Darwin Sound

It thus forms a navigable link across Tierra del Fuego between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans as an alternative to going round the hazardous rocky headland of Cape Horn.

In the Beagle Channel they looked at its north shore in amazement at the vast "beryl blue" glaciers on the steep mountains of the Cordillera of the Andes, which fed down to the water and formed icebergs.

On 29 January 1833 they had their boats drawn up on the beach about half a mile (1 km) from the ship and were dining when a huge mass of ice fell from the face of a glacier and plunged into the water with a "thundering crash".

Captain Fitzroy was impressed and next day named a nearby expanse of water Darwin Sound.

Darwin felt that he had acted out of fear rather than bravado, noting in his Diary that, had they lost the boats, "how dangerous would our lot have been, surrounded... by hostile Savages & deprived of...