by A. N. Wilson
Now all that remained to Darwin was to make his farewells, which he intended to squeeze into the final week of September. He went to Cambridge to take leave of Henslow and Sedgwick and other friends and mentors. Then there was time for only a few days in Shrewsbury before he returned to Plymouth. In Shropshire, Fanny Mostyn Owen, with whom he had lain in the strawberry beds, asked if he could persuade FitzRoy to take on her brother as a midshipman, but this request was turned down. The number of ‘mids’ had been determined when the vessel was commissioned by the Admiralty. In conveying this brush-off, FitzRoy also warned Darwin that the dockyard in Devonport was making very slow progress in repairing and refurbishing the ship and that their departure would be yet further delayed.
It was a frustrating time for all the Beagles, but especially for Darwin, who had never been to sea before, and whose head was already filled with ‘date & cocoa trees, the palms & ferns so lofty & beautiful – everything new, everything sublime’,23 as he rhapsodized to Fox. In Plymouth, things were the reverse of sublime. Darwin went on board the Beagle in dock, and even slept on board, finding the cabin so restricted that he had to remove a drawer from his locker to make room for his feet when he lay on the truckle bed. FitzRoy had crammed the ship with no fewer than twenty-two chronometers, packed in sawdust on the shelves.
And there was an ominous portent of things to come when Darwin accompanied the Captain into a Plymouth china shop. A piece of crockery had been bought for the ship, but FitzRoy wanted to exchange it. When the shop man refused, the hitherto charming FitzRoy flew into a rage. Then he asked the price of the most expensive item in the shop and said, ‘I should have purchased that if you had not been so disobliging.’ The two young men left the shop in silence. Apart from the disconcerting rage, the incident had revealed the class abyss between them. Uncle Jos, now a member of the landed gentry, had once served in his father’s London’s showrooms and had begged his father’s leave to discontinue, for dread of the embarrassment of serving his grand friends across the counter should they come into the store.
After some awkward silence, FitzRoy said, ‘You didn’t believe what I said’ (about having intended to buy the china). Darwin answered, ‘No, I did not.’ FitzRoy burst out, ‘You are right. I acted wrongly in my anger at the blackguard.’
The delays were agonizing. The Beagle was at last ready for sea by the beginning of December, but the sea was not ready for her. On 10 December, and again on 21 December, the ship set out into choppy waters, and was driven back to Plymouth by violent turbulence. They set out again on 27 December. They escaped a heavy gale in the Channel, but felt its consequence – a ‘heavy’ sea. The little barque was tossed on vast, heaving waves. Darwin wrote to his father:
In the Bay of Biscay there was a long & continued swell & the misery I endured from sea-sickness is far far beyond what I ever guessed at. Nobody who has been to sea for 24 hours has a right to say, that sea-sickness is even uncomfortable. – The real misery only begins when you are so exhausted – that a little exertion makes a feeling of faintness come on. – I found nothing but lying in my hammock did me any good. – I must especially except your receipt of raisins, which is the only food the stomach will bear.24
Added to the wretchedness of seasickness was his sense of failure, the thought that FitzRoy would find him too ‘soft’ to undertake the voyage at all. FitzRoy, for all his faults of character which were beginning to surface, had become Darwin’s mentor, the parent-substitute which throughout his young manhood (Jameson, Grant, Henslow) he had needed. Though so little older than Darwin in years, the fact that FitzRoy was his Captain meant much; Darwin revelled in acceptance, and in the nickname given him by FitzRoy – ‘Philos’ – short for Philosopher, or Scientist. He need not have worried. ‘Darwin is a very sensible hard-working man, and a very pleasant mess-mate,’ FitzRoy wrote at an early stage of the journey. ‘I never saw a “shore-going fellow” come into the ways of a ship so soon and so thoroughly as Darwin.’ And again, to Beaufort, FitzRoy wrote, ‘He was terribly sick until we passed Teneriffe, and I sometimes doubted his fortitude holding out against such a beginning of the campaign. However, he was no sooner on his legs than anxious to get to work, and as a child with a new toy could not have been more delighted than he was with St Jago [in the Cape Verde islands, now Santiago].’25 The other officers also got on well with Philos and picked up the collecting habit, though none was so thorough as he. (Wickham, First Lieutenant, affectionately called Philos ‘that damned flycatcher’.)26
After the Cape Verde islands, the routines of sea life resumed. Breakfast was at eight. Darwin ate it with FitzRoy in the Captain’s cabin. FitzRoy then went off on his morning inspection of the decks and Darwin absorbed himself in marine animals, dissecting, classifying and noting. Dinner was at 1 p.m., a vegetarian meal consisting of rice, peas, bread and water. They drank no alcohol. Supper was at 5 p.m., with such anti-scorbutics as pickles and dried apples eaten with a little meat.
Darwin’s attitude to FitzRoy slowly changed. ‘Never before have I come across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson. I should not call him clever; yet I feel nothing is too great or too high for him. His ascendancy over everybody is quite curious . . . Altogether he is the strongest marked character I ever fell in with.’27
Junior officers would ask among themselves, ‘Has much hot coffee been spilled this morning?’ It was code for asking about FitzRoy’s mood. His tours of inspection made the sailors mending sails or heaving on ropes fling themselves into the work with near-frenzy. The men did not hate FitzRoy, they admired his seamanship. When the outbursts of wrath got too much for Darwin, he could retreat to the company of the young officers. He had acclimatized himself to shipboard life, and, providing the sea was relatively calm, he worked and read with concentration.
After breakfast on 17 January 1832, Darwin accompanied by Captain FitzRoy, went to Quail Island – ‘a miserable, desolate spot, less than a mile in circumference’.28 They intended to set up an observatory here under canvas. Darwin spent the morning gazing into rock pools, and collecting geological specimens and shells. What chiefly struck him, however, about this outcrop of volcanic rock was the island itself, its geological essence:
a stream of lava formerly flowed over the bed of the sea, formed of triturated recent shells and corals, which has baked hard into a hard white rock. Since then the whole island has been upheaved. But the line of white rock revealed to me a new and important fact, namely that there had afterwards been subsidence around the craters, which had since been in action and had poured forth lava. It then first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight.29
These reflections passed through Darwin’s mind as he sat, in intense heat, on a rock eating his luncheon of ripe tamarinds and biscuit. It was a moment of enormous significance for him. He had moved, already, a mere three weeks after leaving England, from being an amateur naturalist to being a scientist.
What had happened, in the intervals of seasickness and abject self-pity, in his cabin on board, was that Darwin had begun to read the first volume of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. ‘This book was of the highest service to me in many ways. The very first place which I examined, namely St Jago in the Cape Verde Islands, showed me clearly the wonderful superiority of Lyell’s manner of treating geology, compared with that of any other author, whose works I had with me or ever afterwards read.’30
Henslow had recommended Darwin to take the first volume of Lyell on his journey, ‘but on no account to accept the views therein advocated’.31 Darwin’s own copy of the book, in the University Library at Cambridge, is inscribed, ‘From Capt FitzRoy’.
Lyell was thirty-three years old when his revolutionary work was published by John Murray (in July 1830). One of his primary aims had been ‘to free the science [of geology] from Moses’.32 It was while working as a barrister on the western circuit in 1827 that he had first read the sp
eculations of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) and realized that if species were mutable, as Lamarck proposed, this would have profound implications for the science of geology. Lyell at this stage recoiled from the idea of mutable species: he believed that it demeaned the dignity of man. He believed (then) that the fossil record was too sketchy to provide proof of an evolving life. He believed, rather, that fossil evidence suggested that species became extinct, to be replaced by new ones, and this was a view he would maintain (with some modifications) until he had become convinced by the Darwinian theory of evolution thirty years later.
Lyell’s progress in geology, anyway as far as the English-speaking world was concerned, was to explain the changes of the earth’s surface by reference to ‘causes now in operation’. His master – he learnt German in order to read him – was Karl von Hoff (1771–1837), who had compiled an immense volume of data culled from accounts of voyages and expeditions round the world. Lyell explained the volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, sedimentation and erosion which were the story of geology in terms of long-term climate-change. He had two broad viewpoints to confront and refute. One was that of previous geologists, who had clung to the notion that the history of geology was one of inactivity interrupted by ‘catastrophes’ – such as the biblical Flood. The other was the belief, all but universal, in the ‘biblical’ dating of the earth’s age. When Lyell spoke of freeing the science from Moses, he would have been more accurate to say he was freeing it from Ussher (see Chapter 3). He feared that the first volume of Principles would ‘irritate . . . If we didn’t irritate, which I fear that we may . . . we shall carry all with us.’33
When Lyell, in 1831, was offered the chair of geology at the newly founded King’s College, London – his appointment was queried by only one of the clergy on the Governing Body – the Revd Edward Copleston, who was afraid that Lyell’s views on creation and the Flood were incompatible with orthodoxy. The rest of the Governing Body, who included the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Llandaff, accepted Lyell as the innovative and brilliant scholar that he was. His resignation from King’s was not because it was a religious foundation, but because he could not live – after marriage – on the paltry salary they gave him. While Darwin sat on the Beagle reading the first volume of Principles, Lyell was expounding his geological theories, not only to the young men at King’s, but to mixed audiences at the Royal Institution.34
The nineteenth-century public were being introduced to one of the fundamental truths which would eventually enable them to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution: that the world was older, much, much older, than had ever been conceived. That so many other aspects of Lyell’s Geology were false – his concept of a self-balancing non-progressive earth in which species do not evolve – and that many of his ideas were shared by other geologists and were not, in themselves, original does not diminish the revolutionary impact that Lyell had upon his readers. And in Darwin he had found ‘his first and, at that time, only scientific disciple’.35
By the time the Beagle was once again at sea, FitzRoy could note, in his official report to Beaufort,
Mr Darwin has found abundant occupation already, both at sea and on shore; he has obtained numbers of curious though small inhabitants of the ocean, by means of a Net made of Bunting, which might be called a floating or surface trawl, as well as by searching the shores and the Land. In Geology he has met with far much more [sic] interesting employment in Porto Praya than he had at all anticipated. From the manner in which he pursues his occupation, his good sense, inquiring disposition, and regular habits, I am certain that you will have good reason to feel much satisfaction in the reflection that such a person is on board the Beagle . . .36
FitzRoy’s favouritism towards his young protégé did not go unnoticed by the ship’s surgeon, Robert McCormick. As we have observed, it was taken as read that when a naturalist was required on board a Royal Navy vessel, the role was traditionally filled by the surgeon. This was, indeed, McCormick’s brief, and it was agreed that specimens collected by McCormick in the course of the voyage would be ‘at the disposal of Government’.37 It was with understandable envy and chagrin that McCormick saw Darwin’s nets and trawls hanging over the sides of the ship. It was Darwin, the rich young man, who dined alone with the Captain on a daily basis, while McCormick ate in the gunroom with the young officers.
Like his rival, McCormick was a doctor’s son, but not the son of a prosperous medic such as Robert Darwin. McCormick’s father had been a naval surgeon. The boy grew up in Norfolk. No Shrewsbury School or Cambridge for him. He had been taught at home by his mother and sisters and had then studied at Guy’s and St Thomas’s hospitals in London before entering the Royal Navy as an assistant surgeon aged twenty-three. It had become his ambition to be an explorer-naturalist and he had volunteered for an Arctic voyage, north of Spitzbergen, in 1827. Sickness interrupted many of his voyages – yellow fever in the Spanish main in 1825 had been followed up by two occasions in the West Indies when he was invalided home, in 1827 and 1828. In spite of these setbacks he had become a keen geologist and natural historian.
As the Beagle made her way south towards the Equator, they approached St Paul’s rocks, which Darwin ‘considered as the top of a submarine mountain. – It is not above 40 feet above the sea, & about ½ a mile in circumference.’38 Two boats were lowered so that the rocks could be examined in detail. The first, containing Wickham (First Lieutenant, soon to become Commander of the Beagle) and Darwin, landed on the rocky island. They were surrounded by birds, and were able to collect eggs and geological specimens. McCormick, in the other boat, did not so much as get the chance to land.
Two days later, they crossed the Equator, and the tradition was followed of the crew being allowed to torment their superiors, as the world turned literally topsy-turvy. ‘For the first time in my life I saw the sun at noon to the North,’ Darwin noted on 26 February.
‘The disagreeable practice’, wrote FitzRoy, ‘has been permitted in most ships, because sanctioned by time; and although many condemn it as an absurd and dangerous piece of folly, it has also many advocates. Perhaps it is one of those amusements, of which the omission might be regretted. Its effects on the minds of those engaged in preparing for its mummeries, who enjoy it at the time, and talk of it long afterwards, cannot easily be judged of without being an eye-witness.’39
Darwin and thirty-one other ‘griffins’ were locked in their cabins, until four of ‘Neptune’s constables’ came and led them up on deck, blindfolded. They were then soused by a bathtub of cold water. Darwin’s face was next lathered with pitch and paint. Some of this was scraped off with an iron hoop. Then he was ducked in the bathtub again. ‘At last, glad enough, I escaped – most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths & rubbed on their faces.’40
This ritualized reversal of the hierarchies, paralleling their entry into an up-ended hemisphere, was a raucous way of acknowledging that, as far as victims and perpetrators were concerned, the social structures were as immovable as the laws of nature.
Between the officer class and the ratings was a great gulf. Only political dreamers felt pain as they stared across it. The hidden valleys within the middle class of money-dominated England were more painful to contemplate, for in some cases they might be traversed with ease, and in others, where luck was absent, they were insurmountable. As well as being much richer than the Irish doctor, Darwin, having read Lyell’s Principles, or having begun to read it, could remark, when they had geologized together in St Jago, that McCormick ‘was a philosopher of rather antient [sic] date; at St Jago by his own account he made general remarks during the first fortnight & collected particular facts during the last’.41
The ship sailed quietly, in calm warm weather, until the coast of Brazil came into sight and they glimpsed Bahia, or San Salvador, ‘embosomed in a luxuriant wood & situated on a steep bank’.
After a fortnight in this paradise, in which Darwin felt ashamed of his
idleness (‘a few insects & plants make up the total’),42 the Beagle weighed anchor and slowly made her way along the coast to Rio de Janeiro. The weather was perfect and the sea calm. Just after midnight on April Fool’s Day, Sulivan, Second Lieutenant, called out, ‘Darwin, did you ever see a Grampus [killer whale]: Bear a hand then.’ The naturalist rushed out from his hammock ‘in a transport of Enthusiasm, & was received by a roar of laughter from the whole watch’.43 Porpoises, sharks and turtles all were seen in the blue sea during the ensuing days, and on 5 April the ship moored at Rio. Darwin, to whom expense seemed little object, commissioned carpenters to encase the collections he had already catalogued. The sight was too much for McCormick who complained to FitzRoy that Darwin had been given preferential treatment.
McCormick’s complaint was not to be tolerated. In later life, the surgeon expressed ‘unavailing regret, as so much time, health, and energies utterly wasted’; he regretted having gone on the voyage in the first place.44 He applied to be ‘invalided’ out of the expedition. Benjamin Bynoe, the assistant surgeon, served as surgeon for the rest of the voyage.45 There is something chilling about Darwin’s scorn for McCormick, whom he saw as having ‘chose[n] to make himself disagreeable to the Captain & to Wickham’.46 Darwin used McCormick as a postman to take a letter to his sister Caroline back to England in HMS Tyne; in the letter which the poor doctor carried, his rival said bluntly, ‘He is no loss.’ The two naturalists had locked antlers and in his passive, gentlemanly way Darwin had ruthlessly demonstrated the Survival of the Richest.