We have left the port of Ushuaia. After a blustery day, the Beagle Channel is now calm, begging to be painted. This will be my first painting of this semi-circumnavigation of Antarctica. After supper the paints, water and paper are stowed away in anticipation of the entry into the Drake Passage, which contains some of the most wild and unpredictable waters.

-- David

More Information:
The Beagle Channel is a strait separating the islands of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. Its eastern portion is part of the border between Chile and Argentina. The channel was named after the HMS Beagle that took part in two hydrographic surveys of the southern part of South America in the 19th century. On HMS Beagles’s second voyage, Captain Fitz Roy took a 22-year-old naturalist, Charles Darwin, aboard on what became famous as the Voyage of the HMS Beagle.

The Beagle Channel is 150 miles long and 3 miles wide at its narrowest point. To read more about the Beagle Channel, visit www.theworldwidegourmet.com/travel/southamerica/argentina/beagle-channel.htm.
Charles Darwin kept a journal that R.D. Keynes edited. Cambridge University Press reprinted it in 1988. Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary is available in paperback, as is the Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches as a Penguin Classic.