I continue to be impressed by the excellent Sunday services conducted by our cruise director Heather.  They are jewels!  I even found myself signing up for the bible study held once during each sequence of sea days and led by one of the passengers, and I attended Monday morning.  It’s not actually bible study per se but rather reading and discussing a book centered on the Bible.  We are going to begin Because he loves me by Elyse Fitzpatrick, which I do not know and have not yet tried to download to my kindle given the erratic wifi.  We shall see…

Darwin and Insomnia.  While cruising from the Falkland Islands to Valparaiso, Chile, we traversed the Beagle Channel and much of the Magellan Strait; and saw majestic fiords as Cynthia has already described.  During the passage, I’ve been (re)reading Charles Darwin’s account of his voyage on HMS Beagle (1832-1836), which covered more or less the same route.  As the Beagle’s naturalist, at age 23 and fresh from studies at Cambridge University, his account and collections of geological samples and examples of extant and fossil animals and plants from Patagonia form the bases for his seminal work on the origin of species.  The collections are now housed at Cambridge and the British Museum. 

     Of course, these days Patagonia is warmer, more populated and much less pristine and exotic than it was more than 180 years ago, and I find it difficult to imagine Darwin’s travels from his rich and colorful 19^th century prose.  And his descriptions do go on and on and on.  As several biographers (most recently, his great grandson R. D(arwin) Keynes) have noted, Charles Darwin from childhood onwards compiled lists of things he had seen or collected….and descriptions of his Beagle collections are very detailed.

     Often during the cruise when I am having trouble sleeping, I get up and read a section of his travel account and I find the “tangled bank” (one of his favorite metaphors) of his detailed prose, well, soporific.  For Darwin, however, what he saw was new and exciting, and his travel notes form the inductive foundation for his speculations and experiments during the 20 years following the end of the Beagle’s voyage.  During those decades he reworked his Beagle notes, discussed them and his nascent ideas with his friends, enlarging and synthesizing his data and revising his thoughts.  Moreover, he initiated studies at his home, which included barnacles, earthworms, pigeons, and dogs.  What an incredibly rich life!

     For me, the details are not so new, and the South American locations and creatures have changed too much.  I do, however, enjoy following his footsteps and I welcome the drowsiness the tangled details induce! —Chris