Creation (Movie Tie-In)

by Randal Keynes

  With his liberal upbringing and values, Charles was able to recognise his common nature with negro slaves, but the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego were the greatest challenge for civilised people, as they were reckoned to be among the “lowest Barbarians” known. The first Fuegians that Charles met were on board HMS Beagle when he joined the ship, and had been trained in European ways. When Captain FitzRoy had visited the Straits of Magellan on a previous voyage in 1830, he took three young men and a small girl from their families, just as a slave-owner might have taken one of his slaves’ children. He brought them back to England for a Christian education. One died of smallpox but the others, Jemmy Button,York Minster and the nine-year-old Fuegia Basket, were clothed and schooled in a village on the outskirts of London. They were so pliant and took their instruction so well that Captain FitzRoy was able to arrange for them to be presented to King William and Queen Adelaide at the Court of St. James’s. When Charles embarked on HMS Beagle the three were on board for their return to their people together with a missionary to make a Christian settlement among them. As the ship sailed south, Charles got to know Jemmy Button and York Minster well. He found Fuegia Basket “a nice, modest, reserved young girl, with a rather pleasing but sometimes sullen expression, and very quick in learning anything.” As he had been with John Edmonston the freed slave, Charles was “incessantly struck” while living with the Fuegians on board ship, “how similar their minds were to ours.”

  When HMS Beagle reached Tierra del Fuego, Charles found that the Fuegians in their own surroundings were “without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld.” “Four or five men suddenly appeared on a cliff near to us. They were absolutely naked and with long streaming hair; springing from the ground and waving their arms around their heads, they sent forth most hideous yells. Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants.” Charles felt they were “man in his lowest and most savage state.” Seeing a Fuegian in his native surroundings was like watching “the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, the rhinoceros on the wide plain, or the hippopotamus wallowing in the mud of some African river.” And “the reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors.”

  Here it was the difference that struck Charles deeply. He knew York Minster, Jemmy Button and Fuegia Basket as quiet and well-mannered young people who could follow the etiquette of an audience with the King and Queen of England. But their fellow tribesmen, yelling and waving on the rocks, looked “scarcely like earthly inhabitants.” The gulf between savagery and civilisation was enormous, and yet the three young Fuegians had stepped across it.

  Seeing how savages could be brought so close to civilisation, Charles also recognised an element of the savage in his own being. He wrote of his feelings when hunting game on the vast empty steppes of Patagonia, that the love of the chase was said to be “an inherent delight in man, a relic of an instinctive passion.” If so, he felt that living on the steppes as he had done, “with the sky for a roof, and the ground for a table,” was part of the same feeling. “It is the savage returning to his wild and native habits.” He always looked back to that way of life in “unfrequented countries, with a kind of extreme delight, which no scenes of civilisation could create.” The young English gentleman, shocked by the unearthly savagery of the Fuegians on their wild and rocky shores and yet seeing how similar their minds were to ours, recognising that “such were our ancestors” and feeling himself to be “the savage returning to his wild and native habits,” was ready to step further beyond accepted boundaries in seeking to understand mankind’s place in the natural world.

  Fuegia Basket

  When Charles arrived back in England in October 1836, he took lodgings in London with his servant Syms Covington and two pet tortoises they had brought back from the Galapagos. He met the geologist Charles Lyell and was welcomed into his circle, as Lyell recognised his promise and felt he was a “glorious addition” to his group of friends and supporters. Charles set to work on his geological notes but gave his zoological and botanical specimens to experts who could describe and classify them for him. Living in Great Marlborough Street, he was depressed to see “nothing but the same odious house on the opposite side as often as one looks out,” but he dined at the Athenaeum Club, and felt “just like a Duke” as he sat reading on a sofa in the great drawing room.

  The Beagle specimens were found to be remarkable in a number of ways. They posed some taxing questions and set Charles thinking again about the nature of species and the disturbing possibility that they might change. On his expeditions in Patagonia, he had made an impressive assembly of fragments of giant fossil mammals, and Professor Owen at the Royal College of Surgeons now examined them for him. Among them were a giant ground-sloth, an enormous armadillo and a capybara the size of a rhinoceros. All were long extinct, but it was striking how similar they were to the living species, all much smaller, which were unique to the South American continent. Owen drew attention to a remarkable “persistence of type” which Lyell suggested amounted to a “law of succession.” The ornithologist John Gould pointed out that a number of bird specimens from the Galapagos which Charles had shown to a meeting of the Zoological Society as finches, wrens, “Gross-beaks” and blackbirds, were in fact all finches of a special kind, so peculiar in their likenesses and differences as to form an entirely new genus and three subgenera. Charles’s earlier hunch about the “zoology of archipelagoes” was thus borne out.

  Charles kept notebooks for jotting down ideas as they occurred to him. He had developed the habit while observing in the wild and then working in his cabin on HMS Beagle. In 1837, he wrote down his first gnomic suggestion on the creation of new species: “Speculate on neutral ground of two ostriches.” Shortly afterwards, he opened a special notebook for his notes on the “transmutation of species,” and from then on he recorded his ideas and questions as they came to mind. Between July 1837 and the end of 1839, the years of his boldest and most far-reaching thinking, he filled six small volumes. They are a unique record of the free flow of creative thought, strictly private, utterly frank and fascinating in what they reveal of his wayward progress towards the conclusions that eventually became his theories of evolution and the descent of man. He had no fellow naturalist to confide in at the time; no one he could trust to consider his ideas without writing him off as a heretic or crank.

  He started his first notebook on transmutation with a string of comments on the processes of sexual reproduction and generation, finding in them clues to the critical factors of fixity and change between parents and offspring. He took up the theme of inheritance and variation, and formed the idea that species might be related by branching descent from a common ancestor. On the thirty-sixth page he sketched a tree of life to help him envisage what he had in mind.

  Charles used his Beagle specimens and notes as a store of facts for his conjectures, but Herschel’s emphasis on the universal laws of nature was part of the framework for his thinking. Herschel had himself suggested to Lyell in 1836 that the replacement of species by others was the “mystery of mysteries” for natural science. He challenged the idea of separate creation, and suggested that God might work at one remove through laws of nature which somehow brought new kinds of creature into being. If, then, we could ever observe the origin of new species, he suggested that it “would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process.” Charles now made it his aim to find that process.

  Evolution by branching descent

  In the first months Charles did not say clearly in his notes how he saw mankind in the scheme of things, or what possibilities he was considering, but he quickly came to believe that humans were a species of animal like any other and had evolved naturally from animal ancestors just as the others had. This drew him at once to metaphysics as it put into question the idea that God governed events in human lives according to a “particular Providence” or special moral purpose for each per
son, and that individuals’ suffering had a moral meaning for them or people close to them.

  Radical thinkers were playing with materialist ideas, and Charles toyed with an organic view of mind and brain in order to make sense of the inheritance of instincts and other mental capabilities. He also, though, held on for some time to the possibility that humans had immaterial souls, and an afterlife in which they enjoyed some form of reward or punishment for their conduct in this world.

  Charles showed his interest in human nature in his reading. While Milton’s Paradise Lost had been his favourite book on HMS Beagle, he now explored Wordsworth’s writings and found many passages that struck chords with his thinking. His moments of intense awareness during the voyage—the thrill he felt on the crest of the Cordillera and his haunting memories of the empty wastes of Patagonia—could be seen in the light of Wordsworth’s experiences in his early years. He remembered his pleasure as a ten-year-old child “in the evening or on blowy days, walking along the beach by myself and seeing the gulls and cormorants wending their way home in a wild and irregular course.” He was surprised to realise how early in his life he had first experienced “such poetic pleasures, felt so keenly in after years.”

  Charles noticed Wordsworth’s comments on the links between poetry and science in his “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth had written that poetry was “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”; it was the “impassioned expression” which was in “the countenance of all science.” Thinking perhaps of Wordsworth’s remarks in the “Preface” about the ways in which poetry gave pleasure, Charles noted the pleasures of imagination with which, for him, it was linked. “I, a geologist, have ill-defined notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surface &c.—truly poetical.” A botanist might also view plants and trees in the same way. “I am sure I remember my pleasure in Kensington Gardens has often been greatly excited by looking at trees as great compound animals, united by wonderful and mysterious manner.” Wordsworth had suggested that the “remotest discoveries” of science were “as proper objects of the poet’s art” as any on which it could be employed. Charles understood him to mean that science might one day become “sufficiently habitual to become poetical,” and welcomed the idea.

  At the same time, though, the secrecy with which he felt he had to work on his “species theory” gave Charles a special understanding of one contrast which Wordsworth drew between the poetic and scientific approaches. Wordsworth had suggested that the knowledge that poets gain in their work was shared by everyone as “our natural and unalien able inheritance.” Giving voice to a song in which all human beings join with him, the poet “rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion.” The knowledge of the man of science, on the other hand was a “personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us,” and not shared with our fellow beings by any “habitual and direct sympathy.” “The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes it and loves it in his solitude.”

  Charles read Wordsworth’s long poem The Excursion twice, and found links with his own interests and ideas in the poem’s rhetoric. Wordsworth’s underlying theme was always human nature, rather than nature on its own. In his preface to the poem he offered a passage from another poem as a “kind of Prospectus.” He had found his inspiration while musing in solitude “on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life.”. . . Not Chaos, not

  The darkest pit of lowest Erebus,

  Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out

  By help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe

  As fall upon us often when we look

  Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man,

  My haunt, and the main region of my song.

  Charles may have recognised a kindred spirit in Wordsworth’s figure of the Wanderer. Growing up in wild country, the Wanderer “had felt the power of Nature.” In one of the poem’s climaxes, he spoke of the wisdom he had gained in words which Charles could have read as voicing his own wish to find scientific laws to explain the pattern of natural species.

  Happy is he who lives to understand,

  Not human nature only, but explores

  All natures,—to the end that he may find

  The law that governs each; and where begins

  The union, the partition where, that makes

  Kind and degree, among all visible Beings;

  . . .

  Up from the creeping plant to sovereign Man.

  Wordsworth looked forward to a time when science would teach humane values from all things. Then her heart would “kindle” and she would find her “most noble use . . . in furnishing clear guidance . . . to the mind’s excursive power.”

  So build we up the Being that we are;

  Thus deeply drinking-in the soul of things,

  We shall be wise perforce . . .

  Charles saw that if one wanted to understand human nature, one must look first into the natural history of mankind. It was widely believed that humans were part of a “vast chain of being” which was a fundamental element in the Divine plan of Creation. Man was the head of the chain of terrestrial beings, and “from him all the other links descend by almost imperceptible gradations.” Next below were the great apes. The likenesses were remarkable, but they posed no challenge to our pride as long as each animal in the sequence was seen as a separate creation, fixed in its position in the ascending scale. A number of thinkers before Charles had suggested that humans might be tied more closely with the great apes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Scottish philosopher Lord Monboddo both believed that chimpanzees and orang-utans were human beings in a more primitive state. Each had different points to make about the nature of the link between man and animal, but Charles found little of value in the ideas of either.

  Most naturalists in London in the 1830s ridiculed the suggestion of shared ancestry, and saw mankind as completely separate from the “brute creation.” They recognised that according to the best principles of comparative anatomy, humans were close to apes and monkeys in almost all anatomical details, but the human mind was so utterly superior that the anatomists refused to group us with our animal cousins. The naturalist William Swainson spoke for many when he urged the “innate repugnance, disgust, and abhorrence, in every human being, ignorant or enlightened, savage or civilised” against the admission of any relationship between humans and other mammals. The French comparative anatomist Baron Cuvier and most of his successors put mankind into a taxonomic order of its own. Professor Owen and others were quick to seize on small anatomical differences and claim that they were critical.

  Nevertheless, the similarities continued to puzzle many people, and some who looked carefully into human and animal thinking found that the boundaries between them were unclear. Lord Brougham noted how the customary distinction between human “reason” and animal “instinct” broke down when it was seen that humans had some instincts and some animals reasoned. When a new periodical, the Magazine of Natural History, was launched in January 1837, the first article in the first issue was “On the psychological distinctions between man and all other animals.” It opened: “There is not, within the wide range of philosophical inquiry, a subject more intensely interesting to all who thirst for knowledge, than the precise nature of that important mental superiority which elevates the human being above the brute.”

  One reason for the special interest during those years was that people were only then coming to know the man-like apes for the first time, and discovering just how disconcertingly close to humans they were. Before the 1830s a few travellers had written vague accounts of orang-utans, gibbons and chimpanzees but every one that had been brought from Africa or the Far East had died on board ship or shortly after arrival. Skeletons and skins had been exhibited, and taxonomists had put their specimens in various places in their different classifications, but people had almost no idea how the living animals looked and behaved. The first chimpanzee to be exhibited in London a
rrived at the Zoological Gardens in 1835. He was called Tommy and lived for a few months before dying of tuberculosis.

  All who saw Tommy were fascinated, and he was treated in a remarkable way which reflected the obsession with the difference between man and brute. The pattern was repeated with the young orang-utan called Jenny who came to the zoo in 1837 and survived until 1839, and a second orang also called Jenny who came in 1841. People insisted on the gulf between ape and man, but they dressed Tommy and the two Jennys in children’s clothes; they taught them to eat and drink at table with spoons, dishes and cups, to understand what their keepers said to them, and to recognise things they were allowed to do and others that were forbidden. Visitors were eager to watch them behaving like human children, and yet almost all found the spectacle disquieting.

  Mrs. Lyell saw Tommy in 1835 and was struck by his “painfully humanlike expression.” The Zoological Society’s veterinary surgeon, William Youatt, looked after him, and wrote a detailed account of his patient. Tommy wore a Guernsey frock and a little sailor’s hat “and as he sat within his cage gazing composedly around, he looked like an old weather-beaten sailor.” Youatt had to inspect all the animals every day, and wrote that “it was long before he could get rid of a feeling of dislike, and almost of loathing, when he paid him his usual morning visit.” However, they became friends and Tommy would give him his hand every time he came. When Tommy fell ill, Youatt and the other staff nursed him like a child. Youatt described his last hours as if he were human. After Tommy had screamed with pain for a while, “the screams became less violent, and assumed a resemblance, painful to hear, to the cries of a sick and sinking infant.” At the end “he flung his arms around the keeper’s neck and clenched his hands for firmer hold—he threw back his head a little, and brought it before that of the keeper, gazed intensely on his face, with an expression which the man says he never shall forget; and so he continued for one or two minutes, when his hold gradually loosened, his arms fell, and he had died without a struggle.” Youatt’s account, which appeared in a veterinary periodical, was of such interest to others that it was reprinted only weeks later in two leading medical journals.