Walking in Darwin's footsteps.  Beach-goers play on the black sand beach in Matavai Bay near Point Venus,  probably none realizing they had walked where Darwin, and indeed, Cook and Bligh had walked more than 170 years previously.  On November 17, 1835, Captain Fitzroy set up instruments on Point Venus (to the left of the picture), where Lieutenant (later Captain) Cook took his observations of the transit of Venus across the sun 66 years earlier, to make navigational measurements.  Darwin took advantage of the time by climbing the valley in the background to a spot "between 2000 and 3000 feet" from which he made his observations of the island of Eimeo (Moorea today) and its reef, as an engraving in a frame, the breakers on the reef representing the frame, the smooth lagoon the marginal paper, and the island itself the drawing.