V !(° 
JOURNAL OF THE EXPEDITION TO TIERRA 
DEL FUEGO 
By SIR WALTER BALDWIN SPENCER 
(with Miss Hamilton’s Narrative) 
February iy y 1929. Left London for Newcastle, and went 
on board ‘Tudorstar’ (Blue Star Line) on Monday, February 
18. ‘Tudorstar’ left South Shields under Captain G. Owen 
on Tuesday, February 19, at 1.30 p.m. Saw Madeira Light 
on Wednesday, February 27, at 7.30 p.m., Cape Verde 
Islands on Monday, March 4, and on Saturday the 9th, 
passed St. Paul’s Rock during the night. Sunday the 10th, 
Fernando Noronha (fig. i). Saturday the 16th, crossed 
Tropic of Capricorn at 8 a.m. Arrived at Puerto Deseado 
on Monday, March 25, and left on Monday, April 1, at 
3 p.m. Arrived at St. Julian on Wednesday, April 3. For 
shingle beds, oysters in beds, &c., at St. Julian, see Darwin, 
ed. xii, p. 175. 1 Left St. Julian on Saturday the 6th, and 
1 The geology of Patagonia is interesting. Differently from Europe, where the 
tertiary formations appear to have accumulated in bays, here along hundreds of 
miles of coast we have one great deposit, includingmany tertiary shells, all apparently 
extinct. The most common shell is a massive gigantic oyster, sometimes even a foot 
in diameter. These beds are covered by others of a peculiar soft white stone, includ¬ 
ing much gypsum, and resembling chalk, but really of a pumiceous nature. It is 
highly remarkable, from being composed, to at least one-tenth part of its bulk, of 
Infusoria: Professor Ehrenberg has already ascertained in it thirty oceanic forms. 
This bed extends for 500 miles along the coast, and probably for a considerably 
greater distance. At Port St. Julian its thickness is more than 800 feet! These white 
beds are everywhere capped by a mass of gravel, forming probably one of the largest 
beds of shingle anywhere in the world: it certainly extends from near the Rio 
Colorado to between 600 and 700 nautical miles southward} at Santa Cruz (a river 
a little south of St. Julian) it reaches to the foot of the Cordillera; half-way up the 
river its thickness is more than 200 feet; it probably everywhere extends to this great 
chain, whence the well-rounded pebbles of porphyry have been derived: we may 
consider its average breadth as 200 miles, and its average thickness as about 50 feet. 
If this great bed of pebbles, without including the mud necessarily derived from 
their attrition, was piled into a mound, it would form a great mountain chain! 
When we consider that all these pebbles, countless as the grains of sand in the desert, 
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