by A. N. Wilson
While the Beagle sailed back down to Bahia, Darwin stayed behind in Rio, taking a cottage in nearby Botafogo. They were a revelatory few weeks. On 6 April he ‘frittered away’ a day obtaining passports to explore the interior: ‘It is never very pleasant to submit to the insolence of men in office; but to the Brazilians who are as contemptible in their minds as their persons are miserable it is nearly intolerable. But the prospect of wild forests tenanted by beautiful birds, Monkeys & Sloths, & Lakes by Cavies and Alligators, will make any naturalist lick the dust even from the foot of a Brazilian.’47
Darwin was not alone in the cottage. He had as a companion Augustus Earle, the thirty-nine-year-old official artist on the Beagle. Although in the early stages of his time ashore, Earle was bed-bound with rheumatism, he was a likeable and useful companion. He had been to Rio before and was able to show the sights to Darwin and to one of the midshipmen, Philip Gidley King (aged fifteen), whom Darwin found to be ‘the most perfect, pleasant boy I ever met with’.48 Earle took them to dine at a table d’hôte, where they met several English officers serving under Brazilian colours: but ‘it is calamitous how short & uncertain life is in these countries: to Earle’s enquiries about the number of young men whom he left in health and prosperity, the most frequent answer is he is dead and gone – the deaths are generally to be attributed to drinking’.49
When the old conquistador Tomé de Souza landed on this spot in 1552, he wrote, ‘Tudo e graça que se dele pode decir’: ‘Everything here is of a beauty which can hardly be described.’50 They are words which are echoed in Darwin’s diaries nearly three centuries later. In Darwin’s time, the city had a population of some 229,600.51
Rio was a South American embodiment of Grandfather Wedgwood’s mercantile values. It had become the capital of the Brazilian Empire because of the proximity of the gold- and diamond-mining areas of Minas Gerais. It was also a centre of trade and commerce. ‘The whole day has been disagreeably frittered away in shopping’ is one diary-entry,52 while Darwin was impressed by ‘the gay colours of the houses, ornamented by balconys, from the numerous Churches & Convents, & from the numbers hurrying along the streets’ – all of which ‘bespeaks the commercial capital of Southern America’.53
Most of the splendid buildings were but a few decades old. When Napoleon had invaded Portugal in 1807, the royal family relocated to Brazil, and in the next eight years many of the most magnificent streets and buildings in Rio were constructed around the royal court.54 As well as buildings, the arrival of the Portuguese government in exile brought institutions – the Treasury, the High Court, the Court of Appeal. The ‘royal hand’ had ‘regenerated America’.55 A new political order had come into being, and after 1821, when the King returned to Lisbon, Brazil became an independent kingdom – as it remained at the time of Darwin’s residence in Botafogo, then a district much favoured by English merchants and bankers.56 There was a great appropriateness about Darwin, so much of whose money derived from trade, settling in this spot. ‘With the claws of a lion’, it has been aptly said, British trade, soon after the establishment of the independent kingdom, ‘controlled almost the entire Brazilian market’.57 Britain took three-quarters of the cotton exported by Pernambuco, half of its sugar, cacao, coffee, rubber, timber, as well as gold and diamonds from the mines. All this helped boost the British economy: it was the ore from which Conrad’s Nostromo would be fashioned.
For Darwin, however, the primary excitement of Rio and its environs was to be found in natural history. In the bay itself, ‘on the sandy plain, which skirts the sea at the back of the Sugar Loaf’,58 he collected ‘numerous animals’. The sheer abundance of vegetation was a source of boundless rapture. ‘The number of oranges which the trees in the orchards here bear is quite astonishing. I saw one today where I am sure there were lying on the ground sufficient to load several carts, besides which the boughs were almost cracking with the burthen of the remaining fruit.’59
If the coastline provided him with an abundance to admire, how much more was this the case as he made his way into the interior. ‘If we rank scenery according to the astonishment it produces, this most assuredly occupies the highest place.’60
Through May and June he divided his time between encounters with English exiles – ‘called on a Mr Roberts, one of the endless nondescript characters of which the Brazils are full – broken down agents to speculation companies; officers who have served under more flags than one: &C &C’61 – and natural history.
In the month of May, concentrating upon land animals, he collected ‘an host of undescribed species’ for dispatch to England. Together with its cotton, cacao and diamonds, Brazil was to give up its beetles, its spiders, its very rocks, for ‘geology carries the day’.62 On the coast he gathered ‘several specimens of an Octopus, which possessed a most marvellous power of changing colours, equalling any chamaelion & evidently accommodating the changes to the colour of the ground which it passed over’.63
The tropical forest ‘in all its sublime grandeur’ yielded a ‘host of parasitical plants’.64 Darwin could scarcely contain his excitement as he wrote back to Henslow and Fox, cataloguing his discoveries.65
He saw it all with fresh eyes. It was indeed epiphanic. At the same time, he saw it through the eyes, and through the pages, of his role model Alexander von Humboldt, the European traveller in South America who had gone on, in Kosmos, his magnum opus, to write a book which tried to explain, or describe, everything that is. ‘I formerly admired Humboldt,’ Darwin told Henslow, ‘I now almost adore him; he alone gives any notion, of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics.’66 In an earlier part of that letter, Darwin revealed to Henslow that he actually had passages of Humboldt by heart: he speaks of himself ‘at Santa Cruz, whilst looking amongst the clouds for the Peak & repeating to myself Humboldt’s sublime descriptions’.67
It is striking that, with the spoilt languor of the rich, Darwin should have written to Fox in May 1832, ‘I suppose I shall remain through the whole voyage, but it is a sorrowful long fraction of one’s life.’68 Only a few months later, he had changed. There had always been a contrast in Darwin’s nature between the amiable loafer, who preferred shooting and country-house life to any commitment to work, and the insatiably curious naturalist. During the first few months in Brazil, Darwin quite consciously walked in the footsteps of Humboldt.
‘We have been 3 months here,’ he wrote to his sister Catherine,
& most undoubtedly I well know the glories of a Brazilian forest. Commonly I ride some few miles, quit my horse & start by some track into the impenetrable – mass of vegetation. Whilst seated on a tree, & eating my luncheon in the sublime solitude of the forest, the pleasure I experience is unspeakable. The number of undescribed animals I have taken is very great – & some to Naturalists, I am sure, very interesting. I attempt class after class of animals, so that before long I shall have a notion of all – so that if I gain no other end I shall never want an object of employment & amusement for the rest of my life.69
He was happier systematizing Brazilian fauna in the forests than contemplating the Brazilians, who were from his perspective ‘ignorant, cowardly, & indolent in the extreme’. As for the monks ‘it requires little physiognomy to see plainly stamped preserving cunning, sensuality and pride’.70
Early in his stay at Rio, trying to make himself understood while crossing in a ferry and talking to ‘a negro who was uncommonly stupid’, Darwin had talked in a loud voice and made manual gestures which passed near the man’s face. The Brazilian had flinched, making it clear that he expected his face to be struck. ‘This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal.’71 Earle told Darwin that it was usual for Brazilian gentle-women to keep thumbscrews to punish their slaves and that he had ‘seen the stump of the joint, which was wrenched off in the thumbscrew’.72 He felt bound in honesty to record that ‘the slaves are happier than what they themselves expected to be or than people in Engl
and think they are’, though his diary does not make it clear how he arrived at this conclusion. The grandson of two conspicuous abolitionists, Erasmus and Josiah, could not fail to ‘hope the day will come when they will assert their own rights & forget to avenge their wrongs’.73
The Brazilian slave trade was not abolished until 1850, partly as the result of an outbreak of yellow fever, brought from Africa, which killed some 16,000 Brazilians; partly because of Lord Palmerston’s policy, when British Foreign Secretary, of sending gunboats to the Brazilian ports where the vile trade was conducted. ‘These half-civilised governments’, he opined, ‘all require a dressing down every eight or ten years to keep them in order.’74
Yet while the cruelty of slavery shocked Darwin, there is no evidence that he believed, either as a young man or as a mature one, in the equality of the human race, whether as a political ideal to be hoped for or as a scientific fact. His cool appraisal, in The Descent of Man, of the inferiority of ‘savages’ to ‘civilised people’ shows that if he were forced to answer the enchained man’s question on old Wedgwood’s medallion – ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ – the answer could have been negative. He believed, what has now been roundly refuted by medical science, that the size of people’s skulls and their intellectual faculties were correlative.75 He was to express the view that the nineteenth century was one in which ‘civilised nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations’,76 and attributed the ‘remarkable success of the English as colonists over other European nations’ to their ‘energy’, implying at least that the English were more ‘civilised’ than, say, the Italians or the Germans. They were clearly in every way superior to the ‘immense mongrel population of Negroes and Portuguese’ to be encountered in Brazil.77 When he had developed the central idea of The Origin of Species, it was essential for him to believe that ‘the American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans’ stemmed from ‘a common progenitor’. This did not commit him, however, to the view that they had progressed at the same pace, and the doctrine of European superiority to other peoples of the planet underlay all his later work on the descent of the human animal. Even if this had not been the case, Darwin was in a political sense cautious, shy of anarchy. Though a supporter of Whigs versus Tories in domestic politics, he was no radical and would probably have shared Goethe’s view: ‘ich will lieber eine Ungerechtigkeit begehen, als Unordnung ertragen’ – ‘I would rather perpetrate an injustice than put up with anarchy.’78
So, when he rejoined the Beagle and they cruised south from Rio to Montevideo in July, his diary betrayed no sense of angst at Captain FitzRoy’s gung-ho approach, either to the volatile politics of the Latin colonists or to the plight of their conscripted slave soldiers and sailors. The aim of the voyage, after all, from FitzRoy’s perspective, was primarily cartographical, and from Darwin’s it was natural history. Why should they waste their time attempting to understand these obviously laughable foreigners? ‘Everybody is full of expectation & interest about the undescribed coast of Patagonia,’ Darwin wrote on 13 July.79 There was a good mood aboard, though Darwin suffered from the falling temperatures. ‘Everything shows we are steering for barbarous regions, all the officers have stowed away their razors, & intend allowing their beards to grow in a truly patriarchal fashion.’80 As the ship got up speed, eight or nine knots, Darwin delighted in the sight of hundreds of porpoises crossing their bows, and of flying fish leaping from the water.
When they reached harbour at Montevideo, however, they learnt (‘to our utter astonishment and amusement’) that the ‘present Government is a military usurpation’: ‘The revolutions in these countries are quite laughable.’81 The Captain of an English frigate, the Druid, told them his men had not been allowed to go on shore for several weeks. When they went to Buenos Aires they were forbidden to land because of a cholera scare. And when they tacked back to Montevideo, they found themselves being asked by ‘the Minister for the present military government’ for assistance against an insurrection of ‘some black troops’.82
Old Samuel Johnson, on a visit to Oxford, proposed as a toast ‘Here’s to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies!’83 His reason was simple: that ‘the laws of Jamaica allow a Negro no redress’.84 It is a measure of how the British capacity for sympathy had been coarsened by colonialism, in the fifty years since Johnson died, that no one aboard the Beagle, least of all Darwin, appeared to side with the insurgents in Montevideo. Captain FitzRoy sent fifty-two men ashore ‘heavily armed with Muskets, Cutlasses & Pistols’, but withdrew them a day later. His evident reason was cowardice, but the reason he gave was that if he gained possession of the citadel, which the mutineers had occupied, it would impugn his ‘character of neutrality’. Had he wished to preserve this ‘character’, FitzRoy would never have sent his men ashore in the first instance. ‘There certainly is a great deal of pleasure in the excitement of this sort of work,’ commented Darwin, who, with some of the young officers, had ‘amused ourselves by cooking Beefsteaks in the courtyard’ of the fortress of St Lucia while the working-class sailors and the besieged rebel slaves threatened one another’s insignificant lives. On 9 August, Captain FitzRoy thought to ask what exactly was going on to cause the disturbance. He found out that there ‘are actually 5 contending parties for supremacy’. Darwin inevitably added, ‘It makes one ask oneself whether Despotism is not better than such uncontrolled anarchy.’85
They sped southwards, sometimes through heavy rain. Sometimes seasickness overwhelmed Darwin (‘two of the days I was on my “beam ends”’).86 Sometimes, being at sea, enclosed in his small cabin, enabled him to catch up on correspondence, and to catalogue what was already becoming a prodigious collection of specimens. Off Baia Bianca they encountered a sealer, a small schooner hunting seal. Landing, they visited the settlement of ‘wild Gaucho cavalry’, wearing brightly coloured shawls around the waist, fringed drawers and ponchos. The ‘old Spaniards’ of ‘pure blood’ impressed Darwin very much, with their sabres, and powerful horses and warlike talk. The Indians, by contrast, ‘whilst gnawing bones of beef, looked, as they are, half recalled wild beasts’.87 The Commandante had the previous week led an expedition to seize horses and cattle from the Indians. His son had been captured and tortured with nails and small knives by Indian children. ‘The Indians torture all their prisoners & the Spaniards shoot theirs.’88 As well as the excitement of this encounter, Darwin was pleased to be given an ostrich egg by the Spaniards, and subsequently to discover a nest containing twenty-four more. FitzRoy and Harris, a British trader they had met in Patagonia (he owned two sealers), were engaged in surveying the coast while Darwin went ashore and saw deer, ostrich and a warren of Agouti – ‘or hare of the Pampas’.89
The Spaniards offered Darwin some hunting, and he was able to accompany nine men and one woman (‘the woman was a perfect nondescript: she dressed & rode like a man’)90 pursuing an ostrich with two or three balls fastened to leather thongs; these were whirled above the gaucho’s head before being flung at the bird and instantly lashing its legs together. Having chased an ostrich and some cavies, the gauchos then plundered an ostrich nest and caught a number of armadillos, which they roasted, in their hard cases, over a camp fire. Some days later they caught a large puma which they sold for its skin.91 In addition to this sport, Darwin found time for geologizing and at Punta Alta chipped out a fossilized jawbone and a tooth belonging to ‘the great ante-diluvial animal the Megatherium’: a giant sloth. In common with other contemporary naturalists Darwin wrongly believed this creature to be like an armadillo with an osseous coat – he had confused it with the Glyptodon. Punta Alta, both on this visit and on their return a year later, was one of the richest sources of palaeontological discovery for Darwin: a low bank on the shore about twenty feet in height, made up of shingle and gravel with a stratum of muddy red clay running through it.
South American palaeontology was in its infancy. Humboldt had, in the course of his travels, found a few mastodon teeth. And in the 1780s a Megatheri
um had been discovered in Argentina and sent back to Madrid.92 But at Punta Alta, Darwin was in effect a pioneer. Tapping with their pick-axes, he and his personal servant, Syms Covington, were revealing a plenitude of extinct species. FitzRoy wrote, ‘My friend’s attention was soon attracted to some low cliffs near Punta Alta, where he found some of those huge fossil bones, described in his work; and notwithstanding our smiles at the cargoes of apparent rubbish which he frequently brought on board, he and his servant used their pick-axe in earnest and brought away what have since proved to be most interesting and valuable remains of extinct animals.’93
Darwin was gazing at creatures, most of them, which were unknown to modern zoology: a giant hippopotamus, a creature like a llama, big as a camel, packed in a matrix of seashells. Almost the most arresting discovery were the bones of what was evidently a horse. The conquistadors in the sixteenth century had found a horseless South America. Yet here, embedded in the shells of Punta Alta, was clear evidence that an animal very like a modern European horse had once inhabited Patagonia. Moreover, the resemblance which these fossils bore to their modern equivalents provoked inevitable questions. These animals were similar in all but size to their contemporary counterparts. The giant hippo had become extinct, to be replaced at a later juncture by a more moderate-sized hippo. It was inevitable, when he had brought all these specimens home, that he should ask: what if the ur-horse to be seen in fossilized form in Argentina was not a species separate from the modern horse, but . . . its ancestor?
