William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
Yesterday evening, as we navigated along the Beagle Channel, the clear southeastern sky gave me hope that we would reach our target area unhindered. The engines started at 4 a.m., and everyone hurried to use the bathroom, having been warned of rough seas. However, my Pollyanna premonition seems to have been correct as we never saw bad waves.
We were scheduled to reach our safe harbor at Isla Grevy by 8 a.m. Stepping out onto the deck, I found islands all around us, and relatively calm waters meant we were bypassing Isla Grevy and heading straight to Isla Hermite, one of our main targets. I could have jumped up and down in delight! It would be some time yet until we arrived, but after waiting weeks to reach this island, what was another few hours?
William R. Buck, Ph.D., is the Mary Flagler Cary Curator of Botany at The New York Botanical Garden. Every January for the last three years, Dr. Buck, a moss specialist, and a team of colleagues have journeyed to the Cape Horn region at the southern tip of South America to document the area’s rich diversity of mosses and search for new species.
This year’s expedition ship, the Doña Pilar, at dock
Our time in Puerto Williams, an interruption in our fieldwork, raced by. We arrived at 8:30 a.m. on the 16th after a four-and-a-half-hour trip from a collecting site on the northwest coast of Navarino. We decided to have lunch and dinner at a local restaurant; the stable environment would be a welcome change after so many meals on the Doña Pilar.
After lunch, I skipped flan and headed back to the house where we were staying to be picked up for a public meeting with some politicians who had come to Puerto Williams for the occasion. I was scheduled to speak in support of creating a ministry of science for Chile. But due to a misunderstanding, I wasn’t the only one they wanted, so we swung by the restaurant to pick up more warm bodies. Barb Andreas, Barbara Murray, and John Brinda volunteered.
