My Last Post

Saturday, 12th September 11.00 AM, Tenerife Airport

The 12-day voyage, comprising the first leg in an epic journey retracing the journey of Darwin’s Beagle, is now at an end. The industrial port of Santa Cruz came into view early on Friday morning. Oversized petroleum vats lined the coast, while lorry ferries busily emptied and refilled their cavernous interiors with freight. The city itself, mostly a concrete carbuncle, rises up from the shoreline, infesting the volcanic rock with asymmetrical tentacles that reach upwards into what seems like a mostly barren, mountainous core.

How different must this place have been in Darwin’s day! Captain Fitzroy rightly ordered the Beagle to set its sails immediately for the islands of Cape Verde without stopping to take a look. A cholera outbreak meant either suffering a 12-day period of quarantine or abandoning the islands to their fate. It was too great a delay and the disappointment of not seeing Tenerife stayed with the ship’s young on-board naturalist for the rest of his life.

Quite whether Darwin would have been so keen to visit this place today is a mute point. Even to my contemporary eyes, accustomed as they are to the realities of modern industrial cityscapes, it was a real shock.

For twelve days we saw nothing solid in the distance except the occasional remote coastline (Spain and Portugal) and the brief, isolated charm of the Selvagens. Close up I had grown accustomed to the view of twisted ropes and rigging, the intricate wooden craftsmanship on desk and those three awe-inspiring masts, towering upwards like giant pencils gently etching indecipherable spirographs on the pale blue canvass above.

This journey had clearly reset my mental horizons, reminding me of how wonderfully plastic is the human mind.

From a distance, the sight of the volcanic island of Tenerife looked majestic enough, rising out of the calm, still sea. But then, as the ship got closer, ugliness quickly intervened. My spirits sank. What’s that – a car? Well, of course! Traffic, lorries, containers, rusty steel hulls…. concrete – nothing natural to se been at all.

I determined to spend the day trying to find something beautiful that could redeem this ruined place. Burt and Hanneke, the paleontologist heroes of the fossil hunting expedition, volunteered to lead a trip to the city’s Natural History Museum. John Francis, Marten, from Dutch radio, and I tagged along. At lunch John introduced us to Moquitos, a Cuban lime and rum cocktail. It tasted divine. We ordered more… Despite the ugliness all around, my spirits, literally, began to rise…. I guess that’s one type of fix.

The museum was big – but sterile. Stuffed animals and drawers of lanced insects complimented an endless array of large, bleached backlit photos interspersed with various noisy, jiggling videos. There was also a lot of writing – which may have redeemed the displays - but it was all in Spanish. Burt was impressed, though, because, he said, “the data was good”. Somehow, I needed more. For me, museums must excel at telling stories. My best bit was a piece of sliced but petrified wood – the colours and the texture reminding me of what that ever so powerful collaboration of nature and time can achieve.

The museum did help me get orientated, though. I discovered that these Canary Islands rose from the seas between 20 and 5 million years ago. Volcanic eruptions provoked by the shifting of tectonic plates (Africa moving north, I believe) was their Earth mother. Human settlements only appeared in about 1,500 BC – before which time, these were places untouched by human hands.
Later I realized that the beauty I craved for was back on the boat. The ship's masts stood in tall defiance of all that modern ugliness. The sails, carefully tied up by the dedicated crew, were all ready to be unfurled for a future wind. Such an intricate symbiosis of wind, sails and seas seemed like a tiny piece of a long-lost jigsaw puzzle, one that truly belonged to Darwin’s world…

The inner beauty was in our friendships, sculpted within the intimacy of such a small space, surrounded by the infinity of the seas. My great uncle Christo used to tell me how easy it can be to make old friends quickly. We certainly did that. Goodbye all you “wet” Beagles, too many to mention all by name. What fun it was (once the sea-sickness passed….).

We were not quite complete, though. The Ashton Brothers had already departed, flying back to Holland to prepare for their new European tour that starts this Monday. Sarah was missing, too, having been co-opted with a film crew to spend the night half way up Humboldt’s volcano on a pilgrimage to the place where her great great grandfather so wanted to go, but could not, owing to all that disruption caused by the invisible, microscopic world (of Wim).

It was a brave but genius choice of hers to bring Leo and Joss - her 3 and 5 year old children - who were such wonderful company for us all. Talk about a tonic to raise the spirits! Better than any number of Moquitos. Priceless impressions and unique memories will be theirs to treasure forever.

But now I long to see my wife and family again! I’m not sure if it was the endlessness of the seas or the lack of a telephone connection, but somehow I have missed them these last two weeks as if I have been away for twenty years.

A final picture, if you please. That’s the one of me at the departure gate in the airport looking somewhat bizarre in a bright orange waterproof coat. You remember? The one that got me the free train ride on my way to Plymouth because the ticket inspector thought I must be a maintenance worker…

Wow! What a remarkable 12 days. Thank you all……