Chapter Eight
THE PATAGONIA REGION OF SOUTH AMERICA SITS AT THE bottom of the world, extending over 900,000 square miles through Argentina and Chile. Sandwiched between two oceans, a strait and a river, its interior offers a survey of the Earth’s extremes: mountainous peaks where sudden violent snowstorms appear without warning give way to nearly barren deserts marked by deep gorges, while lush forests taper into the largest ice fields in the Southern Hemisphere outside of Antarctica. The region culminates in an archipelago that Spanish explorers named Tierra del Fuego, or Land of Fire. There, hundred-foot waves routinely batter boats trying to round Cape Horn, leaving its shores a graveyard of ships and sailors alike.
“The calms here are unlike those in most parts of the world,” wrote Richard Henry Dana Jr. in Two Years Before the Mast, his 1840 recollection of sailing on a small clipper ship around the Cape from Boston en route to the still-Spanish colony of California. The ship took four days to pass the Cape, battling hail, snowstorms and wind so severe that it threatened to pull a sailor off his feet. “Here there is generally so high a sea running, with periods of calm so short that it has no time to go down, and vessels, being under no command of sails or rudder, lie like logs upon the water.”
A few years before Dana’s voyage, a 90-foot-long ship called the HMS Beagle had appeared off the Cape while on a five-year-long voyage around the world. Among the sixty-eight men on board was a twenty-four-year-old son of a society doctor named Charles Darwin. He paid his own way to serve as the voyage’s naturalist, intent on collecting and cataloging plants and animals unseen by English eyes. In truth, he was mainly there to keep the twenty-six-year-old captain, a fellow aristocrat named Robert Fitzroy, from getting lonely. (Fitzroy took command of the Beagle after its previous captain, Pringle Stokes, grew increasingly despondent and isolated while on a mission to survey the coast of Patagonia, a region which he described in his journal as consisting of such dreary and brutal weather that “the soul of man dies in him”; Stokes locked his cabin and shot himself in the head two years into the voyage, dying twelve days later.)
Darwin was decades away from formulating the theory of evolution by natural selection that would make him a pillar of British science, held in such high esteem that upon his death he would be buried in Westminster Abbey alongside kings. Instead, he was a wealthy young man who had turned to natural science after an attempt to follow his father into medicine ended when he threw up after watching his first autopsy, and he jumped at the chance to travel the world because he had little else to do. He was expected to dine with Fitzroy and serve as a trusted counsel he could talk with, but beyond that to mainly stay out of the way. The sense that Darwin was a late addition to the voyage was underscored by the fact that, with no other room on the crowded ship, he slept in a hammock slung over a drafting table. He spent the entire five-year journey battling violent seasickness, heaving with each passing swell. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote in a letter to a cousin.
When he was not seasick, Darwin drew in the richness and variety of ocean life he had never before encountered. He noticed the subtle artistry in oyster shells embedded in rocks and the gracefulness of tiny fish and plankton he pulled up in his net, all the while wondering why God spent time perfecting something so few people would see. “Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms & rich colours,” he wrote. “It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.”
Each day he encountered another mystery of nature, and, with nothing else competing for his time, he plunged headlong into trying to figure it out. His enthusiasms shifted with the changing landscape. When at sea, he formulated theories as to how coral reefs formed; when on land, he wanted to collect every animal in the jungle. “Here I first saw a Tropical forest in all its sublime grandeur. — Nothing, but the reality can give any idea, how wonderful, how magnificent the scene is . . . I am at present red-hot with Spiders, they are very interesting, & if I am not mistaken, I have already taken some new genera,” he wrote.
After nearly a year at sea, the Beagle reached Patagonia. The solitude of the landscape unnerved Darwin, and he spent his hours on watch painfully aware of how far away he was from home. “The consciousness rushes on the mind in how remote a corner of the globe you are then in; all tends to this end, the quiet of the night is only interrupted by the heavy breathing of the men & the cry of the night birds,” he wrote. His first encounters with the Yamana, the tribal people who lived in the region, left him with the sense—common among Victorians at the time—that he was glimpsing a lesser form of human. (Indeed, on the same voyage, Fitzroy returned home with a man named Orundellico, a member of the Yaghan Indigenous group whom Fitzroy had kidnapped a year before on the beach and brought to England as proof that he had reached the continent. Orundellico, whom the English called Jemmy Button, would meet up again with Darwin a year later, having shed his short-cropped hairstyle and English clothing and clad in nothing but a blanket around his thin waist. “We had left him plump, fat, clean, and well-dressed; —I never saw so complete and grievous a change,” Darwin wrote.)
Drawn by a false sense that he was seeing an untouched vision from the romantic past, Darwin was both fascinated and repelled by the humans he met. “I do not think any spectacle can be more interesting, than the first sight of Man in his primitive wildness,” he wrote. “It is an interest, which cannot well be imagined, until it is experienced. I shall never forget, when entering Good Success Bay, the yell with which a party received us. They were seated on a rocky point, surrounded by the dark forest of beech; as they threw their arms wildly round their heads & their long hair streaming they seemed the troubled spirits of another world.”
Captain Fitzroy decided to spend the winter in Patagonia, giving Darwin a chance to explore the rivers leading up to the Andes. There, he collected samples of everything he could find, stacking thistle next to deer skins next to shells, and lamenting in one letter the strain it took to capture some of the rare beetles he came across. The region is “most singularly unfavourable to the insect world,” he complained. Yet he also began to realize that the undeveloped region was in fact a giant graveyard, filled with the bones of enormous animals that no longer inhabited the Earth. Patagonia was “a perfect catacomb for monsters of extinct races,” he marveled. He found huge prehistoric armadillos and giant birds, all the while wondering why some lifeforms had apparently shrunk over geological time. “It is impossible to reflect on the changed state of the American continent without the deepest astonishment,” he wrote. “Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters: now we find mere pygmies. . . . What has exterminated so many species?”
Darwin would ponder how and why some lifeforms survived and others did not for the next twenty years. He experimented with seeds in seawater, satisfying his hunch that they could withstand the lurching sea until they washed up on a far island, and tested how genetic variations spread through colonies of pigeons and bees. Finally, eight years after the death of his oldest daughter from typhoid erased the last vestiges of his Christian faith, he published On the Origin of Species, an explanation of evolution driven by natural selection that suddenly made everything from the colors of a peacock’s feathers to the colossal bones uncovered in Patagonia make sense.
Among scientists, the region would have remained best associated with Darwin’s expedition had it not been for an Argentine paleontologist by the name of Florentino Ameghino. The son of Italian immigrants who were unable to afford him a formal education, Ameghino first discovered natural history through books, and then through long walks in his adopted country. His genius was apparent despite his poverty and he eventually became a professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of La Plata, where he found himself embroiled in the most burning question of the era: if Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection was indeed correct, then how and where did humans and other mammals originate? While European and American scientists centered their view on Africa, Ameghino argued in a well-publicized paper that Argentina was the cradle of human life. Ameghino’s theory drew fierce criticism from European scientists who felt that it lacked rigor, but others found it credible enough that expedition teams from around the world set out to Argentina to investigate whether this little-known professor was on to something. Cope, for his part, called the paper “a monumental work, such as can only be produced under circumstances which seldom concur.”
Osborn lived for any chance to make the American Museum part of an intellectual debate, searching for any method to further his own reputation. Ameghino’s theory proved especially difficult for him to pass up. Osborn had long disbelieved the prevailing notion that humankind originated from a common ancestor in Africa. Over time, his suspicion would harden into something altogether more cruel, infused with the vile notion that fixed racial traits in humans meant that light-skinned Europeans were naturally smarter and stronger than dark-skinned Africans, whom he considered less evolved. In one particularly shameful incident in his life, Osborn served on the board of trustees of the Bronx Zoo when it installed a twenty-three-year-old Congolese man named Ota Benga in an exhibit in the Monkey House, and refused to meet with Black clergymen who, appalled at its implications, protested that “We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.” Osborn’s racism was common among his peers. While Black Americans protested the spectacle, a medical doctor by the name of M. S. Gabriel wrote an essay for the New York Times in which he declared, “I saw the pigmy on exhibition, and must frankly state that the storm of indignation which some well-meaning clergymen are trying to raise around it is absurd. The unprejudiced observer cannot possibly get the impression that there is in the exhibition any element implying the slightest reflection upon human nature or the colored race.”
Osborn, however, took this a step further. Rather than viewing skin tone as just one of many adaptations that evolve in a species over generations, he held that racial attributes were a sign of parallel evolution, suggesting that light-skinned humans did not evolve from apes but from some other species yet to be discovered. Throughout his life, Osborn would jump at any evidence that appeared to justify his pet theory, which went unchampioned by his peers, and never wavered in his refusal to accept that a common thread of humanity lay below the veneer of skin color. His racism would infect the American Museum of Natural History, leading to displays and exhibitions that implied that white Protestants of what Osborn called the Nordic race were the pinnacle of billions of years of evolution.
As those theories hardened in his head, he struck a deal to send a museum staffer along on a trip organized by his college friend William Berryman Scott, to search for clues to mammalian evolution in Patagonia. Osborn chose Brown, perhaps struck by his outsized role in obtaining the museum’s only dinosaur specimens. If Brown could find a Diplodocus alone, Osborn’s thinking went, then who knows what he would bring back from a region known for its abundant fossils. The decision infuriated Jacob Wortman, who had lobbied hard for the opportunity. Passed over for a man barely out of college who had served as his trainee not long before, Wortman began nursing a grudge against Brown that he held on to for the rest of his life.
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BROWN KNEW NOTHING OF OSBORN’S plans and little of Patagonia’s history until the morning of December 7, 1898, when he arrived at the American Museum shortly before nine in the morning after trudging through snow piled high along the city’s streets. “Before I had taken my hat off, Professor Osborn called me into his office,” Brown later wrote, describing the two-minute conversation that upended his life. Osborn asked him, “Brown, I want you to go to Patagonia today with the Princeton expedition. . . . The boat leaves at eleven; will you go?” Without hesitation, Brown replied, “This is short notice, Professor Osborn, but I’ll be on that boat.”
He rushed home to pack a small bag and raced back through the snow to Pier 45 in the West Village. There he boarded a Grace Line freighter named the Capac bound on a nonstop voyage of over six thousand miles to the port of Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan. As the ship left New York harbor and the skyscrapers of Manhattan slowly sank over the horizon, Brown found himself yet again in an alien environment. Unlike the frontier, however, his body was not equipped for this. It was Brown’s first time at sea, and he struggled to adjust to life aboard ship. He “soon was a victim of seasickness, first hoping I would die, and then afraid I wouldn’t,” he later wrote. For thirty days, the ship steadily moved south. Christmas and New Year’s Day passed by, two days spent like any other staring out at the featureless ocean. The ship spotted land just once over the four weeks as it sailed by Pernambuco on the coast of Brazil.
To pass the time, Brown played poker with the expedition’s leader, John Bell Hatcher, who was equally famous in the field of paleontology for his part in discovering Triceratops and for his fallout with Marsh, who refused to let Hatcher name the species because he had paid for the expedition. Fearing that Osborn would prove to be another tyrant in the same mold, Hatcher had not wanted Brown or any other member of the American Museum on the trip to Patagonia, but was overruled by Scott. If he couldn’t get rid of Brown, he could at least empty the man’s wallet. Hatcher spent every day and night over the four weeks it took to get to Patagonia systematically draining Brown of every cent to his name, one poker chip at a time. “ ‘Brown,’ he would say, ‘I hate to take your money as I know your salary is only fifty dollars a month,’ ” Brown later wrote. Only one fluke hand kept Brown from destitution. As they neared land, Brown somehow won back almost everything he had lost over the previous month at once, saved by the kind of outlandish bet that would become a constant of his life.
The Capac finally reached Punta Arenas in early January, and its crew rushed to gather provisions for the expedition ahead, like squirrels surprised by an early snowfall. Brown walked along the streets of the busy port city, taking in its mix of English, German and Latin merchants as he tried to make himself useful. The farm boy within him couldn’t help but notice the incongruity of advertisements for high-end Italian and Spanish wines posted next to the offices of sheep-dealers, the economic lifeblood of the region. Though he did not understand the languages flittering through the streets, the city felt strangely familiar, the sort of hive of activity on the border of an empty expanse that he had trudged through with his father as a child and would encounter again on frontiers throughout the world. Hatcher directed his men to stock up on enough food, shovels, pickaxes and whiskey to last for several months. He acquired two teams of horses and harnessed them to a cloth-covered Studebaker wagon. This would be the first time that a scientific expedition attempted to cross the vast, windswept Patagonian pampas on a set of wheels. (The Studebaker brothers would introduce their first electric car four years later, and would continue producing canvas-covered wagons alongside automobiles until the 1920s.)
Hatcher jumped on the back of a horse and rode ahead, alone, to check on the condition of a fossil bed he had uncovered the previous spring, leaving Brown and another assistant to follow behind on a four-hundred-mile route along smooth, flat stones that had once been covered by the receding ocean. Neither knew the path beyond Hatcher’s directions, and took to a system in which Brown drove the wagon while his partner scouted the trail. A few days into the trip, Brown was holding the reins when the ground around them began to recede and fall, as if a plug had been pulled from below. He yanked the horses as hard as he could to the side and tried to race ahead, not knowing whether the land itself was crumbling. When he looked back, he realized that the wagon had barely escaped falling into a deep, quicksand-like bog of mud known as a soap hole. “Had the team and wagon gone into this mass, we would have all gone down without anyone knowing where we had disappeared,” Brown wrote, spooked at the realization that he was crossing a place where even the ground seemed out to get him.
They reached the foothills of the Andes and began the slow trek upward. Once the trail became impassable, they ditched their wagon on a dry lakebed and continued on horseback. Finally, in March, Brown reunited with Hatcher. The expedition team was almost immediately caught in a blizzard, forcing them to release their horses to seek shelter. Brown, Hatcher and the others crammed onto one single bed in a tent and remained there for two days to preserve body heat. The storm eventually passed, allowing a brief window of time to dig before another sudden violent snowstorm again whipped through, halting everything once more.
Hatcher’s calm demeanor while battling the weather made an impression on Brown, who at the age of twenty-five was still puzzling out the question of who exactly he was going to be as he stepped further into adulthood. There was enough alike in Hatcher’s background—a childhood on a farm in the Midwest, a brief stint in a coal mine, college in his home state of Iowa—for Brown to see a reflection of himself and a model of what he could become. While Osborn’s wealth and status would forever make him a man apart, Hatcher was someone whom Brown found himself looking up to as a mentor. He admired how Hatcher carried himself with a sense of purpose; furthermore, he had demonstrated an ability, which Brown had not yet mastered, to mesh the scientific world of papers and lectures with the real-life skill to acquire the fossils that would push the field further. Through his physical abilities and success in Wyoming, Brown had already shown his worth outside of the classroom, yet he kindled doubts whether his academic skills would ever catch up. Hatcher was “a truly remarkable man, with few vices and more virtues than are found in most men . . . as a worker he was indefatigable,” Brown would later write. “He would ride off alone in an uncharted area, with only his blankets, revolver, and a pocket full of salt, living off the game of the land as he travelled. His geological observations were, to my knowledge, accurate; and as a collector, no one ever surpassed him.”
After two months and several snowstorms, Hatcher had to admit that the trip was proving to be a bust. The fossil beds he had expected to find in abundance were nearly nonexistent. After a final effort to trace a seam of fossils proved fruitless, Hatcher announced that the expedition would return to Punta Arenas and head home. They descended from the mountains and made their way back to the city, their empty wagon reminding them of their failures with each easy rotation of its wheels. While Hatcher consulted with travel agents for the next ocean liner to New York, Brown explored nearby marine beds, unable to stand the thought of disappointing Osborn so thoroughly. By chance, he found the skull, jaw and vertebrae of a toothed whale that had lived in the Miocene, some five million years ago.
It was enough to keep him from getting on the boat home. Never before had Brown headed off into the field and come home empty-handed, and he did not want to start on a trip where he carried the weight of Osborn’s expectations on his back. As Hatcher and the other members of the expedition boarded the ship, Brown was far away, gathering supplies for what would become a six-month mission prospecting alone along the coast of South America. With no one to answer to, he allowed himself to get lost in the natural world, his ambition and curiosity merging to form a single-mindedness which bordered on the reckless and pushed him to take risks that older, more experienced prospectors would never dare.
At Cañon de las Vacas, he built a sling out of a tarp and used it to hang off a cliff face so that he could chisel out what turned out to be an armadillo-like creature known as a Propaleohoplophorus, a specimen that now stands in the American Museum’s Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives. Near the outlet where the Gallegos River spills into the Atlantic, he dodged incoming waves and the occasional shark to dig up a fossil he thought he saw exposed at low tide. After several hours of work, he pulled out the skull and jaws of an extinct creature known as an Astrapotherium, which looked like a cross between an elephant and a hippopotamus yet was unrelated to either. Not long after, Brown found himself standing chest-deep in the ocean while locked in battle with an octopus that refused to get into his pickling jar, too immersed in his task to realize that the tide was coming in. Only when his horse whinnied did Brown realize that the water was up to its belly. He grabbed the octopus and jumped on the horse’s back and rode it to shore, trying to avoid the deep holes hidden by the waves.
A few weeks later, he came across sixty slaughtered lambs while riding alone through rocky foothills. A survey of the area uncovered tracks of a mountain lion and its cubs, which he followed to the mouth of a cave. He lit a candle, drew his revolver and walked in. “I had proceeded a short distance when all at once there came a roar—apparently back of me,” he later wrote. “Holding the candle up, I wheeled, and saw the reflection of two eyes. I fired between them . . . I heard a kicking; then all was still . . . I think this terrifying experience was when I lost my hair—figuratively scared off.”
By October, Brown had amassed an impressive haul of fossils. “This collection includes a more varied fauna than that obtained by Mr. Hatcher from Gallegos . . . this will make a great exhibit,” he wrote in a note accompanying the shipment to New York, his growing confidence apparent on the page. Over six months of solitude, he had confronted one of the most treacherous regions on the planet and walked away with a greater trust in himself and his path in life. While he did not have wealth, like Osborn, and had not yet discovered a major species, like Hatcher, he had tested himself in a grand arena and left its stage pleased with the results. That his finds had come after a man he looked up to as a mentor decided to give up only sweetened the triumph and made him eager to see how far he could go.
He gathered the self-assurance to write another letter to Osborn, this time approaching him as an equal and demanding honesty in return. His time in Patagonia had made clear what he knew all along: he was not meant to be an academic, with one foot in the classroom and one in the field; he was built for a life of action, as comfortable in the roughest terrain in the world as he was carousing in the bars of Greenwich Village. “I have been with the Museum now three years at $50 per month and assets have just about covered liabilities,” he wrote. “Although I failed at Columbia University (it’s a bitter pill to swallow) my aim there was not lost. I tried to cover too much and got swamped. For me to remain with the Museum I am sure I can best serve its interests in the field where physical energy and resource are most called for. After a thorough collection has been made from the different horizons in South America . . . There is South Africa, Australia and Siberia which must eventually be represented in the American Museum. But this takes time and means, if I am the man to do the work, that I must give up other projects and interests and rely wholly on my salary from the Museum,” he wrote, adding that he “[did] not feel justified in doing this for less than $100 per month . . . believe me sincerely this letter is not dictated by a spirit of greed but by an awakening that I must know where I am at.” Osborn’s response does not survive, but apparently it was enough to convince Brown to remain with the American Museum, where he would work for the next forty years of his life.
His future set and his fossils packed and sent on their way, Brown returned to Punta Arenas only to discover that no ships were scheduled to leave for New York for another four months, extending his time in South America once again. Loath to take on any new expenses without Osborn’s approval, Brown “decided to do some exploring,” he wrote. Fun had a way of finding Brown, and he soon fell in with a quasi-professional gambler named Saltpere, who was never seen without gloves on and could recite several full novels by Charles Dickens from memory. In one of the more bizarre episodes of a life that was full of them, Brown begged Saltpere to take him on a joy ride around Cape Horn after the man casually mentioned that he owned a six-ton boat. Saltpere agreed, but told him they would first need to work together to recover the boat from a one-armed man who had stolen it and moored it near a shipwreck off Tierra del Fuego when he realized he couldn’t sail it on his own. Brown couldn’t tell how much truth was attached to Saltpere’s tale, but decided to go along with it to see where it led. Sure enough, a few days later Brown stood next to Saltpere as he confronted the one-armed thief on the stolen boat and retook possession of his vessel. Having secured what was his, Saltpere offered to take the thief along with them on the trip to Cape Horn and was disheartened when he refused (a smart move, given that Saltpere was likely to leave him on an island as punishment, Brown later surmised).
Saltpere, Brown and a crew member continued south toward the Cape. While in the Le Maire Strait, the three men spent a turbulent night battling the wind and fearing that they would be taken far out to sea. On another night, when the water was calm, Brown lay awake on deck deep into darkness, marveling at an overpowering feeling of connection with the Earth. “What a sight was presented in the pitch-black night—schools of porpoises cutting back and forth across the bow, leaving a streak of silver in the phosphorescent medusa-filled sea,” he wrote. His sense of foreboding around the ocean never quite left him, with good reason. Not long after, Brown was exploring the shoreline in a canoe when another sudden storm struck. He paddled back to the larger boat and grabbed the wheel, attempting to maneuver it through the narrow bay while Saltpere and the other crew member secured what they could. The boat crashed into a rock and ripped six feet off its side, tossing Brown overboard into water so cold he couldn’t swim. As he felt his body seize up, he grabbed a barrel that had also been flung from the sinking boat and rode it to shore. Saltpere and the crew member survived by grabbing onto scattered shards of the doomed vessel, and they soon washed up on the same rocky beach as Brown. With no boat, no supplies and no way to send for help, the trio walked north along the remote coast for days until they came upon a camp of startled Australian gold miners. They waited there another sixteen days before they were able to signal to a passing ship, which took them back to Punta Arenas.
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AT LAST, BROWN WAS READY to leave Patagonia. He had survived a shipwreck, killed a mountain lion, wrestled an octopus and outlasted the mentor whom he considered one of the toughest and most talented prospectors he had ever known. The haul of fossils he sent back to New York confirmed his worth without question. Today, several specimens that Brown collected on his solitary expedition in Patagonia remain on display on the floor of the American Museum, including the skeleton of a primitive ground sloth known as Hapalops and the bones of three species of ungulates, a group of animals that were the forerunners of modern horses, camels and deer. In the wild with no one but himself, Brown faced down his self-doubt and now looked forward to rejoining his life in New York and the possibility of reestablishing a relationship with Marion, if she remembered him. If she did not, then the trip was still worth it. “For many months I had been out of touch with civilization,” he wrote. “There are no cables, and mail often reached me via Liverpool. The Spanish [American] War had been fought and won, but I was happy following the life work I had chosen.”
The next scheduled ship to New York was several weeks away. Hearing of his predicament, the captain of a ship heading to Portugal offered Brown a ride across the Atlantic if he was willing to sleep in the ship’s saloon. There, perhaps, he could find a quicker connection to New York. Brown soon found himself in Paris and London, examining the collections of what were considered the best natural history museums in the world, the dirt from his digs in Patagonia still clinging to his boots. He spent his days inhaling culture in art galleries and at monuments, and his nights thirsting for adventure in bars and salons.
Brown finally returned to New York having shed his nasal Kansas accent and all other markers of the farm boy he once was. “Since he had lost all his clothing in the shipwreck near Spaniard Harbor, he bought an entire new outfit in Paris, including a tall, collapsible silk hat,” his daughter would later write. “Sporting a moustache and a pointed Vandyke beard, he then considered himself the epitome of a cultured European.”
For the rest of his life, Brown brought a suit, tie and full-length beaver fur coat on digs, often looking more the part of a man ready to drop into an opera than a scrappy paleontologist. It was as if he was forever making up for lost time, trying to will away those hours of suffocation and containment on the farm by becoming the flamboyant explorer of his boyhood dreams. That self-possession would soon meet its gravest challenge, however, as Brown realized upon his return how much New York—and indeed, his standing at the museum—had changed in his absence.