 He agreed with Lyell's idea of "the gradual birth & death of species" but, unlike Lyell, Darwin was willing to believe Giovanni Battista Brocchi's idea that extinct species had somehow aged and died out.They arrived at the port of Valdivia on 8 February 1835, then twelve days later Darwin was on shore when he experienced a severe earthquake and returned to find the port town badly damaged.They sailed north to Concepción, and arrived on 4 March to find that the same earthquake had devastated the city by repeated shocks and a tsunami, with even the cathedral in ruins.