At Sea
Our final port of call will be a kind of homecoming for me and for the few of my fellow-countrymen on board. For Puerto Madryn was founded by the Welsh in 1863, the date of their landing there, 28 July, celebrated as a provincial holiday in this part of Argentina. When the first 151 Welsh men, women and children disembarked the Mimosa, a converted tea-clipper that had taken two months to run down the Atlantic, they faced a winter of great hardship. They had missed the planting season by a month and had arrived in a land that Darwin, a generation before, had only been able to describe in negatives: no water, no trees and no mountains. After surviving the first few months in caves along the shoreline, the colonists decided to trek into the interior to settle in the Rio Chubut, known in Welsh as Afon Camwy. Within a generation, the valley had been irrigated and was sustaining a prosperous mixed agriculture based on wheat and dairying. A string of Welsh townships now runs along the valley: Rawson, Trelew, Gaiman and Dolafon. The aim of the emigration was to find a place in the New World where the Welsh language, threatened at home, might find a new lease of life. Miraculously it survives there today, thanks to the efforts of people like Luned Fychan Roberts de Gonzales, the energetic Principal of the valley's bilingual school (in Welsh and Spanish), Coleg Camwy.
Accompanying the ship as we roll down to Puerto Madryn are some of my favorite birds, Manx Shearwaters. Their largest breeding colony in the world, some 150,000 pairs, is close to my home in Wales, on the tiny offshore island of Skomer. Beautifully adapted to a life at sea, with its legs set far back for efficient swimming, it is ill-adapted to a life on land. During the breeding season on Skomer the only way to catch sight of these birds is on a dark night with a flash lamp. Then the birds that have been gathering offshore in large "rafts" fly in to land just in front of the burrows that they use to rear to their young. When the single egg hatches and is ready to fly it sets off immediately on a long Atlantic journey covering much the same route as the Mimosa, but covering the distance effortlessly. Studies of ringed birds show that they make this journey of some 7,000 miles in less than a fortnight. What the birds do the following the summer is something of a mystery but in their second year some fly back to Wales. Incredibly, when those birds drop in front of the burrow it is more often than not the very burrow in which they had been born. Manx Shearwaters do not breed until about 6 years old but will make several round trip Atlantic crossings to check out the burrow and look for a mate before the time comes to lay that single egg. The bird keeps the same partner for several seasons, the pair taking it in turns to incubate the egg while the partner flies off to feed on sardines in the Bay of Biscay.
History and natural history thus form an unlikely link between these opposite corners of the Atlantic, confirming an experience that I often have on board the M. S. Endeavour, that the sea can unite us in often unexpected ways.
Our final port of call will be a kind of homecoming for me and for the few of my fellow-countrymen on board. For Puerto Madryn was founded by the Welsh in 1863, the date of their landing there, 28 July, celebrated as a provincial holiday in this part of Argentina. When the first 151 Welsh men, women and children disembarked the Mimosa, a converted tea-clipper that had taken two months to run down the Atlantic, they faced a winter of great hardship. They had missed the planting season by a month and had arrived in a land that Darwin, a generation before, had only been able to describe in negatives: no water, no trees and no mountains. After surviving the first few months in caves along the shoreline, the colonists decided to trek into the interior to settle in the Rio Chubut, known in Welsh as Afon Camwy. Within a generation, the valley had been irrigated and was sustaining a prosperous mixed agriculture based on wheat and dairying. A string of Welsh townships now runs along the valley: Rawson, Trelew, Gaiman and Dolafon. The aim of the emigration was to find a place in the New World where the Welsh language, threatened at home, might find a new lease of life. Miraculously it survives there today, thanks to the efforts of people like Luned Fychan Roberts de Gonzales, the energetic Principal of the valley's bilingual school (in Welsh and Spanish), Coleg Camwy.
Accompanying the ship as we roll down to Puerto Madryn are some of my favorite birds, Manx Shearwaters. Their largest breeding colony in the world, some 150,000 pairs, is close to my home in Wales, on the tiny offshore island of Skomer. Beautifully adapted to a life at sea, with its legs set far back for efficient swimming, it is ill-adapted to a life on land. During the breeding season on Skomer the only way to catch sight of these birds is on a dark night with a flash lamp. Then the birds that have been gathering offshore in large "rafts" fly in to land just in front of the burrows that they use to rear to their young. When the single egg hatches and is ready to fly it sets off immediately on a long Atlantic journey covering much the same route as the Mimosa, but covering the distance effortlessly. Studies of ringed birds show that they make this journey of some 7,000 miles in less than a fortnight. What the birds do the following the summer is something of a mystery but in their second year some fly back to Wales. Incredibly, when those birds drop in front of the burrow it is more often than not the very burrow in which they had been born. Manx Shearwaters do not breed until about 6 years old but will make several round trip Atlantic crossings to check out the burrow and look for a mate before the time comes to lay that single egg. The bird keeps the same partner for several seasons, the pair taking it in turns to incubate the egg while the partner flies off to feed on sardines in the Bay of Biscay.
History and natural history thus form an unlikely link between these opposite corners of the Atlantic, confirming an experience that I often have on board the M. S. Endeavour, that the sea can unite us in often unexpected ways.
