by John Edmonstone, a freed South American slave, and to identify the rock strata and colonial flora and fauna. The young Darwin learned much in this rich intellectual environment but didn't learn much about medicine. His father transferred him to Cambridge in 1828. In 1831 he placed 10th in the Bachelor of Arts degree.

Darwin jumped at a suggestion of a voyage to Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America, aboard a rebuilt brig, HMS Beagle. Darwin would not sail as a lowly surgeon-naturalist but as a self-financed gentleman companion to the 26-year-old captain, Robert Fitzroy, an aristocrat who feared the loneliness of command. Fitzroy planned to survey coastal Patagonia to facilitate British trade and return three “savages” previously brought to England from Tierra del Fuego and Christianized. The Beagle sailed from England on December 27, 1831.

The circumnavigation of the globe would be the making of the 22-year-old Darwin. Five years of physical hardship and mental rigor, imprisoned within a ship’s walls, offset by wide-open opportunities in the Brazilian jungles and the Andes Mountains, were to give Darwin a new seriousness. As a gentleman naturalist, he could leave the ship for extended periods, pursuing his own interests. As a result, he spent only 18 months of the voyage aboard the ship.

His fossil discoveries raised more questions and fossil extraction became a romance for Darwin. It pushed him into thinking of the primeval world and what had caused giant beasts to become extinct.

The land was evidently rising; Darwin’s observations in the Andes Mountains confirmed it. After the Beagle surveyed the Falkland Islands, the ship sailed up the west coast of South America to Valparaíso, Chile. Here Darwin climbed 4,000 feet (1,200 metres) into the Andean foothills and marveled at the forces that could raise such mountains. The forces themselves became tangible when he saw volcanic Mount Osorno erupt on January 15, 1835. Then in Valdivia, Chile, on February 20, as he lay on a forest floor, the ground shook: the violence of the earthquake and ensuing tidal wave destroyed the great city of Concepción, whose rubble Darwin walked through. But what intrigued him was the seemingly insignificant, the local mussel beds were all dead because they were now above high tide. The land had risen, the continent was thrusting itself up, a few feet at a time. He imagined the eons it had taken to raise the fossilized trees in sandstone (once seashore mud) to 7,000 feet (2,100 metres), where he found them. Darwin began thinking in terms of deep time.

The Beagle left Peru in September 1835 to continue their circumnavigation home. First Darwin landed on the “frying hot” Galapagos Islands. Those were volcanic islands, crawling with marine life, iguanas and giant tortoises. Darwin and the crew brought small tortoises aboard as pets. Contrary to legend, those islands never provided Darwin’s “eureka” moment. Although he noted that the mockingbirds differed on four islands and tagged his specimens accordingly, he failed to label his other birds—what he thought were wrens, “gross-beaks,” finches, and oriole-relatives—by island. Nor did Darwin collect tortoise specimens, even though locals believed that each island had its distinct race.

They continued home via Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. By April 1836, when the Beagle made the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean, Darwin already had his theory of reef formation. He imagined (correctly) that those reefs grew on sinking mountain rims. The delicate coral built up, compensating for the drowning land, so as to remain within optimal heat and lighting conditions.

On the last leg of the voyage Darwin finished his 770-page diary, wrapped up 1,750 pages of notes, drew up 12 catalogs of his 5,436 skins, bones, and carcasses—and still he wondered: Was each Galapagos mockingbird a naturally produced variety? Why did ground sloths become extinct? He sailed home with problems enough to last him a lifetime. Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after returning from the voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle. It was not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public expression in On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply influenced modern Western society and thought.

Darwin shocked religious Victorian society by suggesting that animals and humans shared a common ancestry. His nonreligious biology appealed to the rising class of professional scientists, and by the time of his death, evolutionary imagery had spread through all of science, literature, and politics. He had a seizure in March 1882 and died of a heart attack on April 19. Darwin was laid to rest with full ecclesiastical pomp on April 26, 1882, attended by the new nobility of science and the state

We had dinner with Vicki and Gord and then we decided to skip the Magician, tonight’s entertainment and called it an early night.Read more