and wrote directly into his Beagle diary , scientific notes or, less regularly, letters. It is curious that there is no reference in the last pages of the Rio Notebook to Darwin's first encounter with the native Fuegians, which is described in his Beagle diary entry for 18 December, but this could be explained by the fact that some of the Rio Notebook pages have been excised. As he declared in his Beagle diary, 'it was without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld', p. 122 , and recorded in his Autobiography how 'the sight of a naked savage in his native land is an event which can never be forgotten', p. 80 . Darwin was struck with the realization that his own ancestors lived in a similar way a few thousand years before. Because of the gap in the notebooks, there is also no mention of the terrible storm of 13 January which wrecked several ships in the seas around the southern tip of South America. This storm nearly brought the Beagle voyage, and the lives of all the men onboard, to a premature end. FitzRoy, in Narrative 2: 126 , reported that even in the normally quiet harbour of Berkeley Sound in the Falklands, the whaler Le Magellan was totally wrecked that day. He also says 'Mr Darwin's collections, in the poop and forecastle cabins on deck, were much injured' and the Beagle lost one of its beautiful whale-boats at 1.45pm, when sixty miles WSW