Three months earlier, Conrad Martens, the son of a German merchant and his British wife, had boarded HMS Hyacinth in Falmouth, eager to capture the energy of Rio de Janeiro in watercolour. Writing to Charles Darwin, who was on an inland trip when the painter’s services were engaged, Capt Robert FitzRoy described Earle’s successor as ‘a stone pounding artist — who exclaims in his sleep, “think of me standing upon a pinnacle of the Andes — or sketching a Fuegian Glacier!!! A self portrait by Conrad Martens. Beagle in Ponsonby Sound, as captured by Conrad Martens. This, Martens wrote, was ‘a tribe naturally savage and bloodthirsty, now… taught to consider every stranger as an enemy from whome no quarter will be received and consequently none given’.