by Paul Johnson
Apart from his older contemporary, the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who spent the years 1799–1804 in Latin America, no other scientist had traveled anything like so long as Darwin making studies on the spot or had observed so wide a variety of phenomena on land and ocean. He rightly called the voyage “the most important event of my life.” The extensive records he kept, both descriptive and speculative, and the specimens he shipped home and brought back with him provided material on which he worked and published, over the next twenty years and which influenced his thinking over the entire range of his activities for the rest of his life. He wrote a comprehensive account, Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the voyage of HMS Beagle round the World, under the Command of Captain FitzRoy RN, which formed the first volume of the three-volume report presented by FitzRoy to the admiralty and was later revised and republished as The Voyage of the Beagle. In addition, Darwin produced and printed a large number of learned articles and three books arising from the voyage. He also circulated his observations, discoveries, and notes widely among the scientific community during the voyage, so that by the time he returned, he was already becoming well known and highly respected among his peers, and this esteem was reinforced by his publications. By 1840, when he was in his early thirties, he was on the edge of fame.
It is important to grasp that Darwin was not only a cerebral and intuitive man but a highly emotional one. He received a number of shocks on the voyage that permanently altered the way he saw things. The first concerned the variety of human beings and those he termed “savages.” On the Beagle were two men and a woman, Yahgan Indians, natives of Tierra del Fuego, who had been picked up on an earlier voyage, taken to England and “civilized,” and were now being returned. One of them, called Jemmy Button, had been extremely kind to Darwin when he suffered dreadfully from seasickness in the first week of the voyage. The three did not prepare Darwin for what he saw as the “horrible experience” of meeting Yahgans in their pristine state when the ship touched land in Tierra del Fuego. He wrote: “I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in a man there is a greater power of improvement.” Darwin was astounded by what he thought was the misery, cruelty, aimlessness, and primitive nullity of the Fuegans’ lives. He came to believe they were cannibals, constantly engaged in vicious and murderous warfare with other tribes, their neighbors, and even with their own families, virtually devoid of religious or moral beliefs or instincts, without any kind of culture, and not only illiterate but also inarticulate.
We come here to a characteristic of Darwin that must be seen as a serious weakness in his equipment as a scientist. He was a poor anthropologist. He did not bring to his observation of humans the same care, objectivity, acute notation, and calmness he always showed when studying birds and sea creatures, insects, plants, and animals. He jumped to hasty conclusions and believed gossip (in this case from the Beagle’s sailors). Almost everything he wrote or believed about the Fuegans was quite untrue. They were not cannibals. They had a horror of eating human flesh. They were kindly and altruistic, especially within the family and tribe. They were little inclined to violence. They had a good deal of culture, an elaborate religion, and many skills and aptitudes. A missionary, Thomas Bridges, settled among them some years after Darwin’s visit and compiled a dictionary of their languages, which contained 32,000 words but is incomplete. His son, Lucas Bridges, was born there and wrote an account of the savages that contradicts Darwin at every point. The Fuegans were not the only “savages” Darwin misunderstood as a result of superficial observation and mistaken conclusions. He grossly underrated the Maoris of New Zealand, contrasting them with the Tahitians. “One glance at their respective expressions,” he wrote, “brings conviction to the mind that one is a savage, the other a civilized man.” The Maoris were guilty of “cunning and ferocity,” their houses and persons were “filthily dirty and offensive,” and “the idea of washing” never “seems to have entered their heads.” Fascinated by facial expressions, from which he deduced all kinds of scientific conclusions, Darwin noted, as a sign of savagery, the “air of rigid inflexibility” of the Maori expressions. His picture of the Maoris rivals the inaccuracy of his attack on the Fuegans, but it was the Fuegan experience that did permanent damage to Darwin as a scientist, for the emotional shock, which came to him as a crucial revelation, led him for the first time to see the evolution of savage to civilized man as a fearful struggle to break out of endless cycles of cruelty and killing in a desperate effort to survive—what Thomas Hobbes called “the war of everyman against everyman.” His experience in Tierra del Fuego was of paramount importance in persuading Darwin to see evolution as a theater of violence.
The second shock Darwin experienced on the Beagle was the emotional frisson of grasping the immensity of time. He became aware of the colossal age of the universe and the earth within it, of the time-space available for almost unimaginable numbers of minute changes to take place and cumulatively to effect staggering transformations. The year before the Beagle set out, Charles Lyell (1797–1875), the great geologist, had published the first volume of his three-volume work, The Principles of Geology (subsequent volumes came out in 1832 and 1833). Captain FitzRoy, who kept up with the latest scientific publications, presented Darwin with the book before they set out, and he read it, was enthralled, and got the other two volumes later in the voyage. Lyell demonstrated, beyond any possibility of doubt, that by dividing the geological system into three groups, which he called by the names still used, Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, characterized by the proportion of recent to extinct species of shells embedded in the rocks, the age of the earth could be calculated in many millions of years instead of the total of about six thousand reached by extrapolating figures given in Genesis and other biblical records. Belief in the literal accuracy of the Old Testament had been declining sharply among the educated since the late eighteenth century, but Lyell’s work, which was very comprehensive, serious, and persuasive, quite devoid of any antireligious animus, made it quite impossible to accept the Bible any longer as a guide to the chronology of creation. Though Lyell remained a believing Christian and a regular communicant in the Church of England to his death in 1875, his work was more effective in presenting the scientific case against biblical fundamentalism than anything that followed, including Darwin’s own Origin of Species. Its effect on Darwin was not so much to destroy his faith as to open up possibilities. There was no need to look for catastrophic events and huge shocks in bringing about the world we knew and the organic creatures and vegetation on it and beneath its oceans. There had been plenty of time for everything in creation to emerge gradually, as Darwin had already observed nature tended to operate, so gradually that natural progress could be described as an endless succession of minute events rather than bold acts of creation.
Toward the end of the Beagle’s voyage, in the spring of 1836, he had a first-class opportunity of observing such a process of infinite minutiae when the ship called at the Cocos or Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean. For the purpose of compiling a global record of navigable harbors, the Admiralty had ordered FitzRoy to investigate how ocean coral reefs were formed, to create anchorages. Darwin was put in charge of the project, and he conducted it with such thoroughness and success as to give complete satisfaction to FitzRoy, the Admiralty, and not least, to himself. This particular project, studying the way in which nature effects major changes by a series of countless minute changes over long periods, was exactly to his taste and appealed strongly to Darwin’s particular kind of intellect. He much preferred the tiny to the gigantic and the slow to the sudden. The formation of oceanic reefs and atolls from coral polyps had been going on for eons, and the results were measurable. But it was still going on, and human memory was available to record recent results. The formation was not gradual only, for ear
thquakes and major storms hastened, reinforced, or diverted the process, and by questioning sailors, missionaries, and natives, Darwin was able to include this kind of evidence. But his chief interest was in the actual coral formation, its accumulation, the subsistence it provided, and its relationship to volcanoes, active or dormant, and to areas where the earth’s crust was pushing up or settling down. He was able to divide coral reefs and atolls into distinct categories, explaining why differences occurred, and to show why they occurred in specific parts of the sea, such as the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, and not in others, such as the Caribbean. He supplied various diagrams of coral formations, and when his material, expanded from his account in the Beagle voyage, was eventually published in book form, he produced a world map, too. But he clearly wrote about coral with great pleasure, certitude, and the admirable clarity and logic he had learned from Paley, and so produced the best thing he had written so far, and the best science.
The year before, however, he had made observations and discoveries that in the long run were to have an even more profound effect on his knowledge of natural processes, his thinking, and his great work. Off the coast of Chile, so far off as to be seldom visited, the Beagle anchored in the Galápagos, a group of ten islands, and numerous rocky islets of volcanic formation. Darwin took intense delight in investigating the creatures he found there, including giant tortoises, marine and terrestrial lizards, and numerous birds, especially finches. It was easy for the Beagle to dump him and a colleague, plus servants, on an island for a week at a time, while it went off to take aboard fresh water supplies. So Darwin had a good chance to make detailed observations, while living off “excellent” turtle soup and the “very good” roasted breastplate of young turtles. He examined the birds in particular, especially the twenty-six kinds of land birds. He was intrigued by “a most singular group of finches,” thirteen species, divided into four subgroups. He noted that all the species were peculiar to the Galápagos, with but one exception, and that there were small but significant variations in their beaks. He did drawings of them and then added a significant sentence: “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” Here was the germ of a seminal idea. He investigated many other creatures—waders, owls, doves, gulls, reptiles (especially the tortoises and lizards, dissecting a number, opening their stomachs and examining the contents), fifteen kinds of sea fish, and insects—and went thoroughly into the botany of the islands. It is characteristic of his industry that he recorded 225 species of flowering plants, 100 of them not noted before, and that he sent home 193 specimens of them.
What particularly struck Darwin, and the shock was again emotional as well as cerebral, was the distinctiveness of the flora and fauna of the island group. Though they were five hundred to six hundred miles from the mainland, driftwood, bamboo, and other objects from South America often washed up on the islands, and the Galápagos were clearly part of the continent zoologically and in other ways. But “we see that a vast majority of all the land animals, and that more than half of the flowering plants, are aboriginal productions.” He also found “by far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of the archipelago” was that “the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings.” He was in the islands just long enough to observe the fact. The locals, he found, could look at creatures or plants and tell you which island they came from. In short, not only had organisms on the islands evolved differently from the mainland, but within the group, distinct evolutions or transformations were taking place. Here indeed was food for thought. “We seem,” Darwin wrote, “to be brought near to that great fact—the mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”
The Beagle voyage transformed Darwin from a promising naturalist to a widely experienced and dedicated one. He now knew what he loved: to investigate nature in the greatest possible detail and on the widest possible scale. He said later that he had become a machine for accumulating countless facts and finding out from them universal laws. He delighted in being that machine. His father, impressed by what had been done on the voyage and gratified that his son was already becoming known in learned circles as a hard worker and a man on the way up, also noticed a physical change: the shape of his head was different. Coming from a doctor as sharp as Robert Darwin, this is worth recording. Maturity had occurred. At this time, Darwin became pleasurably aware that his father now plainly had the intention, and had the means, to set up his son as a gentleman-scientist, free from financial worries and able to devote his entire time to research. It is important to grasp the point: Darwin never had to exhaust his energies on teaching, to scrabble about to get an academic appointment, or to keep it by conforming to the fashions and prejudices of the academy and its rules about publication. This had disadvantages, as we shall see. But the overwhelming advantage was to give the twenty-seven-year-old complete freedom to pursue lines of inquiry he thought most likely to produce worthwhile knowledge, especially about “the mystery of mysteries,” for as long as they might require. He had no one to report to except his own conscience and no institution or body to fit in with except the confraternity of learned men. Was ever a scientist more fortunate or more happy?
CHAPTER THREE
The Loss of God
Darwin returned to England in 1836, landing at Falmouth on October 2. He told his uncle Josiah Wedgwood, “I am so happy I hardly know what I am writing.” He quickly began networking, oscillating between Cambridge, where he reestablished close relations with Henslow and Sedgwick, and London, especially the Geological and Zoological societies, the Royal Society, the British Museum, and London University, in all of which he found himself an established authority, “a universal collector,” in the words of another leisured naturalist, Charles Bunbury, who had identified new species “to the surprise of the big wigs.” The first major contact Darwin made, on October 29, was with the great Lyell himself. They instantly became friends and allies and remained so for the rest of their lives. He had a huge haul of specimens, unpacked from the Beagle by his valet-assistant, Covington; these served as working capital in ingratiating himself with the experts and institutions among which he divided them. His fossil mammals were regarded as the greatest treasures and brought him the most acclaim.
From the winter of 1836, Darwin can be regarded as a fixture in English savant society, a celebrity. First he lodged in Fitzwilliam Street, Cambridge, then moved into the same street as his brother Erasmus in London. He was elected to the Geological Society as a fellow, and two years later, having presented 80 mammals and 450 birds, to a similar fellowship at the Zoological Society. He led a busy and purposeful social life, getting to know such useful celebrities as the journalist Harriet Martineau, the first great female economist, who was capable of pushing any theory or cause she believed in with tremendous force. He attended the regular Saturday parties of the mathematical inventor Charles Babbage, who designed and constructed the first working computer and who attracted to his Mayfair entertainments the scientific and scholarly elite.
While socializing at night, Darwin was busy by day garnering the results of his five years on the Beagle. On January 4, 1837, he read to the Geological Society his first mature scientific paper, on the way in which the western coast of South America had been thrust upward. It was so well received that he said he “felt like a peacock admiring his tail.” This was the first of many papers produced for half a dozen learned bodies over the next decade. He was also busy editing The Zoology of HMS Beagle, to which famous figures like Richard Owen, John Gould, Thomas Bell, and others contributed, and producing monographs of his own, such as “Observations on the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy,” published in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, his atoll book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Ree
fs, published in 1842, and Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands Visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle (1844), as well as the Journal of Researches, which went into a revised edition in 1845 published by the leading London publisher, John Murray, in his famous Colonial and Home Library. Thus the first major chunk of his published scientific work, eventually to encompass fifteen substantial volumes, reached the public.
But Darwin was also working hard on new material, involving plants and birds and mammals of all kinds, and keeping private notebooks relating to “man, mind and materialism,” as he put it, and especially to the way in which species evolved or, as he preferred to put it, were “transmuted.” These notebooks housed the raw materials, in thoughts and facts, from which his masterpiece, The Origin of Species, was to emerge. He was also voraciously reading scientific publications, as well as books on a wide variety of subjects. In 1838 he came across the sixth edition of a famous book, Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population, originally published in 1798. This had a huge emotional impact on him, equivalent to the ones he had felt when he first experienced the savages of Tierra del Fuego, investigated the species of the Galápagos Islands, or examined the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. An entry in his notebook on September 28, 1838, reveals him shattered and excited by reading Malthus’s text and considering its implications for his work.
Ever since he became a systematic naturalist, Darwin had been an evolutionist. That is, he dismissed the account in Genesis of the separate creation of species by Yahweh as symbolic and not to be taken literally. They had, in some way, evolved. There was nothing new, surprising, or alarming in this view. His grandfather had been an evolutionist. So had his French mentors, Buffon and Lamarck. So had other, more distant, thinkers. It was arguable that Francis Bacon had posited some form of evolution, and even that it went back to the pre-Socratic Greeks. Moreover, by the late 1830s, evolution, as opposed to revolution, was a commonplace of philosophers, political and economic, as a natural and desirable way of proceeding in the development of institutions, societies, and much else. The German philosophical heavyweights, Kant and, still more, Hegel, had shown evolution to be inherent in many disciplines and in religion itself. Art, architecture, music, and literature evolved. The English constitution, seen as perfect by many Englishmen and widely admired all over the world, was regarded as a model instance of evolution. The principle was constantly invoked by Goethe. The word comes from classical times and denotes the motion of unrolling a scroll. As set out in Buffon’s evolutionary theory of 1762, what happens in nature is that the embryo or germ, instead of being brought into existence by the process of fecundation, is a development or expansion of a preexisting form, which contains the rudiments of all the parts of the future organism.
