In the 19th Century, South America, which had once attracted the gold seeking Conquistadors, became the happy hunting ground for quite a different breed of explorers: the travelling scientists. They spread over the sub-continent, recording, mapping and measuring its natural treasures.
Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882
The most famous of these visitors was Charles Darwin, later to write Origin of Species and propose the theory of evolution. Darwin visited the coasts of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and Peru in the Beagle on which he served as naturalist. It was largely as a result of his observations on this trip which lasted from 1831 to 1836 that Darwin developed his new theory of evolution.
Henry Bates 1825 - 1892
Very similar, in its own way, was the experience of Henry Bates. One of the great explorer naturalists, Bates went out to Brazil in 1848 intending a short visit, but he was so enthralled by the tropical rain-forest that he stayed over seven years. While collecting insects in Amazonas, he noticed that some insects tended to adopt the same colours and shapes as other insects which were unpalatable to natural predators such as birds. This gave the "copycat insect" a degree of protection against its enemies, and this process was named "Batesian mimicry" in Bates' honour. Undaunted by the physical dangers, he would wander by himself through the forest draped with collecting boxes and scientific equipment. When he came home to England, he had collected 14, 712 species of insect, 8,000 of them previously unknown.
Baron Alexander von Humboldt 1769 - 1859
Baron von Humboldt was another of the great scholars fascinated by the lure of travel in South America. Humboldt, who came from a wealthy land-owning Prussian family, devoted his fortune to science. In 1799 he arrived at Venezuela with a large collection of scientific instruments and a brilliant botanist-zoologist, Aime Bonpland. The two men travelled slowly across South America, collecting and cataloguing their finds, examining their specimens in a mobile laboratory and filing them in special travelling cabinets.
Said to have been the most famous man in Europe after Napoleon, Humboldt travelled widely in South America, Europe and Asia. His observations of natural phenomena laid the foundations of modern geography. He was interested in everything he could observe and measure scientifically: animals, plants, ocean currents (the Humboldt current off South America is named after him), geology, and climate. His collection of specimens numbered over 60,000, many of them new to science. While climbing Mount Chimborazo, Ecuador, he set a world altitude record that lasted 36 years.
Sources:
- Desmond, A and Moore, J.(1992) Darwin. Penguin Books
- Smith, A (1993) Explorers of the Amazon. University of Chicago Press
Linda Smallwood - Hi my name is Linda Smallwood. I am married with two sons aged 13 and 11 and live in North Wales. After 18 years working for The ...
