̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - South America

̽��ֱ��cultural significance of carbon-storing peatlands to rural communities

sc604 — Tue, 21 May 2019 06:30:00 +0000

Tropical peatlands, found in Southeast Asia, Africa, Central and South America, play an important, and, until recently, underappreciated role for the global climate system, due to their capacity to process and store large amounts of carbon. Across the world, peat covers just three per cent of the land’s surface, but stores one third of the Earth’s soil carbon.

̽��ֱ��peatlands are sparsely populated but have been inhabited for centuries by indigenous and Spanish-descended populations. Even now, most communities are only accessible by boat.

Now, a group of researchers led by a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge geographer have carried out the first detailed survey of how local communities view and interact with these important landscapes. Their results are reported in the journal Biological Conservation.

Working with colleagues from Peru, the UK researchers spent time with two rural Amazonian communities: a small indigenous community from the Urarina nation and a larger mestizo community of mixed cultural heritage. While other researchers have been engaging with these communities for decades, the study was the first to engage with their views on the uses, cultural significance, management and conservation of peatlands in the Peruvian Amazon.

“These communities are very remote, and very little is known about their relationship with the peatlands,” said Christopher Schulz from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, the paper’s first author. “People living in remote and rural communities are shaping ecosystem management in their surroundings, but their perspectives are rarely heard in wider debates.”

Members of both communities are primarily subsistence farmers, although the mestizo community does have some small shops and conducts some trade outside their community. Both communities, along with others based in the remote, largely-unknown peatlands, are mostly ignored by central government.

̽��ֱ��peatlands are home to various guardian spirits, such as the Baainu known among the Urarina people, who is said to trick people into losing their way. ̽��ֱ��area is also home to various ‘dead lakes’ which are culturally taboo among the mestizo community, who believe that guardian spirits can cause thunderstorms if the lakes are approached. ̽��ֱ��mestizo community also fear that approaching the dead lakes could lead to getting attacked by anacondas or caimans, or getting sucked into the soft ground.

Away from the lakes, the landscape is dominated by palm trees, which grow well despite the wet, poor peatland soils, and are an important food source for animals and for the Urarina and mestizo communities. ̽��ֱ��palm fruit and hearts are harvested by both communities for personal consumption and to sell to travelling traders. Both communities also make use of the wood and timber, although it is of lower quality than from trees from non-peatland areas. In the Urarina community, the palm fronds are also used as roofing, although these are increasingly being replaced by corrugated metal roofs.

In addition to their practical applications, palms also have a cultural and spiritual function. In the Urarina community, fibres from the aguaje palm are used for textile production. ̽��ֱ��Urarina creation myth contains an element in which a wise woman is identified by her ability to weave aguaje fibres into cloth.

Given the importance of the palm trees to both communities, it has led to issues of conservation. To harvest the aguaje fruits, the trees are currently felled. “Both communities recognise that they have an effect on palm tree populations, but they don’t have any specific conservation strategies as such,” said Schulz. “In the past, different groups have introduced equipment for climbing the palms instead of felling them, so that’s a simple conservation initiative that could be supported.”

“ ̽��ֱ��knowledge accumulated by the Urarina about these permanently wet ecosystems is the best guarantee for their conservation,” said co-author Manuel Martín Brañas from the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP).

“Before the scientific community had discovered the importance of these ecosystems for the climatic balance of the planet, the Urarina were already using them in an efficient and sustainable way, they classified them, gave them names, and they had established social controls for not damaging them,” said co-author Cecilia Núñez Pérez, also from IIAP.

Further research will investigate the potential role that conservation NGOs and other relevant stakeholders or institutions could play in the safeguarding of peatland areas, and ecological surveys will be conducted to better understand the ecological composition of the peatland vegetation.

̽��ֱ��research was funded in part by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Reference:
Christopher Schulz et al. ‘Uses, cultural significance, and management of peatlands in the Peruvian Amazon: Implications for conservation.’ Biological Conservation (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2019.04.005

A bold response to the world’s greatest challenge
̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is building on its existing research and launching an ambitious new environment and climate change initiative. Cambridge Zero is not just about developing greener technologies. It will harness the full power of the ̽��ֱ��’s research and policy expertise, developing solutions that work for our lives, our society and our biosphere.

A group of UK and Peruvian researchers have carried out the first detailed study of how rural communities interact with peatlands in the Peruvian Amazon, a landscape that is one of the world’s largest stores of carbon.

People living in remote and rural communities are shaping ecosystem management in their surroundings, but their perspectives are rarely heard in wider debates

Christopher Schulz

Travelling to a peatland area with the Urarina.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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‘ ̽��ֱ��greatest director in the world right now’ begins residency at Centre for Film and Screen

sjr81 — Fri, 04 May 2018 11:55:02 +0000

Lucrecia Martel comes to the Centre as this year’s Filmmaker in Residence from 5-20 May, following in the footsteps of Gianfranco Rosi (2017) and Joanna Hogg (2016).

A retrospective of her feature films — the first to be held in the UK—has been jointly organised between the Centre for Film and Screen and the Arts Picturehouse. Martel will be present following each screening for conversation and Q&A.

Martel, who lives and works in Argentina, is one of international cinema’s major stylists. Her provocative films treat questions of family, childhood, sexuality, belonging, nation, class, historical memory, and colonialism. In a cinema that is both sensually immersive and politically attuned, Martel looks at the world in a way that acknowledges mystery and prompts criticism.

Dr John David Rhodes, Director of the Centre for Film and Screen said: “ ̽��ֱ��residencies offer our students, staff and our community both inside and outside the ̽��ֱ�� the opportunity to engage with serious filmmakers of the highest order, all of them crucially important figures in the unfolding history of contemporary cinema.

“ ̽��ֱ��residencies also offer the filmmakers the opportunity to develop and reconsider their practices in the context of the vibrant scholarly and intellectual ecology that is unique to Cambridge.”

Described by Vogue as ‘the greatest director in the world right now’, Martel is the director of four acclaimed films and a number of award-winning shorts. After almost a decade after her last full-length feature film, Martel returned as director of the critically-lauded Zama in 2017.

Based on the 1956 novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, the film is a period drama relating the story of a 17th century Spanish officer, separated from his wife and family, and awaiting a transfer from a remote area of Paraguay to Buenos Aires.

Shining a light on colonialism and class dynamics, the film won almost universal acclaim from film critics in South America, and was chosen as Argentina’s nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 2018 Academy Awards.

Martel will be resident at the ̽��ֱ��’s Centre for Film and Screen for more than two weeks, during which she will be offering a sequence of seminars on her filmmaking practice.

Symposium

18 May, 10am-4pm, McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College.

Speakers: Lucy Bollington (Cambridge), Catherine Grant (Birkbeck), Rosalind Galt (KCL), Debbie Martin (UCL).

Full details - TBC

Screenings

̽��ֱ��screenings will all be held at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse

Tuesday 8 May at 6pm - ̽��ֱ��Swamp (La Ciénaga)

Thursday 10 May ay 6pm - ̽��ֱ��Holy Girl (La niña santa)

Tuesday 15 May at 6:30pm - ̽��ֱ��Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)

Thursday 17 May at 6pm - Zama

One of Argentina’s and Latin America’s pre-eminent filmmakers begins a 16-day residency at Cambridge’s Centre for Film and Screen from tomorrow (May 5).

Lucrecia is a crucially important figure in the unfolding history of contemporary cinema.

John David Rhodes

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Yes

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'Extreme sleepover #19' – Living beside Uruguay’s ‘Mother Dump’

jeh98 — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 08:30:55 +0000

Returning to Uruguay’s largest landfill (cantera), ‘Felipe Cardoso’ in Montevideo, to conduct fieldwork for my PhD, I was delighted when local social worker and missionary Jorge told me that I could live at his home, in a housing cooperative overlooking the landfill.

I had worked as a labourer in the construction of the cooperative in 2010 and knew that most of the occupants were relocated residents of an infamous shantytown built on top of an old landfill.

I could use the house as a base for exploring Montevideo’s formal and informal waste trade, since many neighbours were urban recyclers, known locally as clasificadores or classifiers. I’d be able to accompany them as they left in the morning to recover value from the trash at sites nearby, often returning in the afternoon on motorbikes, trucks or horse-drawn carts laden with an impressive array of plastics, metals and cardboard, as well as food, clothing and electronics for domestic consumption or neighbourhood sale.

Waiting to move in and impatient to start fieldwork, I had eagerly accepted when one neighbour offered to host me temporarily in his yard. As it transpired, I lived for a week in the most densely populated accommodation I have ever experienced, sharing a shack with his teenage son and the flapping wings and loose bowels of 22 birds. Now, though, Jorge’s house would be my home for the following year. Initially a concrete block lacking windows and doors, I set about making it habitable, mostly using materials scavenged from the landfill.

Of course I could do nothing about the sights, sounds and smells of the landfill itself. It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist.

Each day, some 60 trucks roll into the compound filled with urban rubbish. At the last count (in 2008, and likely to be an underestimate), around 5,000 waste-picking families make a living from Montevideo’s trash, attempting to recover all that is valuable, usable or edible. Their role in a city where waste management has reached crisis points in the past has been lauded as a lesson to society: they help to reduce the environmental and financial cost of landfill and find value in something that might be surplus to some but not others.

Like my interlocutors who recovered materials from there, I had ambivalent feelings about the cantera which, because of its reliable provision, was nicknamed “the mother”. On the one hand, it was an intriguing site for fieldwork where, under the supervision of Dr Sian Lazar, I focused on processes of labour formalisation, the socio-cultural dynamics of the waste and recycling work, and the history of waste infrastructure and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was also a place of hazard, police violence and a smell that lingered on clothes and skin, getting into hair and under fingernails.

I never slept at the dump but this was previously a common practice: clasificadores would camp there for days or weeks at a time, always at the mercy of the feared mounted police who would set tents alight, showing little tolerance for intruders.

̽��ֱ��closest I came to the apparently boisterous atmosphere of these encampments was joining clasificadores of the Felipe Cardoso recycling cooperative as they spent the last nights in a building the municipality had ceded them for facilities but which some had appropriated as a residence. With the exception of veteran clasificador Coco, who lived there permanently, the space seemed to function as a temporary refuge for male clasificadores who had been kicked out by their wives! On the night of my visit, we sat and played cards, listened to cumbia music, drank into my supplies of Scotch, and discussed the impending closure of the site and the workers’ relocation to a formal sector recycling plant.

With the municipal government’s attempted formalisation of Montevideo’s recycling trade, it is possible that the days of such precarious, autonomous, clasificador spaces are numbered, to be replaced by hygienic and technologically provisioned infrastructures. Yet at the end of my research trip, many of my neighbours were still making their way to the cantera to classify the tons of waste dumped there daily.

Uruguayan priest Padre Cacho once described clasificadores as “ecological prophets” and I can see what he meant – they have long functioned as ‘prospectors’, mining the urban waste stream for valuable materials that consumers have been happy to discard, and municipal governments to landfill or incinerate.

Now back in Cambridge as an intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), I am helping to organise a workshop on the ‘circular economy’ to explore the ways that government and industry are increasingly reconceptualising waste as recoverable resource. At a global level, it is important that shifts in policy benefit rather than dispossess informal sector recyclers, the long-time ‘artisanal miners’ of the waste stream.

Just before leaving Montevideo, the annual landfill clasificador Christmas social afforded me an enduring image of slumber amidst the scraps: an old, intoxicated and weary recycler lying on a recovered floral mattress, his sweated brow resting on a large folded rubbish bag, surrounded by thousands of pesos worth of scrap metal.

Patrick’s policy internship at CSaP is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Cambridge Doctoral Training Centre.

In a new podcast, Patrick O’Hare describes his time with the clasificadores – the families who scavenge Montevideo’s pungent ‘wastescape’ to recover and classify anything that is valuable, usable or edible.

It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist

Patrick O'Hare

Patrick working with the clasificadores in Montevideo

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Yes

Biggest library of bat sounds compiled to track biodiversity

jeh98 — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 11:41:21 +0000

An international team led by scientists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, ̽��ֱ�� College London (UCL), and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), developed the reference call library and a new way of classifying calls to accurately and quickly identify and differentiate bat species.

̽��ֱ��researchers say the method can be used to monitor biodiversity change and complete information on bat species distributions in remote and understudied regions in Mexico. It could also be expanded for use in other areas across the Neotropics, which incorporates South and Central America, and the Caribbean Islands and Florida.

It is the first time automatic classification for bat calls has been attempted for a large variety of species, most of them previously noted as hard to identify acoustically.

“Audio surveys are increasingly used to monitor biodiversity change, and bats are especially useful for this as they are an important indicator species, contributing significantly to ecosystems as pollinators, seed dispersers and suppressors of insect populations,” explains lead author Dr Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and UCL.

“By tracking the sounds they use to explore their surroundings, we can characterise the bat communities in different regions in the long term and gauge the impact of rapid environmental change.”

“Before now it was tricky to do as many bat species have very similar calls and differ in how well they can be detected. We overcame this by using machine learning algorithms together with information about hierarchies to automatically identify different bat species.”

For the study, published today in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, the researchers ventured into some of the most dangerous areas of Mexico, primarily the northern deserts, to collect 4,685 calls from 1,378 individual bats from 59 of the over 130 species occurring in Mexico.

Most of the areas hadn’t been sampled before and the data collected, along with additional information from collaborators, provides calls for over half of the species and all of the families of bats in Mexico.

Co-author, Professor Kate Jones, UCL and ZSL, said: “We’ve shown it is possible to reliably and rapidly identify bats in mega-diverse areas, such as Mexico, and we hope this encourages uptake of this method to monitor biodiversity changes in other biodiversity hotspot areas such as South America.”

“Our ability to readily map ecological communities is imperative for understanding the impact of the Anthropocene and implementing effective conservation measures.”

̽��ֱ��team now plan on developing a citizen science monitoring programme for Mexican bats to collect further information on bat calls. They will also develop more robust tools for bat identification using the Bat Detective website which will allow them to refine the machine learning algorithms used by the software.

̽��ֱ��study also involved researchers from the IPN CIIDIR Durango (Mexico), Universidad Veracruzana (Mexico), Western ̽��ֱ�� (Canada), ̽��ֱ�� of Bristol, ̽��ֱ�� of Ulm (Germany), Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Panama), Ernst-Moritz-Arndt ̽��ֱ�� (Germany), ̽��ֱ�� College Dublin and ̽��ֱ�� of Warwick. It was kindly funded by CONACYT, Cambridge Commonwealth European and International Trust, ̽��ֱ��Rufford Foundation, American Society of Mammalogists, Bat Conservation International, Idea Wild, ̽��ֱ��Whitmore Trust and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Adapted from a ̽��ֱ�� College London press release.

Inset image: ̽��ֱ��western yellow bat (Lasiurus xanthinus) is a species of vesper bat found in Mexico and the south-western United States (UCL/ZSL).

Researchers have compiled the largest known library of bat calls to identify and conserve rare species in Mexico – a country which is home to many of the world’s bats and has one of the highest rates of species extinction and habitat loss.

Bats are especially useful for monitoring biodiversity change as they are an important indicator species, contributing significantly to ecosystems

Veronica Zamora-Gutierrez

Noel Reynolds

Bat

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Yes

What is so unusual about a sloth’s neck?

amb206 — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 09:58:52 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

Xenarthra is an order of primarily South American mammals that includes sloths, ant-eaters and armadillos. Several are sufficiently endangered to be on the IUCN ‘red list’. In previous millenia, the group was far bigger. It covered many other creatures, now extinct, such as giant ground sloths estimated to have exceeded the size of a male African elephant.

As ‘exotic’ animals, xenarthrans have long fascinated westerners and became a must-have item in ‘cabinets of curiosities’ – collections gathered from a world that was opening up to exploration from the 15th century onwards. In the mid-17th century, the naturalist-physician, Georg Marcgrave, stationed in Dutch Brazil, described the armadillos that he encountered:

" ̽��ֱ��Tatu or Tatu-peba in Brazilian, Armadillo in Spanish, Encuberto in Portuguese, we Belgians call Armoured-piglet. It is a most powerful animal that lives in the ground, though also in water and soggy places. It is found in various sizes."

As a consequence of the blossoming of scientific enquiry in the 19th century, many leading zoology museums have examples of xenarthrans in their collections. Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology, for example, has a fine collection of specimens collected on expeditions to South America, from the diminutive Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus) to the towering giant ground sloth (Megatherium americanum) which became extinct some 10,000 years ago.

̽��ֱ��ground sloth is one of a number of relatively recently extinct large sloths, one of which Charles Darwin himself helped discover on the voyage of the Beagle. On September 18, 1832, Darwin noted in his dairy that he had dined on “Ostrich dumpling & Armadillos”. ̽��ֱ��‘ostrich’ he ate was, in fact, rhea; the abundant armadillos were a staple diet of the local gauchos.

Not long afterwards, Darwin saw for the first time fossils of shells and other animals, embedded in soft sea cliffs, including a specimen of giant ground sloth which was to be named Mylodon darwinii in his honour.

Xenarthans have been a source of fascination to Dr Robert Asher, an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Zoology, ever since he first began studying mammalian diversity as a graduate student some 20 years ago. He’s particularly interested in the evolutionary stories told by the structure of their skeletons – and the ways in which their bones act as clues to their relative position within the tree of life.

Natural history museums in Berlin, Paris and London have in their collections examples of three-toed sloths, including embryos and foetuses. These specimens enabled Dr Robert Asher and his colleague Dr Lionel Hautier (formerly a Cambridge postdoctoral fellow and now at the ̽��ֱ�� of Montpellier) to publish research on an aspect of the anatomy of sloths which sets them apart from almost every other mammal on earth.

̽��ֱ��difference lies in the arrangement of vertebrae in sloths’ spinal columns – which can be seen as clues to xenarthrans’ divergent evolutionary pathways over the past few million years.

You might think that animals with long necks would have more neck vertebrae than those with short necks. This is certainly true of some birds and reptiles. But almost every placental mammal on earth (some 5,000 species in total) has seven ‘ribless’ vertebrae in the neck – even creatures with long necks such as giraffes. ̽��ֱ��three-toed sloth deviates from this rule: many of these tree-living creatures have eight, nine or even ten cervical vertebrae.

This remarkable diversity was noticed in the 18th century and scientists continue to tease apart the mechanisms by which mammals deviate from the “rule of seven”. In 2009, Asher and colleagues set out to learn more about this intriguing quirk. Neck vertebrae are known as cervicals and the rib-bearing vertebrae below them are known as thoracics. Thoracic vertebrae have facets which allow articulation with the ribs.

Asher and colleagues looked at patterns of bone formation in mammals as they developed. They found that, in all mammals, the centrum (or middle part) of the first thoracic (number eight, counting down from the skull) turns from cartilage to bone earlier than the centra of the posterior-most cervicals. In sloths, too, the eighth vertebrae begins to develop early – but, in their case, this ribless vertebra is located in the neck and generally considered to be ‘cervical’.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘extra’ vertebrae in sloths’ necks have the same developmental characteristics as thoracic vertebrae. They are, in effect, ribcage vertebrae, masquerading as neck vertebrae. In sloths, the position of the shoulders, pelvis and ribcage are linked with one another, and compared to their common ancestor shared with other mammals, have shifted down the vertebral column to make the neck longer,” explains Asher.

“Even in sloths, the mammalian ‘rule of seven’ applies to the vertebral centra. ̽��ֱ��ossification of the centra in a long-necked sloth resembles ossification in other mammals. However, sloths can deviate from the “rule” by shifting the embryonic tissues that give rise to the limb girdles and rib cage relative to the vertebrae, adding what are essentially one or more ribcage vertebrae into the caudal end of their neck. ̽��ֱ��next question to address is why and how sloths managed this shift.”

Xenarthrans also pack some intriguing surprises when it comes to teeth. Anteaters have no teeth. Sloths have just one set of teeth to see them through life – as do all but one genus of armadillo. Armadillos in the genus Dasypus (including seven- and nine-banded species) are unlike other armadillos in having two sets of teeth during their lifespan: deciduous (or ‘milk’) teeth and permanent teeth.

Most mammals, including humans, shed their baby teeth while they are growing. Recent research by Asher and colleagues from the ̽��ֱ�� of La Plata, Argentina, into the dentition of Dasypus revealed that its permanent teeth erupt long after the animal reaches its full size. “ ̽��ֱ��equivalent scenario in a human would be losing your milk teeth, and gaining all your permanent ones, once you were fully grown and well into your 20s,” says Asher.

In this regard, Dasypus is similar to most species of endemic African mammals (Afrotheria) – a group of animals that includes elephants, manatees, tenrecs, golden moles and sengis. “Eruption of adult teeth after the attainment of full body size and sexual maturity is not unheard of in other mammals,” says Asher. “Some people reading this won’t yet have erupted their ‘wisdom’ teeth or third molars. But few groups do this as pervasively as Afrotherians and Dasypus.“

With gratitude to PhD candidate Natalie Lawrence (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) for her input on early western encounters with ‘exotic’ animals.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: Y is for an animal that is an integral part of high-altitude livelihoods throughout the Himalayas, Tibet and Central Asia.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Illustration of an armadillo from Historiae Naturalis Brasilae Tatu by Georg Marcgrave; Skeleton of a giant land sloth (Museum of Zoology); Three-toed sloth - Bradypodidae - Luiaard (Martha de Jong-Lantink); Lateral view of 3D reconstruction of computerized tomography (CT) scans of skeleton in the three-toed sloth Bradypus (Hautier et al).

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge’s connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, X is for Xenarthran. A must-have item for 15th-century collectors of 'curiosities' and a source of fascination for evolutionary biologist Dr Robert Asher.

It is a most powerful animal that lives in the ground, though also in water and soggy places

Georg Marcgrave

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Yes

HMS Beagle sketchbooks added to Cambridge Digital Library

sjr81 — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 10:56:42 +0000

̽��ֱ��intricate pencil drawings and watercolours in the sketchbooks were made by Conrad Martens, shipmate to Charles Darwin as they travelled around South America on the voyage of HMS Beagle.

Now, for the first time, all of Martens’ Beagle sketches have been made freely available online through Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s Digital Library: cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk and can also be seen in the photo film above.

Martens made the drawings between the summer of 1833 and the early months of 1835. Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library owns his two sketchbooks from this period and has made the above audio slideshow to celebrate their addition to the Digital Library.

“These drawings were made almost two centuries ago but even now, they still really vividly bring to life one of the most famous voyages in the world and arguably the most famous in the history of science,” said Dr Alison Pearn, Associate Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

“Each of these pages is only 14cm by 20cm. It’s wonderful that everyone now has the opportunity to flick through these sketchbooks in their virtual representation and to follow the journey as Martens and Darwin saw it unfold.”

̽��ֱ��first sketchbook begins just before Martens heard that the Beagle was looking for a new ship’s artist, capturing street life in Montevideo in August 1833. ̽��ֱ��later sketches give a sense of how hard and difficult the journey must have been both on sea and land in uncharted territory.

Martens did not have much time to make his sketches and the notebooks are littered with hastily-scribbled notes to himself about colours, textures and the geology of the landscapes before him.

“Darwin described the Beagle voyage as the most formative experience of his life and to see it through the eyes of one of his companions is a very vivid reminder of the reality of that journey,” added Pearn. “Martens' sketches are a visual counterpart to Darwin’s letters home. Both bring to life a really remarkable adventure in a vast and remote part of the world.”

Tiny sketchbooks that bring to life one of the most famous voyages in history have been digitised and made available online for the first time.

Darwin described the Beagle voyage as the most formative experience of his life and to see it through the eyes of one of his companions is a very vivid reminder of the reality of that journey.

Alison Pearn

A Voyage of Sketches: ̽��ֱ��Art of Conrad Martens

Conrad Martens/Cambridge Digital Library

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Yes

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