Darwin spent more than three years on HMS Beagle as it surveyed the coasts of South America, including a long sojourn in the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego in 1832–34. The chapters on Patagonia and the Fuegian peoples are some of the most readable in the book, and they capture the place at a moment just before it was transformed by sheep and settlement.
Darwin is a sharp observer of landscape and of people, and his accounts of Punta Arenas's predecessor settlement at Port Famine, of the Yámana along the Beagle Channel, and of his climb of the rocks above the strait remain remarkably fresh.