Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  The trouble for Kingsley, and many others, was that Gosse had almost managed to convince him that only by adopting his law of prochronics could the biblical story of creation and geology be reconciled. And he found Gosse’s theory so preposterous and silly that it threatened to remove for him the last barrier to disbelief. It left him gaping into an abyss.

  Hardly anyone bought Omphalos. Most copies of the book were sold for waste paper.

  For those whose faith in the literal word was buckling under the weight of scientific argument, or preposterous rationale, the last barrier came down on November 24, 1859, when Darwin finally published his book on the transmutation of species. It was not the immensely long work he had envisioned and begun a few years earlier at Lyell’s urging, but, inspired by the clarity of Wallace’s brief essay, a shorter, simpler volume (though still 502 pages long). It was titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

  The first edition of 1,250 copies, priced at fourteen shillings, sold out on the day of publication.

  26

  In late June 1860, FitzRoy traveled by train to Oxford to read a paper on British storms at the annual congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. This week-long gathering of Britain’s scientific community offered exhibitions, lectures, and informal meetings for professional scientists, amateur enthusiasts, and interested members of the public. Many attendees brought their families, stayed at local inns, and enjoyed picnics and punting on the Thames.

  FitzRoy came alone, leaving Maria at home in London with his children. He was in no mood for fun. Only six weeks earlier, he had read in the press of the massacre, apparently instigated by Jemmy Button, at Woollya. Everything to do with Tierra del Fuego had turned sour on him. Almost as awful as the massacre, in FitzRoy’s view, was Darwin’s new book. In the six months since its publication, Origin of Species had become a sensation.

  Darwin had sent a copy to FitzRoy, in recognition of their connection and the fact that, but for FitzRoy, there would have been no book—no Darwin as history was just beginning to perceive him. This was clear to both men, horribly so to FitzRoy. He had provided Darwin with the vehicle for his conclusions. The voyage aboard the Beagle was the central engine behind everything his one-time friend, “Dear Philos,” had accomplished since returning to England twenty-three years before.

  FitzRoy hated the book. “My dear old friend,” he wrote to Darwin. “I, at least, cannot find anything ‘ennobling’ in the thought of being a descendent of even the most ancient Ape.” Darwin had scrupulously avoided any mention of the man-from-ape connection in his book, but it was the implication seized upon by everybody. It was the image that sold the theory.

  Origin of Species left FitzRoy so disturbed that he seized any opportunity to denounce its findings or its author. When, a few days after its publication, the antiquarian Sir John Evans wrote in the Times about 14,000-year-old hand axes made by people of paleolithic “drift” cultures that had been found on the banks of the Somme, FitzRoy fired back a letter to the Times castigating Evans’s conclusions. The axes, he said, were not 14,000 years old, but were left by far more recent savages who had wandered away from and lost their own civilization—the same argument he had made about Noah’s wandering descendants. “In what difficulties do not those involve themselves who contend for a far greater antiquity of mankind than the learned and wise have derived from Scripture and the best tradition!” FitzRoy signed the letter not with his own name but with the pseudonym Senex (“old man”). Evans and Senex had a brief, fractious correspondence in the Times, during which Senex referred to “Mr Darwin” as a corroborator of Evans’s “weak cause.” Darwin read this and realized immediately the identity of Senex. “It is a pity he did not add his theory of the extinction of the Mastodon etc from the door of the Ark being made too small,” Darwin wrote to Lyell.

  It was not only fundamentalist believers who disagreed with Darwin. Many naturalists and geologists—including close friends like Charles Lyell—never fully accepted his theory of a mutating evolution ungoverned by a creator. But Lyell and others recognized the importance of Darwin’s work and found their own ways to accommodate it. Charles Kingsley also received a copy of Origin of Species. “It awes me,” he wrote Darwin, “both with the heap of facts, & the prestige of your name, & also with the clear intuition, that if you be right, I must give up much of what I have believed & written.”

  Yet Kingsley didn’t fully comprehend the totality of Darwin’s departure from holy doctrine. He still believed that no matter what clever device allowed for the evolution of species, it had all been designed and instigated by the creator. But Darwin had shown that species could evolve by an automatic mechanism that could run—and had run since the earth had cooled—independent of any designer. If Charles Kingsley failed to, many more had got Darwin’s clear atheistic message: there was no creator.

  What gave Origin its legs and brought ridicule to Omphalos—what brought a desperate, defensive stridency to FitzRoy’s and others’ protests—was that Darwin’s idea of godless creation had become thinkable. By midcentury, God had suffered a decline in prestige exactly like that of the British royal family in the present era. He might exist, but he was increasingly unnecessary.

  Man had become stupendously powerful. He was competing with, and exceeding, God’s works. Sir Isaac Newton’s handy determination of the biblical cubit as 20½ inches had revealed Noah’s Ark to be 537 feet long and weighing 18,231 tons, dimensions once sufficient to contain all life on Earth. But in the 1850s there rose at the edge of the River Thames in east London a ship bigger than God’s. It was the Great Eastern, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the little man who dreamed big in an age of mighty works. Begun in 1854, launched in 1858, the ship was 693 feet long and displaced 22,000 tons. She was the most prodigious vessel the world had ever known, the largest movable object on the planet (and almost too large to launch; it took many months and hundreds of thousands of pounds to get her across a few hundred feet of mud into the Thames). She was designed to carry 4,000 passengers, and 15,000 tons of coal, to steam without refueling around the globe to Trincomalee, Ceylon, and back to London, to monopolize, in a single voyage, the Oriental tea trade. She weighed more, when fully laden, than the combined tonnage of the 197 English oaken ships that sailed to meet the Spanish Armada. She was vaster than the apocalyptic Rhine timber rafts that had come on the spring floods out of Germany in the Dark Ages, demolishing the towns, bridges, boats, and people in their path. Sitting zeppelin-like on the flat boggy ground on the Isle of Dogs, swarmed over by men like ants on a dead buffalo, the Great Eastern appeared preternaturally large, monstrous, a vision from the Book of Revelation, the fallen Wormwood star. The sight raised the hair on the napes of observers’ necks. (The Great Eastern was in fact too large for her times and never fulfilled her dreamt-of potential; she found her most useful work laying telegraph cable across the Atlantic and was broken up for scrap in 1888.)

  But nothing appeared more ungodly than the ubiquitous and universally enjoyed scientific marvel of the age, the steam locomotive. The engine itself was plainly demonic: “like a huge monster in mortal agony, whose entrails are like burning coals”; it flew “faster than fairies, faster than witches.” Thomas Carlyle’s hallucinatory description of a train journey at night read like a scene from Harry Potter.

  The whirl through the confused darkness on those steam wings…hissing and dashing on, one knew not whither. We saw the gleam of towns in the distance—unknown towns. We went over the tops of houses…chimney heads vainly stretching up towards us—under the stars; not under the clouds but among them…snorting, roaring we flew: likest thing to a Faust’s flight on the Devil’s mantle; or as if some huge steam night-bird had flung you on its back, and was sweeping through unknown space with you.

  The devil, if he traveled, would go by train, said Lord Shaftesbury after journeying by rail from Manchester to Liverpool.
Engineers named their locomotives Wildfire, Dragon, Centaur. Rocking in half-open carriages, passengers smelled cinder-fire smoke, were deafened by screeching whistles and the snorting roar ahead, and plunged into tunnels that appeared like portals into hell. This was modern travel. There was nothing in it of the loveliness of the sea or ships, the contemplative pleasure of a walk, or the creature-communion of a ride on horseback or in a carriage.

  Manmade, the railway destroyed both men and nature. Laborers cut unsightly gashes hundreds of feet into the earth for railway cuttings (delighting geologists for exposing strata and fossils as they dug). They tunneled two miles through rock at a cost of £6.25 million and 100 men’s lives to dig the “monstrous and extraordinary” Great Western Railway tunnel at Box in Wiltshire (Brunel’s scheme again). Collisions and derailments left horrific casualties. And yet the man-destroying science grew like a contagion, spreading its black web of track over the landscape, and more and more passengers crowded aboard trains that went faster and faster.

  That speed made the remotest extremities of Britain seem infinitely closer. The Midland counties were “a mere suburb” of London. But the new speed of rail travel, like the later acceleration of information and communication, brought with it a paradoxical effect of time: there seemed to be less and less of it. People started running to catch trains. They grew anxious to be “on time.” Life speeded up.

  Railways captured the Victorian imagination like nothing else. Architects designed stations as vaulting iron cathedrals of the industrial age. Artists turned out endless paintings and drawings of the public crowding into stations, of railway views, of cuttings and tunnel entrances. They were also quick to see in the railway apocalyptic visions, from J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway (1845), in which a smoking train charging across a bridge bears down on a fleeing hare in its path, to John Martin’s The Last Judgement (1853), showing angels gathering over a train as it hurtles into a black abyss. These said what people already knew: there would be no turning back, no matter what the cost.

  Darwin’s mechanistic view only coincided with such advances, but it resonated with the age; life had acquired the context in which it could be accepted. The theory of evolution now spread over the earth as a seed of truth, resembling nothing so much as, ironically, the early spread of Christianity, though incredibly accelerated. It marked the moment when one world, with all its precious assumptions and truths, was destroyed; and another, new, beguiling, and frightening, began.

  As FitzRoy’s train snorted through the Chiltern Hills toward Oxford (traveling at sustained speeds of 45 to 50 miles per hour, sometimes hitting 60), he could have no doubt that Darwin’s book and theory would be on everybody’s lips. It would be the topic of conversation and interest. He would hear no end of it. It depressed him terribly. His presentation of his own work, which he believed was important and was saving lives, would be a sleepy sideshow.

  FitzRoy read his paper on Friday, June 29. He described some of the terrible storms that had caused loss of life around the British coast over the previous hundred years. He reviewed the disaster of the Royal Charter. He outlined the forecasting powers of barometric readings and described how his Met office was engaged in receiving information and providing forecasts by telegraph. And he mentioned that this work had sufficiently impressed French meteorologists to initiate a similar program.

  For whatever reason—maybe he met friends and acquaintances, or had already arranged to meet them; or maybe he wanted to hear what everyone else had come to hear—FitzRoy did not return to London that night. He stayed in Oxford. The next day he made his way to the lecture hall in the University Museum of Natural History. It was the location for a lecture to be delivered by John William Draper, a chemist and historian, a Liverpudlian by birth and now head of the medical school of the City University of New York. Draper liked to mix things up. The title of the lecture he intended giving that Saturday was: “On the Intellectual Development of Europe…” and then came the kicker, “…Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin.”

  Darwin had not come to Oxford. He was unwell again, or perhaps the prospect of coming and speaking in public and defending his now spectacularly controversial ideas had made him unwell. There was no lecture scheduled that was specifically concerned with “Darwinism” (the term was spontaneously coined in hundreds of conversations in late 1859–1860, and was in common use by 1861), so Draper’s reference to “the Views of Mr. Darwin” singled his lecture out as the forum for the debate everyone wanted. Proponents for and against Darwin’s argument, and those who wanted to hear them argue, had come to Oxford for just this lecture, and rumor had it that Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, who was to be present, would use the occasion to publically denounce Origin of Species.

  When FitzRoy reached the lecture hall, he found an overflow crowd of scientists, Oxford and Cambridge professors, journalists, and a noisy mob of undergraduates. Organizers soon moved the lecture to a much larger room in the building. As many as a thousand people pushed in, grabbed seats, stood where they could.

  In an atmosphere of charged expectation, Draper started talking. Known for his dislike of organized religion, he began, promisingly, by alluding to the “Views” of his speech’s title by saying that human progress was only possible when science pushed theology aside. But his listeners, ready to hear brilliance, were disappointed. Draper waffled on for an hour and a half about the intellect of the ancient Greeks, “flatulent stuff” according to Joseph Hooker, who was among the audience.

  When Draper finally sat down, John Henslow, Darwin’s old professor from Cambridge, who was chairing the lecture, asked if any members of the public cared to say anything. This was the moment when everyone expected Wilberforce to rise and condemn Darwin, but instead a Mr. Dingle stood and said, “Let point A be the man, and point B the monkey.” Mr. Dingle had a curious accent, pronouncing monkey “mawnkey.”

  “Mawnkey! Mawnkey!” undergraduates began shouting, until Mr. Dingle could not go on.

  Now Bishop Wilberforce rose, resplendent in his robes of office. A large, self-assertive man, supposedly the model for Trollope’s Archdeacon Grantly of the Barchester chronicles. Silence was restored to the hall. Wilberforce had written a damning but still unpublished review of Origin of Species, and he used this as the basis of his thirty-minute speech.

  Darwin’s book was filled with error! he boomed. His “facts” were assumptions, not evidence, and did not support his conclusions.

  “Has any one such instance [of the existence of a species by natural selection] ever been discovered? We fearlessly assert not one.”

  An experienced, even theatrical public speaker, deliverer of sermons, debater, essayist and writer, Wilberforce took command of his audience. He finished on a note of withering humor: “Is it credible that a turnip strives to become a man?”

  As the room filled with laughter, Wilberforce turned and stared at Thomas Huxley, a thirty-five-year-old zoologist who, in six months, had become Darwin’s greatest champion in print, reviewing Origin of Species in a number of influential magazines and journals. His efforts had earned him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog.” Now Wilberforce decided to bait him. Was it on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side, Wilberforce asked Huxley, that he was descended from an ape?

  While the audience laughed again, Huxley is said to have whispered to a friend: “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.” He rose and responded in measured, factual terms. But all that is remembered is his final remark, his answer to Wilberforce about his ancestry.

  [As to whether] I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

  Almost instantly, the meeting became legend. Nobody took down verbatim what was said, yet immediately
afterward everyone who had been there began disseminating versions of the great slugfest between Wilberforce and Huxley, and opinions of who had won. The essence of all versions eventually became the same: it was the great Victorian confrontation between science and religion, between God and ape; the moment when that ceased to be the concern only of philosophers, scientists, academics, and clerics, but passed into the public consciousness and became the question of the age. History has for once determined the victors, rather than the other way around, but the battle raged furiously on. Sixty-five years later, in the famous “Monkey Trial,” Tennessee schoolteacher John Thomas Scopes was convicted and fined $100 for teaching Darwinian evolution in a high school biology course, and the debate between creationists and evolutionists continues today.

  Draper, whose droning lecture was the crucible for debate, is now forgotten, a historical footnote.

  Also forgotten is the man who rose to his feet and tried to speak above the commotion that filled the lecture hall when Huxley was finished. A week short of his fifty-fifth birthday, he looked at least a decade older, his face pale from lack of sun, creased by anxiety and the never-ending strain of trying to find a balance between waves of upheaval, forces he had been battling all his life. He wore the naval uniform of a rear admiral.

  He stood and waved a Bible over his head. Several people later wrote down what they remembered him saying: He regretted the publication of Mr. Darwin’s book; Mr. Huxley’s statement that it was a logical arrangement of facts was mistaken; he had often expostulated with his old friend aboard the Beagle for his ideas that were contradictory to the first chapter of Genesis….

  Few paid attention. Those who might have recognized Robert FitzRoy would have been embarrassed for him. His comments were irrelevant to either side. The roiling tide of debate swept away from him. He cut a sad figure that invited ridicule, if not pity.