Day 58, Sunday, January 1st, 2017, Ushuaia’s harbour.

The Spanish writer Enrique Gil y Carrasco could hardly image, siting on his modest home in Berlin where he first received and later delivered to the nobleman Humboldt and the King of Prussia, the first copies of his romantic novel entitled, the El Señor de Bembibre, that someday his hero and protagonist, Álvaro Yáñez, would sail the South Seas.

The most admired and respected humanist meeting in Europe, between Alexander von Humboldt, and the young Spanish poet, would had been a memorable one. In fact, it has been staged by the Threatre Group Conde Gaton, with a script by Ovidio Blanco. In 1845, when Enrique Gil met the German sage, Humboldt was the most influential person in Berlin. Humboldt had already been to Gil’s town, El Bierzo, on his way to the port of A Coruña in Spain, from which he sailed on a tour of America that lasted five years (1799-1804). Humboldt traced the Orinoco, travelled to the Chimborazo, and toured Russia and Siberia. Enrique Gil, who was a very diplomatic and avid traveller of extraordinary intelligence, conversed in German with the Humboldt, who was the author of Cosmos: it was probably a magical moment that we can only imagine.

I image what that moment might have been like, while on aboard the research vessel Sarmiento de Gamboa, on the verge of ending 2016 and while sailing the South Seas. The same seas that Humboldt peeped out when he crossed the equator. I image that meeting while I am sailing, for the third time in my life, to Antarctica and within a few hours of crossing Drake passage.

I have to tell you that the Spanish author Enrique Gil has been my passion in recent years. I have had the honor to work as the editor for a new publication of his complete works, to mark his two-hundred-year anniversary for the “Biblioteca Gil y Carrasco”. However, in my new adventure, it is his friend Humboldt who accompanies me, along with other scientific colleagues such as Charles Darwin and Alejandro Malaspina, whose steps I am following along the Río de la Plata and Tierra del Fuego
With Darwin’s book, I have also brought with me two copies of the book “El Señor de Bembibre” 2015 edition with colorful illustrations of the poet Juan Carlos Mestre.

After sailing for two months around the Spanish scientific bases, the ship Sarmiento de Gamboa has ended up at the port of Ushuaia to celebrate New Years’ Eve and relieve the crew. Reinforcements arrive and a score of men and women go. I say goodbye to the ship’s captain Pablo Fernández, from Argovejo in Leon. And as a thank you for their hospitality on board the ship, I give the Capitan a copy of the El Señor de Bembibre, and I donate another copy to the ship’s library, so Álvaro Yáñez, the main protagonist of the novel, can sail the South Seas forever.

 

 

by Horizonte Antártida