by A. N. Wilson
He travelled on horseback to St Jago (‘enjoyed myself very much’)56 and for much of September the mountains continued to delight him. Then, as he made his way back to Valparaiso, illness struck. At first he attributed an upset stomach to ‘sour new made wine’ which he had drunk while at the gold mines. In a later account, however, in his diary for 26 March 1835, he described sleeping in a village five leagues south of Mendoza, where he was attacked by ‘the Benchuca, the great black bugs of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, cawling [sic] over one’s body; before sucking they are quite thin, but afterwards round & bloated with blood.’57
Speculation naturally arose afterwards whether the illness of September 1834 or the ‘attack, & it deserves no less a name’58 could have been the origin of Darwin’s lifelong mysterious illness – palpitations, vomiting and so forth. The great black bug of the pampas – not Benchuca as Darwin called them but more properly Triatoma infestans – are the principal vectors of South American trypanosomiasis or Chagas’s disease. They spread the disease not directly through their bites, but by defecating in the contaminated wounds which they inflict. Many of Darwin’s later symptoms – fevers, such as those suffered in autumn 1834, vomiting, palpitations – do correspond to those of Chagas’s disease. It has been convincingly argued, however, that Darwin suffered from many of these symptoms before he even left England for South America and that ‘it is beyond credibility that Chagas’s disease could produce symptoms of cardiac insufficiency for between 40 and 50 years and not produce some physical signs’.59 No other Beagle suffered from the infection and moreover, in 1838, two years after his return to England, Darwin undertook a strenuous mountain tour in Scotland, which would scarcely have been possible for a sufferer from Chagas’s disease. The simpler explanation, that Darwin was suffering from a bad case of poisoning – either from the filthy wine or from something he ate – is more plausible. He just managed to get back to Corfield’s house in Valparaiso where he languished in bed for a fortnight. ‘Capt. FitzRoy very kindly delayed the sailing of the Ship till the 10th of November, by which time I was quite well again.’60
In Darwin’s sickly absence, FitzRoy had had more than his share of problems. The Admiralty in London persisted in its refusal to pay for the Adventure and FitzRoy came to the reluctant conclusion that the second ship must be sold for 7,500 dollars – nearly £1,400 in the money of that time. Darwin believed that the Admiralty had treated FitzRoy badly (‘solely . . . because he is a Tory’).61 He noted with alarm that the hard work, the distress of discharging the crew of the Adventure and the difficulty of equipping and arranging the now grievously overcrowded Beagle had brought on ‘a morbid depression of spirits & loss of all decision & resolution. The Captain was afraid that his mind was becoming deranged (being aware of his hereditary predisposition)’62 – an allusion to the suicide of FitzRoy’s kinsman Lord Castlereagh.
Before the Beagle at last set sail in November 1834, Darwin arranged for two more boxes of specimens to be conveyed back to England in HMS Challenger. This sadly fated vessel was wrecked in a storm at Aranco. It would seem that, for some reason, Darwin’s cases were transferred, at Rio, to another vessel and so did not go down with Challenger.
The Captain’s temper was frayed to snapping point. When Darwin eventually went aboard the Beagle (and one can imagine that, even having disposed of two large packing cases, he was taking up a lot of space with all his equipment and his specimens), he found FitzRoy in a foul mood. The obligation to give a party on board ship to thank all the local residents who had been helpful to him caused an agony of irritation and, upon Darwin’s appearance, FitzRoy burst out into a fury, accusing the naturalist of being one who ‘would receive any favours and make no return’.63 Darwin was stung. His quiet but intensely ambitious pursuit not only of scientific knowledge but also of fame was marked by, precisely, receiving favours and making no return. He went back to Corfield’s house, momentarily wondering whether he should not take another ship direct for home. Two days later, however, he returned to the Beagle and was welcomed back by a cordial Captain. Wickham, however, serving once more as First Lieutenant having lost the Adventure, said: ‘Confound you, philosopher, I wish you would not quarrel with the skipper; the day you left the ship I was dead-tired (the ship was refitting) and he kept me walking the deck till midnight abusing you all the time.’64
On 10 November, they got under way and southerly winds bore the Beagle up the Chilean coast again. They anchored at the island of Chiloe and tried (unsuccessfully) to penetrate the lush forests, drenched with rain. It was a tangle of bamboo creepers which enmeshed them like fish in a net. For two months of mostly bad weather they sailed up and down surveying the mainland coast. On 18 January 1835, they anchored for a second time in the bay of San Carlos on the island of Chiloe. The next day the volcano of Osorno was in great activity.
At 12 o’clock the sentry observed something like a large star from which state it gradually increased in size till three o’clock when most of the officers were on deck watching it – It was a very magnificent sight; by the aid of a glass, in the midst of the great red glare of light, dark objects in a constant succession might be seen to be thrown up & fall down. The light was sufficient to cast on the water a long bright shadow. By the morning the Volcano seemed to have regained its composure.65
Afterwards they heard that the volcanoes of Aconcagua in Chile, 480 miles to the north, and Cosegüina in Nicaragua, 2,700 miles north again, had also erupted that same night. Darwin, by now steeped in the works of Lyell, had travelled in regions which most European geologists could only dream of. His palaeontological finds placed him at the forefront of fossil research. (F. W. Hope had told him that sending home ‘the much desired bones of Megatherium’ had ensured that his name ‘is likely to be immortalized’.)66 With his eyes fixed on erupting volcanoes he was now seeing geology in action, as it were.
Four weeks later, when the Beagle was anchored off the town of Valdivia on the south Chilean coast, Darwin went ashore with Covington in search of specimens. After a walk through an apple orchard they lay down to rest and felt the ground beneath them tremble. When they sailed north, to the port of Talcahuano, they realized the extent of the earthquake. The shore was strewn with debris ‘as if a thousand great ships had been wrecked. Besides chairs, tables, bookshelves &c &c in great numbers there were several roofs of cottages almost entire . . .’67
By 4 March, when they landed at the island of Quiriquina, they learnt that the town of Concepción, and the port of Talcahuano, had been devastated by the earthquake, with not a house left standing. Even on the island, Darwin noticed great cracks in the rocks on the beach. Surface slabs of slate had been smashed to smithereens. ‘For the future when I see a geological section traversed by any number of fissures I shall well understand the reason.’68
Riding through the ruins of Concepción with FitzRoy at his side was an awful, and awe-inspiring, experience. Within six seconds the town had been wrecked. Had the quake happened at night, three-quarters of the population would have perished. The accounts of it by ‘Mr Rous the English Consul’ – a thunderous noise, a whole side of his house disappearing while he ate his breakfast, the sky dark with dense dustclouds, the air unbreathable – were not to be forgotten. Darwin, the banker’s son and industrialist’s grandson, thought immediately of the economic implications of living in a volcanic environment. Imagine ‘if beneath England a volcanic focus should reassume its power . . . England would become bankrupt; all papers, accounts, records as here would be lost; & Government could not collect the taxes.’69 Pliny the Younger, who left us his immortal description of the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii, watched the disaster with cinematic eye and, after all the flame and dust and mayhem, focused on one death, that of his beloved uncle. Voltaire, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, was a changed man, his capacity for optimism destroyed, his world-outlook, and that of a generation thanks to what he wrote about
it, disrupted, shaken, changed. Darwin saw the ruins of Concepción with distress; but his immediate thoughts, financial and parochial, were of the Treasury in London if such a calamity were to occur at home.
Two adventures lay ahead: one of great excitement to Captain FitzRoy and his men would be a piece of gallantry and superb seamanship; the other, for Darwin, in his mental journeyings, an event of the greatest importance.
On the Beagle’s last visit back to Valparaiso, after a second trip to Concepción, the news was waiting from the Admiralty in London that FitzRoy, hitherto only a lieutenant in rank, had been promoted to full captain. No doubt this was intended to soothe his bruised ego after the Adventure fiasco. The strategy worked and it put not only FitzRoy but all the Beagles in a happy frame of mind and in a mood for a proper naval adventure. When FitzRoy heard of the plight of the Challenger, the man-of-war wrecked in a storm at Arauco (an effect of the earthquake which destroyed nearby Concepción) he determined to go in search of the ship’s Captain, Michael Seymour, and such of his crew as had survived the wreck. Seymour was an old friend of FitzRoy’s.
The Admiralty had entrusted the task of rescue to HMS Blonde, the British man-of-war on the station, but the Blonde, under the command of an elderly commodore, was reluctant to get on to a lee shore in winter. FitzRoy placed the Beagle under Wickham’s command, and set off on the Blonde having volunteered his service as a pilot. They anchored in the Bay of Concepción and FitzRoy, having hired horses, made a 100-mile trek overland, braving all the hazards caused by currents, streams, hostile Indians and exhausted pack animals, to find his British comrades. An encounter with a party of Chileans made the expedition all the more urgent, for these men told FitzRoy that 3,000 hostile Indians had assembled on the Chilean frontier and that, until driven off by some other Indians, they had been on the verge of plundering the meagre supplies of the marooned Challengers. When FitzRoy finally found the shipwrecked crew, they were hungry, semi-mutinous and dead tired, but astonishingly, given all they had been through, only two had died. Thanks to FitzRoy they all got back to Coquimbo where a rescue-ship awaited them. Captain Seymour had to answer for the loss of HMS Challenger before a court martial in Greenwich when he reached home. It was largely because of FitzRoy, who told the court of the tsunami which had accompanied the earthquake, that he was acquitted.
FitzRoy rejoined the Beagle at Callas, in Peru. By now, Darwin, together with the rest of the crew, was yearning for home. They had been absent from England for four years. FitzRoy caused them all an agony of frustration when he insisted on one last trip to Lima, where he consulted maps and charts. He was determined to do as thorough a job as possible of charting the coastline before they left South America, heading out north-west into the Pacific Ocean past the little archipelago known as the Galápagos Islands (off the coast of Ecuador) before heading down towards the Society Islands and the Friendly Islands, following the route taken by Captain Cook in 1775 on his sea-path to New Zealand.
‘My dear Henslow,’ Darwin wrote from Lima on 12 July, ‘This is the last letter which I shall ever write to you from the shores of America, and for this reason I send it. In a few days time the Beagle will sail for the Galapagos Isds. I look forward with joy & interest to this, both as being somewhat nearer to England, & for the sake of having a good look at an active volcano. Although we have seen lava in abundance, I have never yet beheld the crater.’70
His mind still, primarily, absorbed in geology, he did not realize that when he reached the little cluster of Pacific islands, he would behold biodiversity on a scale unmatched on the planet.
When he first went ashore at Chatham Island, the barren volcanic rock was uninviting; and the small black cones, former craters, resembled nothing so much as the foundries at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, believed by some to be the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. He saw them as ‘the ancient chimneys for the subterranean melted fluids’. Yet the grandson of the Industrial Revolution was soon superseded by the naturalist who rejoiced to see that ‘The Bay swarmed with animals; Fish, Sharks & Turtles were popping their heads up in all parts.’71 There was good fishing, and the first hunting party on the island brought back fifteen tortoises which were good to eat. Too good. On Charles Island, they met the acting Governor, Nicholas Lawson, an Englishman working for the government of Ecuador. Lawson told them that the American whalers regularly hunted the tortoises and turtles here. One tortoise provided them with upwards of 200 pounds of meat. Lawson believed they would last twenty years before becoming extinct.
Today, the giant Galápagos tortoises are all but extinct, as is the land lizard – ‘hideous animals; but . . . considered good food’.72 Even some of the finches, which supposedly first set Darwin’s mind moving towards an explanation of the evolutionary process, have become extinct.
The Beagle spent a month exploring the Galápagos Islands. While the ship cruised, boatloads of men could be sent ashore to investigate. The birds, of which there was a prodigious variety, were quite tame. Darwin pushed a hawk off a branch with the end of his gun.73 On Charles Island he saw a boy sitting beside a well with a long stick in his hand. As the doves came to drink he casually killed as many as would feed his family, and had collected easily enough within half an hour. The sheer variety of birds was intoxicating. ‘Doves and finches swarmed,’74 Darwin excitedly told the diary. The days were cloudless, overpoweringly hot. They slept on the soft, warm sand.
Darwin’s collecting-jars filled up with plants, seashells, insects and reptiles. It was as they moved from island to island in the archipelago that he saw the truth of what Lawson had told him: you could tell from the look of a tortoise which island it came from. Captain FitzRoy was to write, ‘All the small birds that live on these lava-covered islands have short beaks, very thick at the base, like that of a bull-finch. This appears to be one of those admirable provisions of Infinite Wisdom by which each created thing is adapted to the place for which it was intended.’75 The key word here is ‘adapted’. Though it is well known that FitzRoy became a diehard opponent of evolutionary theory, the use of the word ‘adapted’ implies that, in conversation with Philos, even on the archipelago, some discussion took place, not merely about the variety of the birds, tortoises and other creatures, from island to island – as pointed out by Lawson – but also about the underlying cause.
The Darwinian mythology suggests that it was on the Galápagos Islands that the naturalist first began to observe the different characteristics of species from one island to the next, and that, in particular, the beaks of the finches, differing from one island to the next, suggested to him the phenomenon of descent by modification. Darwin’s granddaughter, Nora Barlow, published extracts from his Beagle notebooks in 1945 and propounded the notion that already on the islands ‘a revolution was taking place in his views on the immutability of species’. Anticipating the obvious question – why, were this the case, her grandfather had not expressed such thoughts at the time – she hazarded, ‘Probably, there was some deference to FitzRoy’s emphatically creationist opinions in this delay; but mostly the need in his own mind to marshal all the facts in logical sequence.’76
Today, the mythology has become so fixed in the public mind that when, for example, the Encarta World Dictionary turns to the finches of the Galápagos Islands it speaks of ‘the birds . . . on which Charles Darwin based his theory of natural selection through observation of their feeding habits and corresponding differences in beak structure. Subfamily Geospizinae.’ A typical tutorial, at Palomar College in California, teaches that:
Darwin identified 13 species of finches in the Galápagos Islands. This was puzzling since he knew of only one species of this bird on the mainland of South America, nearly 600 miles to the east, where they had all presumably originated . . . Each of the various islands had its own species of finch, differing in various ways, and in particular in beak shape. Darwin’s idea was that these finches were all descendants of a single kind of ancestral finch, but that the different environmen
ts of the different islands had given advantages to different characteristics in its finch population . . . Eventually the separated populations would become too different to interbreed, and would be separate species.77
Although this is what modern biologists believe, such thoughts did not occur to Darwin at the time. As a matter of fact, he failed even to identify most of the finch specimens which he collected on the Galápagos as finches. Some he labelled blackbirds, others ‘gross beaks’ and one a wren. He gave them to the Ornithological Society of London, which in turn gave them to John Gould, an ornithologist, to be identified, and it was Gould, not Darwin, who recognized that they were all distinct species of finch.78 It was FitzRoy, not Darwin, who made collections of finches and labelled them correctly, and, as Harvard University’s Frank Sulloway demonstrated in 1982, it was FitzRoy’s identification of the differences between the finches which enabled Gould to make his remarkable observations.79 Darwin never in fact mentioned the differences between the finches in The Origin of Species, even though, during the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of publication, Gould’s drawings of the Galápagos finches were reproduced again and again as if they were Darwin’s ‘discovery’.