Calling all medals.

• Author: McCracken Peck, Robert
• Position: UPFRONT - Letter to the Editor

While surveying the coast of South America between 1826 and 1830, the officers of HMS Adventure and her better known sister ship, HMS Beagle, presented an unknown number of brass medals especially struck to commemorate their voyage. They bear an image of Britannia, holding an olive branch, seated beneath a crown within an open wreath. On the reverse are the names of the two surveying vessels, the reigning British monarch, George IV, and the dates 1826, 1827, or 1828 (examples vary). Each medal measures about one inch in diameter. In 1981 a party from the Chilean survey ship Piloto Pardo recovered a small cache of these medals and other artifacts from an archaeological site near Skyring Water in northeast Tierra del Fuego. Other examples are known from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England, and from private collections.

It was the Beagle's first captain, Philip Parker King, who had the medals made "to give away to the Indians with whom we might communicate." In the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle, Between the Years 1826 and 1836, edited by the Beagle's second captain, Robert Fitzroy, King recorded at least one occasion in which the medals were used to positive effect in...