Charles Darwin* (4 page)

Hiring tutors, he crammed for exams and passed his courses with relatively high marks (tenth out of 178 students who didn’t go on for advanced or honors classes).

Darwin’s plan for the summer of 1831 was to join classmates to study in the tropics—at Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, said by Humboldt to be a paradise for naturalists. The trip fell through. In July Darwin went to book passage and found that passenger ships to the Canaries departed only in June.

Meanwhile, Henslow introduced Darwin to his old tutor, the great Cambridge professor of geology Adam Sedgwick. Darwin had diligently avoided Sedgwick’s classes, still disillusioned by the boring geology classes he’d taken at Edinburgh.

But now Henslow asked Sedgwick to take Darwin as his assistant on a geological walking trip through Wales. Darwin overcame his resistance to geology and agreed. Before the trip he even practiced using his “clinometer,” the tool for measuring mountains, on the furniture in his bedroom.

As The Mount was on the way to Wales, Sedgwick offered to meet Darwin there. That night Darwin, all excited, told the professor a story he’d heard of a tropical shell found in a nearby gravel pit. This news contradicted the known geology of the area. Sedgwick gently pointed out Darwin’s naïveté. The shell could have landed there in a number of ways that had nothing to do with the geological makeup of the land. Just one shell was not nearly enough evidence to overturn established knowledge.

From this, Darwin learned “that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.” It was better not to draw conclusions without lots of proof.

Sedgwick’s goal in Wales was to correct errors in earlier geological maps of the area. These maps, which recorded different types of rock layers (strata), were used by scientists to learn the geological history of an area. Darwin quickly learned how to identify rock specimens, interpret rock strata, and generalize from his observations. Sometimes he went off on his own, and he and Sedgwick would meet up later and compare notes. When Sedgwick made use of some of Darwin’s findings, it made Darwin “exceedingly proud.”

He returned to The Mount with a new passion for geology. He vaguely looked forward to Cambridge in the fall and continuing his studies to enter the church. Ras, whose delicate health had forced him to give up medicine and live off his inheritance, was more cynical and made fun of Charles’s lack of proper religious fervor. With two weeks to kill before school, Charles went off for some intense shooting with his Uncle Josiah.

On his return home, there was a letter from Professor Henslow. Henslow had been asked to recommend someone—a gentleman—to work as an unpaid naturalist aboard the HMS
Beagle
. This ship of the Royal Navy was going to explore the coast of South America and its ports. Ensuring the safety of trade routes was a crucial step in expanding the mighty British Empire. After that the
Beagle
would continue on to the South Sea Islands and Australia, circling the world over the course of two years. If new gold or diamond deposits were located, so much the better.

The ship was sailing from Plymouth in a month. Would Darwin be interested?

Silly question.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Journey of a Lifetime

ATRIP AROUND the world . . . seeing birds, bugs, and flowers he (and most naturalists) had never seen before . . . on a ship with a library of 250 books, including the latest science books and the complete
Encyclopedia Britannica
. . . out of school, away from his nagging father, treated with respect as the ship’s naturalist. . . .

To the twenty-two-year-old Darwin, it all sounded incredibly exciting. He had no real idea what he was letting himself in for, but it seemed like a fantastic opportunity, for what he didn’t know yet. “I immediately said I would go,” Darwin wrote later.

But first he had to get around his father’s serious objection to the “wild scheme.” The risks were too high—harsh conditions, disease, shipwreck, death—and the whole idea meant yet another delay in Charles’s settling down to a proper profession. Darwin went to Uncle Josiah for help. Point by point, Josiah answered the objections of Charles’s father, and the doctor finally changed his mind.

The captain of the
Beagle
was twenty-six-year-old Robert FitzRoy. It was an English custom to take a naturalist along on such trips for information gathering. Basically, FitzRoy was looking for a nice guy, someone easy to be around, a cultured gentleman he could talk to as an equal at meals. The previous captain of the
Beagle
, overwhelmed by responsibilities and with no real peer to talk to, had shot himself. Intensely ambitious, conscientious about every detail, FitzRoy wanted to avoid conditions that could lead to this fate. He was interested in science himself, especially astronomy and meteorology, and had bought six of the ship’s twenty-two chronometers (for determining longitude) with his own money.

The two men met and liked each other, though the captain worried about Darwin’s nose. A believer in the pseudoscience of phrenology—analyzing personality from a person’s features and the bumps on his skull—he didn’t think Darwin’s nose showed enough stamina to withstand the rigors of this voyage. Still, traveling with the grandson of Erasmus Darwin sounded very cool. Darwin was able to persuade him that his “nose had spoken falsely.”

So the deal was on. Darwin promptly set about meeting with London naturalists for advice on what and how to collect, spending quality time with Ras, advising the sisterhood on packing up his things and labeling his shirts with his name. “I am as happy as a king,” he wrote. Besides materials for collecting and preserving specimens, a portable dissecting microscope, and other high-tech gadgets, he packed a Bible, John Milton’s epic religious poem
Paradise Lost
, his own copy of Humboldt’s
Personal Narrative
(a gift from Henslow), and
Principles of Geology
, volume one, by lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell (a gift from FitzRoy).

Alas, FitzRoy’s meticulous preparations, then several winter storms, delayed the trip for several months. Discouraged, Darwin spent his time in Plymouth, fearing he’d made a big mistake. He developed a rash on his face and pains in his chest, but he refused to visit a doctor for fear of being told he couldn’t go.

Finally, on December 27, 1831, the voyage got off to a sickening start. This was not a cruise ship. Darwin had a tiny cabin under the poop deck, which he shared with two roommates, a fourteen-year-old midshipman and a nineteen-year-old survey officer. To sleep in his hammock each night he had to pull a drawer out of the wall so his feet could tuck in. Darwin was seasick beyond belief. He spent the first several days vomiting nonstop, eating only raisins. The misery was “far far beyond what I ever guessed at.”

And then there was the harsh treatment of the crew. With seventy-four men under his command, mostly younger than he was, FitzRoy was paranoid about establishing discipline immediately. He ordered twenty-five to forty-five lashes given to any sailor guilty of drunkenness, disobeying orders, or neglecting his duties. Darwin was horrified by the cruelty and the nightmarish screams of men being whipped. He felt like he was in hell. His distress was obvious to FitzRoy, who assumed Darwin would be leaving the ship at the first port.

But soon enough, he was being soothed by nature—the brightly colored fish jumping around the bow of the ship, the warm breezes, a storm of butterflies. He began lowering gauze nets, thrilled at the intricate sea creatures—the plankton and jellyfish—he was catching. These tiny, simple forms of life never ceased to amaze him—“that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.”

He started keeping a journal for the first time, training himself in the discipline of putting his thoughts into words on paper, developing his powers of observation, learning how to write in a clear, unpretentious style. In three weeks the ship reached St. Jago in the Cape Verde Islands, 450 miles off the African coast. Darwin eagerly rushed ashore to investigate. The dense green jungle, with its palm trees, orange trees, coffee plants, strange new bugs, rich colors of the valleys, unfamiliar birds—he was in heaven. “It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes,” he wrote. After tasting bananas for the first time, he set about harvesting every specimen he could find, exclaiming out loud with pleasure.

Throughout the voyage, he never lost his enthusiasm for anything new. He was like a kid in a candy store: “If the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butterfly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over.” He collected tiny insects, reptiles, fish, birds, mice, corals, barnacles, dried bulbs and seeds of plants, rock specimens, shells, and, of course, beetles.

At one point, Darwin described his mind as “a perfect
hurricane
of delight and astonishment.” In a rock pool, he marveled at a cuttlefish changing color as it hurried for cover. He succeeded in catching another and taking it back to the ship, where it put on a show by glowing in the dark. Charles was amazed, thrilled, transported by this discovery. Only later was he told that these were typical, well-known cuttlefish talents.

Aboard ship, he was too seasick to read much. He was only halfway through Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
, but he was very impressed. Lyell, like Leonardo da Vinci centuries before him, reasoned that Earth’s mountains and valleys had formed over enormously long periods of time. The Earth must be at least hundreds of millions of years old, not a few thousand as stated in the Bible. Lyell saw that “the present is the key to the past,” meaning that the same forces acting on Earth now—such as volcanoes, earthquakes, floods—have always been the cause of change on the planet. Over time lots of small events led to big changes.

This was new news, opposed to what Darwin’s professors had taught about Cuvier and isolated catastrophic events.

Trying to reconcile Cuvier and Lyell—they couldn’t both be right—kept Darwin’s brain busy. He happily “geologized” his way through the trip, starting in St. Jago, the site of an ancient volcano. Exploring a streak of white rock that turned out to be compacted coral and seashells, he noticed that the embedded shells were the same as the live sea creatures on the beach. So this layer must once have been a seabed, underwater. The level of the white streak varied, but there were no dramatic breaks in the white streak, so it didn’t seem to have arisen from a sudden catastrophe. The land must have risen from the ocean gradually, as the result of a long series of volcanic events over many years.

Landing in present-day Salvador in Brazil, Darwin was delighted by the tropical forest but disgusted by slavery, banned in Britain but still legal in other countries, including the United States. Darwin’s family was strongly abolitionist, so he was shocked to find that Captain FitzRoy was pro-slavery, believing it was part of the natural order of things. Uncharacteristically, Darwin was drawn into a huge argument with him about it. Afterward FitzRoy apologized, then they never spoke of it again.

As for his attitude toward native people he encountered over the course of the voyage, Darwin attributed differences between people to cultural advantages, to “civilization” (British, of course, being the best), not racial inferiority. Humans around the word were ultimately and “essentially the same creature,” he wrote, but their societies were at different stages of development. Today Darwin’s views seem elitist and condescending, but for the time his thinking was progressive.

By 1832 Darwin was in the Brazilian rainforest, delighting in butterflies, parrots, and army ants. After seeing a group of vibrantly colored flatworms undulating in the shade, he started his flatworm collection, marshalling some fifteen species.

When they were onboard ship, he and FitzRoy settled into a routine. After breakfast in the captain’s quarters, they went their separate ways. Darwin would tag his specimens, record every observation, make duplicate copies of his lists to be on the safe side, keep up his journal, and write long letters back home. The two men took lunch and dinner together, enjoying each other’s company, discussing the novels of Jane Austen and the glories of that day’s scenery. Darwin did notice that the captain had a temper (the crew’s nickname for him was “Hot Coffee”). For the most part FitzRoy treated Darwin affectionately, as a sort of mascot. One of FitzRoy’s tasks was to name places, and Darwin Sound in Tierra del Fuego and Mount Darwin in the Andes were showing up on his maps. Very religious, FitzRoy would lead long services every Sunday, which everyone onboard was required to attend.

Seasickness continued to plague Darwin just about every time the ship sailed—“I hate every wave of the ocean with a fervor,” he wrote. To get relief he would lie down on the table he was supposed to be working on. “I must take the horizontal,” he would plead.