Southern belle: Ushuaia, nestled against the Andes mountains, is the southernmost city in South America and serves as the staging grounds for cruises to the Antarctic and the Falkland Islands. Richard I'Anson/Lonely Planet

Of all the places I visited, Ushuaia, the biggest city in Tierra del Fuego, most aggressively marketed itself as a Charles Darwin destination. Which is how one explains "The Adventure of the Beagle," the musical, or as it's called there, "El espectáculo del fin del mundo," the "show at the end of the earth," a production of the tourist-friendly Centro Beagle.

I arrived at the Beagle Center an hour before the show and bought a ticket (labeled "boarding agreement") from a young man in a sailor hat who waved me into the waiting room.

The lobby was huge and featured wooden tables arranged around the aft end of a scale-model replica of the Beagle. It was empty, so I grabbed a bar stool and waited, as the lobby speakers blasted a looped recording of Handel's "Coronation Anthem, Zadok the Priest." Four repeats of the anthem later, I wondered if they would perform the show for a solo, although highly enthusiastic, spectator. But ten minutes before show time, a group of twenty or thirty cruise ship passengers arrived, with a tour director in tow. They seated themselves at a long table and ordered pre-performance Argentine wines. A few actors in wide-brimmed floppy hats and silver-blue neckties that made them look more like Parisian pastry chefs than 19th-century sailors emerged and pretended to swab the decks.

Before the violins could strike up a seventh chorus of the "Coronation Anthem," the cruise ship passengers rose in unison at a signal from their tour director and shuffled through a curtain in the back of the Beagle replica. I followed them onto the ship and climbed into a seat near the top of the converted cabin, looking down at the deck planks and the sail-less main mast. My view also encompassed Tierra del Fuegian glaciers made of crinkly white fabric draped over a metal framework. The ship sat in the middle of a big-top-style tent, and the black walls, with inset starry lights, rose high overhead.

Then everything went dark. The audience went quiet.

The production began with a small video screen showing—what else?—Darwin as an old man in his study, recounting the origins of the voyage in a frail, Argentine-accented voice. Suddenly, our hero appeared in the flesh, emerging from a door in the Beagle's fore cabin dressed in a long corduroy jacket, long red pants, and a pink shirt, and carrying what looked to be a rusty red suitcase emblazoned with flowers. The actor's long, straight hair was dyed blond with visible dark roots, and worn in an unruly mop. Synthetic muttonchops were glued to his cheeks.

Soon, the sailors that had earlier been pretend-swabbing the deck appeared, and then an appropriately costumed Robert FitzRoy and another officer, and then, as Monty Python might say, things got silly. They broke out in song, in English. The lyrics, transcribed on the "boarding agreement," read:

We'll fight the roaring seas
We shall face no defeat
All across the Seven Seas
The Beagle will succeed.

When the sailors finished singing and stomped off, Darwin and FitzRoy took center stage for a duet about searching for truth (in Darwin's case) and the work of the Lord (in FitzRoy's case). The lyrics—Darwin: "I'll listen to the calling of the Earth," FitzRoy: "uncover all of nature's divine perfection and more"—played on two falsehoods, the first being that Darwin had any notion of evolution by natural selection before, or even really during, the Beagle's voyage. (Mostly, he had inklings that all species were not created exactly as they were and unchanged over time.) The second untruth was that FitzRoy wanted Darwin along to prove the literal truth of the Bible.

The musical continued to hammer that point, portraying FitzRoy as a fundamentalist blowhard, unwilling to tolerate dissent on religious matters. It staged Darwin as a tormented evolutionist, torn between his friendship with the captain and the new scientific truths he was discovering.

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