Hill or High Water

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been cataloguing a collection of over 300 photographic slides from the Royal Society expedition to Southern Chile, which took place from September 1958 to March 1959. The slides were donated in July 2024 by Sir Martin Holdgate (b.1931), who acted as the expedition leader. He took the vast majority himself, and donated his field notebooks, expedition diary and some objects collected during the trip. The expedition was planned to coincide with the centenary of On the origin of species, the seminal work on evolutionary biology by Charles Darwin FRS (1809-1882) first published in 1859. Originally an extensive trip around the Southern Temperate Zone was suggested, tracking the voyage of HMS Beagle that took the young Darwin across this part of the world in the 1830s. However, when HMNZS Endeavour, the proposed ship for this voyage, proved unavailable, the stops in Australia, New Zealand and a number of smaller islands were cut, shifting the expedition to a det ... Read full article.