Rio de Janeiro, 4/3/2016, National Geographic Explorer
Aboard the
National Geographic Explorer
Atlantic Isles
‘Good Morning’... somehow Jim Kelley sounds bright and positive even at 5:45 a.m.—that was a little harder for those emerging from an all-too-short slumber after experiencing Rio’s famous samba nightclub, Galeria Scenarium. But by 7:30 a.m. everyone was rolling in different directions, ready to explore the eye opening sights of Rio, including Ipanema beach, a cosmetic surgeon’s carnival.
Floresta de Tijuca national forest proved a delight: claiming the title of “largest urban forest in the world” it bisects Rio, dividing north from south. The sounds of the city cannot be heard, only the views break through the canopy of trees. Plain parakeet, Bananaquit, swallow-tailed manakin showed for the birders. Butterflies, a waterfall, ferns and mosses, and hibiscus creeping, added to the magic of this wild space in Rio.
But most of us headed for Rio’s most famous sights. Christ the Redeemer, spreading his arms in welcome, symbolizes the city. The 19th century cog-railway through the forest clicks through greenery and snatches of views before the final ascent by elevator or foot. Sometimes swirling in mist this great Catholic monument, like Rio’s extraordinary modernist Cathedral, suggests the importance of faith to the city. Then on to the Sugarloaf: reached by a series of cableways, this sentinel at the mouth to Rio’s great bay offered uninterrupted vistas of the hills, waters, beaches, and high skyline of this complex weave of city, forest, elevation, and ocean.
It had been a hot morning, and lunch on National Geographic Explorer, with iced tea, was welcome. Soon the captain put out from the dock, into a weekend scene of sailing boats, past the Sugarloaf, and out to sea on course for another, more distant part of Brazil: Fernando de Noronha.
Originally from the UK, Roderick spent a 'gap year' in a Cape Town township in the late 1980s. A state of emergency was in force, and Roderick was caught up in the revolutionary spirit in South Africa, and at the same time bewitched by the beauty and...
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Steve fell in love with the beauty of the natural world at an early age. In addition to nature, his other main passion was telling stories though the medium of television and radio. Steve studied broadcast jo...
This was the final day of an extraordinary voyage that has brought us some 6,762 nautical miles from Europe via Africa to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. Today we departed Punta Arenas , where the central square has a large monument depicting a proud Ferdinand Magellan surveying a new land imperiously from the shoulders of the native people, tribes of varying ethnicities that Captain FitzRoy of HMSS Beagle later called Fuegian, from their hinterland in Tierra del Fuego . We sailed the Magellan Strait , named after the first European explorer to chart his way through the maze of channels that link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans . Magellan, from Portugal but sailing under the patronage of the Spanish king, took six weeks to navigate these waters, entering the strait on October 21, 1520 near Islas de Virgenes before, in the words of Pigafetta (a Venetian employed to keep a journal of the voyage), “we debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific Sea.” “Pacific” was to be an enduring misnomer, as Magellan was fortunate with the weather. He had become the first European to reach and name Tierra del Fuego , after the fires that the native peoples lit everywhere, including in their canoes. On this day, 487 years ago, All Saints’ Day 1520, he passed through Estrecho de Todos los Santos, before finally, after 373 nautical miles, reaching Cape Desire on November 28th. Our use of the term Magellanic for birds and stars in the southern hemisphere also dates from this voyage. Magellanic penguins, of the kind we saw yesterday at Isla Magdalena, were well described by Reverend Francis Fletcher aboard Golden Hind anchored at Puerto Deseado in 1578: “Great store of strange birds which could not flie at all, nor yet runne so fast that they could escape us with their lives; in body they are less than a goose, and bigger than a mallard, short and thicke sette together, having no feathers, but instead thereof a certaine hard and matted downe; their beakes are not unlike the beakes of crowes, they lodge and breed upon the land, where making earthes, as the conies doe, in the ground, they lay their eggs and bring up their young; their feeding and provision to live on is the sea, where they swimme in such sort as nature may seeme to have granted them no small prerogative in swiftnesse, both to prey upon others and themselves, to escape from any others that seeke to seize upon them; and such was the infinite resort of these birds to these ilands, that in the space of a day we killed no less than 3000.” Francis Drake passed through these waters in that year becoming the first man to successfully lead an expedition of circumnavigation, since Magellan was killed on the island of Cebu in today’s Philippines before completing the voyage. Drake became a Protestant hero to rival Columbus and Magellan in the English national imagination and his patron was Queen Elizabeth, the “Virgin” Queen. As a protestant she felt under no obligation to be bound by the Catholic Treaty of Tordesillas, of which Pope Alexander VI had divided the New World between the two rival Catholic powers of Spain and Portugal. Elizabeth was eager to establish her own colonies in the New World. To strengthen her claims her advisor, Dr. John Dee, leaked various “fake news” stories claiming that the Welsh (the Tudors were a Welsh dynasty as was he) had discovered America before Columbus and that Welsh vocabulary could be found amongst native peoples in the Americas, north and south. In Drake’s widely read account of his voyage World Encompassed (1628) he describes “birds that our Welsh sailors do call penguins.” This particular example has persisted to this day in respectable dictionaries where the etymology of “penguin” is still given as Welsh, pen meaning “head” and gwyn meaning “white.” Unfortunately for Dr. Dee, who had never seen a penguin, they have black heads; the true etymology derives from the Latin word for “plump” or “fat,” for these birds were considered a delicacy by hungry sailors.
Today was a very special day. When we awoke to the beautiful and unnaturally glassy waters of Punta Arenas harbor, we knew our excursion ahead to Isla Magdalena (home of one of Chile’s favorite penguin encounters) was blessed!
We have finally left the open ocean behind. Gone are the tropics, the blue water, and the endless horizon. We awoke today to sunny but cool temperatures and to land! Most people take for granted always seeing land. But for us on this journey it has been a long time. To see distant snowcapped mountains, buildings, trees, and especially cars certainly seemed weird. Like always, the crew bedazzled us with their preparations for Halloween. Delicious pumpkin soup was a good indication of what was going on today. The pumpkin carving contest started it off, with a mind-blowing array of creativity. Soon the costumes appeared, followed by the entertainment……well, you had to be here to understand. It was too incredible to share with those of you who were not here.
