Charles Darwin – The Voyage of the Beaglefriend and in the employ of Charles Darwin after they returned to London and until he
migrated to Australia in 1839.
From Carmen de Patagones at the mouth of the Rio Negro, Darwin undertook
a long overland journey of 960 kilometres back to Buenos Aires and subsequently
another 960-kilometre journey up the Parana River from Buenos Aires to Santa Fe
and back. Darwin revelled in these journeys, travelling on the open plains, hunting for
deer and ostriches, living with the gauchos, meeting with the armies of General Rosas
who were putting down an Indian revolt, and in his diary he writes of the pleasure of
living in the open air – ‘with the sky for a roof and the ground for a table’. During
his excursions across the Argentinian pampas Darwin seems to regularly find, or is
regularly directed to, outcrops containing the fossilized bones of animals many of
which are extinct, but are also related to existing species:
It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest
astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere
pygmies, compared with the antecedent, allied races ... What, then, has exterminated so
many species and whole genera? The mind at first is irresistibly hurried into the belief of
some great catastrophe; but thus to destroy animals, large and small in both South and North
America, we must shake the entire framework of the globe ... Certainly, no fact in the long
history of the world is so startling as the wide and repeated exterminations of its inhabitants.Travelling the plains, Darwin saw many examples of the rhea or South American
version of the ostrich, which were hunted for
food by gauchos using their twirling bolas which
are thrown around the rheas’ legs to render them
immobile. The large rhea is abundant on the
northern plains of Argentina but the smaller one
is more common in the south. It was in Patagonia
that his crew shot a small rhea and it went into
the cooking pot. It was half-eaten before Darwin
realized it was a new species that he wanted for
his collection, the bones were quickly pieced
together and the animal was subsequently named
Rhea darwinii in his honour.
During the first voyage of the Beagle, Robert
FitzRoy had taken four Fuegian natives hostage
after the ship’s whaleboat had been stolen while
Rhea darwinii, Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagleby John Gould, 1873, The in Tierra del Fuego. The boat was never recovered
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