Bonpland’s unprecedented geological record of the malvinera peat

Abstract

The present work focused on the identification of and the historical value given to the geological records, linked to the Malvinas Islands and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, which the French naturalist Aimé Bonpland (1773-1858) enumerates and describes in his geological catalogue, individualized as manuscript MS 210. These were examined for the first time by this investigation in the year 2018 during a study of Bonpland’s non digitalized Files at the National Museum of Natural History, Paris, France. The aforementioned records had their origin in the geological samples given by Mr. Luis Vernet (1791-1871), the first governor and Argentinian commandant of the Malvinas Islands, when both of them were in Buenos Aires in the year 1832. Samples were classified and incorporated in the General Geology Catalog of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris as brown peat from the Malvinas Islands and rocks from Isla de los Estados, belonging to the Bonpland Collection with Argentina as a country of origin. At the same time, the aforementioned geological catalogue is documented, and Bonpland’s 1832 letters to Humboldt are analyzed, in relation to the context and interest that those letters represent for the history of the Argentine Republic.