He was more carefree in 1833, while riding the Pampas plains with Argentinean gauchos. From the cowboys, as they hunted and fished, he learned of their creation stories. Trying to be suave in throwing his bolas around as the cowboys did, he once tripped up his own horse, and everyone roared.
Still an eager hunter, Darwin contributed to the ship’s food supply with deer, guinea pigs, tuna, sharks, and turtles. One year, he personally supplied all the food for Christmas lunch. On occasion he accidentally ate valuable specimens. Once, in the middle of a meal, it occurred to him that he might be consuming a new species of ostrichlike bird, something he’d actually been looking for. He was able to save parts of it (a species that’s known as Darwin’s Rhea).
Darwin hired one of the crew as his assistant, but all the men were interested in Darwin’s work and often helped him or kept him company. FitzRoy pointed out that Darwin “makes everyone his friend.” The crew brought some of his best specimens and made useful introductions for him at ports of call; to those who didn’t know what a naturalist was, they would explain that Darwin was “a man who knows everything.” They called him Philos, short for ship’s philosopher.
It wasn’t all fun. There were storms, and once the ship hit a wave two hundred feet high. On land, there were hairy escapes from bandits as well as nights spent sleeping on the ground, attacked by gigantic bugs. In one house he woke up with bloody spots on his shirt, his body entirely covered in flea bites.
Aside from seasickness, Darwin actually fell ill only once during the trip, in 1834, but he was bedridden for six weeks. What caused him to be so sick remained a mystery . . . possibly sour wine, possibly South American sleeping sickness from a bug bite, possibly acute food poisoning made worse by toxic medicines. During this low point of the trip, he wrote, “Our voyage sounded much more delightful in the instructions, than it really is.” He even made plans to quit and go home. At the same time, FitzRoy’s moodiness increased from the burden of his duties, and he had to be talked out of resigning.
Both men snapped out of depression after witnessing nature at its most dramatic. In southern Chile, while they were safely onboard ship, a volcano erupted right before them. They stayed up most of the night using a telescope to observe giant chunks of fiery lava spewing forth.
Then, exploring the forest in Valdivia, Chile, Darwin experienced his first earthquake. The land he stood upon shook for a full two minutes, a shock to someone who till now had always experienced the earth as solid and firm under his feet. Thirteen days later in Concepción, he saw the immense damage caused by the quake—the town in ruins, a hundred people dead. Nature wasn’t just a romp. But what most attracted his attention was that the land near shore had risen almost eight feet. Mussels that had once thrived underwater were now clinging to exposed rocks way above the surface of the waves, dying in the sun.
Firsthand, he was witnessing a shift in the earth’s surface. It was happening right then, in his own time. With Cuvier and Lyell still arguing inside his head, Darwin was leaning toward Lyell: land was constantly changing, rising and falling.
Riding into the Andes Mountains, he saw beyond the spectacular scenery—wondering “who can avoid admiring the wonderful force which has upheaved these mountains, & even more so the countless ages which it must have required.”
He was still vaguely assuming this voyage was all one big detour and he’d be entering the church back in England. But nearly four years had passed, and all his separate ideas were piling up, ready to coalesce and explode.
CHAPTER FIVE
Galápagos
THE TRIP THAT originally was to take two years stretched into five.
Luckily for Darwin’s stomach, a good part of the time was spent on land, a total of three years and one month. While FitzRoy mapped shoreline nooks and crannies or had the ship repaired, Darwin traveled inland, sometimes farther inland than any European had before.
Four years into the voyage, in 1835, the Beagle reached the wild, isolated Galápagos Islands. Darwin could not know it at the time, but this stop was to be the defining moment of the trip, the defining moment of his life as a scientist. Six hundred miles west of Ecuador, the islands were collectively named in Spanish for the giant tortoises lumbering about. Though now famously associated with Darwin, the islands were little known at the time, mainly the destination of pirates hunting turtles for meals and prisoners bound for a small penal colony.
The Galápagos, an archipelago of twenty or so islands in sight of one another, were created from the eruption of underwater volcanoes. The black, rocky land, formed from lava, almost appeared to be in various stages of decomposition. To Darwin it seemed as if he had set foot on an alien planet with powerful wind and ocean currents streaming in from every direction. The islands were home to an astonishing array of creatures that lived nowhere else, as well as plants unknown to the western world.
Darwin was in heaven. Penguins and sea lions living alongside flamingoes, flying fish, male frigate birds inflating their throats to look like red balloons, stunning tropical birds like the red- and blue-footed boobies, yellow warblers—all with no fear, so tame they would come right up to him. The tortoises truly were giants, measuring seven feet around. Black marine iguanas, the only sea-going lizards on Earth, lolled, almost camouflaged on the craggy black rocks, so “disgusting, clumsy” that they made him laugh out loud. Yellowish land iguanas, with a “singularly stupid appearance,” were “torpid monsters.”
Today, Darwin’s treatment of the wildlife would be considered boorish at best, criminal at worst. There was no such concept as “endangered species.” He felt entitled, as a scientist, to poke and probe. He threw stones at the birds to test their reactions and pushed a hawk out of a tree with his gun. Over and over, he threw a marine iguana into the sea, proving only that it really didn’t like to be in the water. He pulled another iguana’s tail until it looked right at him as if outraged. He lifted up a tortoise’s shell to see how much it weighed—it hissed at him in response. He rode another one like a horse, rapping on the shell to get it going.
One night Darwin was invited to dinner by the British governor in charge of the penal colony on one of the islands. Just making conversation, the officer said something odd. He mentioned that he could tell by the shape of a tortoise’s shell which island it had come from. At the time Darwin didn’t think much about this, but later when he looked over his notes, his brain went into overdrive. These islands were cut off from each other—there was no interbreeding among tortoises. So was the particular environment of each island responsible for changes in the species?
Eventually he pondered the enormous ramifications of this in his journal: “If there is the slightest foundation for these remarks the zoology of Archipelagoes will be well worth examining, for such facts (would) undermine the stability of Species.” In other words, species might not be permanent; they could change.
This journal note could have been called his breakthrough, his eureka moment, but as of then it was just a sense. He had nothing to back it up, and he had learned how important it was to have evidence. He wasn’t going to figure all this out until much later. But—his mind was starting to race with possibilities.
He was in the Galápagos for a month, and he was happy to leave. The islands were stark and creepy. The temperature was always boiling hot. After capturing eighteen tortoises for upcoming meals, the crew of the Beagle set sail. Everyone onboard was looking forward to the next stop—the balmy paradise of Tahiti in the South Seas.
It took another year before the Beagle returned to England. After New Zealand and Australia, it was on to the Cocos Islands, seven coral islands off the coast of Perth. Here Darwin had a chance to investigate the reefs of living coral, wading up to his waist in warm water that teemed with tiny bright fish. He started to wonder just how coral reefs were formed, gleaning evidence to be sorted out later.
The ship sailed around the tip of Africa, detoured once more to the east coast of South America for more mapping,
and finally headed back to England.
Darwin had written almost 1,400 pages of notes on geology, almost 400 on zoology, and a diary of 770 pages. He’d amassed well over 5,000 specimens, many already shipped home, some dried, some preserved in alcohol, some still alive. He was returning skinnier but full of ideas.
One decision he made on the way home was that killing animals for sport was wrong. He vowed to give up hunting.
Desperately homesick, exhausted with the new, he set foot on British soil on October 2, 1836. “Oh, the degree to which I long to be once again living quietly with not one single novel object near me!”
He was a changed man. The trip had developed his powers of observation and appreciation for the wonders of nature. He had seen things few people had, with enough material for several books. He saw clearly now his purpose in life. He was not meant for the Church. Being a naturalist in his off hours was not enough. He wanted to be like Lyell. He would give his life to science—contributing to the world’s knowledge was utterly honorable in itself.
He also realized that he was done with travel. Ras had bought a house on Great Marlborough Street in London, living the leisurely life of a socialite. Darwin wrote to ask him to look for a nearby place for him to live.
Back on British soil after four years, nine months, and three days, he knew he’d had the experience of a lifetime. He never left Great Britain again, and for the next forty years, barely left his house.
CHAPTER SIX
Um, Now What?
AT TWENTY-SEVEN, Darwin had evolved, matured, grown up. Even his father could see the change, exclaiming when he first saw him: “Why, the shape of his head is quite altered!”
Darwin returned something of a celebrity, at least in science circles. His name had a buzz. For that he owed Henslow. While Darwin was gone, his old professor had unpacked shipments of specimens that Darwin kept sending ahead. He had to rent a room to store them—the spiders, butterflies, shells, birds, glowworms, bearded monkeys, green parrots, and beetles.
Along with a whole rainforest in miniature, Darwin had sent letters trying out his new ideas. Acting like an unpaid promoter, Henslow had done his former student the enormous favor of getting his samples into the right hands and reading his letters to the right people.
Also, the giant Megatherium head had been exhibited in London and caused a sensation. Vestiges of extinct animals were the rage.
In some ways he was a stranger in a strange land. At eighteen, Princess Victoria was about to become Queen Victoria and begin her sixty-four-year reign. For the rich there were indoor bathrooms, gaslights, lawnmowers, new steam technology, railroad tracks crisscrossing the country, more factories, more shops, more books and magazines. In Oliver Twist Charles Dickens was to reveal the miseries of the poor, the thousands of orphaned children working in factories or living on the streets of crowded, polluted London.
Soon Darwin moved, with two pet tortoises, to London, just down the street from Ras. After their separation, the two brothers were closer than ever, dashing around town to visit Ras’s many friends. Darwin tried to understand Charles Babbage, inventor of the earliest computer, and with even less success, the early feminist Harriet Martineau.
Darwin’s top priority was to catalog the specimens from his journey. He kept some for himself and distributed the rest among experts he admired. They would identify them and bestow official Latin names.
Among the specimens were many birds from the Galápagos. Darwin had not marked from which specific island the different birds came, because he hadn’t thought it mattered, since the islands were so close. A famous ornithologist named John Gould studied the birds and came to a startling—to Darwin—conclusion.
To the ornithologist, all the Galápagos birds did look closely related. But that did not mean they were one species. After all, horses and donkeys look quite similar and can even mate, yet they still remain separate species. (Their offspring, mules, cannot reproduce.) The differences that Gould discovered among the finches meant they had to belong to separate species—thirteen different species of finches.
The most important difference was the shape of their beaks. For instance, some had beaks that were short and good at cracking open seeds; some had much longer beaks that were good for picking bugs out of bark.
Darwin now realized that each bird’s appearance must result from the environment of its native island. Some islands were covered in trees whose bark was bug-infested. Other islands were covered in plants that produced seeds. Not recording the finches’ place of origin had certainly been a mistake. But Darwin still was able to recover enough information on their origin to form a brilliant theory.
Perhaps a single species of finch had flown from the mainland of South America to different islands of the Galápagos. Over time, depending on the environment of the island on which it landed, this single species adapted in different ways that helped it survive on its specific island. The finches on the different islands changed to the point where they became separate species. This was a huge piece of the puzzle, but Darwin had yet to identify the way it happened . . . that was to come later.
Much to his pleasure, he met his hero the geologist Charles Lyell, and even better, became good friends with him. Lyell took him around to all the important men of science, like John Herschel, who wrote that the “mystery of mysteries” in science was how species were “replaced” by others. Most important for Darwin’s career, he became a close friend of botanist Joseph Hooker, on whom he bestowed all his plant specimens.
A bit embarrassed by all the attention, Darwin buried himself in work. While groaning that “writing is the most tedious and difficult work,” he spent his first nine months home polishing his Beagle journal. (It came out two years later as volume three of FitzRoy’s account of the Beagle’s two voyages.) He had ideas for several more books—on zoology, geology, coral reefs. . . .
He also began keeping a series of small notebooks with him at all times so he could jot down his own thoughts or interesting points others made. Full of misspellings and cross-outs, lacking punctuation, the notebooks were a way of talking to himself. These notebooks include what are now called the Transmutation Notebooks, his first, baby-step attempts to unite his observations that would pave the way to the development of a theory.
Eventually, Darwin filled fifteen of these notebooks, which were labeled alphabetically. The A notebook was devoted to questions about geology. He called the B notebook “Zoonomia,” in homage to his grandfather Erasmus. In it Darwin made a now-famous drawing of a simple tree. It was 1837.
He was a terrible artist and had done no sketching during the voyage of the Beagle, but this tree didn’t have to be fancy. Branching out from its trunk were species—modern species at the top, their ancestors at the bottom. It was a Tree of Life, representing how all animals and plants could have descended from a common ancestor. Some simple form of life changed and branched off into more complicated organisms. Above it he wrote the words, “I think.”
In the B notebook, Darwin also speculated, for the first time in his writings, that species survived or died out depending on their ability to adapt to their environment.
The C notebook was mostly about heredity, the passing down of traits from one generation to the next. At one point he wrote that once you accepted the possibility that one species might change into another, then the “whole fabric totters and falls!” By fabric he meant the traditional idea of unchanging life on Earth, including the biblical story of Genesis in which all species were created from the very first in their final form. Was man the exception to what he was pondering? No, he didn’t see why man should be excluded from the tree. Man was just another species, part of nature. Knocking human beings off their pedestal, Darwin knew, was not about to go over well. So before going public, Darwin set about finding evidence.
He began visiting zoos, parks, and farms, obsessively interviewing gardeners and animal breeders, gleaning facts about how they purposely sought to improve a particula
r species. Crossbreeding was a huge craze in Great Britain, with people trying to develop better strains of pigs, flowers, potatoes, whatever. Breeding experts were always happy to talk about methods they used to produce improvements in a species.
Now came an “aha” moment. Darwin realized that over time reproduction could lead not only to improvements within a species but to the beginning of an entirely new species. This process happened all by itself in nature, with nothing controlling it. Random forces! No one in control! It’s easy to understand how frightening this worldview would have been to Victorians.
Darwin was also reading everything he could get his hands on. The dramatic rise of printed matter in England gave him much to choose from, and he made long lists of books, checking each one off as he finished it.
In 1838 he encountered the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, first published forty years earlier. This influential clergyman and English scholar wrote about evil—and why it exists in the world. He also talked about the problems of an industrial society, such as overpopulation. A minister, he believed that God created famines. They would keep human population in check, and their purpose was to inspire mankind to strive to improve his situation. Malthus drew parallels to nature. He observed that plants and animals will always produce far more offspring than can survive, given a limited food supply. The weakest will not survive long. The stronger, more able, more industrious individuals will have a better chance of surviving and having offspring.
The struggle for existence—Malthus viewed it in terms of people and society. But what hit a chord with Darwin was the idea of a competitive environment in nature. He immediately drew a line from Malthus’s argument to the “warring of the species,” the struggle for existence among plants and wildlife.
Charles Darwin* Page 4