Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  Beaufort’s letter—an invitation to sail away and examine the still largely unknown world aboard a well-stocked floating laboratory—sent a tremor through their community.

  Peacock in turn wrote to John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany at Cambridge, who had a wide acquaintance with a number of scientifically inclined young gentlemen who might be suitable for the voyage Beaufort described. Henslow, who had also been a professor of mineralogy, was described as a man “who knew every branch of science.” He was a cornucopia of prevailing scientific knowledge, and his lectures were immensely popular and crowded, attended even by other professors. Harder to get into were Henslow’s Friday evening soirées, where ten to fifteen favored students and professors could informally discuss the latest and headiest intellectual and scientific ideas. He led field trips, on foot, on horseback, by stagecoach or barge, that might end with supper at an inn or tavern.

  Henslow’s students were mainly well-to-do upper-middle-class young men who came to school with dogs, guns, and horses and set themselves up in private lodgings around Cambridge, attending lectures and their studies only when these were fun. There were a few budding scientists among them, but most were preparing for roles as doctors, barristers, politicians, landowners, and clergymen in the dominant establishment from which they had sprung, a kind of extended family of plutocracy. They were familiar with the classics in their original Greek and Latin, they felt the ease of entitlement in company, they rode, shot, and drank well. They were gentlemen. One of these, with an enthusiasm for the natural sciences perhaps more developed than in his fellows, was what Beaufort, on FitzRoy’s behalf, was looking for.

  “What treasures he might bring home with him,” Peacock wrote to Henslow, “as the ship would be placed at his disposal, whenever his inquiries made it necessary or desirable…. Is there any person whom you could strongly recommend: he must be such a person as would do credit to our recommendation. Do think on this subject: it would be a serious loss to the cause of natural science, if this fine opportunity was lost.”

  For just a moment, Henslow thought of going himself. He was even then considering a trip with several students to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, a place that had been described by Alexander von Humboldt as a scientific paradise. As a young man, Henslow had read François Levaillant’s Travels from the Cape of Good Hope into the Interior Parts of Africa (1790), the story of the Frenchman’s shipwreck on the South African coast and his trek through the country with just a rifle, ten gold ducats, and the clothes he’d washed ashore in. Henslow had become gripped by the urge to make the same expedition and daydreamed of Africa and travel. Now, aged thirty-five, with work, a wife, and a new baby pinning him to a modest house in England, he held the thought of this incredible voyage around the world in his palm for a moment, then ruefully passed it on.

  He sent Peacock’s letter on to his brother-in-law, Leonard Jenyns, a Cambridge graduate, now a curate at nearby Bottisham, and an amateur entomologist who was highly respected among the Cambridge naturalists. Jenyns too was immediately gripped by the idea of the voyage, enough to begin thinking about what clothes to take. But he had recently been appointed to his curacy and reluctantly concluded that it was not “quite right to quit for a purpose of that kind.”

  To both Henslow and Jenyns, the voyage seemed self-indulgent, the sort of thing a grown man of responsibility could not seriously consider. It appealed to the boys they had once been but felt they could no longer be. They agreed to send Peacock’s letter on to such a boy, a Cambridge student, just graduated, who had charmed them both with his naturalist enthusiasms and who was still, unlike them, on the other side of the threshold of responsible manhood.

  Charles Darwin, aged twenty-two, was, in fact, the student who had whipped Henslow up about a trip to Tenerife. It was Darwin who had read von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of his journey to Tenerife and through the Brazilian rain forest in 1799–1804. That book had instilled in him a sudden, almost urgent desire to travel, and “to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of natural science.” Brazil was far away, an expensive and difficult destination for a brief visit by an amateur naturalist. But Tenerife, off the coast of Morocco, was much closer; von Humboldt’s descriptions of the island, visited en route to Brazil, had started Darwin talking to Henslow about a summer expedition there.

  But a voyage around the world! Darwin decided immediately to accept, but his father just as quickly expressed his deep disapproval.

  To Dr. Robert Darwin, the notion of his son suddenly heading off around the world seemed one more sidestep in the pattern of irresolution and disinclination to settle into a profession that Charles had shown since his earliest days at university.

  Charles Darwin at 31, shortly after his voyage in the Beagle. (Watercolor of Charles Darwin by George Richmond; by permission of English Heritage and Down House.)

  At sixteen, he was doing so poorly in school that his father decided he was wasting his time and sent him a year early to Edinburgh to join his older brother Erasmus in studying medicine to become a doctor. Both boys had been keen “scientists” at home, setting up their “laboratory” in an old garden shed. They bought glass-stoppered bottles and heated to incineration with an Argand lamp coins and whatever else would burn in the fireproof china dishes donated by their uncle, the wealthy potter Josiah Wedgwood. They analyzed minerals, chemicals, and compounds supplied by their local chemist in Shrewsbury. Darwin became fascinated by crystallography and began collecting rocks.

  Erasmus’s chronic ill health made him a poor candidate for a doctor, and their father fastened his hopes on Charles. He also thought Charles’s amiable nature would make for a sympathetic bedside manner. But the young Darwin discovered that he was repelled by the practical side of medicine. Apart from the revulsion he felt for dissection, the trade in bodies used in anatomy classes carried its own notorious associations. The subjects were supposedly the dead from hospitals and the poorhouse, or deceased or executed criminals, but they were frequently victims murdered for the sale of their corpses. In 1828, three years after Darwin arrived there, William Hare and Irishman William Burke killed at least sixteen people in Edinburgh’s Old Town and sold the bodies for cash—£10 in winter, £8 in summer, when preservation proved more problematical—at the medical school’s back door. Other corpses came from grave robbers and body dealers who had them shipped in barrels of cheap whisky from city slums and across the Irish Sea from Dublin.

  Darwin found operations on living subjects even less tolerable.

  I…attended on two occasions the operating theatre in the hospital at Edinburgh, and saw two very bad operations, one on a child, but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform.

  Then, or earlier, Darwin developed a lifelong aversion to blood and a terror of illness of any kind. Unable to admit to his father his growing disinclination for medicine, he concentrated on what he did enjoy at medical school: natural history classes.

  At the end of his first year, his older brother Erasmus left Edinburgh to continue his studies in London. The two had been so close that they had made scant efforts at forming outside friendships. Now, alone at school and farther from his family than he had ever been, Darwin was forced to look outward. It was good for him. He joined the Plinian Society, a club of like-minded undergraduates who met regularly to read and discuss papers on natural history. Through the society, he met its former secretary, Robert Grant, who had trained as a doctor but become a noted lecturer and respected naturalist. Reserved, austere, melancholic, a confirmed bachelor, and possibly a homosexual, Grant formed a succession of attachments with favorite students, often later falling out with them. For a time during his second year in Edinburgh, Darwin was one of these.

  Grant, who lived in a house on the shore near Leith Harbour, introduced Darwin to marine zoology. Together they co
llected invertebrates—tiny, gelatinous, spongiform creatures—from rock pools and oyster shells and the muck of fishermen’s hauls from the seabed. Grant’s fascination for these organisms was contagious. He brought them alive for Darwin, showing him the nature and context of their microworlds: how they lived, adapted, and metamorphosed; how they reproduced; and how to dissect them in seawater under a microscope. In that second year at Edinburgh, the medium of the sea became for Darwin one great microscope slide—a lens that held up to view the macro struggle for existence in the alternate world beneath the waves—and for the rest of his life he remained fascinated by tiny sea creatures.

  Grant also talked with Darwin about the heretical theory of evolution. “He one day, when we were walking together, burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution,” Darwin wrote much later. In 1800, Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested that Earth’s species had not been created in their only and unalterable form at the biblical dawn of Creation, but that they had gradually and continually altered, adapting to a constantly changing environment, becoming and generating new species by transmutation. This was a direct contradiction of the Bible, and in an earlier age Lamarck would have been burned at a stake for his views. In Lamarck’s time, most people, even forward-looking scientists, still believed that God had created Earth, and all life upon it, as a “Great Chain of Being” from the smallest—that is, lowest—creatures, to the highest, Man, with each species occupying its own predetermined, unchangeable link in that chain. Lamarck’s claim that creatures evolved from lower to higher—and that Man had also evolved from lower forms, most recently apes—was a blasphemy. But such views were not new to Darwin. His own grandfather, the first Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a doctor and a naturalist, had been a famous evolutionary thinker in England before Lamarck and had expressed his ideas in the form of popular, if controversial, poetry:

  Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

  Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;

  First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

  Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

  Then as successive generations bloom,

  New powers acquire and larger limbs assume.

  Views such as these, and Lamarck’s, were heretical thinking in the early nineteenth century. Most scientists saw the clear hand of God in the design and perfection of a well-ordered Heaven and Earth, not a world of destructive change that wiped out whole species through a process of slow attrition. That would surely be a godless Universe, a living anathema, the third, hellish panel of a Bosch triptych. But a few did believe exactly this, and Robert Grant was one of them.

  Darwin’s studies with Grant produced his first scientific paper, read to the Plinian Society on March 27, 1827. He had observed through a poor microscope what apparently had not been seen or noted by anyone else: the frenzied swimming of tiny eggs that explained the fertilization of the species Flustra, a seaweed-like creature. Darwin was thrilled by what appeared to be a first, but his pleasure was shortlived. Grant appropriated his findings, without crediting Darwin’s efforts, passing them off as his own observations in a paper read to the more august Wernerian Natural History Society on March 24, 1827, three days before Darwin’s presentation to the Plinian Society. Years later, Darwin told his daughter Henrietta that his first scientific discovery had provided his first glimpse of “the jealousy of scientific men.”

  Relations between professor and student cooled, but Grant’s influence on Darwin was profound: it was his first exposure to the deep inductive exploration of a science. The science became the foundation of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, and the scientist provided him with a model for obsession.

  At the end of the school year, Darwin came home and told his father he could not continue his studies to be a doctor. Dr. Darwin was furious. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Darwin later agreed with him: “He was very properly vehement against my turning into an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination.”

  Darwin’s problem was that he had no ambition. The Darwins were landed gentry, wealthy property owners, and there was no financial incentive for Charles to find a career; he would always be wealthy. He enjoyed shooting and hunting more than anything else. In between such outings, he liked collecting and studying small creatures. It was all he wanted to do. But Robert Darwin wasn’t going to see his son turn into a wastrel and dilettante, so he told him to prepare for the church.

  The profession of clergyman was just as respectable as being a medical man, requiring much the same sort of bedside manner. The Church of England was then a gentleman’s club with the most impeccable credentials, and in many places extremely well-appointed. Parish ministers were provided with houses, an adequate income (which Darwin could amply supplement), and instantly acquired social status. They had servants, bred fine dogs and horses, and maintained good wine cellars. The role had the same comfortable, tweedy informality as a schoolmaster’s, but with a higher social profile and a lot more leisure time. For the vicar-with-a-hobby it was a platform upon which to develop a full-blown avocation. Many of the notable writers and scientists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were clergymen who studied and wrote books during their great stretches of spare time. An appointment in the right place would be perfect for him, allowing him to shoot with the gentry, ride with the local hunt, botanize, geologize, collect to his heart’s content, write papers and monographs, and achieve status in the scientific community, if that’s where his enthusiasm led him. Such a man had been the eighteenth-century parson William Paley, whose book, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity had become a standard textbook for theological students. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, another country parson, wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population that would become one of the most influential works of the next fifty years—it would play a crucial role in the evolution of Darwin’s later thinking. Here were the perfect role models for a scientifically distracted clergyman.

  Darwin was happy with his father’s sensible suggestion, as long as he could carry it off in good conscience.

  I asked for some time to consider, as from what little I had heard and thought on the subject I had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England; though otherwise I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.

  The training would not be difficult. A bachelor of arts degree at a university, followed by a period of divinity study, would get him his holy orders. In January 1828, he went to Christ’s College, Cambridge.

  There he started having fun. He met a like-minded cousin, William Darwin Fox, also studying for holy orders, and the two were soon spending most of their time together, rambling through the countryside on collecting expeditions and doing only just enough work to pass their exams.

  Another major preoccupation at Cambridge was to serve him as well as any of his studies. Darwin had become a crack shot at age fifteen, and he loved shooting a rifle more than anything else. “How I did enjoy shooting,” he wrote later. “If there is bliss on earth, that is it.”

  My zeal was so great that I used to place my shooting boots open by my bed side when I went to bed, so as not to lose half a minute in putting them on in the morning…. When at Cambridge I used to practise throwing up my gun to my shoulder before a looking glass to see that I threw it up straight. Another and better plan was to get a friend to wave about a lighted candle, and then to fire at it with a cap on the nipple, and if the aim was accurate the little puff of air would blow out the candle.

  Darwin studied books about guns and the practice of shooting. He kept a “game book,” a ledger of everything he shot, and l
ists of what bores of shot were right for different game. He went on shooting parties with Fox and other Cambridge students. It was as much an accepted and desirable part of a young gentleman’s training for life as anything else, and probably of more subsequent value to Darwin than any of his academic studies.

  The only competition for the long hours and days spent shooting was an obsession he picked up from his cousin William Fox.

  No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow…. No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephens’ Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.”