Sandy Supposes....

May 29th Puenta Arenas Day 2

         The seafaring vessels on display at the Nao Victoria Museo fascinate me. I cannot fathom crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard one and surviving in one piece. They are nothing but joined timbers. The storms battered them. The non-stop waves slapped and jostled them. The winds pushed and pulled.

         How impressive that Charles Darwin signed on to the HMS Beagle as a naturalist and spent five years exploring. What an unusual name for a British ship. Was this scientific voyage so named to reflect the superior tracking instinct of this detection dog? An ocean vessel possessed of this canine's attributes could be invaluable. Could it be said that Darwin beagled/sniffed out his discoveries as tenaciously as these hunting dogs?

         I suppose Charles was an eco-tourist before this became a thing. He collected plant, animal and geological samples from every port of call. He kept notebooks filled with his observations. Imagine five years' worth of material stored aboard a ship and ferried back to England. How did it survive salt water, dampness, mould and mildew, insect infestations, raiding rats, humidity and more? This occurred in the 1830s. There were no Ziploc baggies, or resealable plastic containers. Valuable information could not be forwarded to the Cloud for safe-keeping. Were there never crew disputes, grumblings, misunderstandings? No one ever threatened to torpedo his precious papers, or tear them up to make a dramatic point? Not once did The Beagle encounter a storm so fierce that jettisoning unnecessary weight had to be considered? Both Darwin and his five years of accumulated data were preserved?

         I find all of this to be mind-boggling. Darwin and his fellow sailors were tenacious, I'll give them that.