To the Edge of the World by Harry Thompson

Author:Harry Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M P Publishing Limited
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part TWO

Chapter EIGHT

Valparayso, Chili, 2 November 1834

‘Raise tacks, sheets an’ mains’l haul

We’re bound for Vallaparayser round the Horn!

Me boots an’ clothes are all in pawn

An’ it’s bleedin’ draughty round the Horn!’

So sang the crew, with a surge of relief, as the Beagle and the Adventure finally drew a line under the year’s surveying and headed for the sanctuary of Chili’s warm, fruit-laden valleys – except that, of course, there was no longer any need to proceed via the Horn.

They had repaired the damage to the Beagle’s keel by running her up to the Rio Santa Cruz in Patagonia and beaching her in the estuary, where a forty-foot tide swept in and out. Laid up on the sands amid a crowd of disgruntled sealions, the little ship had assumed the proportions of a leviathan, her fat, glistening, slimy belly towering above the crew, as if she might subside and suffocate them were she to breathe out. While Carpenter May and his team set to work, FitzRoy had mounted an expedition upriver to try to reach the Andes from the east. Amid swarms of persistent horseflies, they had man-hauled the whaleboats against the icy current for three back-breaking weeks, using track ropes fastened to lanyards made from broad canvas strips. For two hundred and fifty miles they had pulled, up a lonely, twisting glen lined by black basalt cliffs. The countryside around, if one could call it that, was a featureless plain of volcanic lava, punishingly hot by day and freezing by night, its ebony sheen flat to the horizon. But the river had cut deep into the lava: the ravine up which they slogged was three hundred feet in depth and more than a mile across. Beady-eyed condors stood sentry on their basaltic battlements, but otherwise there were precious few living creatures to be seen. There were Indian tracks about their camp in the mornings, though, evidence that they had been thoroughly investigated during the night. Here, well south of the front line against General Rosas, it appeared that the white man constituted a mere curiosity and not an adversary to be feared. There were puma tracks, too, for the Indians were not the only lords desirous to know who had intruded into their land. As with the Indians, the men on watch had seen and heard nothing, not even a rustle in the reeds.

In silence the party trudged upriver, each man feeling the curious self-consciousness that comes from the knowledge of being watched. The Andes came in sight, and the river assumed the milky blue colour characteristic of glacial melt, but thereafter the mountains seemed to maintain a constant distance, refusing to come any closer. The men stood in their echoing glen and gazed at the distant snowy peaks, knowing that they had become the first Europeans to behold this view, but knowing also that they could go no further. It was, thought FitzRoy, a wild and lonely prospect, entirely fit for the breeding-place of lions.

Whether it was

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