Portrait Cove, Beagle Channel, 1834
Watercolour
This watercolour was worked up from a sketch Martens made on the spot on 1 March 1834. The Beagle party had encountered alarming groups of Fuegians, the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. Darwin wrote in his Journal, 'I shall never forget how wild and savage' they appeared: 'absolutely naked' and sending forth 'the most hideous yells.' The scenery was of a 'peculiar and very magnificent character' – the mountains rising to 'sharp and jagged points' above the 'dusky-coloured forest.'
National Maritime Museum, London
Santa Cruz River and Distant View of the Andes, 1834
Watercolour
Martens joined the Beagle party and made many pencil sketches of the sights they encountered in South America in 1833 and 1834. The sketches chosen by the ship’s commander, Robert Fitzroy, formed a basis for finished watercolours like this one, and some were subsequently engraved as illustrations for Fitzroy’s Narrative of the Voyage (published in 1839). Darwin himself bought two of Martens’s watercolours in 1836, including another version of this design. Martens’s impression of the desolate landscape of the Santa Cruz is close to Darwin’s account in his Journal of Researches: 'The level plains of arid shingle' supported only 'stunted and dwarf plants.' Encountering volcanic stones further upstream, Darwin speculated on the powerful forces that had shaped the valley 'in the lapse of ages.'
National Maritime Museum, London
