Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  In his short time in New South Wales, he wanted to see as much as possible. He rode out to Bathurst, ‘the centre of a great pastoral district’.106 He saw gum trees against bright-blue skies. He met a party of ‘Aboriginal Blacks, who, in exchange for a shilling, “threw their spears for my amusement”’. He went out to the Blue Mountains. He went kangaroo-hunting with the superintendent of a farm called Walerawang – ‘but had very bad sport, not seeing a kangaroo or even a wild dog’.

  Lying in the sunshine after this unsatisfying experience, Darwin had some metaphysical reflections:

  on the strange character of the Animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World. An unbeliever in everything beyond his own reason, might exclaim, ‘Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work; their object, however, has been the same, & certainly the end in each case is complete’. Whilst thus thinking, I observed the conical pitfall of a Lion-Ant [predatory insects, not ants at all, usually now called antlions] – A fly fell in & immediately disappeared; then came a large but unwary Ant, his struggles to escape being very violent, the little jets of sand described by Kirby107 were promptly directed against him. This fate however was better than that of the poor fly’s – without a doubt this predacious Larva belongs to the same genus, but to a different species from the Europaean [sic] one – Now what would the Disbeliever say to this? Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple, & yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought so – the one hand has surely worked throughout the universe. A Geologist perhaps would suggest that the periods of Creation have been distinct & remote the one from the other; that the Creator rested in his labour.

  NB: the pitfall was not above half the size of the one described by Kirby.108

  They set sail again on 14 March. ‘Farewell Australia!’ said Darwin. ‘I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.’109 He was psychologically ready for home, but he had a long wait, sailing first to the Keeling Islands, to Mauritius, round the Cape of Good Hope and on to St Helena. Then, to Darwin’s dismay, FitzRoy decided that they must return home via South America in order to complete his circle of chronological measurements of the world. ‘This zig-zag manner of proceeding is very grievous,’ he told Susan in August; ‘it has put the finishing stroke to my feelings. I loathe, I abhor the sea, & all ships which sail on it.’110

  He was no less seasick on the way home than he had been on the voyage out, and when eventually the Beagle approached the coast of Cornwall, on 2 October 1836, Darwin was numb. ‘After a tolerably short passage, but with some heavy weather, we came to an anchor at Falmouth. To my surprise and shame I confess the first sight of the shores of England inspired me with no warmer feelings than if it had been a miserable Portuguese settlement. The same night (and a dreadfully stormy one it was) I started by the Mail for Shrewsbury.’111

  7

  The Ladder by Which You Mounted

  TWO YEARS AND three months elapsed between Darwin’s return to England and his marriage to his cousin Emma Wedgwood. In his Autobiography he described these months as ‘the most active ones which I ever spent, though I was occasionally unwell’.1

  The activity was imposed upon him by the sheer scale of his collections, made in the course of the previous five years – 1,529 species in spirits and 3,907 labelled skins, bones and other dried specimens.2 Darwin was always a slow worker. Moreover his intense ambition as a scientist made him diffident, ever afraid of error. While the jars and packing cases which he had sent back from South America could have provided him with a lifetime’s research, their very broad extent prompted him to seek out experts in every field to examine them. The spring of 1837, for example, found him approaching Thomas Bell (Professor of Zoology at King’s College, London) to examine the reptiles and higher orders of Crustacea.3 Leonard Jenyns, Henslow’s naturalist brother-in-law, was asked to examine the fish. Botanists were consulted. There were a ‘few dozen’ drawers full of seashells. Many of the mammals and the creatures preserved in alcohol had been sent to the Zoological Society of London.

  Describing himself as ‘active’ was certainly no exaggeration. The Darwin who returned to England in 1836 was a very different being from the seemingly rather lazy boy who had hesitated about accepting Captain FitzRoy’s invitation to sail with the Beagle in December 1831. Because Darwin, after marriage, became a domestic recluse in Kent, cogitating his theories and conducting his experiments; and because he was, in person, of a retiring, almost apologetic manner, it would be possible to think of him still as the amateur naturalist who bumbled into world fame as a scientist almost by accident. Nothing could be further from the truth. We see him, from the moment he returned to England, actively promoting himself. That he had collected so very many specimens – of plants, bones, preserved mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, as well as a prodigious quantity of insects, shells, stones and fossils – was an indication of how wide the net of his ambition was cast. To Leonard Jenyns, an ichthyologist to whom Darwin sent fish specimens, he spelt out his ambition of writing ‘the Zoology of the Beagle’s voyage on some uniform plan’. He said that ‘The plan would resemble on a humbler scale Rüppel’s Atlas or “Humboldt Zoologie” where Latreille, Cuvier &c &c wrote different parts.’ (Eduard Rüppel was a German naturalist whose Atlas of 1826 chronicled his journeys in Africa.) Although he told Jenyns, ‘I myself should have little to do with it,’4 this was clearly not going to be the case. While Alexander von Humboldt did not write every word of his encyclopaedic scientific studies, his is the name on the spine. When Darwin set sail with FitzRoy he still had it in mind to be a naturalist-clergyman such as Leonard Jenyns. Those who have chronicled his life have sometimes written as if this was, in effect, what he did become, only without taking holy orders: a bearded eccentric with no particular desire to ‘get on’. The Darwin of 1836–9, however, comes across in his letters as a man with towering ambitions.

  We see this in the dedication with which he sat down at once to complete his Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle Round the World. In those days before photography, before National Geographic magazine, before natural history films, books of travels were the only way in which the ever-expanding reading public could look at the world. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s Voyage autour du monde (1771) with its descriptions of the South Pacific was a book which made the late eighteenth-century world a larger place for all who read it. James Cook, a greater cartographer and navigator than Bougainville, sailed into some of the same territory when he led the expedition in HMS Endeavour to Tahiti to observe the passage of Venus in 1769. Cook was enraged, when he visited Cape Town in 1773 (during his second voyage of discovery in the Resolution), to discover that the journalist Dr John Hawkesworth had gone into print, using among other sources Cook’s own journals, with his own Voyages. Cook was determined that this would not happen a second time. Apart from wanting the kudos of writing up his explorations in Antarctica before anyone else, Cook was looking forward to the money. Yet again, however, he was pipped to the post. Though the Admiralty, to protect Cook, put a gagging order on the official naturalist of the Resolution, Dr Reinhold Forster, preventing him from writing up his journals of the voyage, they could not prevent Forster’s young son George from publishing the tearaway best-seller A Voyage Round the World in his Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution in 1777.

  The tension between the professionals of the Royal Navy and the naturalists, artists, journalists and writers they took on board would always be strong. FitzRoy, though aristocratic, was not especially rich and he wrote his own account of the voyage of the Beagle. As well as wanting some money therefrom, he was justly hopeful that his work as an expert cartographer would achieve public recognition. When Darwin sent to FitzRoy his finished draft of Journal of Researches, the Captain read it with considerable chagrin. What took FitzRoy’s breath away, and that of the other officers to whom he showed Darwin’s Preface, was the sense conveyed by the young
man’s words that he had been the hero of the entire journey, and that the prodigious accumulation of specimens had been all his own achievement, all his own work. Such was Darwin’s genius for self-promotion that this is still how the Voyage of the Beagle is perceived, even by those scholars, for instance, who edited the second edition of the book (The Voyage of the Beagle) for Penguin in 1989. Captain FitzRoy drew the map of South America, patiently tacking in and out of inlets, braving storms and enduring the frustrations of calms, measuring, drawing, returning to the coast to redraw, while for much of the time Darwin was in his cabin being sick, or ashore, hunting, shooting and, of course, observing natural history. Yet although the voyage of the Beagle made such a difference to all subsequent geographical study of South America, it is not FitzRoy’s voyage, but Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle which went down in the history books.

  FitzRoy at first acknowledged the receipt of the proofs of Darwin’s Journal of Researches in a curt note, written in the third person: ‘Captain FitzRoy begs to say that he has spoken to Captain Beaufort – to Sir Edward Parry’ (Rear Admiral and the explorer who made unsuccessful attempts to find the Northwest Passage in voyages between 1819 and 1824). FitzRoy declined to give any opinion ‘at present’ on Darwin’s book, but it is clear that not only he, but Beaufort and Parry believed that Philos had overstepped himself in pushingness.

  Next day, however, FitzRoy was unable to restrain himself and burst forth – on 16 November 1837. First, he reminded Darwin that the very idea of inviting the young naturalist on board the Beagle had been his own, FitzRoy’s. Then he recalled how his officers ‘gave you the preference upon all occasions – (especially Sulivan, Usborne, Bynoe and Stokes) and think – with me – that a plain acknowledgement – without a word of flattery – or fulsome praise – is a slight return due from you to those who held the ladder by which you mounted to a position where your industry – enterprise – and talent could be thoroughly demonstrated’.5

  The letter perspicaciously notes Philos’s ruthlessness in self-promotion and in particular his willingness to airbrush out of his story those who had ‘held the ladder’. FitzRoy went on:

  I was also astonished at the total omission of any notice of the officers – either particular – or general. My memory is rather tenacious respecting a variety of transactions in which you are not aware that the ship which carried us safely was the first employed in exploring and surveying whose officers were not ordered to collect – and were therefore at liberty to keep the best of all – nay, all their specimens for themselves. To their honour – they gave you the preference.6

  The shock FitzRoy felt is palpable (‘Believe me Darwin, I esteem you far too highly to break off from you willingly – I shall always be glad to see you’).7 The diffident, tall Philos, whom FitzRoy thought he had come to know and love during five years at sea, was certainly there. He was the friend he would always be glad to see. There was, however, another Darwin, scrambling up the ladder and ignoring those who had held this useful device.

  The accusation, which came, not from FitzRoy alone, but from the other officers concerned, was levied in 1837, the year in which we know that Darwin started his First Notebook on the Transmutation of Species. It is in these notebooks that Darwin began the observations and meditations which would lead eventually to his Origin of Species. As has already been pointed out, Edward Blyth expounded the idea of transmutation in the January 1835 issue of the Magazine of Natural History. In Darwin’s Second Notebook, never intended for publication, he referred to Blyth’s question, ‘May not, then, a large proportion of what are considered species have descended from a common parentage?’8

  Blyth’s three essays on evolution were published in the 1835, 1836 and 1837 issues of the Magazine of Natural History. Blyth believed that nature was operating a system of selection of species which was analogous to a human breeder selecting particular dogs or pigeons. He saw what could be called – what Loren Eiseley did call – a ‘Malthusian struggle of population against natural resources’.9

  It would be easy to point out additional hindrances to the more extensive spread of species of fixed habit, by treating on the fraction which are allowed to attain maturity, even in their normal habitat, of the multitude of germs which are annually produced; and in what ratio the causes which prevent the numerical increase of a species in its indigenous locality would act where its adaptations are not in strict accordance will sufficiently appear, on considering the exquisite perfection of those of the races with which it would have to contend.10

  Blyth, in these three essays, was not merely putting forward the theory of the origin of species which would one day be claimed as ‘Darwinian’. He was also wrestling with the clear objections to the theory. One of these was contained in the second volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology: ‘where a capacity is given to individuals to adapt themselves to new circumstances, it does not necessarily require a very long period for its development; if indeed, such were the case, it is not easy to see how the modification would answer the ends proposed, for all the individuals would die before new qualities, habits or instincts were conferred’.11 This was one of the objections to his own idea which Blyth found insuperable.

  While Blyth discussed these matters in a magazine which Darwin quotes in his notebooks, at the very period when Darwin began in earnest to answer ‘the species question’, we confront a problem. The first fifty pages of Darwin’s First Notebook on the Transmutation of Species have been cut out. We know how carefully and deeply Darwin cherished his notebooks. ‘I remember’, said his son Francis, ‘when some alarm of fire had happened, his begging me to be especially careful, adding very earnestly, that the rest of his life would be miserable if his notes and books were to be destroyed.’12

  On the first page of the notebook, Darwin wrote, ‘all useful pages cut out, Dec 7/1856 (and again looked through April 21 1873)’. So far, searches in Cambridge University Library, Down House, the Royal College of Surgeons and the British Museum of Natural History have been in vain. The missing pages relate to the year 1837, the year when Edward Blyth was expounding his theory of the origin of species, the year when Captain FitzRoy denounced Darwin, who had just completed his journal of The Voyage of the Beagle, for not giving sufficient credit to those who ‘held the ladder by which you mounted’. It has been questioned whether Loren Eiseley was right in accusing Darwin of plagiarism, but it seems inconceivable that Darwin, who, we know, read the Magazine of Natural History, had not read the articles. This is not to mention Darwin’s very obvious debt – already mentioned, and to be explored later – to Lamarck.

  One ladder-holder to whom Darwin always did acknowledge his debt, however, was Charles Lyell. His revised, second edition of the Voyage was dedicated to Lyell. ‘The chief part of whatever scientific merit this journal and the other works of the author may possess has been derived from studying the well-known and admirable Principles of Geology.’ The notes which Darwin sent home from the voyage for Henslow’s safe-keeping had caused great excitement. Henslow had communicated their contents to Sedgwick at a meeting of the Geological Society on 18 November 1835, and when Lyell had absorbed them he wrote to Sedgwick in December, exclaiming, ‘How I long for a return of Darwin! I hope you do not mean to monopolize him at Cambridge.’13 In his Presidential Address to the Society in 1836 Lyell paid fulsome tribute:

  Few communications have excited more interest in the Society than the letters on South America addressed by Mr Charles Darwin to Professor Henslow. Scattered over the whole [area examined] and at various heights above the sea, from 1300 feet downwards, are recent shells of the littoral species of the neighbouring coast so that every part of the surface seems once to have been a shore and Mr Darwin supposes that an upheaval to the amount of 1300 feet has been owing to a succession of small elevations, like those experienced in modern times in Chili.14

  FitzRoy’s loyalty to his unfortunate friend Captain Seymour, and the testimony which got Seymour acquitted at his court martial
– for the loss of HMS Challenger – provided some of the crucial evidence for Lyell, whose ideas had considerably developed since he published the first volume of Principles. ‘Did you see’, he wrote to Sedgwick in October 1835,15 ‘that Captain FitzRoy had borne witness in a court-martial that the late Chilian earthquake had altered the whole coast? That a north-westerly had become a southerly current: thus the island of Mocha was upheaved 10 feet? and this upon oath! and the Captain of the “Challenger” acquitted on this evidence!’ Yet it was Darwin, rather than FitzRoy, whom Lyell cited in his Presidential Address to the Geological Society on 14 January 1837 as his principal witness for recent earth-movements, and it was Darwin’s collection of the bones of extinct mammalia ‘near the banks of the Rio Plata, in the Pampas of Buenos Ayres and in Patagonia’16 which excited special mention. ‘These fossils . . . establish the fact that the peculiar type of organization which is now characteristic of the South American mammalia has been developed on that continent for a long period.’17