One of a group of 15 watercolours made by Conrad Martens of Robert Fitzroy's voyage of the 'Beagle'. It depicts a stretch of desert country close to the Santa Cruz River. Scrubby plants and guanaco bones can be seen in the foreground, with a group of guanacoes in the right middle-distance and the Andes mountains in the background. See 'Conrad Martens's "Beagle" Pictures', no.187, in R.D. Keynes (ed.), 'The Beagle Record...' (CUP, 1979), pp. 389-402. The view was taken in Patagonia in April-May 1834 as a drawing in Martens's first voyage sketchbook, now in Cambridge University Library, which Keynes numbers as 186. It was engraved, with the title above, by S. Bull for the second volume of Fitzroy's 'Narrative' of the 'Beagle' voyage (f. p. 352). For notes on Martens, see PAF6227.