And thus begins our trip to Antarctica, South Georgia Island, and the Falkland Islands. Yesterday evening we boarded the Caledonian Star and departed Punta Arenas, Chile, on the Strait of Magellan. Early this morning we entered the Beagle Channel. In 1832 the survey ship H.M.S. Beagle, Captain Robert Fitzroy in command, entered this narrow channel to complete its charting for the Royal Navy. Aboard as ship's naturalist and Captain's dining companion was a recent graduate of the University of Cambridge: Charles Darwin. The thought process that Darwin began on the voyage of the Beagle was to shake the foundations of science and society.
The Beagle Channel is part of a system of fjords carved by the glaciers that covered much of both the northern and the southern hemispheres during the Pleistocene Epoch. Even today glaciers push out from ice fields in the mountains above us (the Darwin Cordillera) to reach the sea at the head of the fjords. One of these is Garibaldi Fjord, which became our afternoon destination. We boarded our Zodiacs for a cruise along the shore, and there we encountered a colony of South American sea lions. There were females still nursing their pups of the year, immature animals, and a few adult bulls, easily identified by their large size and the very heavily built head and neck that is used in battles with other males for control of a harem of females. Now, breeding has been completed for the year and all was peaceful. Peaceful but not quiet, as a variety of squeals, bellows, and roars echoed off the rock wall behind the colony. Nearby a dead sea lion pup provided a meal for an Andean condor, the huge black and white vulture of the southern mountains
