During his historic journey aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin spent over a month on a small island off the coast of Chile, known as Chilue.

It wasn't his final destination, but he still managed to work and collect information and specimens, including a small endangered fox, now known as Darwin's Zoro.

He also witnessed the after-effects of an earthquake, and made note of a rainbow that transitioned from the typical semi-circle to a full circle right before his eyes, but it was the people he encountered that seemed to impact him the most.

He later wrote,

they are a humble, quiet, industrious set of men, although with plenty to eat, the people are very poor, and the lower orders cannot scrape together money sufficient to purchase even the smallest luxuries.

He also noted seeing a pair of black-necks swans, but thankfully Darwin didn't have the same view of birds that the local people did.

And still do, actually.

One local historian recalls how, when he was a boy, a hunched back heron flew low over his fishing boats. When he told his father, the older man grabbed his shotgun and waited for the bird to return.

Why? Because for as long as anyone could remember, the people of Chilue had believed that some birds are more than they appear.

Some people, it seems, believe the birds are warlocks, and seeing one was a bad omen, hinting that someone close to you would soon die.

All of us are ruled by authority to some degree, whether it's through our government, our religion, or our family ties.

Often, it's all three, but there's another governing body, one that says old as time itself, and on Chilue, it controlled people for centuries.

Sometimes, you see, people are ruled by fear.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

The Incas called it the Place of the Seagulls. They stayed away from the area, believing it was the border between their empire of prosperity and safety, and a cold, dark wilderness to the south.

Chilue isn't a large island, perhaps less than 100 miles from north to south, but it's certainly the largest in the collection of small islands there off the coast of Chile, and to visit it is to go back in time.

Green hills, mountains in the distance, the dark waves of the south Pacific lapping on the shore, where colorful houses are built on stilts to stay above the mud and the rocks.

Darwin described it as beautiful in 1835. He wrote of the mixture of evergreen trees and tropical vegetation, of the rolling hills and the thick forests, and all of that green Darwin postulated was due to the enormous amount of rainfall.

Grey skies and wet soil are a constant of life in Chilue, then as it is now.

And while most people have never heard of the place, the unique churches there have an architectural style that has earned them classification as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

There are churches, of course, because Jesuit missionaries built them shortly after arriving at the beginning of the 17th century.

But don't let those European artifacts fool you. The culture, the Jesuits encountered when they arrived, was far outside their realm of experience.

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