The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Two weeks later, on 15 December, Humboldt departed from St Petersburg. Before he left, he returned one-third of the money he had been given for expenses, asking Cancrin to use it to fund another explorer – the acquisition of knowledge was more important than his personal financial gain. His carriages were filled with the collections he had made for the Prussian king – so loaded with specimens that they were a ‘natural history cabinet’ on wheels, Humboldt said. Packed in between were his instruments, his notebooks and an opulent seven-foot vase on a plinth that the tsar had given him along with an expensive sable fur.4

  It was freezing cold as they raced towards Berlin. Near Riga, Humboldt’s coachman lost control on a treacherously icy road and the carriage crashed full speed into a bridge. When the impact broke the railing, one of their horses fell into the river eight feet below, pulling his freight along. One side of the carriage was completely shattered. Humboldt and the other passengers were catapulted out, landing just four inches from the edge of the bridge. Amazingly only the horse was injured but the carriage was so damaged that the repairs delayed them for a few days. Humboldt was still excited. Dangling close to the edge, they must have looked rather ‘picturesque’, he mused. He also joked that with three learned men in the carriage, they had of course come up with a great many ‘contradictory theories’ about the causes of the crash. They spent Christmas in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad) and on 28 December 1829 Humboldt arrived in Berlin, fizzing with so many ideas that he was ‘steaming like a pot full of boiling water’, a friend reported to Goethe.

  This was Humboldt’s last expedition. He would not travel the world any more himself, but his views on nature were already spreading through the minds of thinkers in Europe and America with seemingly unstoppable force.

  1 The Kazakh Steppe is the largest dry steppe in the world, stretching from the Altai mountain range in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west.

  2 The two books were Fragmens de géologie et de climatologie asiatiques (1831) and Asie centrale, recherches sur les chaînes de montagnes et la climatogie comparée (1843).

  3 Humboldt’s views were so new and different from what was generally believed at the time that even his translator questioned the arguments. The translator added a footnote in the German edition which stated that the influence of deforestation as presented by Humboldt was ‘questionable’.

  4 Humboldt gave the vase to the Altes Museum in Berlin. Today it is in the Alte Nationalgalerie.

  17

  Evolution and Nature

  Charles Darwin and Humboldt

  HMS BEAGLE WAS riding the valleys and crests of the waves with relentless regularity as the wind ruffled the swelling canvas of the sails. The ship had left Portsmouth on the south coast of England four days previously, on 27 December 1831, on a voyage across the globe to survey coastlines and measure the exact geographical positions of ports. On board was twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin who felt ‘wretchedly out of spirits’. This was not how he had envisaged his adventure. Instead of standing on deck and watching the wild sea as they crossed the Bay of Biscay towards Madeira, Darwin was feeling more miserable than he ever had before. He was so seasick that the only way to bear it was to hide out in his cabin, eat dry biscuits and remain horizontal.

  The small poop cabin that he shared with two crew members was so crammed that his hammock was strung above the table where the officers worked on sea charts. The cabin was about ten by ten feet, lined with bookshelves, lockers and a chest of drawers along the walls and the large surveying table in the middle. At around six feet tall, Darwin didn’t have the headroom to stand. Cutting through the midst of the small space was the ship’s mizzenmast like a large column next to the table. To move around in the cabin the men had to clamber over the bulky wooden beams of the ship’s steering gear which crossed the floors. There was no window, only a skylight through which Darwin watched the moon and the stars as he lay in his hammock.

  On the small shelf next to his hammock were Darwin’s most precious possessions: the books that he had carefully chosen to accompany him. He had a number of botanical and zoological volumes, a brand-new Spanish–English dictionary, several travel accounts written by explorers and the first volume of Charles Lyell’s revolutionary Principles of Geology which had been published the previous year. Next to it was Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, the seven-volume account of the Latin American expedition and the reason why Darwin was on the Beagle.1 ‘My admiration of his famous personal narrative (part of which I almost know by heart),’ Darwin said, ‘determined me to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in her Majesty’s ship Beagle.’

  Plan of the Beagle with Darwin’s cabin (poop deck) towards the stern (Illustration Credit 17.1)

  Weakened by nausea, Darwin began to doubt his decision. When they passed Madeira on 4 January 1832, he felt so ill that he couldn’t even bring himself to stumble on deck to see the island. Instead he was inside, reading Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics because nothing was better ‘for cheering the heart of a sea-sick man’, he said. Two days later they reached Tenerife – the island Darwin had dreamed of for many months. He wanted to walk among slender palms and see Pico del Teide, the 12,000-foot volcano that Humboldt had climbed more than three decades previously. As the Beagle neared the island, a boat stopped them and it was announced that they weren’t allowed to go ashore. The authorities in Tenerife had heard of recent cholera outbreaks in England and worried that the sailors might bring the disease to the island. When the consul imposed a twelve-day quarantine, the Beagle’s captain decided to press on rather than wait. Darwin was devastated. ‘Oh misery, misery,’ he wrote in his journal.

  That night, as the Beagle sailed away from Tenerife, the sea calmed. As gentle waves rolled in against the ship’s stern and the warm air softly flapped the sails, Darwin’s nausea lessened. The sky was scrubbed clean and uncountable stars spread their glitter across the dark mirrored water. It was a magical moment. ‘Already can I understand Humboldts enthusiasm about the tropical nights,’ Darwin wrote. Then, the next morning, as he watched the cone-shaped Pico del Teide disappearing in the distance, tinged in orange sunlight and its peak poking out above the clouds, he felt repaid for his sickness. Having read so much about the volcano in Personal Narrative, he said, it was ‘like parting from a friend’.

  Only a few months previously the prospect of seeing the tropics and of being the naturalist on an expedition had been the ‘wildest Castles in the air’ for Darwin. According to his father’s wishes he had been destined for a more conventional profession and had studied at Cambridge to become a country clergyman. This choice had been a compromise to pacify his father after Darwin had abandoned his medical studies at Edinburgh University. Convinced that he would one day inherit enough money to ‘subsist with some comfort’, Darwin had not been too ambitious about his prescribed career. In Edinburgh he had preferred to examine marine invertebrates rather than focus on his medical work, and in Cambridge he had attended botanical lectures instead of those required for theology. He had become fascinated by beetles and went on long walks, lifting stones and logs, stuffing his bags with his entomological treasures. Never wanting to lose any of his finds, one day – with his hands already full of beetles – he had even popped one in his mouth for safekeeping. The beetle objected to this unusual treatment, ejecting enough acid fluid for Darwin to spit it out.

  It was during his last year in Cambridge that Darwin first read Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, a book that ‘stirred up in me a burning zeal’, he wrote. Darwin was so impressed by Humboldt’s writing that he copied out passages and read them aloud to his botany teacher, John Stevens Henslow, and other friends during their botanical excursions. By spring 1831, Darwin had studied Humboldt so intensely that ‘I talk, think, & dream of a scheme I have almost hatched of going to the Canary Islands,’ he told his cousin.

  His plan was to travel to Tenerife with Henslow and some university friends. Darwi
n was so excited, he said, that ‘I cannot hardly sit still.’ In preparation he dashed to the hothouses in the botanical garden in Cambridge in the mornings to ‘gaze at the Palm trees’ and then rushed home to study botany, geology and Spanish. Dreaming of dense forests, dazzling plains and mountaintops, he ‘read and reread Humboldt’ and talked so much about the trip that his friends in Cambridge began to wish he had already left. ‘I plague them,’ Darwin joked to his cousin, ‘with talking about tropical scenery.’

  In mid-July 1831 Darwin reminded Henslow to read more Humboldt ‘to fan your Canary ardor’. His letters gushed with excitement and were peppered with newly learned Spanish expressions. ‘I have written myself into a Tropical glow,’ he told his sister. But then, just as they were preparing to leave, Henslow cancelled because of work commitments and his wife’s pregnancy. Darwin also realized that few British ships sailed to the Canary Islands – and those few only in the early summer months. They were too late in the season, and he would have to defer the trip to the following year.

  Charles Darwin (Illustration Credit 17.2)

  Then, a month later, on 29 August 1831, everything changed when Darwin received a letter from Henslow. A certain Captain Robert FitzRoy, Henslow wrote, was looking for a gentleman naturalist to travel as his companion on the Beagle – a ship that was due to leave four weeks later on a circumnavigation of the globe. This was a much more exciting prospect than Tenerife. But Darwin’s enthusiasm was immediately dampened when his father refused his permission and the much needed financial assistance to pay for his son’s passage. It was ‘a wild scheme’, Robert Darwin told his son, and a ‘useless undertaking’. A voyage across the globe didn’t seem a necessary prerequisite for being a country clergyman.

  Darwin felt crushed. Of course the voyage would not be cheap but his family could afford it. His father was a successful doctor who had made most of his money as a canny investor, and Darwin’s grandfathers had made the family famous and prosperous. The celebrated potter Josiah Wedgwood was his maternal grandfather – a man who had applied science to manufacturing and thereby industrialized the production of chinaware. Wedgwood had died a rich and respected man. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather, the physician, scientist and inventor Erasmus Darwin, was equally illustrious. In 1794 he had published the first radical evolutionary ideas in his book Zoomania in which he had claimed that animals and humans descended from tiny living filaments in the primordial sea. He had also turned Carl Linnaeus’s botanical classification system into verse in his hugely popular poem Loves of the Plants – which Humboldt and Goethe had read in the 1790s. There was a pride of achievement in the family, maybe even a sense of greatness, to which Charles Darwin certainly also aspired.

  In the end it was an uncle who helped to convince Darwin’s father of the value of the trip. ‘If I saw Charles now absorbed in professional studies,’ Josiah Wedgwood II wrote to Robert Darwin, it would not be advisable to interrupt them, ‘but this is not, and I think will not be, the case with him’. Since Charles was only interested in natural history, his uncle concluded, the expedition would be a great opportunity to leave his mark in the world of science. The next day Darwin’s father finally agreed to underwrite his son’s expenses. Darwin was to go around the world.

  The first three weeks of the voyage, as the Beagle sailed south, were rather uneventful. After they had passed Tenerife, Darwin was feeling better. As the days became warmer, he changed into lighter clothes. Darwin caught jellyfish and other small marine invertebrates, occupying himself with dissecting them. It was also a good time to get to know the rest of the crew. Darwin shared his cabin with the nineteen-year-old assistant surveyor and one of the midshipmen who was fourteen at the time. There were seventy-four men on board, including sailors, carpenters and surveyors as well as an instrument maker, an artist and a surgeon.2 At twenty-six, Captain FitzRoy was only four years older than Darwin. He came from an aristocratic family and had spent all his adult life at sea. This was his second voyage on the Beagle. As the crew quickly discovered, the captain could be bad-tempered and morose – especially in the early mornings. With an uncle who had committed suicide, FitzRoy often worried that he might be prey to similar predispositions. At times, the captain fell into deep depressions that were ‘bordering on insanity’, Darwin thought. FitzRoy alternated between seemingly boundless energy and silent melancholy. But he was intelligent, fascinated by natural history and worked incessantly.

  FitzRoy was heading a government-funded expedition with the goal of circumnavigating the globe to make a full circle of longitudinal measurements – using the same instruments in an attempt to standardize maps and navigation. He had also been instructed to complete a survey of the southern coast of South America where Britain hoped to gain economic dominance among the newly independent South American nations.

  At ninety feet long, the Beagle was a small ship, but packed to the rim – from thousands of tin cans filled with preserved meat to the latest surveying instruments. FitzRoy had insisted on taking as many as twenty-two chronometers to measure time and longitude, as well as lightning conductors to protect the ship. The Beagle carried sugar, rum and dried peas as well as the usual remedies against scurvy such as pickles and lemon juice. ‘The hold would contain scarcely another bag of bread,’ Darwin noted in admiration about the tight packing.

  The Beagle’s first landfall was at Santiago, the largest of the Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic Ocean, some 500 miles off the western coast of Africa. Stepping ashore on to the tropical island, new impressions rushed into Darwin’s mind. It was confusing, exotic and thrilling. Palms, tamarind and banana trees vied for his attention, as did the bulbous baobab tree. He heard the melodies of unfamiliar birds, and saw strange insects settling into the blooms of even stranger flowers. Like Humboldt and Bonpland on their arrival in Venezuela in 1799, Darwin’s mind was a ‘perfect hurricane of delight & astonishment’ as he examined volcanic rocks, pressed plants, dissected animals and pinned moths. As Darwin hacked off rocks, scraped off bark and looked for insects and worms under stones, he collected everything from shells and huge palm tree leaves to flatworms and the tiniest insects. In the evenings, when he returned, ‘heavily laden with my rich harvest’, he couldn’t have been happier. Darwin was like a child with a new toy, Captain FitzRoy laughed.

  It was ‘like giving to a blind man eyes’, Darwin wrote in his journal. To describe the tropics was impossible, he explained in his letters home, because it was all so different and bewildering that he felt at a loss how to begin or end a sentence. He advised his cousin William Darwin Fox to read Humboldt’s Personal Narrative to understand what he was experiencing and told his father, ‘if you really want to have a notion of tropical countries study Humboldt.’ Darwin was seeing this new world through the lens of Humboldt’s writing. His diary was filled with comments such as ‘much struck by the justness of one of Humboldt’s observations’ or ‘as Humboldt remarks’.

  There was only one other publication that shaped Darwin’s mind to a similar extent and that was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, a book that itself was steeped in Humboldt’s ideas. In it Lyell quoted Humboldt dozens of times, ranging from his idea of global climate and vegetation zones, to information about the Andes. In Principles of Geology Lyell explained that the earth had been shaped by erosion and deposition in a series of very slow movements of elevation and subsistence over an unimaginably long period of time, punctuated by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. As Darwin looked at the rock strata along the cliffs of Santiago, everything that Lyell had written made sense to him. Here Darwin could ‘read’ the creation of the island by looking at the layers of the sea cliffs: the remains of an old volcano, then further up a white band of shells and corals and above that a layer of lava. The lava had covered the shells and since then the island had been slowly pushed up by some subterranean force. The undulating line and irregularities of the white band were also testimony to more recent movement – Lyell’s forces that were still
active. As Darwin rushed across Santiago, he saw the plants and animals through Humboldt’s eyes and the rocks through Lyell’s. When Darwin returned to the Beagle, he wrote a letter to his father, announcing that inspired by what he had seen on the island ‘I shall be able to do some original work in Natural History.’

  A few weeks later, when the Beagle reached Bahia (today’s San Salvador) in Brazil at the end of February, Darwin’s amazement continued. Everything was so dream-like that it might have been a magical scene in the Arabian Nights, he explained. Again and again, he wrote that only Humboldt came close to describing the tropics. ‘My feelings amount to admiration the more I read him,’ he declared in one letter home, and ‘I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him’ in another. Humboldt’s descriptions were unparalleled, he said on the day he saw Brazil for the first time, because of the ‘rare union of poetry with science’.

  He was walking in a new world, Darwin wrote to his father. ‘I am at present red-hot with Spiders,’ he exulted, and the flowers would ‘make a florist go wild’. There was so much that he wasn’t sure what to look at or pick up first – the gaudy butterfly, the insect crawling into an exotic bloom or a new flower. ‘I am at present fit only to read Humboldt,’ Darwin wrote in his journal, for ‘he like another Sun illumines everything I behold.’ It was as if Humboldt gave him a rope on which to hold tight so as not to drown in these new impressions.

  The Beagle sailed south to Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, and then on to the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego and Chile – over the course of the next three and a half years often retracing the route to ensure the accuracy of their survey. Darwin regularly took leave from the ship for several weeks at a time to go on long inland excursions (having arranged with FitzRoy where to rejoin the Beagle). He rode through the Brazilian rainforest and joined the gauchos in the Pampas. He saw the wide horizons over the dusty plains of Patagonia and found giant fossil bones at the coast of Argentina. He had become, he wrote to his cousin Fox, ‘a great wanderer’.