"Beagle" reached Ascension Island on 19 July 1836, and Darwin was delighted to receive letters from his sisters with news that Sedgwick had written: "He is doing admirably in S. America, & has already sent home a Collection above all praise.— It was the best thing in the world for him that he went out on the Voyage of Discovery— There was some risk of his turning out an idle man: but his character will now be fixed, & if God spare his life, he will have a great name among the Naturalists of Europe." Darwin later recalled how he "clambered over the mountains... with a bounding step and made the volcanic rocks resound under my geological hammer!." He agreed with the saying attributed to the people of St Helena that "We know we live on a rock, but the poor people at Ascension live on a cinder", and noted the care taken to sustain "houses, gardens & fields placed near the summit of the central mountain". (In the 1840s, Darwin worked with Hooker, who proposed in 1847 that the Royal Navy shall import tree species, a project started in 1850 which led to the creation of an artificial cloud forest on what is now Green Mountain.)