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South America

The Brazilian rainforest was overwhelming to Darwin

Darwin’s encounter with South American nature was overwhelming for the young naturalist. Darwin’s notes present a vivid description of his continuing and undisguised admiration of everything he experienced. “Joy does not begin to describe the emotions going through a naturalist as he walks alone in a Brazilian rainforest for the first time”, he later wrote in his travel reports. But this was only the beginning.

One of the remits of the HMS Beagle was to make precise surveys in order to make the nautical charts as precise as possible. This meant that the same routes were travelled several times, and there was no reason for Darwin to be on board all the time. He was therefore allowed to travel into the country a number of times, which lead him to many important adventures and discoveries in South America. In Punta Alta in Argentina, he made a major fossil find, which showed obvious similarities to living species. He compared animals across continents and discovered that the same species differed from one area to another, and that it was not necessarily the same animals that occupied places with similar living conditions. In Chile, he experienced an earthquake and the devastating consequences that followed. He became more and more convinced of nature’s incredible powers and the accuracy of Lyell’s observations that everything he saw in nature including mountains and seas were the result of natural processes taking place over a very long period of time.

Peter C. Kjærgaard