Darwin and the Barnacle

by Rebecca Stott

  Even this breakdown could not keep Coldstream from his marine creatures, especially now that he was living and working back on the shore of the Firth of Forth; but with the infidel Grant in London and the Revd John Fleming offering him non-heretical interpretations of marine zoology, Coldstream returned to some kind of peace even in his rock-pool hunting. He married in 1835 and settled down to family life and his growing medical practice. He continued to write occasional non-controversial marine pieces for Todd’s Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology – on jellyfish (1835), limnoria (1834) and barnacles (1836).

  From Cambridge, Darwin wrote to Coldstream in Edinburgh in 1829, expressing his sympathy for Coldstream’s illness and grief that his friend had apparently given up marine zoology, arguing that ‘no pursuit is more becoming for a physician than Nat. Hist.’26 Coldstream agreed, but added in his letter that he had decided to dedicate himself to ‘useful knowledge’. Natural philosophical speculations were not for the faint-hearted. He had also resolved to give up dissecting live creatures, for it seemed to be against nature. Nevertheless he asked Darwin to pass on his regards to Dr Grant and ended: ‘Be so good as to write me again soon, and tell me something of the present state of Natural History in Cambridge. Have you had any opportunity of studying marine Zoology since you left this?’27

  Darwin had not had any experience of marine zoology since leaving Edinburgh. How could he? In Cambridge, eighty miles from the sea, his attention had turned to beetles. Professor Henslow, his new, less-radical botanist mentor and walking companion, was already remarking: ‘What a fellow that D. is for asking questions.’ Passing his exams in 1831, Darwin was now ready to take on a parish and settle down. Instead, his imagination full of the travelling tales of Alexander von Humbolt in South America, his thoughts turned to tropical expeditions. He wrote: ‘It strikes me, that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen wd know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.’28

  The answer was to leave the corner of the field and scratch elsewhere, but what would his father have to say to this? In September 1831 the opportunity presented itself in the form of an invitation to accept the position of gentleman companion on a map-making voyage of coastal South America on board the Beagle. His father, exasperated by his son’s apparent flightiness, refused to agree to the voyage, but his Uncle Jos intervened, arguing that ‘Natural History … is very suitable to a Clergyman’, and eventually Darwin’s father agreed.29 Darwin wrote one last time to Coldstream, asking for advice and information about deep-sea dredging and techniques for meteorological observations. In particular he asked Coldstream to draw him a diagram of an oyster dredger in such a way that he could have one designed for the Beagle voyage. Coldstream drew careful instructions and diagrams and urged Darwin to contact Robert Grant in London for further advice.

  Darwin bought one of the most powerful microscopes available in the world before he sailed, a microscope purchased from Bancks and Son of 119 New Bond Street. A botanist and physiologist, Robert Brown, who was also interested in zoophyte research, had recommended it to him. It was portable and especially designed with a watch glass fitted to the object stand to allow for submerged dissection.

  Darwin and Grant met in London in the weeks before the Beagle sailed. There are no records of the meeting, only a series of notes Darwin made, recording preservation instructions given to him by his old teacher. What must Grant have felt, called upon by his old protégé? Grant, the great traveller, who had crossed European mountain ranges and walked Mediterranean coastlines in the footsteps of Aristotle, was now, without the luxury of a private income like Darwin, a long way from the sea, his days filled entirely with writing lectures and giving tutorials, struggling to make ends meet. Darwin came to him, twenty-two years old, asking for precise instructions on collecting marine creatures in exotic, tropical seas.

  Notes

  1 CD to Robert W. Darwin, 23 October 1825, Correspondence 1, pp. 18–19. For an excellent account of Edinburgh medical training in this decade see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London: Pimlico, 1996), chapter 2.

  2 CD to Caroline Darwin, January 1825, Correspondence 1: p. 25.

  3 Susan Darwin to CD, 27 March 1826, Correspondence 1: p. 41.

  4 Autobiography, p. 25.

  5 R. B. Freeman, ‘Darwin’s Negro Bird-Stuffer’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, vol. 33 (1978–9), pp. 83–6.

  6 Fleming (1822), p. 40.

  7 This section is based upon Darwin’s Edinburgh Zoology journal: DAR 129.

  8 John Hutton Balfour, Biography of the Late John Coldstream (London: James Nisbet and Co, 1865), pp. 2–3.

  9 Balfour (1865), p.6.

  10 The first historian to suggest that Robert Grant might have been homosexual was Adrian Desmond in Archetypes and Ancestors: Palaeontology in Victorian London 1850–1875 (London: Blond and Biggs, 1982). It is still conjectural but based upon accounts of Grant’s reputation from the Zoology Department at University College London. Grant never married and continued to have intense friendships with men throughout his life; many of them he travelled with for many months abroad. If this were indeed true and if sexual feelings occurred between Coldstream and Grant, this may account for the level of self-loathing that Coldstream expressed in his diaries during the time he worked alongside Grant, particularly given the intensity of Coldstream’s religious beliefs. It may also, as Desmond points out, be one possible factor among many in the decline of Grant’s reputation in London and Charles Darwin’s eventual distancing from him. Again I am grateful to Adrian Desmond for discussions on this matter.

  11 See J. H. Ashworth, ‘Charles Darwin as a Student in Edinburgh 1825–1827’ in Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 55 (1935), pp. 97–113. For this period of Darwin’s life see the fascinating account by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992); Helveg Jespersen, ‘Charles Darwin and Dr Grent’, Lychnos (1948–9), pp. 159–67; George Sheppersen, ‘The Intellectual Background of Charles Darwin’s Student Years at Edinburgh’, in M. Banton, ed., Darwinism and the Study of Society (London: Tavistock Publications; Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), PP. 17–35.

  12 Plinian Minutes MSS, 1: ff. 34–6, Edinburgh University Library, Dc.2.53.

  13Autobiography, p. 48.

  14 See Sara Stevenson, Hill and Adamson’s The Fishermen and Women of the Firth of Forth (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1991) and Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside, 1750–1840 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995).

  15 D. Blackadder (1827), ‘Mr Blackadder’s Account of an Aurora Borealis, observed at Edinburgh 16th January 1827; with some particulars of another, of a preceding year’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, vol. 2 (July-September), p. 342.

  16 W. F. Ainsworth (1882), ‘Mr Darwin’, Athenaeum, no. 2846, p. 82.

  17 DAR 5:28–39.

  18 Robert Grant, (1826), ‘Observations on the Spontaneous Motions of the Ova of Zoophytes’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, vol. 2, p. 156.

  19 DAR 118: pp. 5–6.

  20 Ibid.

  21 Cited in J. H. Ashworth (1934–5), ‘Charles Darwin as a Student in Edinburgh, 1825–27’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 55, part 2, p. 105.

  22 P. Helveg Jespersen (1948–9), ‘Charles Darwin and Dr Grant’, in Lychnos, p. 164–5. The scrap that Jespersen refers too has now been lost, so one should read this reminiscence warily. However, later when Grant worked in London he was notorious for his priority disputes and guarded about his research findings; see Desmond, Adrian, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  23 Balfour (1865), p.38.

  24 Keith Winton (1985), Murder in Edinburgh (Edinburgh Impressions), pp. 95–105 and Alex Young (1998), The Encyclopaedia of Scottish Executions 1750–1963 (Kent: Eric Dobby Publishing, 1985), pp. 102–3.

  25 Bal
four (1865), p. 69.

  26 Letter from John Coldstream to Charles Darwin, 28 February 1829, Correspondence, vol. 10, p. 77.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Cited in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 94.

  29 Autobiography, pp. 71–2.

  3

  A Baron Münchausen Amongst Naturalists

  We may begin where we please,

  We shall never come to an end;

  our curiosity will never slacken

  George Henry Lewes, Studies in Animal Life, 1862

  It is 6 January 1832 – nightfall. The Beagle has been at sea for two weeks. She has sailed past the Dry Salvages and Madeira, and now she is moored off the coast of the Canary Islands. Darwin has been terribly seasick and today has been one of the first times he has ventured on deck; now he sits under the stars, writing his diary, gazing across to the lights of the port and trying to make out the shapes of the island’s volcanic cones in the darkness. Confined to his hammock below deck, he has been dreaming of the volcanic wonders of ‘the peak of Tenerife and the great Dragon tree; sandy, dazzling, plains, and gloomy silent forest’1 of the Canary Islands. It is, for Darwin, ‘perhaps one of the most interesting places in the world’.2

  Now he can see the lights of Tenerife across the bay – within reach; but the crew are not allowed to land. There is a cholera epidemic sweeping across Britain and the consul in Santa Cruz has imposed strict quarantine regulations on all British ships – twelve days’ quarantine. Captain FitzRoy, though mortified on behalf of his young guest, cannot wait that long and has given orders to sail south. The Beagle has work to do and a schedule to maintain. The coastline of South America has to be mapped, charts are to be checked and extended, tides and weather conditions measured and recorded constantly on this voyage around the world. Darwin is devastated. He feels the prohibition like a ‘death warrant’.3 Yet, the beauty of the sea and the tropical night are consolations of the most exquisite kind: ‘The night does its best to soothe our sorrow – the air is still & deliciously warm – the only sounds are the waves rippling on the stern & the sails idly flapping round the masts – Already I can understand Humboldt’s enthusiasm about the tropical nights, the sky is so clear & lofty, & stars innumerable shine so bright that like little moons they cast glitter on the waves.’4

  There is nothing to do; the ship is becalmed. The other sailors and officers who are not on duty sit on deck. Some play cards, others write their first letters home. A group of three young, well-dressed and portly Fuegians sit together watching the sea, talking in broken English. Captain FitzRoy, who brought them to England the year before, has promised to return them to their families in Tierra del Fuego in the care of a young missionary called Richard Matthews. The Beagle has thus carried four Fuegians to England to be educated and converted to Christianity, Fuegians given pantomime names by the officers: Fuegia Basket, York Minster, Jemmy Button and Boat Memory. In Britain they have been educated in a private boarding school, examined by phrenologists, instructed in the ‘simple arts of civilised life’5 and presented to King William and Queen Adelaide at court. Only three are returning: Boat Memory died in the naval hospital of Plymouth after a smallpox vaccination, a dose too heavy for his small body.

  The sailors and officers are not entirely at ease with Darwin yet. Pecking orders and territories are still being established and Darwin’s chronic seasickness does not bode well. Employed as gentleman companion to the Captain, he is the only man to share the Captain’s table, yet, given FitzRoy’s unpredictable moods, this is a rather dubious honour. In such a small community the emotions and moods of an individual, especially the captain, will affect everyone. A previous captain of the Beagle, fearing breakdown, had shot himself in the captain’s cabin only four years before. There are jealousies, too, even this early in the voyage. The ship’s surgeon, Robert McCormick, an experienced naturalist, is suspicious and jealous of Darwin’s dissecting station in the poop cabin. Traditionally, it is the surgeon’s job to be the ship’s naturalist on an Admiralty voyage. It has always been his responsibility on his previous voyages. The ship’s crew has a rigid hierarchy; yet, financially independent, Darwin exists outside it. He will have to use his good nature and charm to establish his own territory.

  Darwin goes below deck to make the most of the last hour or two of light before lights out, grasping the handrail as the ship rolls to one side and steeling himself against a rising wave of nausea. Captain’s orders are clear: ship’s candles are to be extinguished by nine o’clock in harbour, half past eight at sea.6 During the day Darwin shares this poop cabin with the ship’s nineteen-year-old mate and assistant surveyor, John Lort Stokes, and the fourteen-year-old midshipman Philip Gidley King, who use the large chart table in the middle of the room to work on the surveying documents. There is no time to be lost and he has a new golden rule to live by: Take care of the minutes.7 In the evenings Captain FitzRoy sometimes invites the ashen-faced and nauseous Darwin into his cabin for conversation and, to their mutual pleasure, they have discovered they share an admiration for the novels of Jane Austen.

  A crew of seventy-five young men sailing around the world, most in their twenties, like Darwin and the Captain; one woman: the teenage Fuegia Basket, already ‘betrothed’ to York Minster, who is jealous of her every movement. Several of the young sailors have an interest in natural history: McCormick, the ship’s surgeon, and Benjamin Bynoe, the assistant surgeon, are well read in botany, zoology and geology and are putting together their own natural-history collections; 1st Lieutenant Wickham is a plant collector and 2nd Lieutenant Sulivan has geological interests. The ship’s steward, Harry Fuller, and the ship’s clerk, Edward Hellyer, collect birds. Even the boy, Philip Gidley King, is interested in marine invertebrates, for his father, Philip Parker King, the Captain of the first Beagle survey, keeps a rare barnacle collection on his estate in Australia.

  Darwin is already aware that the lack of distractions, the strict regimes imposed by FitzRoy and the cramped conditions he has for his work are nurturing in him a discipline that is new and welcomed, a natural progression from the training Grant imposed. When he writes from the boat to his older sisters, who since his mother’s death have nurtured his moral and educational development and mediated between him and his father, he tells them how well he is working: ‘I find to my great surprise that a ship is singularly comfortable for all sorts of work. – Everything is so close at hand, & being cramped makes one so methodical, that in the end I have been a gainer…’8 The poop cabin is very small indeed – ten feet by eleven feet – so that at night Darwin and the boy midshipman King must hang up their hammocks across the tables, piles of books, measuring equipment and maps. They watch the movements of the stars through the skylight above them. The heavy furniture creaks slightly with the roll of the waves and at night they can hear the footsteps of the night sentinel on the deck above. Stokes sleeps in a bunk bed under the stairs just outside the door. There are hundreds of volumes here: atlases, dictionaries, Bibles, novels, travel narratives, books on zoology, volcanoes, mineralogy and Darwin’s precious copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Captain’s orders: all officers are permitted to borrow books from the poop cabin; books must be signed out and returned by 8.30 p.m., lights out.

  Darwin’s candle casts a pool of light upon his part of the table. Polished mahogany gleams in the candlelight and shadows play across the walls as the ship rolls in the swell. Collecting drawers, especially made for him by the ship’s carpenter, make the most of the restricted space, but two weeks into the voyage the drawers are still empty. A dead black-backed gull lies on the table next to Darwin’s portable microscope, books, dissecting tools and a glass jar full of slightly milky seawater. It gives out a faint green glow in the darkness of the cabin. He examines a drop of the water under his microscope, pauses for a moment and takes his pen to begin the very first of his Beagle zoology notebooks:

  January 6th 1832: The sea was luminous in specks & in the wak
e of the vessel, of a uniform, slightly milky colour. – When the water was put into a bottle, it gave out sparks for some minutes after having been drawn up. – When examined both at night and next morning, it was found full of numerous small (but many bits visible to the naked eye) irregular pieces of (a gelatinous?) matter. The sea next morning was in the same place equally impure.9

  Zoophytes – luminous zoophytes. Not quite plants, not quite animals, these swarming organisms, invisible to the naked eye, lit up the sea and sky. They were also, he discovered, in the strange red dust that fell upon the boat from time to time. Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, the leading European microscopist, who was working on infusoria in Berlin and who had travelled with Alexander von Humbolt in Siberia, was using infusoria dissections to question Cuvier’s fixed and hierarchical system of classification. To his mind there were no such things as superior and inferior organisms – all had the organs necessary for the full range of animal activities: ‘The infusorian has the same sum of organisation-systems as a man,’ he had written in 1835.10

  Next Darwin turns his attention to the black-backed gull. Frustrated by Tenerife’s quarantine sanctions, he had taken his pistols up on to deck that afternoon. It is an unremarkable bird in itself, not worth collecting, but Darwin is only interested in the contents of its stomach, for he is looking for new marine invertebrates. The plumage is soft in his hand as he inserts the dissecting knife. The contents of the bird’s stomach spill out on to the paper laid carefully across the wood. He puts the bird to one side to examine the pile of warm, half-digested molluscs and scraps of fish, most now quite unrecognizable. Poking at the pile with his dissecting knife, he finds a small cuttlefish here, still intact, about two inches long. Its bulbous eyes perhaps still register the surprise of being rudely snatched from tropical waters and the wonder of its short moments of flight before being swallowed whole by its feathery predator in mid-air. It is not a species that Darwin recognizes. Perhaps Professor Henslow will be able to identify it. This will be Specimen 1 of Darwin’s Beagle collection. Dried, wrapped in paper, labelled and tucked inside a box within a crate, it will be posted to Cambridge a few months later. Darwin’s Beagle collection, five years in the making, begins with a cuttlefish. His first zoology notes describe phosphorescent zoophytes.