For all those who have suffered

from the paroxysms of Planet Earth . . .

And for those curious ones who render

its behavior ever less mysterious.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS LIST

DRAWINGS

Signal Post Hill

Analemma Chart

Darwin’s Sketch of the Plains at Puerto San Julián

Darwin’s Sketch of the Terraces in Valley of Río Santa Cruz

Sketch of Darwin’s concept for formation of the stepped plains of Patagonia

MAPS

North Wales, 1831

Chile—Valdivia to North of Concepción

Montevideo to Bahía Blanca

Patagonia and Santa Cruz River Route

Valparaíso/Santiago/Mendoza

Chiloé Island and Surroundings

Glen Roy

North Wales, 1842

Earthquake, Magnitude 8.8, February 27, 2010

A Note on Quotations, Spelling, and Names

In the nearly two centuries since the voyage of the HMS Beagle, styles, spelling, and conventions in both English and Spanish, as well as geographic names, have changed, leading to consequences ranging from quaint amusement to downright confusion.

In the quotations from letters, journals, articles, and books from the period, I have tried to maintain the original spelling and punctuation. Spelling was not as standardized then as it is now, and Darwin himself was not a particularly good speller. His confusion with compass directions offers a hint of dyslexia. The punctuation and construction in his notes and letters reflect the style of the times, but are also to some extent idiosyncratic. Among Darwin’s correspondents, Charles Douglas, an Englishman, residing on the Chilean island of Chiloé, may be the worst speller ever to allude to Milton’s Paradise Lost, although Douglas likely didn’t have the opportunity for an education to match his native intelligence. To capture the spirit and tenor of the times I have tried to preserve these mannerisms, quirks, and foibles—warts and all—only interfering when the meaning is obscured.

Geographic names and their spellings present another set of problems. The country that we now know as Chile, was sometimes referred to as Chili. The city in Chile and the island in the Cape Verde Islands, both now known universally as Santiago, were referred to in English as St. Jago. In 1834, shortly after the departure of the Beagle, the name of the city on Chiloé Island, previously known as San Carlos de Chiloé, was formally changed to Ancud. The standardization of the spelling of some geographic names derived from Mapudungun and its relatives, the languages spoken by the native peoples of south-central Chile and Argentina, remains a work in progress. The translation of the sounds hua and hui are particular problems. What was called Huafo Island by Robert FitzRoy and Darwin, is now Guafo Island. Huamblin Island is now Guamblin Island. Darwin and FitzRoy also used English names for several places for which Spanish names are commonly used today. In quotations and where the meaning is clear, I have used the names in the original sources. Where confusion might arise, I have used the modern name.

In the U.K., Welsh and Scottish place names present their own special charm to those of us speakers of English who have not grown up with them. For me—a product of the State of Washington—Seattle and Suiattle, Snohomish and Skykomish, all roll off my tongue, but Betws-y-Coed catches me up short.

Another possible source of confusion is that there are several rivers named Río Negro in South America. The two that I mention herein, are first, the most important river of Uruguay, and the second, a river farther south in Argentina, in northern Patagonia.

I have tried to provide a path for the reader through this linguistic and nomenclatural obstacle course that is, at the same time, true to the original, yet also intelligible to the modern reader, especially to one who is familiar with the modern names or who may wish to consult a map or atlas. I beg the reader’s forgiveness for any shortcomings or lapses that may remain.

Last but not least, and as unlikely as it might seem, the two men that I met at the potato field in Lipimávida, Chile—one the owner, the other the overseer and laborer who was caught in the tsunami of 2010—as well as a school administrator in Tirúa were all named Don José Luis. To avoid confusion, and with apologies to both, I refer to two of these gentlemen by their last names, the land owner in Lipimávida as Señor Ruíz, and the school administrator in Tirúa as Señor Montero.

PROLOGUE

A Peculiar Obsession

His eyes told the story. Dark eyes, rimmed with red. Sad, weary, haunted eyes. They didn’t tell the whole story, not by a long shot. But one person’s story, his story.

Behind us across the dunes I could hear the muffled crash of breakers on the beach. We stood in the jumble of his yard, strewn with scattered piles of boards and odd bits of furniture. Don José Luis, a slender, lanky man with a slight stoop, wore a broad, flat-brimmed straw hat. It shaded those eyes from the sun. He was not so much old as worn. His slow gait, his roughened hands, his deeply lined face patched with gray stubble, spoke of work in the potato field a hundred yards down the road. A man of the countryside, Marco later said. His small, pink one-story house lay before us, twisted off its foundation, reminiscent of Auntie Em’s house from The Wizard of Oz, windows boarded, one wall patched with fiberboard. But the eyes of Don José Luis—mournful, downcast, remembering eyes—those eyes told his story of the tsunami.

Marco pulled out his notebook and began the interview. Don José Luis spoke quietly and slowly, answering Marco’s questions. I looked on, struggling to follow the colloquial Chilean Spanish. Marco read his notes aloud as he wrote, checking them with Don José Luis for accuracy. On the night of February 27, 2010, José Luis Díaz Farías was sleeping in his house located only a few yards from the sea. Between three and four in the morning the ground began to shake. It was a large earthquake that lasted about two minutes. It moved the whole house, making it jump, he said. After the shaking stopped, he checked on his neighbor next door. Then he and his sister, Mercedes, began to prepare some coffee to calm their nerves.

Why didn’t you go up the hill when you first felt the earthquake? Marco asked. This after all is the first tenet of tsunami education and understanding tsunamis. Helping the people of Chile to prepare for them is Marco’s passion.

Nobody told us, Don José Luis said. Nobody told them. Marco and I shook our heads later as we repeated his words.

As they fixed the coffee, suddenly, through the window his sister saw the sea was rising.

I was surprised to see her move so fast, he said. He tried to follow her, as she ran across the road toward the hill, but his legs would not move as quickly. He couldn’t keep up. The first wave of the tsunami caught him as he was crossing the road, the water rising to his knees. Then the water began to recede, tugging at his legs, dragging him out to sea. He grabbed the branches of a large bush and held on. Held on for dear life.

Finally escaping the grip of the receding water he made his way up the hill, joining his sister. Together, they watched the second wave approach, seeing it clearly thanks to the full moon. This wave rose much higher than the first, already carrying debris. A horrific din rumbled through the night, the roar of breaking wood and glass, as the wave crushed and shattered the houses along the road.

We walked around the remains of Don José Luis’s house lying akimbo off its foundation, one of the few nearby that hadn’t been completely washed away, and continued a few yards down the road. A hedge of bushes rose above our heads. Don José Luis stopped at a gap in the hedge. Here, he said, showing us the branch. The branch that saved his life. He grasped the branch, and looked to the sky, reenacting his salvation.

Marco Cisternas and I had come to the tiny settlement of Lipimávida along the Chilean coast to study the effects of this devastating tsunami. It was neither our first visit here, nor to the potato field where Don José Luis earned his living. But it was our first since the giant earthquake and tsunami. On visits before the earthquake we had found a layer of black beach sand buried four feet down in the potato field, the trace, we suspected, of a historic tsunami. But we had harbored doubts. Was the buried sand layer evidence of a tsunami, or of something else? We puzzled through all the possibilities that we could think of. Now a fresh layer of sand covered the potato field. Slabs of asphalt, ripped from the road, lay tossed about like dry leaves scattered by an autumn wind. Nearby beach houses lay in shambles, or just gone, completely washed from their foundations. Our doubts ebbed. Our suspicions about that buried layer of black sand were almost certainly correct. It had been deposited by a tsunami.

And tsunamis at Lipimávida now had a human face—the sad, red-rimmed eyes of Don José Luis.

One hundred and seventy five years before, two other inquiring men began their study of a similar earthquake and tsunami, possibly the very tsunami responsible for the layer of sand buried in the potato field at Lipimávida.

That day, February 20, 1835, dawn broke peacefully enough. The small but stout sailing ship HMS Beagle bobbed gently at anchor near Valdivia, Chile, about 350 miles south of Lipimávida. Her sails were folded and stowed below. Her three straight masts, jutting bowsprit, and bare angular rigging contrasted sharply with the soft green tangle of rain forest lining the banks of the estuary. The tide flowed out as the sun rose. Ripples lapped at the Beagle’s sides as she tugged at the cables holding her, creaking softly. The pungent, organic smell of sea life and the squawking of gulls hung in the still, austral summer air. Onshore a few hundred yards away rose the massive stone block walls of Corral Fort. The fort, almost in ruins, its cannons more a hazard than a threat, belonged to a string of decaying fortresses built by the Spanish to defend the town of Valdivia, ten miles up the Calle-Calle River. But this morning, so serene at its outset, would end rather differently, and for none more so than for the young man who would become the Beagle expedition’s most famous member, its unofficial geologist, Charles Darwin.

Arriving ten days before, the Beagle crew had set up an observation point on the shore near the fort. Based in tents, the officers carried out a familiar suite of measurements: determining angles to the sun and stars, the direction and intensity of the magnetic field, the time and height of the tide, all to the exacting standards of their captain, Robert FitzRoy. In their whaleboats and cutter, the crew plied the surrounding waters, making soundings with pole and lead line to measure the water’s depth, and mapping the details of the coast, noting especially rocks and shoals that could present a hazard to an unwary ship. Their bosses at the British Admiralty envisioned that these charts and observations would facilitate British merchant trade with the newly independent Republic of Chile.

The officers ashore carefully gauged the altitude of the sun to determine the precise moment of noon. They compared this moment with the time back at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, read from an array of carefully tended, wind-up chronometers on board the Beagle—chronometers suspended in gimbals and packed in sawdust to insulate them from shipboard jarring and changing temperature—painstakingly determining the longitude at the observation point. A reference for their local map, this longitude would also become a link in a chain of observations of longitude circling the globe. Their results near Corral Fort differ by only about three miles from what would be determined in a few seconds by a GPS (or more formally, Global Positioining System) receiver today.

At 6:00 A.M. the ship’s meteorological log reported an air temperature of 59°F (it would rise to 67°F by noon) and a water temperature of 59.5°F under a blue sky with drifting clouds. Later FitzRoy and some of the officers ran errands in town along its wooden-paved streets. A sketch made by one shows a few residents of the sleepy town ambling through the small plaza beneath the twin bell towers of the modest church, an old man with a broad-brimmed hat and a cane, a boy chasing a stray dog with a stick, a woman carrying a bowl on her head, an abandoned two-wheel cart parked nearby.

In late morning, Darwin lay not far away taking a rest from his explorations in the woods. Perhaps he was just relaxing, or maybe suffering from his disappointment at the obstacle to studying the geology of the region: the dense, green, broad-leafed rain forest covering the countryside and obscuring the underlying rocks.

But at 11:40 A.M., the unnatural swaying of the trees of the forest, the creaking of buildings in town, the rumbling of a giant earthquake, jolted them all to attention.

Darwin came to quickly, recording later in his journal, It came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes; but the time appeared much longer. The rocking of the ground was most sensible . . . He was perhaps two hundred miles from the source of the earthquake, so the shaking where he sat in the forest was much less intense than at points closer to the center of destruction.

In town, FitzRoy also felt the shock, At Valdivia the shock began gently, increased gradually during two minutes, was at its strongest about one minute, and then diminished. He too had no difficulty standing, but the houses waved and cracked . . . All the dwelling-houses being strongly built of wood, withstood the shock.

The light wooden buildings in Valdivia withstood the shaking fairly well. Later a man and a woman, apparently trying to take advantage of the unusually low water level to gather shellfish across the bay from the Corral Fort, drowned when the waters of the small tsunami rose more quickly than they had anticipated. But as Darwin and FitzRoy would learn in the days ahead, the towns of Concepción and Talcahuano, much closer to the source, were not so fortunate. The earthquake shattered the brick and adobe buildings of Concepción, and the waves of the tsunami dashed what was left of Talcahuano after the shaking calmed. When the Beagle arrived twelve days later, both towns lay in ruins.

Through the weeks that followed, Darwin and FitzRoy recorded every detail they could find about these peculiar and terrifying geologic events. Thanks to Darwin and FitzRoy this earthquake would eventually become the pivotal evidence for the nineteenth-century notion of how continents rose from the sea, of how even the most dramatic of the earth’s features, including the mighty Andes, were formed; the uplift caused by this earthquake one more step in their skyward ascent, the vera causa for this great range, in vivo.

The earthquake on February 27, 2010, struck the same area, had similar consequences, and was a near repeat of the earthquake in 1835. I learned of the earthquake from CNN as I ate powdered sugar doughnuts in the breakfast room of a Holiday Inn Express in southern Arizona. I was on a bicycle tour with my wife and some friends, to escape the winter weather of Colorado, and to pay back my wife who’d suffered winter in Colorado as I’d spent January enjoying summer in Chile.

I’d spent that January as I’d spent the two previous winters—and would spend the six succeeding winters—following the geologic footsteps of Darwin and FitzRoy in southern South America. I roamed Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, and tramped across the Andes. My aim was to explore the geologic legacy of Darwin and FitzRoy, to try to understand how these geologic pioneers had interpreted what they saw—then still in the early days of the science, to fast-forward to the present to consider how the same phenomena are interpreted today, and to reflect on what this kind of science has meant, and will continue to mean for the people living on our planet. Now Darwin and FitzRoy’s earthquake had happened again.

But I am getting way ahead of the story. Let’s get a couple of things straight.

First, I am a geologist. I’ve spent a career studying earthquakes. I’ve earned my living puzzling about them. They fascinate me. I’m an earthquake guy. But it’s not just earthquakes. It’s mountains and glaciers and volcanoes and floods and sea level and climate. I am captivated by the way the earth changes. How it’s changed in the past and how it will change in the future. And, in truth, it’s not only geology. It’s how Homo sapiens deals with these changes in particular.

Second, until middle age I knew almost nothing about Darwin, FitzRoy, or the Beagle expedition. I didn’t know that Darwin had joined the expedition to serve as its geologist, or what the two men had achieved in their investigations of the earth.

A decade ago, indulging my passion for wild places, I went on vacation to Patagonia. For reading material I took along Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. I hiked among the jagged teeth of the Torres del Paine in southern Chile. I climbed to the glaciers at the base of the sheer granite monolith named for FitzRoy. I traversed the dry plains of Argentine Patagonia. I cruised the waters of the Beagle Channel. I was in a geologist’s heaven. On buses and during evenings I read Darwin’s groundbreaking descriptions of the wondrous geology he encountered; from the immense to the microscopic, of the landscape of Patagonia, of fossil shells from a shallow sea now at nearly 14,000 feet on the crest of the Andes, and of tiny bubbles frozen in a volcanic bomb—a lump of lava that exploded during the eruption of a volcano on Ascension Island in the Atlantic. When I came home to Colorado, I kept reading.

While I was amazed at Darwin’s powers of observation, I was even more impressed by his ability to synthesize and explain what he saw. I also became intrigued by FitzRoy, his fellow explorer, who, although not strictly speaking a geologist, was fascinated by science, even though he later reverted to Biblical explanations for the origin of the earth. The two men seemed to embody the sense of inquiry and adventure that had drawn me to geology in the first place, but had been missing in my nearly forty years of sitting in front of a computer screen, attending tedious meetings, and supporting other geologists who experienced the challenges and rewards of working in the field instead. Had I taken the wimp’s way out, focusing on quantitative analysis and management, instead of confronting geology face to face? I needed to find out if I could do it too. Even though my own fascination with the earth had been kindled in the field, I had drifted away.

The seeds of this passion initially began to sprout in the summer before beginning ninth grade. I had the chance to join a ten-day hiking trip with a group of Explorer Scouts into the wilderness of the North Cascade Mountains near my home in Seattle. One day, leaving the evergreen forest, we climbed above the tree line through meadows of blooming pink heather, finally reaching bare rocks at the foot of a glacier. We camped among stark boulders that seemed to shout that they had only recently escaped the clutches of ice. The next day, beginning before dawn, we trekked across the glacier, with crampons and ropes, to climb Glacier Peak, one of Washington’s less-known volcanoes. Approaching the summit we climbed above the glacier onto a ridge of sandy ash and loose, rotten pieces of lava, riddled with small pits and holes, like chunks of sponge frozen in stone. Even to a fourteen-year-old kid, it seemed pretty obvious that these rocks had cooled from a froth during an eruption. I grabbed a few, threw them in my pack and carried them down, even as the day turned into one of the longest and most arduous of my young life. We returned to our camp near dark, exhausted.

During the following school year, in a class on the geography and history of Washington State, the teacher listed the state’s volcanoes. He did not include Glacier Peak. I raised my hand to object. Mr. Davis, a short, chubby, well-liked teacher with a horseshoe of white fringe surrounding his shiny pate—his real claim to fame was that he played music on a saw at school assemblies—dismissed my arguments summarily. Unbowed, in the notebook that each of us had to prepare as individual class projects, I Scotch-taped a tiny chip of the lava, evidence to support the position of the young smarty pants. Today volcanologists view the resumption of explosive eruptions at Glacier Peak as a serious possibility.

Later in high school, intrigued by the mechanics of glaciers, I even tried to make a working model of a glacier out of a big slab of raspberry Jell-O resting on a tilted sheet of plywood. The experiment proved a dismal failure and the subject of great hilarity to the teenage friend who witnessed the Jell-O slide down and off the plywood with a disappointing plop. But from there—trying to understand how a glacier moves—it really wasn’t all that big a step to puzzling about earthquakes.

As a university student, I was seduced by the exactitude of mathematical models away from the critical analysis and synthesis of observations. Now five decades later, I traded my chair in front of a computer for a sleeping bag and a trenching shovel to get back to the field. Here it makes a difference whether the sun is shining or the rain is pouring down, the air still or the wind howling. And here I could learn by experiencing and seeing the geology—the coasts, the mountains, the rocks, the rivers, the dirt—for myself, directly, rather than by taking someone else’s word for it. I became obsessed without really being able to explain why, or what I hoped to learn, but I was hooked once again. I wanted to try my hand at parsing the landscape, to understand its history and development as Darwin had done.

This path would lead me across southern South America, and also to Snowdonia in Wales and Glen Roy in Scotland; to mountains and beaches; to caves where both ancient Patagonian people and now-extinct giant ground sloths lived only several thousand years ago; to dimly lit archives filled with scholars silently leafing through ancient documents; to the church in Wales where Darwin’s college girlfriend lies buried; and to the teatro municipal in the Chilean village of Maullín filled with chilenos seeking answers to questions about their own experiences with an abruptly changing Planet Earth, their lives once again jolted by a giant earthquake; to my meeting with Don José Luis, and to his haunting eyes, looking skyward, seeking answers; and to reigniting my own passion for understanding the earth and Homo sapiens’s place upon it.

CHAPTER ONE

The Lieutenant and the Beetle Collector

If ever I left England again on a similar expedition, I would endeavour to carry out a person qualified to examine the land; while the officers, and myself, would attend to hydrography.

—Robert FitzRoy

Geology is a capital science to begin, as it requires nothing but a little reading, thinking & hammering.

—Charles Darwin

For one week each December, members of a rather strange subspecies of Homo sapiens stride the morning streets of San Francisco. Thousands of them. Some might be hard to distinguish from the general population, maybe a touch more in need of a haircut, a few more beards among the men, the older ones perhaps a bit tweedier. Many, perhaps most, are easier to pick out. These wear Gore-Tex or fleece jackets from The North Face, Mammut, or Millet, and hiking shoes. Eyes rimmed by glasses, many bear backpacks or messenger bags. Their ages run from young to old, almost as many women as men. Some speak German to those hurrying beside them, others Italian, French, Japanese, Spanish, and many, Chinese. But even the English speakers seem to communicate in a patois of familiar and unfamiliar words. They all scurry purposefully along the sidewalks from the BART, the Caltrain, the buses, and from the less expensive hotels of the city, all in the direction of the Moscone Center.

The dead giveaway is the tube.

Carried under their arms, held in their hands, or slung from a strap over their shoulders, these three-foot-long tubes—brown, orange, or white cardboard, black or gray plastic—provide a sufficient, if not necessary, condition for a positive identification. Rolled in each of these tubes is a form of scientific communication unknown in the time of Charles Darwin—the poster.

The members of this subspecies are all headed for a kind of convention, an unusual convention for San Francisco. Taxi drivers report that the hookers take vacation for this week each year, the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). What truly defines this subspecies is a passion for understanding the earth, its insides and out, its surroundings in space, how it got to be the way it is, where it’s going in the future, and even, increasingly, the creatures and vegetation that grow upon it. These geo-ists (as in geochemist, geomorphologist, geophysicist, geobotanist . . .) come to listen to and to give talks, to view and present these posters, and, of course, to network.

These are scientific descendants of Charles Darwin and his captain, Robert FitzRoy of the Beagle expedition. It would be nearly impossible to find a single one of the presentations of the more than ten thousand at the meeting this year, that could not be traced (perhaps in some cases a little tortuously) to something that Darwin or FitzRoy wrote.

The problem is that so many have so much to say; the posters offer a partial solution. In contrast to a proper lecture, familiar to Darwin and FitzRoy, with tea, or perhaps after dinner, the presentation of these posters seems more like a combination of window shopping, a science fair, and speed dating. Rows of poster boards divide an immense exhibit hall at the Moscone Center into long aisles. Each presenter tacks his or her poster onto a preassigned space measuring four feet high by six feet wide. The poster typically contains too much text to read, but through a mix of words, graphs, maps, photos, and equations, describes some incremental advance of science. As the presenters stand in front, ready to explain, expand, and extol, the attendees stream past, stopping to read, chat, and sometimes challenge. Crowds gather at popular posters, blocking the aisles. The din of thousands of simultaneous conversations makes verbal communication difficult.

I’ve been coming to these meetings for four decades, to listen, to talk, to get new ideas, and to meet old friends, but this year I have a different mission. I must reach outside my comfortable circle of colleagues to try something that I haven’t done before. This morning, as I join my fellow attendees on the crowded streets, I am headed for Moscone West, a massive metal and glass monument that is proof—despite the insinuations of twenty-first-century technology to the contrary—that human beings actually do want to meet face-to-face. My mission is to inveigle an invitation, an invitation that could spirit me away from this myriad of subspecialties and posters, and back to geology in the raw.

The AGU attendees represent different tribes, each with its own idiom. A certain kind of etiquette guides this intertribal event. Each attendee is most comfortable powwowing with the other members of his or her own tribe; there the jargon is familiar, the common assumptions already agreed upon, the agreements and disagreements well-established, and knowledge of the tribal hierarchy, its history, and its foibles taken for granted. Cross-tribal interactions remain a sought-after, but elusive goal.

My own tribe, the seismologists, a large and domineering bunch, have planned dozens of arcane sessions with titles like Rethinking Seismicity Declustering and Earthquake Source Inversion Under Scrutiny: Validation, Resolution, Robustness. Instrumental, rather than personal, on-the-spot observations are our thing. Other tribes, such as the paleoseismologists and tectonic geologists, are more field-oriented geologists who rely more on their own senses, rather than fancy gadgets. They sometimes refer to us as black-boxers, to them a pejorative term.

But if I hope to get my feet into the footsteps of Darwin and FitzRoy—to truly bolt from my computer screen and reconnect with the essence of my profession—I must hop over these tribal boundaries. I want to join a real geologist, someone who is working in the field in South America on a problem related to one that intrigued Darwin and FitzRoy. I have been thinking for weeks and asking around. Now I have a lead. I am seeking out an acquaintance, Brian Atwater, a field geologist, and a very good one, who has worked on earthquakes and tsunamis around the world, but for me most importantly, in Chile. I’ve been acquainted with Brian for many years, but I don’t know him well. I could have emailed him, but I wanted to do this in person. I’ve heard that he is planning a return trip to Chile. I need a few quiet moments to make my case and pop my question: Is there any chance that he might let me come along?

I slip into the back of a cavernous lecture room to listen to a series of talks about giant earthquakes of the kind that affected Sumatra in 2004 and southern Chile in 1960. As one speaker concludes, I notice out of the corner of my eye, my prey leaving through a side door. This is my chance, I think, as I race after him. Exiting the dark lecture room into the brightly lit corridor, I call after him, Hi Brian, do you have a minute?

Brian stops and turns, smiling politely, his eyes crinkling. What’s up?

The gray creeping into his short curly hair and closely cropped beard only hint at Brian’s high status within his own subtribe of field geologists, the paleoseismologists, not to mention his inclusion in Time magazine’s list of the one hundred most influential people of 2005, a list that also included a then-little-known senator from Illinois, a future president of the United States.

I hear that you are going to Chile, I blurt out, and I was wondering if there is any chance that I might tag along? stammering some of the reasons for my interest.

¿Hablas español? he asks.

"Un poquito [a little bit]," I reply, stretching the truth.

Chileans will like that use of the diminutive, he chuckles, explaining that the trip is not yet for sure, but that it might be possible for me to come. He’ll know in a few weeks. He will be in touch. In the meantime, he is meeting for lunch with some colleagues to discuss planning a future meeting in Chile to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the largest earthquake since the birth of seismology, the great Chilean earthquake of 1960. He suggests that I might want to come along. I instantly agree.

Of course it’s not for sure, but I feel like I’m already on my way. I’ve taken the first, and possibly most difficult step.

The 1820s—as Darwin and FitzRoy were coming of age—saw the British Empire settling into its Imperial Century, an unrivaled global power. Its Royal Navy ruled the seas. The notion of the white man’s burden flourished as a component of Britain’s image of itself, even if Rudyard Kipling wouldn’t write his poem for another seventy years. Back then geology amounted to little more than a new arrival, a captivating toddler, among the sciences. Physics had its Newton; chemistry its Lavoisier; but perhaps geology’s best candidate up until then, James Hutton—who credited natural processes with the structure and composition of the earth’s crust—wrote such cryptic prose that his ideas were not yet fully appreciated more than two decades after his death. Now Adam Sedgwick, Charles Lyell, and a vibrant band of English geologists were gathering momentum. But none of these come to modern lips as easily as Newton.

It’s not that geology landed like a meteorite from the cosmos and led the canal builder William Smith to make the geologic map of England and Wales that he finished in 1815, the triumph of practical science that Simon Winchester describes in The Map That Changed the World. No, as with almost everything in the history of science, one can find the fingerprints, albeit a little smudged by the passage of time, of both the Greeks led by Xenophanes and Aristotle, and the Persian, one-man MIT of the eleventh century, Avicenna. Two factors came together to get the ball of modern geology rolling in the nineteenth century, however. First, the Industrial Revolution brought practical needs to dig up useful minerals from mines—coal, iron, and copper—and to make big holes in the ground, like the construction of canals that William Smith supervised and provided the stimulus for his map. And second, the Age of Enlightenment allowed the curious to freely inquire about what the rocks and sediments had to say about how the modern landscape formed . . . and to question the Biblical version of events.

One central Biblical issue was the Deluge, the flood that tossed Noah and his ark around in the book of Genesis. Were the deposits of rocks and gravel scattered all around the countryside dumped at once, the result of Noah’s great flood; or accumulated from many floods, large and small? (Some even argued that the complexity was just God’s way of throwing the proto-geologists off track, a strange idea that has resurfaced in the arguments of the antievolutionists.) Was the earth shaped by apocalyptic cataclysms, or by processes going on all the time, processes that continue to the present day? These two points of view received fancy names: catastrophism and uniformitarianism. Ultimately FitzRoy would come down on one side, Darwin on the other.

In December 1831, the HMS Beagle set sail from Plymouth, England, on a voyage around the world. Only one of numerous expeditions launched by the British Admiralty during this era, it would take almost five years. Notwithstanding its impact on science, the voyage of the Beagle had a very practical purpose: to make nautical charts. Up until this point, the British lagged behind the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and French in navigation and mapmaking. Britain had neither the incentive nor the technology to produce her own. Sir Francis Drake sailed around the world using not only captured Portuguese and Spanish charts, but also unfortunate Portuguese and Spanish pilots whom he kidnapped, then abandoned along the way. As late as the mid–seventeenth century, English seafarers suffered the indignity of being forced to use Dutch charts for navigating their own coasts and harbors.

The art and science of navigation involves finding the way from one place to another. Generally this requires knowledge of where you are, and a chart showing the location of your destination, the best ways to get there, and the places that might pose dangers along the way. Today we all learn in grade school about latitude, the angle measured north and south of the equator, and longitude, the angle now measured 180 degrees around the globe east and west from Greenwich, England. We learn that we can read these arcane coordinates off a map. But how does one learn the latitude and longitude of a point on a featureless plain, in a dense forest, or from the deck of a rolling ship far beyond the sight of land? With today’s technology it’s easy, but it wasn’t until the end of the fifteenth century that determining latitude both at land and at sea—using an astrolabe or one of its descendants to measure the altitude of the sun or a star together with an almanac—became almost a piece of cake. And then by the late eighteenth century, the problem of determining longitude was conquered through accurate timekeeping. By comparing the local time from observing the sun or stars, with the time on a precise clock, called a chronometer, kept to show the time at a place of known longitude, the relative longitude could be fixed. In those days, while the English used Greenwich as the reference, or zero point, the French used Paris, and the Spanish, Cádiz. Greenwich was finally adopted as the international standard for the zero meridian in 1884.

Every hour of difference between the local time and the time on the chronometer represents fifteen degrees of longitude. As an example, say you were at the center of the Plaza de Armas, the main square in Chile’s capital city of Santiago. By observing the sun, you determined the exact moment of noon. Checking your trusty chronometer at that instant, you would see that the time in Greenwich was 4:42:36 P.M., and doing the arithmetic you would find a west longitude of 70°39’1.7".

More accurate tools were developed through the 1700s for measuring the angles from the horizon to the sun, moon, and stars (the sextant), and between land-based points (the theodolite). A three-armed protractor, called a station pointer, was invented to facilitate the plotting of a position on a chart from two angles measured between three known points. These new tools supplemented the previous old standbys of mapmaking: the plane table for plotting positions on a piece of paper, the chain for measuring distance, the compass for determining the direction of magnetic north, and the pole and lead-line for measuring, or sounding, water depth. By the 1820s Britain had the tools, the skills, and the imperative to make her own nautical charts.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, as the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies along the southern coasts of South America gained independence—becoming Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay—their markets became objects of intense desire for British merchants. The passage around the southern tip of South America was critical to reaching the resources and markets along the west coast of the continent. The need for accurate charts of these coasts (at this time Bolivia still had one) became acute. Spain guarded her nautical charts as state secrets; they were available neither to Britain’s Royal Navy nor to its merchant fleet. In 1823 the British Admiralty broke from tradition and allowed distribution of its own Admiralty charts to merchant vessels. Then in 1826 the British Admiralty targeted southern South America for new surveys and chart making, and launched an expedition under the overall command of Captain Phillip Parker King aboard the HMS Adventure. The expedition also included the HMS Beagle, then under the command of Captain Pringle Stokes.

From a base at dourly named Port Famine (now Puerto de Hambre), about halfway through the Straits of Magellan at the southern extremity of mainland South America (near what is today Punta Arenas, Chile), Stokes and his men sailed west toward the Pacific Ocean, mapping the rocky and treacherous coasts. Stokes’s journal tells the story of sunken rocks, dreary landscapes, heavy clouds, violent gales, mountainous seas, incessant rain, constant danger, and a sick crew. Around us, and some of them distant no more than two-thirds of a cable-length [about four hundred feet], were rocky islets, lashed by tremendous surf; and, as if to complete the dreariness and utter desolation of the scene, even the birds seemed to shun its neighborhood. And then the punch line, "The weather was that in which (as Thompson [sic] emphatically says) ‘the soul of a man dies in him.’"

Sitting one day in sunny Colorado, I sought out a copy of The Seasons, by James Thomson, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet, from which Stokes quotes this last line. As Stokes read the Winter section of the poem, with its descriptions of the fierce-conflicting brine, a thousand raging waves, winds across the howling waste, it must have rung all too true to his surroundings. The whole section of the poem, including the line that Stokes quoted in his journal likely epitomized both his dismal environment and his deteriorating state of mind, and seems to portend the means he used to resolve his plight.

. . . Thus Winter falls,

A heavy gloom oppressive o’er the world,

Through Nature shedding influence malign,

And rouses up the seeds of dark disease.

The soul of man dies in him, loathing life,

And black with more than melancholy views.

Even through all the years and miles, I could glimpse his despair.

Stokes found the work exhausting, the weather abysmal, the loneliness of command unbearable. In August 1828, caught in the vise of depression, and alone in his cabin, Pringle Stokes shot himself in the head. He lingered for eleven days, a pistol ball embedded in his brain. When the end came at last, his crew buried him nearby at Port Famine, where his grave may be found today.

King, the expedition commander, spent much of Stokes’s last days by his side, trying to comfort him, and, during his periods of lucidity, extracting what he could about Stokes’s progress on the mission. He learned that the responsibility for much of what had been accomplished lay with Lieutenant William Skyring. He named Skyring acting captain of the Beagle. But upon return to Rio de Janeiro, Admiral Robert Otway, commander of the Royal Navy fleet in South American waters, overruled King, and named his own golden boy, his Flag Lieutenant Robert FitzRoy, to the job. In Otway’s consideration, FitzRoy scored off the charts in two key categories: merit and connections. A brilliant, hardworking young officer, he also had serious pull through his upper-crust family connections in military and political circles, what the young naval officers of the day called interest or a handle to his name.

Members of FitzRoy’s family were, and indeed still are, aristocrats. From a puritan American perspective, it seems a bit odd that a family that traces its roots to the licentious romping of a bawdy king would be blue-blooded aristocrats. But that’s the way it was, and is. One needs look no farther than the late Princess Diana to find a modern aristocrat who shared FitzRoy’s lineage from the same wild seed. Of their mutual ancestor, Charles II, a friend wrote:

Restless he rolls from whore to whore

A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.

Despite these indelicate roots, and the name to prove it (FitzRoy after all means son of the king), through the