Charles Darwin*

by Kathleen Krull

  “What a fellow that Darwin is for asking questions!” said Henslow, who began inviting him to a weekly open house for heady chats with professors and serious students. In general, the Cambridge atmosphere stifled independent thought—it was even stuffier and more orthodox than Edinburgh. But a few professors, like Henslow, were liberal thinkers. Yes, God’s laws were the ultimate authority, but conventional theology and science could coexist. These progressive thinkers were shifting from a literal interpretation of the Bible to a metaphorical one. In this light, studying nature was seen as studying God’s work, with no conflict between science and religion. Science was not the enemy of religion; falsehood was the enemy of both

  Thirteen years older than Darwin, Henslow became a father figure: “He is quite the most perfect man I ever met with,” Darwin said of him. He ate his meals with Henslow’s family and went for many long walks with him. He used Henslow’s microscope to study the structure of cells in orchids and geraniums. In contrast to Darwin’s old teacher Robert Grant, Henslow rejoiced in whatever discoveries Darwin made, and was kind when pointing out which of his “discoveries” weren’t actually new.

  To remain teacher’s pet, Darwin sometimes would go to foolish lengths. One day Henslow led students on a field trip to hunt for bladderwort plants. They were given poles in case they encountered muddy ditches and needed to vault themselves across. Darwin spotted a perfect specimen, but when he tried to vault across to get it, his pole got stuck in the straight-up position. Undeterred, he slid down the pole and into the muck, got his specimen, and proudly if sloppily carried it over to his laughing professor.

  Henslow’s influence was both academic and personal. He once wrote to Charles about his tendency to be oversensitive: “One of your foibles is to take offence at rudeness of manners and of any thing bordering upon ungentlemanlike behavior, and I have observed such conduct often wounds your feelings far more deeply than you ought to allow it.”

  He also spurred Darwin to read John Herschel’s new Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy . Herschel believed that nature was governed by laws, and that the highest aim of natural philosophy was to discover these laws through an orderly process of active induction balancing observation and theorizing. The scientific method, as it would come to be called.

  Henslow probably also got him to read Alexander von Humboldt’s sensational Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, about his five-year journey to the Canary Islands and around South America. Humboldt and Hershel sparked in Darwin “a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.” He drifted into fantasies about making discoveries in exotic locations. Writing to his sister Caroline, he said, “My enthusiasm is so great that I cannot hardly sit still on my chair. . . . I have written myself into a Tropical glow.”

  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 soun
ded 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.

  But whenever they hit shore, he regained his stamina. He was always first to disembark, and then would work at full speed to collect. With no guarantee he’d ever be returning to any locale, he worked like a demon to maximize his time. He arranged with FitzRoy to stay longer on land whenever he could.

  Floating around Bahia Blanca Bay, he noticed fossils embedded in the banks. On the spot, he dug up what he could. The next day he returned to dig up the head of a bizarrely big animal. Not until several hours after dark was he able to get the beast’s head on board. It was later identified as an extinct giant sloth Megath
erium, one of the largest animals ever to walk the earth. Farther on, he found more fossilized Megatherium bones, as well as bones from another extinct creature, one that resembled a gigantic armadillo. These fossils were among his most amazing discoveries. They interested Darwin because the extinct creatures seemed to be giant versions of animals currently living on Earth. Were they related? If so, how? Had the extinct creatures “transmutated” into animals the nineteenth century world knew?

  In the 1830s little was known about fossils. The first fossil bones to be identified as coming from large extinct reptiles had only been found in 1822. Scientists now understood that long ago certain creatures had lived on Earth and then disappeared. But what accounted for their disappearance remained a mystery. Some attributed their extinction to the flood in the time of Noah.

  By now Darwin’s collections of specimens sometimes threatened to take over the ship. With every single one, he asked questions: Why was it like this? How did this shape or form develop?

  His mind was wide open, and this was his real education. “I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind,” he wrote. He had the luxury of all this time to contemplate, without pressure to publish or conform to some professor’s teachings. And since Dr. Darwin was paying for all Charles’s mounting expenses, Darwin owned his collections, everything he found. It became important to him to retain control, as he planned to donate his collection to the best and most central museum he could find in England.

  Whenever he reached a port city, he shipped boxes of specimens back to Henslow for real experts to analyze. He also picked up his mail, often finding books he’d asked Ras to send. Late in 1832, pulling into Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was glad to receive his copy of volume two of Lyell’s Principles of Geology.

  In Patagonia, he reported the massacre of native Patagonians by the Chilean army: “Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian, civilized country?”