Natural selection

When fate handed artist Conrad Martens the chance to join HMS Beagle, he captured the flatlands of Patagonia, the wood-cloaked shores of Tierra del Fuego and the 'castles, peaks, and pinnacles' of the Andes with both brush and pen

- Carla Passino

IN August 1833, an English artist roamed the quays of Montevideo, Uruguay, looking for a British ship. Three months earlier, Conrad Martens, the son of a German merchant and his British wife, had boarded HMS Hyacinth in Falmouth, eager to capture the energy of Rio de Janeiro in watercolour. Once he set foot in Brazil, however, a chance encounter with Lt Robert Hammond, fresh off HMS Beagle, overhauled his plans. The officer revealed that the survey expedition's artist, Augustus Earle, had taken ill, a new one was urgently needed and the ship, then moored in Montevideo, might soon set sail again. Painting Rio could wait.

A wind-blasted, stormy journey took Martens to the capital of Uruguay. Stretching at a foot of the Mount—'an ugly lump of ground unbroken by a single bush or even a crag of any size'—was a city 'by no means inviting, either at a distance or on closer observation', where 'the mud in the roads is too deep to be passable'. At least, Martens did find Beagle well in time and, on November 25, took possession of his cabin. Writing to Charles Darwin, who was on an inland trip when the painter's services were engaged, Capt Robert FitzRoy described Earle's successor as 'a stone pounding artist—who exclaims in his sleep, "think of me standing upon a pinnacle of the Andes—or sketching a Fuegian Glacier!!!"'. As well as having enthusiasm in spades, Martens was 'gentleman-like in his habits', an accomplished landscape artist—and had the right head shape: 'By my faith in Bumpology [phrenology, of which both the captain and Darwin were proponents], I am sure you will like him, and like him much,' FitzRoy told the naturalist.