by A. N. Wilson
When Darwin had attended Robert Jameson’s lectures in Edinburgh on the origin of species, he had heard of the vital importance of studying fossils. Jameson had emphasized the importance of studying the higher plants and mammals – where fossil evidence was available – because here you could actually observe the process of evolution at work. You could see new faunas and floras arising. In some cases, they were replacing old taxa. In other cases, old forms were morphing into new ones. This was to be the central puzzle of Darwin’s intellectual life. Georges Cuvier and the French natural historians, about whom Darwin learnt from Jameson’s lectures, had provided, in their museums of palaeontological specimens, abundant evidence of species becoming extinct. They also believed that, somewhere, if the right interpretation could be found of all this evidence, the fossils would provide, not just the history of what happened, but the explanation of how it happened.
Although Darwin was not destined to be a geologist, his geological investigations, while a young man on HMS Beagle, were absolutely central to the later pursuit of the origin of species. Only relatively recently, in the last decade or so, have Darwin scholars realized the importance of his geological notes. The geological journals were for a long time unread, lying with the other abundant manuscript material in the Cambridge University Library. Eventually, in this century, they were put online. Paul Barrett’s monumental edition of Darwin’s works included a volume on Darwin’s geological diaries, published in 2016. And scholars such as Sandra Herbert (Charles Darwin: Geologist, 2005), George Chancellor, who edited and introduced the Darwin Online geological journals, M. D. Brasier (Darwin’s Lost World: The Hidden History of Animal Life, 2009) and Niles Eldredge (Eternal Ephemera, 2015), elucidated their significance for us. The geological journals which he kept on the voyage show us the burgeoning of Darwin’s mind. The notes he kept on the fossils of Bahia Blanca are especially detailed. He found numerous bones of quadrupeds, five or six different species, which he identified as Megalonyx – a genus of North American ground sloth, originally named by President Thomas Jefferson – as well as extinct rodents which had not been previously identified. He also later identified a species of as-yet-unknown endemic South American mammals, the Notoungulata, later classified by Owen, in the Natural History Museum in London, as Toxodon. We see, in every such fossil-gathering expedition Darwin made in South America, how closely the geological work he had undertaken since attending lectures in Edinburgh, which was stimulated by reading Lyell, would feed into his biological theories – how and when the species became extinct; whether (though this thought had not yet occurred to him) the species might not be as distinct as Linnaeus had supposed; that they were fluid, morphing and blending into one another.94
And on they sailed, to Tierra del Fuego.
6
‘Blackbirds . . . gross-beaks . . . wren’
AS WE HAVE seen, on a previous voyage to South America, a year or so earlier, FitzRoy had adopted four Fuegians, one of whom had died of a smallpox vaccination. The rest, a young man whom FitzRoy named York Minster, a boy who had been purchased for a few buttons and so was called Jemmy Button, and a girl named Fuegia Basket, were put in the care of the Church Missionary Society. The aim was, when they had been taught the rudiments of how to use common tools and how to speak English, that they should also have accepted the Christian Gospel. They were now passengers on the Beagle – York Minster aged twenty-seven, Jemmy Button fifteen and Fuegia Basket ten. York Minster and Jemmy in their nankeen trousers and frock coats, Fuegia in her bonnet, were like parody-people, something waiting (as we might think, for it was four years before Sketches by Boz) to come to life in the mind of Dickens. They were accompanied by an earnest trainee missionary called Richard Matthews. They were now returning to Tierra del Fuego as to the Vineyard of the Lord, and as to a home in which, perhaps, York Minster, supplied by the London Missionary Society with a beaver hat, wine glasses, cutlery, soup tureens and white tablecloths,1 would probably never again feel quite at home.
It had been in 1520 when Magellan was making his way in the Trinidada through the Straits which he had discovered that the Portuguese navigator had seen beacons, lit by the natives in the southern hills, and named it the Land of Fire. Tierra del Fuego, the territory around Cape Horn, has about the harshest climate in the world. Icy squalls hurl albatrosses and blue petrels through the relentless air. The Beagle rolled and turned like a cork. The sky was gloomy. The coast was made up of fifty miles of low, horizontal rock strata. In the distance could been seen the glowering, snowy mountains. On 17 December 1832 they anchored in the very place – the co-called Harbour of Good Success – where Captain Cook and Joseph Banks had landed in January 1769.2 On 18 December, FitzRoy sent out a party to communicate with the natives.3
A group of them had assembled on the shore, and when FitzRoy, with an advanced party, had come to land in the jolly-boat, the Fuegian men had sent the women and children into the safety of their huts while they greeted the Beagles with shouts and gesticulations.
In the choppy sea, the rowing-boats borne up and down on waves the height of a London house, the men of the Beagle, sometimes with laughter, had rowed ashore the supplies deemed necessary, by the London Missionary Society, for the implanting of civilization in this inhospitable terrain. There were especial whoops of amusement as they unpacked the chamber-pots.4 For now, the men who were to be persuaded to make use of these commodities stood before the Europeans: huge individuals, with long matted hair and mahogany-coloured faces daubed with stripes of black and red, with white stripes around their eyes. Darwin, when he first set eyes upon them, thought of the devils ‘which come on the stage in plays like Der Freischütz’.5 He told his diary, ‘I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage and civilized man is. It is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal.’6
Although Darwin reassured himself (or tried to do so) by noting that their diet chiefly consisted of limpets, mussels and the occasional seabird, Jemmy Button had told him that in the winter the Fuegians ate their womenfolk. A sealing Captain with whom Darwin later discussed the matter said he had heard the same, and had asked his informant ‘why not eat dogs?’ The reply had possessed an inexorable logic: ‘Dog eat otter; woman good for nothing: man very hungry.’7 ‘Viewing such men’, Darwin confided in his diary,
one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world . . . What a scale of improvement is comprehended between the faculties of a Fuegian savage & a Sir Isaac Newton – Whence have these people come? Have they remained in the same state since the creation of the world? What could have tempted a tribe of men leaving the fine regions of the North to travel down the Cordilleras the backbone of America, to invent & build canoes, & then to enter upon one of the most inhospitable countries in the world?8
The allegation that the Fuegians were sometimes cannibals, repeated by FitzRoy in his Narrative of the voyage, and Darwin in his Journal of Researches, was later seen to be based on misleading interviews, and that Jemmy Button was an unreliable witness.
They spent a couple of months, bobbing around the coast, battling against the westerly winds, soaking themselves in rain – ‘I have scarcely for an hour been quite free from seasickness’ was one January diary entry. When it was possible to land, Darwin did so, climbing the mountains, enraptured by superb views, collecting tiny alpine flowers and noting birds – the steamer, a large variety of goose, being especially remarkable. But the weather was inconducive to study, and on a disastrous 14 January seawater splashed and destroyed all his drying-paper and plant collection.
Every so often, contact would be renewed with one Fuegian group or another. They managed to build some primitive houses and to set up quarters near Jemmy’s people. They were swift. They ran so fast their noses bled, spoke so fast their mouths frothed. Jemmy seemed to forget his English as soon as he was reunited with his mother, his uncle and his brother. It seemed impossible to prevent the Fuegians from stealing. The Be
agles felt sad to be leaving ‘their’ Fuegians behind when eventually, in late February, they weighed anchor; at the beginning of March, they reached the Falkland Islands.
They found these islands, on which there was such an abundance of wild oxen (5,000), horses, pigs, wild fowl and rabbits, to be inhabited only by one Englishman, Mr Dixon, twenty Spaniards and ‘three women, two of whom are negresses’. These were guarding the British flag.9 Darwin, reflecting upon Mr Dixon’s life, mused, ‘It is surprising to see how Englishmen find their way to every corner of the globe. I do not suppose there is an inhabited & civilized place where they are not to be found.’10
One disaster which occurred here was the death of Captain FitzRoy’s clerk, Edward Hellyer. He had shot a seabird, swum out to retrieve it and become entangled in kelp. A melancholy funeral followed, the coffin covered by the British ensign, and a Union Jack borne aloft at half-mast. Darwin spent several days walking, shooting snipe and collecting ‘the few living productions which this island has to boast of’.11
Then it was back to the ship, which sailed to the coast of Patagonia.
For much of the year 1833, Darwin was on land, while the Beagle surveyed the coastline. Several weeks, from April to May, were spent in Maldonado, packing up bones, rocks, plants, skins of birds, fish, fungi, to be taken back to England in spirits of wine. He had already, in a little over a year, assembled a formidable collection – he had catalogued 1,529 specimens.
From April to July Darwin lived at Maldonado. Already – in June – some of the fossil bones which he had dispatched had been exhibited at Cambridge. Henslow wrote in August, from Cambridge, that although a few items in the cask of spirits had been spoiled, ‘owing to the spirit having escaped thro’ the bung-hole’, the majority of specimens were safe.12 Senior geologists in Britain were already taking serious notice of Darwin’s work. He had now passed from being the keen amateur naturalist to being a respected scientist. He had joined the club. In December, he was inscribed as a founding member of the Entomological Society by F. W. Hope, who wished him ‘all success in collecting & Health to enjoy yourself & a safe return to Old England with 1,0000,000,0000 Insects’.13
Meanwhile, between August and September Darwin had made an overland trip from Rio Negro to Bahia Blanca and Buenos Aires. He had made an expedition to Santa Fé, returning from there to Montevideo. Darwin became acquainted with the rhea, the South American ostrich, smaller than the African one. Later on the Santa Cruz river, Darwin twice saw the ostriches swimming. He caught one example of a particular species, very rare, and sent it to the Zoological Society; later it was named after him: Rhea darwinii.14 He came to know the appalling smell of the zorillo or skunk. Very little missed his notice – birds, armadillos, hunting dogs, sheepdogs, he noted them all. Darwin was one of the greatest cataloguers of the world, perhaps the greatest, a taxonomist in the Linnaean league. He also developed a great fondness for the gauchos, in their scarlet ponchos and white riding-drawers. Superb horsemen, they forced their animals into great rivers: the naked rider, once the horse was out of its depth, would slip off its back and take hold of its tail and drive it forward.
Darwin stayed at the encampment of General Rosas, a cattle rancher who ruled Argentina as Governor of Buenos Aires in the years 1829–32 and 1835–52. When Darwin encountered him he was leading a campaign ‘to exterminate the Indians’.15 Rosas was ‘a perfect Gaucho’. His popularity was attested by an anecdote in the diary. A man was arrested for murder, but when he explained what had happened – ‘the man spoke disrespectfully of General Rosas & I killed him’16 – he was instantly released. ‘I never saw anything like the enthusiasm for Rosas & for the success of this most just of all wars against Barbarians.’17 The enthusiasm for Rosas was ‘universal’.18 The Argentinians accepted without question that the Indians (who resented the Argentinians overrunning their hunting ground) must be eliminated. Rosas eventually also overturned the Argentinian government and ruled as a dictator for seventeen years (when he was ultimately deposed he went to live in England, in Hampshire, where Darwin met him again). ‘It is clear to me’, the naturalist wrote with some approval in his diary, ‘that Rosas ultimately must be absolute Dictator.’19 It would be evident to most political thinkers and historians that Rosas’s activities – a campaign of violence in which he eliminated a weaker group of individuals for the sake of their hunting-prey, followed by a strutting, macho seizure of political power – were not a recipe either for progress or for stability. Darwin, however, was not a political philosopher, and there can be little doubt that the career of Rosas, observed through the naturalist’s lens, became for him a template of human behaviour. While Britain advanced in political power – and far greater influence than nineteenth-century Argentina – by its lack of ‘Darwinian’ savagery in the public sphere, its gradual extension of the franchise, its increasing attempts to look after the ‘weaker’ elements in society in schools, hospitals and the like, the young Darwin was able to see the South American dictator as an example of ‘natural’ aggression, of the inevitability that ‘struggle’ and violent conflict were necessary ingredients in the development of human societies.
At the beginning of the next year – 1834 – they once again negotiated the Straits of Magellan, and in February they made a detailed survey of the east coast of Tierra del Fuego. During this surveying work, they landed only once, at what had been called St Sebastian’s Channel – closer investigation showed it to be a large wild bay. When James Cook and Joseph Banks had tried to draw an accurate map of ‘Terra del Fuego’ as Cook called it, in January 1769, the weather had made the task impossible: ‘Foggy weather, and the westerly winds which carried us from the land prevented me from satisfying my curiosity.’20 In 1834, the world – every inch of which, as moderns, we reckon on being able to find in the atlas – was still an incomplete puzzle, an unfinished chart.
In the bay, they watched a multitude of spermaceti whales, some of them leaping from the water. Darwin’s delight in, fascination with, the abundance and variety of species he encountered and noted never wavered. Constantly, he reread Paradise Lost; his pocket edition made it the ideal companion not only on board ship, but on his many land expeditions. He responded with particular sympathy to the beautiful passage in Book VII, in which the Archangel Raphael told Adam the story of creation:
Forthwith the Sounds and Seas, each Creek and Bay
With Frie innumerable swarme, and Shoales
Of Fish that with their Finns and shining Scales
Glide under the green Wave . . .21
and Darwin, as he looked at the spermaceti whales disporting themselves in Tierra del Fuego, had some of the excitement experienced on the day such creatures were first created:
there Leviathan
Hugest of living Creatures, on the Deep
Stretcht like a Promontorie sleeps or swimmes,
And seems a moving Land, and at his Gilles
Draws in, and at his Trunck spouts out a Sea.22
Milton, of course, was only writing a poem, as were the authors of Genesis who compiled the creation myths in the Bible. It is probably safe to say that of the two texts, Genesis and Paradise Lost, Milton’s was the more influential upon the British nineteenth-century mind. While the Bible, with its broad creation myths, by no means rules out an evolutionary idea of nature, Milton, for poetic effect, specifically envisaged the arrival on the earth, ready made, of all the species in their immutable form. When God called for earth to bring forth the animal kingdom,
The Earth obeyd’, and strait
Op’ning her fertil Woomb, teem’d at a Birth
Innumerous living Creatures, perfect formes
Limb’d and full grown . . .23
Many of the Victorians who agonized about the specific question of the mutability of species, and about the more general idea of creation, did so as men and women, such as Charles Darwin, who had had these passages of Milton instilled in their minds since childhood. Wordsworth, the Poet Laureate until 1850
, had apostrophized the blind poet, ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour . . .’ In a sense, he was – Lord Macaulay had a better memory than most, but he would probably not have been alone, among the educated classes of the nineteenth century, when he said that if ‘by some miracle of Vandalism all copies of Paradise Lost . . . were destroyed off the face of the earth, he would undertake to reproduce it from recollection’.24
If the poetry of Milton fed the nineteenth century’s belief-systems about science (though Milton himself in his own day had been a progressivist who admired Galileo’s new astronomy), another of the Victorian certainties, which seems so strange to later generations, is the belief in colonialism, and the confidence that they could impose their own brand of civilization upon others. Captain FitzRoy, supported by the London Missionary Society, had generously sent Bibles, a white missionary, a collection of white table-linen, ceramic dinner services and chamber-pots to Tierra del Fuego, but upon the Beagle’s return, in spring 1834, they were dismayed to find that the good seed had fallen on stony ground and failed to take root.
When they came ashore on 25 February, they pulled alongside six Fuegians, ‘stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint and quite naked’. Another canoe-load, encountered on 1 March, struck Darwin as ‘more amusing than any Monkeys’. The Beagles hoped for better things when they moved round the coast, anchoring in Ponsonby Sound, to find themselves in ‘Jemmy Button’s country’.25 Alas, when they came across him – ‘without a remnant of clothes, excepting a bit of blanket round his waist . . . it was quite painful to behold him’.26 Far from wearing his well-tailored English clothes, and persuading his fellow Fuegians to read the Authorized Version of the Bible, and to eat their food off dishes and plates made in Stoke-on-Trent, Jemmy had reverted to his Fuegian ways. He had taught some of his friends a little English, including a woman who was identified as his wife. His own grasp of the language, however, seemed to have deserted him. As for York Minster, he had persuaded Jemmy, and his mother, to come to his own country several months previously and had robbed them of everything.