The Voyage of the Beagle – 1831-36

 

My previous post reviewed events and circumstances leading up to the sailing of HMS Beagle on December 27, 1831.  I drew heavily from the excellent introduction by Browne and Neve to their abridged version of the first (1839) edition of Darwin’s Journal of Researches.  They point out that for Charles Darwin the Beagle expedition was not so much a journey at sea as a voyage on land.  Of the nearly five years away from England, Charles himself spent only 533 days (18 months) at sea, the longest stretch being 47 consecutive days, and even that included many landings.  The usual sailing run was between eight and eighteen days.  This was fortunate for Charles, because he was always seasick!  Charles often could do nothing on board ship except lie down; nothing else would help.  In letters home, he made no secret of his growing hatred of the sea and all ships that sail on it.  It is hard to imagine how miserable he must have felt, not only physically but also from concern for what FitzRoy and the rest of the crew thought of his weakness.  FitzRoy worried in a report to the Admiralty that his guest would abandon ship at the first port of call.  It speaks volumes of Charles’s dogged persistence that he endured the agony of seasickness for all those 18 months at sea.

 

First Landfall in the Cape Verde Islands

 

The first sailing run from Plymouth to the Canary Islands must have been particularly awful for Charles – in winter seas, the shock of first reckoning with unexpected seasickness (Charles had had no problem on the three days sailing on a coastal ship from London to Plymouth to join the Beagle), and then the huge disappointment when the Beagle was denied landing rights at Tenerife in the Canaries because of local fears of English cholera.  Even before knowing of the Beagle and FitzRoy, Charles and friends had been inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative to plan a trip to the Canary Islands.

 

Then the weather and the mood improved as they moved on to tropical seas and the Cape Verde Islands, where they could finally go ashore.

 

The Cape Verde Islands are a former Portuguese colony a few hundred miles off the coast of Senegal in West Africa.  It is an arid, tropical archipelago of volcanic origin.  Here Charles discovered the beauty of a theory that explains reality.  Charles Lyell had published the first volume of his Principles of Geology in 1831, and FitzRoy had given Charles Darwin a copy as a gift, reflecting their common interest in new evidence and ideas in geology.  Henslow also urged Charles to study this book but warned him not to accept the views advocated by Lyell.  This was one of the few books Charles was able to take on the voyage; others that he mentioned in his Recollections were von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of his travels with Aimé Bonpland in tropical America, which shaped the content and style of his own Journal of Researches, and William Paley’s Natural Theology, which explained natural phenomena as evidence of God’s work in the world.  He also carried Milton’s Paradise Lost and other poems with him on the ship and always on his land journeys from the ship.  Of these four books, Lyell’s was the one that truly gave direction to Charles’s future thinking. 

 

Lyell’s “uniformitarian” theory of geological history immediately proved its utility to Charles as he puzzled over the origin of a layer of white rock that formed a horizontal stripe part way up and along the whole length of the low sea cliff that defines the eastern shore of the island of São Tiago.  In his Recollections, Charles described in detail only this observation during the voyage:  “… a stream of lava formerly flowed over the bed of the sea, formed of triturated recent shells and corals, which has baked into a hard white rock.  Since then the island has been upheaved.  But the line of white rock revealed to me a new and important fact, namely, that there had been afterward subsidence around the craters, which had since been in action, and had poured forth lava.”  Lyell proposed that the earth’s surface has been altered dramatically over time by gradual changes, each small in itself, which continue today as they have for millennia, if not millions of years – uniformity of process over time, in contrast to a constancy of the earth’s surface interrupted only by cataclysmic events caused by forces outside the earth’s normal system, such as the Deluge described in the Old Testament.  Lyell’s theory served better than the alternatives to help Charles come to his satisfying explanation of the history of São Tiago. 

 

Imagine the profound impact of discovering a theory with such satisfying power to explain the phenomena of the world around us.  Charles was one of the first young men to set out on a round-the-world natural history expedition with Lyell’s book under his arm, able to put its explanatory power to the test.  In effect, for Charles, the defining purpose of the voyage became his application of Lyell’s theory.  In the same paragraph as the observation above, he went on, “It then first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries I visited, and this made me thrill with delight.  That was a memorable hour to me, and how distinctly I can call to mind the low cliff of lava beneath which I rested, with the sun glaring hot, a few strange desert plants growing near, and with living corals in the tidal pools at my feet.”  He had encountered not only a new world but a new way of looking at the world.

 

Impact of the Wet Tropics

 

Charles must have found arid lands like the Cape Verde Islands quite inviting for geological theorizing, because the geology is uncloaked by vegetation or even soil in some places.  But Charles displayed a deeper, emotional response to the lush vegetation of the tropical forests of Brazil.  His first landing on the shore of South America was at Bahia, also known as San Salvador.  “Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has been wandering by himself in a Brazilian forest.  Among the multitude of striking objects, the general luxuriance of the vegetation bears away the victory.”  And later at Rio de Janeiro, “In England any person fond of natural history enjoys in his walks a great advantage, by always having something to attract his attention; but in these fertile climates, teeming with life, the attractions are so numerous, that he is scarcely able to walk at all.”  His journey then carried him for years into lands not nearly so appealing – the flat pampas of Uruguay and Argentina, the arid plains of Patagonia, the damp, cold forests and brooding peaks of Tierra del Fuego and the southern coast of Chile, the starkly arid coasts of northern Chile and Peru, and the equatorial, yet strangely dry, volcanic Galapagos Islands.  Only the spectacular Andes seemed to compete with the tropical forests for his enthusiastic affection.  

 

He did not see the luxuriance of the wet tropics again until he arrived in Tahiti, and there the luxuriance combined with precipitous mountains:  “On each hand the walls [of the ravine] were nearly vertical; yet from the soft nature of the volcanic strata, trees and a rank vegetation sprung from every projecting ledge.  These precipices must have been some 1,000 feet high: and the whole formed a mountain gorge, far more magnificent than any thing which I had ever before beheld.”

 

The Collaboration with FitzRoy 

 

While Charles lived and traveled ashore for long periods, FitzRoy and the Beagle crew spent long days and weeks cruising the coastal waters, making innumerable precise measurements – position fixes by the sun and the stars, chronometer readings, depth soundings, distance and elevation calculations – compiling a mountain of coastal survey data, from which FitzRoy and his lieutenants created detailed navigation charts and notes for the benefit of future generations of sailors.  It was exhausting work, as much or more for FitzRoy, who drove himself harder even than he drove his crew.  No doubt, Charles considered himself fortunate to miss, whenever he could, the tedious tacking of the ship to get the multitude of measurements at each location, plus FitzRoy’s fierce concentration on the work. 

 

In his Recollections, Charles wrote: “FitzRoy’s temper was a most unfortunate one.  It was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame.  He was very kind to me, but was a man very difficult to live with on the intimate terms which necessarily followed from our messing by ourselves in the same cabin.  We had several quarrels …” He described one early in the voyage, in Brazil, where Charles reacted to the abomination of slavery (his Whig family, particularly on the Wedgwood side, were early, well-known abolitionists), which FitzRoy (a Tory aristocrat) rather lamely defended.  Charles made a sneering remark which enraged FitzRoy sufficiently that he evicted Charles from the cabin.  Charles thought he would have to leave the ship altogether, but reflecting Charles’s popularity with the crew, “all the gun-room officers” invited Charles to mess with them.  However, within hours FitzRoy had vented his anger sufficiently to show “his usual magnanimity by sending an officer to me with an apology and a request that I would continue to live with him.”  Charles went on to write that FitzRoy’s “character was in several respects one of the most noble which I have ever known.”  “… devoted to his duty, generous to a fault, bold, determined, and indomitably energetic, and an ardent friend to all under his sway.  He would undertake any sort of trouble to assist those whom he thought deserved assistance.”

 

Fitzroy certainly counted Charles among those who deserved his assistance.  He and his crew cheerfully accommodated Charles’s messy collections of animals, plants, sea life, rocks, and fossils, which he spread out on the ship’s well-scrubbed deck for sorting, describing, labeling, preserving, and storing away for later shipment from a suitable port of call back to Professor Henslow in England.  A few times, notably in Patagonia, FitzRoy and Charles with others of the crew made expeditions inland to explore the hinterland.  In the five years of the voyage, he improved upon the fitness and experience gained from outdoor adventures in England, distinguishing himself with his comrades by his endurance and courage in these overland treks.  More often Charles traveled independently with locally acquired guides, sometimes with his servant, Sims Covington.  FitzRoy coordinated with Charles so that while the Beagle worked its way along the coast, Charles traveled inland, toward a pre-designated pick-up point and date. 

 

Protected by Gauchos and the British Network 

 

His longest trip overland was across the pampas in the company of gauchos, whom he came to admire for their independent life under the open sky, their survival skills, and their primitive dignity, superior in Charles’s opinion to the people of Buenos Aires and provincial towns of Argentina.  It was a challenging, dangerous trip, in the midst of a savage war with the indigenous people of the pampas, benefiting from the protection of General Rosas, protagonist of war against the Indians, then rebellion against the government, and later dictatorship of the country.  As an English naturalist, Charles was an object of local curiosity but also gracious hospitality.  With his poor ear for languages, Charles must have spoken Spanish with a terrible accent, but he no doubt became fluent enough to do business with and even charm the locals.  He managed, sometimes barely, to slip through the turbulence of the time to each of his destinations. 

 

It is important to remember that Charles, FitzRoy and the Beagle crew were hardly explorers in the same league as Captain Cook or Lewis and Clark.  Surely they tread on some ground never before seen by people of European origin, especially toward the headwaters of the Santa Cruz River in Patagonia.  For the most part, however, they were exploring for more detailed knowledge of coasts and countries already known to Europeans, even the English – for centuries in some parts of South America.  They benefited from a resident network of British citizens doing diplomatic, military, and commercial business.  In the larger cities, they entered into society similar in refinement to what they knew in England.  Charles even stayed for a few months in Valparaiso at the home of an English friend from school days. 

 

Charles was also in communication with home, especially his sisters and Henslow.  It might take a year or more for one exchange of letters, but the British network knew enough of the whereabouts and plans of the Beagle to make sure the letters eventually reached the ship.  Charles was aware of events in the scientific community in England; most important perhaps, he received the second and third volumes of Lyell’s Principles of Geology while still in South America, which Charles and FitzRoy both eagerly read.  Moreover, Charles’s letters and collections sent to Henslow began to create awareness of Charles as an emerging man of science, thanks to Henslow’s promotional efforts in England well before his return home.

 

In my next post, I will identify the most significant observations made by Charles over the five years of travel.  I have already mentioned the impact of his visit to the Cape Verde Islands, which set the stage for much of what came later.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

The Voyage of the Beagle – Antecedents

 

In 1831, Charles Darwin was earning a lack-luster degree from Cambridge University and setting his sights on becoming a clergyman of the Church of England.  He was not enthused by the prospect, but he stood a good chance of getting a rural parish.  This would allow him to indulge his passion for natural history on the side, as had many rural clergymen for whom a career with the Church was more means than end.  Not that Charles was in the least insincere.  His father, Dr. Robert Darwin, having concluded that medicine was not for Charles, allowed him to leave Edinburgh University without a degree (as had his older brother, Erasmus) and enroll at Cambridge University to study the classics in preparation for a profession in the Church.  This had long been a fall back position for gentlemen in need of a respectable profession.  Before accepting his father’s offer, Charles considered carefully his ability to pledge himself to uphold the finer points of Church doctrine.  After much reading and thinking on the question, Charles decided that he could do it:  “… 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.” (from his Recollections).  And so he went up to Cambridge. 

 

Charles at Cambridge

 

His brother had preceded Charles to Cambridge and had told him about Professor John Stevens Henslow as a man who knew every branch of science.  His cousin and close friend, William Darwin Fox, a fellow beetle enthusiast, also went to Cambridge and soon got Charles an invitation to the regular Friday evening gatherings of students and faculty at Professor Henslow’s home to explore common interests in the natural world.  Something about Charles made him stand out enough for Henslow to take him under his academic and personal wing.  More than mentor and student, Henslow and Charles became field trip companions and soon very good friends.  In early 1831, after Charles had effectively completed his course work but still had to reside on campus for another two terms to fulfill degree requirements, Henslow encouraged Charles to take up geology under the tutelage of the revered Professor Adam Sedgwick.  Again the relationship became close.  Sedgwick invited Charles to accompany him during the summer on a geological transect of North Wales.  He taught Charles the intimate details of how geologizing was then done.  Charles loved the vigorous hiking across the landscape, observing and collecting samples with his new geological hammer, and putting the pieces of evidence together in a coherent map and understanding of the geology of the area.  Still, he was anxious to get back home in time for the start of the fall partridge hunting.  The start of his career with the Church could wait another few months.

 

FitzRoy Plans the Beagle’s Return to South America

 

Also in 1831, Robert FitzRoy was planning a second voyage in command of HMS Beagle to map the coasts of the “southern cone” of South America.  FitzRoy was in his early twenties but already an accomplished naval officer when he joined the earlier expedition at its midpoint.  The Beagle had sailed with HMS Adventure under the overall command of Phillip Parker King.  The expedition returned to England in 1830 with much work left to be done.  A second expedition was needed, but King decided to retire and live in Australia, so command of the second voyage fell to young FitzRoy with only the Beagle sailing this time. 

 

Their coastal mapping mission was motivated by the opening in the 1820s of the newly independent South American colonies for commercial relations with countries other than Spain and Portugal.  To facilitate trade by commercial shipping, and its ability to protect this trade, the Royal Navy needed more consistently accurate and detailed charts of the South American coasts and adjacent waters.  The expedition also was of vital strategic importance to learn more about these countries in general, especially their people and natural resources as producers of commodities to feed the growing demand of Britain’s industrial revolution.  Scientific exploration served national interests, and military careers in the poorly known regions of the early nineteenth century world not only permitted but even encouraged interest in natural history, from which knowledge of natural resources was likely to come.

 

In Need of “Some Well-Educated and Scientific Person” 

 

FitzRoy was given command of the Beagle quite suddenly on location in South American waters when her captain, Pringle Stokes, committed suicide.  The incident and his own experience of command heightened FitzRoy’s concern about the pressures and loneliness of command at sea, especially given his particular vulnerability to bouts of despair. This time he wanted a gentleman companion to share his cabin and meals, to dispel the loneliness and distract him from the relentless pace of work he was inclined to set for himself.  He asked a friend, who declined.  FitzRoy therefore asked Captain Francis Beaufort, Hydrographer to the British Admiralty (and inventor of the Beaufort Scale for describing wind force) to help him find a suitable gentleman.  It was appropriate that he ask Beaufort, as he was the technical supervisor of the expedition and was engaged in writing FitzRoy’s “terms of reference” (as we today would call his memorandum describing in detail the mapping and other assignments for the second voyage).  In FitzRoy’s own words, he “proposed to the Hydrographer that some well-educated and scientific person should be sought for who would willingly share such accommodations as I had to offer, in order to profit by the opportunity of visiting distant countries yet little known.”

 

When FitzRoy requested a “gentleman,” he was not asking for just any well-mannered sort of fellow but a person of particular social status and outlook compatible with his own – a man of his own class with whom he could deign to associate as an equal.  Actually, FitzRoy was an aristocrat descended from Charles II, but he would find a “gentleman” of some wealth, education, and refinement quite acceptable.  Beaufort contacted Professor Peacock of Cambridge University, and the old school network was activated.  Peacock contacted his friend, Professor Henslow, who was sorely tempted to take the position himself, except for the forlorn expressions of his wife and young children.  Henslow extended the invitation to Charles Darwin, as a very capable, if “unfinished” naturalist. After some famous hesitation, Charles accepted to go to London immediately to meet FitzRoy, to see if both could stand the idea of spending years together in the intimate quarters of a ship at sea.  After some equally famous hesitation by FitzRoy regarding the shape of Charles’s nose (phrenology, or study of the shape of face and head, was seriously considered by many educated people of that time), the two decided they liked each other and sealed the bargain, with the understanding that Charles (rather, his father) would pay all his own costs and would be designated the Captain’s personal guest, with liberty to leave the voyage at any port of call, to return by another ship to England.  FitzRoy was concerned from the start about the staying power of any companion he invited along.

 

Bonds of Friendship, Adventure and Ambition

 

During preparation of the Beagle in the autumn of 1831, these two young men, Robert FitzRoy, 26, and Charles Darwin, 22, quickly became friends, united by the excitement of high adventure to come.   Just imagine the anticipation of Charles as FitzRoy and his crew figuratively and literally showed him the ropes, helping him buy the right equipment and stow his gear in the tight spaces of the tiny cabin, even demonstrating how to hang his sleeping hammock and get into it without being thrown to the deck!  Charles was not the only landlubber guest of FitzRoy who must have amused the Beagle crew.  In addition to the complement of 65 crew, FitzRoy brought along nine “supernumaries,” counting Charles.  The others included a “draughtsman,” Augustus Earle, to record the voyage in paintings as well as, I presume, to make good-looking maps from the charts created by FitzRoy and his officers.  And an “instrument maker,” George Stebbing, to tend the 22 finest chronometers ever carried around the world, for FitzRoy to measure “meridian distances” that would greatly improve accuracy of locating major geographic features of the earth by longitude, still a relatively new method (this task was the primary motive for circumnavigating the globe once the work of surveying the South American coasts was completed).  And Richard Matthews, a missionary, and three Fuegians FitzRoy had brought back to England from the first expedition and educated at his own expense; Matthews and the Fuegians were to establish a mission at the bottom of the world, the vanguard of Christianity in Tierra del Fuego.  Plus FitzRoy had his own steward, and Charles had his own servant, especially to assist in his collecting and preserving of specimens. 

 

Excepting Charles and his servant, all these supernumaries and more were at FitzRoy’s personal expense.  To our modern ears, it seems quite remarkable that a military expedition would include the personal projects of its leader and mix public and personal funding of the diverse endeavors.  But this was typical for the time.  Such expeditions were usually led by wealthy, upper-class men who often had ambitious agendas of their own, compatibly mixed with service to the Crown. 

 

Adding to the bond forged between adventure travelers, FitzRoy and Charles shared a common ambition to use the opportunity of the voyage to establish themselves as experts in their respective professional fields and thereby launch their careers and secure their positions in English society.  An expedition to unknown lands, discovery of new knowledge, and the subsequent reports of the findings had established the reputations and positions of many young Englishmen prior to the second expedition of the Beagle.  Therefore, both FitzRoy and Charles could clearly see the future rewards of literally staying the course, of persisting through the long years of privation, hardship, danger, homesickness, hard work, and boring weeks at sea.  The burden was relieved, no doubt, by their sharing the resolve to see it through.  FitzRoy had the added incentive of being under Admiralty orders.  For Charles, completing the voyage was optional; on the other hand, he was motivated by intense desire to prove himself in some important way – especially to his family, it seems.  Plus, he was passionately committed to the work, and he knew how FitzRoy and Henslow and Sedgwick and many others in scientific English society thought it so exciting and important.  He had a respectable profession, at last.

 

.  .  .

 

I have based the foregoing on three books.  Charles’s Recollections, introduced in my previous posting, devotes only eight pages to the period of the voyage, mainly adding some personal information about his relationship with FitzRoy and events leading up to the sailing of the Beagle on December 27, 1831.  Charles’s public account of the voyage, drawn from his daily journal, was first published with FitzRoy’s account in 1839, and later in the same year as a stand-alone book entitled Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N. from 1832 to 1836.  This book of travels was a surprising publication success; several editions were published with variations of the title and translations into several languages.  It continues to be widely read today.  Charles admitted in his Recollections that “The success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than that of any of my other books.”

 

The version I have read carefully is the Penguin Classics book, Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1989 – this is the first (1839) edition of Journal of Researches edited and abridged by Janet Browne and Michael Neve.  “Abridged” means that Browne and Neve reduced the length of the original first edition by removing whole sections they deemed of less interest, without touching the remaining sections, shortening the whole by about one third.  I admit to being grateful for the abridgment.  Charles wrote well, often with vivid imagery and lively spirit, but his was still an early 19^th century literary style.  I love Jane Austen, but Charles was not that good, and often it is a slog to follow his prose.  Moreover, I find his rather long geological digressions on the landscapes he traveled through quite tedious, and I am just not interested in his minute invertebrates (there is one memorable passage (p. 191) about zoophytes in the seas around the Falkland Islands which left me totaled puzzled after several readings).  The scientific expedition narratives of the time served the dual purpose of entertaining the generalist readers as well as informing the experts looking for information new to their specialty, creating in an uneven reading experience. 

 

I preferred reading the first edition, rather than the 1845 second edition, for which Charles “took much pains in correcting” the first edition, possibly obscuring what he was thinking or not thinking during or shortly after the voyage.  For example, I understand (and plan to verify) that he made more of the Galapagos observations in the second edition than in the first, overlaying his later interpretations on the raw observations and initial reactions during his visit to the archipelago in Sept-Oct 1835.

 

Browne and Neve do the reader a very great favor in their 26 pages of introduction.  Seldom have I found an introduction more enlightening and useful.  I am indebted to them for most of what I have written above about the historical context of the Beagle expedition and the background on Robert FitzRoy.  I highly recommend this introduction as an important document in itself. 

 

Browne and Neve very usefully attach two appendices:  “Admiralty Instructions for the Beagle Voyage” which includes Beaufort’s memorandum of detailed assignments for FitzRoy, and “Remarks with Reference to the Deluge” written by Robert FitzRoy himself as a counter to Darwin’s geological interpretations of what the two men saw together in distant lands.  Both of these pieces first were published in the second volume of FitzRoy’s Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle (1839).  Charles’s Journal of Researches first appeared as the third volume of FitzRoy’s Narrative.  I drew insights from the “Admiralty Instructions” in writing this post and the next.  FitzRoy was given a daunting set of surveying and other tasks, and his faithfulness to the instructions accounts for the length of the voyage extending from the original (and unrealistic) projection of two years to almost five years.

 

The third book is the Darwin and the Beagle by Alan Moorehead, published by Harper & Row in 1969.  This is the first book I read about Darwin himself (rather than his theory and its impacts).  I was a young graduate ecology student at the time.  Moorehead’s book tells the story of Charles and the Beagle experience so well, and so beautifully illustrated with contemporary paintings and sketches of the places, people and creatures, that it awakened in me a longing to travel the world, seeing it as an ecologist, especially the tropics.  I was the same age as Charles when he boarded the Beagle, and I identified with his youthful desire to see what he had only read about in books and his ambition to contribute something new to science.  I hoped that I, too, would gain wonderful insights from experiencing new natural worlds.  I highly recommend Moorehead’s book even today as an easy and compelling way to travel vicariously with Charles on his famous voyage.

 

However, in re-reading this book recently, I was reminded of the ever-so-subtle way an author, whether Moorehead or any other (including me), can create impressions that distort historical facts, without conscious intention to deceive or obscure.  Moorehead highlights a bit too much the intellectual conflict between Darwin and FitzRoy, during the voyage itself, regarding interpretation of geological observations.  He creates an impression of confrontation between the enlightened scientist just looking at the facts and the fundamentalist Christian clinging doggedly to the literal truth of the Biblical account.  As in most books about Darwin and evolution, Moorehead approaches his task with unspoken celebration of the triumph of the modern mind, as science defeats religion, as reason overcomes ignorant tradition, as light dispels the darkness.  Browne and Neve, in their introduction, paint a more complex and interesting portrait of the relationship between Charles and FitzRoy during the voyage.  No doubt they engaged in running debate as they tried together to make sense of what they encountered along the way (reflected by FitzRoy’s “Remarks”), but it seems to have been a friendly exchange between mutually respectful and relatively open minds that only later fully settled on diametrically opposing interpretations of fact.  During the voyage, they had some famous arguments, such as about the benefits of slavery in Brazil, reflecting their different political upbringings.  But it is doubtful that either grew furious with the other over their interpretations of the history of South American landscapes, much less the origin of species. 

 

In this posting, I have dwelled mostly on antecedents to the voyage of the Beagle.  In my next posting, I will summarize what I have learned about the events of the voyage itself.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autobiography of Charles Darwin: A Book Review and Reflection on the Personality

What better way to get started toward understanding Charles the Person than with his own words about himself.  In 1876, at age 67, seven years before his death, Charles wrote Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character for the benefit of his wife, Emma, and his seven living children.  He begins with a passage that shows his humility and his intent:

 

A German Editor having written to me for an account of the development of my mind and character with some sketch of my autobiography, I have thought that the attempt would amuse me, and might possibly interest my children or their children.  I know that it would have interested me greatly to have read ever so short and dull a sketch of the mind of my grandfather, written by himself, and what he thought and did, and how he worked.  I have attempted to write the following account of myself, as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life.  Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me.  I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

 

Unlike his Victorian peers, his style of writing is easy, direct, approachable – and revealing.  I enjoyed these 79 pages more than any other by Charles Darwin.  Of course, it would not be important to read these recollections without his other more important books.   By 1876, Charles was aware of his global fame and therefore the public fascination with himself.  Were it not for the controversy he fueled in British society, he would have been knighted by Queen Victoria, as were some of his close friends (and, later, even some of his own sons).  Yet British society showed its enormous respect by interring the unknighted Darwin almost beside Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey. 

 

Charles’s Testament to His Heirs

 

He was pleased by the success of his books and his theory but distressed by the way his writing so distressed others.  A determinedly private man, Charles refused to engage publically with the socio-scientific-religious dust storm he had kicked up.  He fully expected a quiet burial in the Downe church cemetery, but this was not a man whose contribution to science and society lay undiscovered until after his death.  He had a profound effect on his peers, and he knew it.  Yet, in acceding to requests for his autobiography, he wrote as father and husband, aware that like his own curiosity to really know his nearly-as-famous grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, his children and grandchildren would want to know how he thought, worked and lived.  This was his testament to his heirs.

 

Can We Trust Charles’s Account of Himself?

 

Charles was aware of his success in achieving the scientific stature he clearly craved yet remarkably frank about his own shortcomings.  Did he engage in false humility?  Only a little, if at all.  Can we really trust what this man has written about himself?  Yes, I think we can.  Charles observed his own life with the same dispassionate acumen he applied to the natural world, but surely nothing is more difficult to observe with dispassion than one’s own life.  The best we can hope to get directly from Charles is an honest portrait of his self-image, an accurate rendition of what his memory chose to hold on to over the decades.  I suspect we do indeed get the best in this sense.  Emma Wedgwood, his wife and first cousin, knew Charles literally all his life and found him the most open man of her acquaintance (we would say “transparent” these days), a major reason she gave for falling in love with him.  His openness of mind and demeanor, and even writing style, made Charles stand out as exceptional in a generation given to artifice and ceremony.  By his nature, he seems worthy of our careful trust in what he has to say about himself.

 

A Passion for Collecting

 

Charles remembered that by the age of eight, “my taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting, was well developed.  I collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals.”  This passion for collecting extended in his teenage and university years to insects, especially beetles.  “But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles.”  His mind kept “indelible impressions of many beetles” he encountered, as one might remember time, place, and circumstances of meeting a fascinating person.  Just by the subtle shift in his writing of these lines, an increased intensity and detail, I can sense his passion.  Today, Charles would certainly have become an avid birder, like me, keeping detailed lists of species seen, lists which evoke vivid, colorful, detailed memories of the birds themselves and the circumstances of finding them.  We share this odd collector’s mentality. 

 

A Passion for Shooting (and Keeping Records)

 

Unlike me, Charles also had a passion for shooting (we would call it “hunting” these days), which was how one studied birds in those days (the double-barreled shotgun was the predecessor of the double-barreled binocular).  His “zeal for shooting in autumn” extended to keeping “an exact record of every bird shot through the whole season” which made him the butt of jokes by his “wicked friends.”  “I must have been half-consciously ashamed of my zeal.  I tried to persuade myself that shooting was almost an intellectual employment.”

 

Youthful Shortcomings

 

I can see in this admission a reflection of Charles’s self-consciousness about his youthful shortcomings.  Respect for the intellectual life was instilled in him, no doubt, by his intellectually distinguished father and grandfather.  Respect for the industrious life was instilled, too, by his father, a well-regarded physician, and his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, who made Wedgwood china the dinnerware of royalty.  As a boy and even as a young man, Charles was neither intellectual nor industrious in usual sense.  He was never a good student.  To him a classical grade school education was a waste, most university lectures a tedious bore, “maths” was repugnant, and his medical education at Edinburgh was distressing, even haunting.  “During my whole life I have been singularly incapable of mastering any language.”  He was hilarious among friends for his tin ear and inability to remember even simple musical tunes.  He thought his school masters and his father considered him “a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.”  His father even once made the stinging remark that “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”  Charles excused this as an uncharacteristic outburst by “… the kindest man I ever knew, and whose memory I love with all my heart …” Nonetheless, the threat of disapproval by his beloved but remote father lingered long into Charles’s adult life.

 

Intelligently Curious and Socially at Ease

 

In contrast, Charles clearly possessed deep native intelligence and curiosity, as well as a confident and pleasing social character.  Reflecting more positively on his school life, he wrote “I had strong and diversified tastes, much zeal for whatever interested me, and a keen pleasure in understanding any complex subject or thing.”  He loved reading books, and regretted that later in life he lost all pleasure from poetry of any kind.  He often took long, solitary walks and loved to ride (horses, of course) across beautiful landscapes.  But Charles was hardly a loner.  He made many friends at school and considered his disposition to be very affectionate.  He was at ease in society and adept at making friends with those who shared his general interests in collecting, riding, and shooting – and later in science. 

 

A Companion of Distinguished Men of Science

 

Most important for an unaccomplished youth, Charles’s personal qualities of openness, enthusiasm, curiosity, drive to understand, passion for nature, personal charm, and gentleman’s manners enabled him to become the companion of several distinguished men of science, when science was still known as “natural philosophy” and not quite yet an acceptable university major.  These men, especially Cambridge University Professor Henslow, the pioneering botanist, saw more in Charles than he could see in himself.  As Charles put it, “Looking back, I infer that there must have been something in me a little superior to the common run of youths, otherwise the above-mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in academical position, would never have allowed me to associate with them.”

 

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

 

What they saw recommended him for the opportunity of a lifetime, to travel as Captain FitzRoy’s gentleman companion and unofficial ship’s naturalist on the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle to map the coasts of southern South America and to circumnavigate the globe to take chronometric measurements.  Charles’s personal qualities prepared him well for integration with the socially diverse crew of the Beagle for five long years, 1831-1836, and his many arduous collecting expeditions from various ports of call.  In these Recollections, Charles treats the voyage briefly, referring the reader to his first published  book on the topic, but he sums up simply, “The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career …”  He felt he owed to the voyage his first real education.  “I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were always fairly developed.”

 

Imagine such a gift of opportunity to a young man!  It was almost a fluke, and he would have passed it up, except for the intervention of his Uncle Jos(iah Wedgwood II) with his skeptical father.  Unpromising as Charles was for a standard career in English society, his mentors recognized exceptional qualities that might be nurtured by an exceptional experience.  The voyage of the Beagle was one of many expeditions of exploration, especially following in the wake of Captain Cook’s voyages.  And many ship’s naturalists and medical officers collected specimens of all sorts and reported their findings to a society eager to learn about the world beyond Britain and Europe – in fact, Charles was able to draw on their work to put his own observations in global perspective.  To his generation, these voyages of discovery were equivalent in fascination to our exploration of space.  Even as late as the 1830s, it was still almost easy to discover something new and interesting for science and society simply by traveling the world.  If he could capture his observations and experiences in good English prose, his reports would have a guaranteed, eager audience.  However, there was nothing so unusual about Charles or the voyage of the Beagle that a scientific breakthrough would inevitably result.  His personal qualities, the mentors he gathered, and pure chance delivered him to this fabulous opportunity.  It was then solely up to Charles to make something very special of it.

 

Perspective Gained from Knowing the Young Man

 

Charles continued in his Recollections to briefly recount the people, places and events of his life from the departure of the Beagle from Portsmouth in December 1831 to his writing them down during May-August 1876.  I won’t summarize these recollections here, as the facts are recorded in other letters and books by and about Darwin.  I will review and reflect on many of these in later blog postings.  What is particularly important about his Recollections is that we have little else to tell us the story of Charles’s life and its influences during the formative years before his momentous voyage.  I believe that understanding the basic personality and the experiences that formed it into a young man is fundamental for putting his later life and work in proper perspective.  I will return to this theme repeatedly. 

 

I found Charles’s Recollections in a small volume reprinted from the Life of Charles Darwin, edited by his son, Sir Francis Darwin.  The volume was published as a small hardcover book, No. 7 in The Thinker’s Library, published by Watts & Co. (London) in 1929.  It is titled Autobiograhy of Charles Darwin with Two Appendices, comprising a Chapter of Reminiscences and a Statement of Charles Darwin’s Religious Views, by his Son, Sir Francis Darwin (Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge).  I will review the chapter and statement by Charles’s son in upcoming postings.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)

Charles Darwin’s life, work and words and their meaning for the Science-Religion Debate: a personal exploration committed to intellectual honesty and historical perspective

Darwin Watch is a double entendre.  You, the visitor, can watch the life, work and words of Charles Darwin unfold in a series of essays and book reviews, starting in 2008.  You can also watch an author build a new book, Walking Fish – Charles and Emma Darwin on the Question of God (to be published by Novalis, if it crosses the finish line).  Along the way, you are invited to help – comment, advise, correct.  Actually, it is a triple entendre, because of the watch-as-timepiece metaphor used to illustrate intelligent design or refute it, from Paley to Dawkins.  But here ”watch” means to watch a life or a book unfold.            

I am the author, Chris Dunford.  What are my qualifications for this audacious project?  Perhaps no more than yours.  I am starting this Web site in my 60^th year.  I have a PhD in evolutionary biology and have contributed to the research literature, but for three decades I have made a living in the world of international development and non-profit management.  This career, and my wife and son, have allowed me to observe many faces of the human condition as well as of the natural world, around the world.  I don’t hope to explain what I’ve seen so much as to understand, in some intuitive way, and share this understanding with you, perhaps saving you considerable effort of your own.  If your curiosity insists, you may know me more deeply by reading another book I’ve authored, Life List – A Birder’s Spiritual Awakening.  This is a very personal exploration of nature (based on a visit to sub-arctic Canada ten years ago) and why it means so much to me, especially at the level of the spirit.  In writing my book, I discovered the conflict and interdependence of science and religion.  Yes, it’s about birding, too, but I promise you won’t have to read much about birds at Darwin Watch. 

Darwin Fish vs. Jesus Fish

 

What you read here is about Charles Darwin, the person.  It is the Charles the person who holds my attention, ever since I had to brake violently to avoid rear-ending a car in my California town.  As I recovered my wits and studied the bumper of the car I nearly smashed, I saw for the first time the Darwin fish – the “Jesus fish” with Darwin’s name instead and little feet underneath, like the familiar figure of a fish sprouting feet to become an amphibian.  I laughed!  And I continued to laugh as I saw more of these Darwin fish on the rear ends of cars around town.  It is a university town, where you expect such irreverent humor.  Over time, I saw the growing bumper battle between the Darwin fish and the Jesus fish, with ever more clever designs, culminating in the Darwin fish opening wide to eat the Jesus fish!  I became concerned.  Too many people are taking this battle seriously, seeing Darwin as displacing Jesus.

 

This was not the reaction of an offended Christian or shock at such public display of intolerance.  I was reacting to the name Darwin coming to symbolize so much other than the man or even his work. The Darwin fish proposes an equivalence between Darwin and Jesus.  Darwin the prophet of modernity, Darwin the symbol of Ultimate Truth, Darwin an object of “religious” reverence.  This struck me as profound misrepresentation of who was Charles Darwin and what he himself stood for.  This was not science versus religion or science versus Christianity but Science as a religion competing with Christianity as a religion.  I knew Charles the person would have been appalled. 

 

In Defense of Charles the Person

 

I am a friend of Charles the person and therefore feel obliged to defend his good name.  Not that that I knew him in person!  My great, great grandfather was born in England the same year as Charles – 1809.  But I know Charles a great deal better than I know my own ancestor.  His voyage on the Beagle inspired me to travel the world, too.  His evolutionary theory structured my worldview in university and to this day.  To me, however, Charles is more than a voyage and a theory.  Charles is a life-long friend — not a mentor or a teacher or a hero or an icon – a personal friend – like the fantasy friend of a child, I suppose – with passions and aversions, strengths and weaknesses, to which I relate my own.  He is a person with whom I can sympathize but also criticize.  He puzzles yet inspires me.  He makes me smile, and he is exasperating.  We agree, and we disagree.  We walk together in silence.  He speaks, I listen.  He is a personal friend, no less than my deceased father, who is gone, yet with me.  It is a person-to-person connection.  In short, I like Charles Darwin a great deal, but I know him too well to sit by while the modern world enthrones him as its demi-god.  Nor can I idly allow him to be branded the Anti-Christ. 

 

My “friendship” with Charles Darwin does not authorize me to tell you what motivated him or what he believed without my going back to the written record, his own books, journals and letters and the writings of his peers, family and biographers.  What a daunting task that is!  I am not a trained historian or biographer, and I still have a day job and a family to care for.  For the most part, I have to depend on others who have done the tedious work of extracting and summarizing what Charles and others actually revealed about the man.  It is a voluminous record, yet very sketchy regarding his religious and philosophical positions.  It requires a good deal of interpolation and interpretation, always subject to personal bias. 

 

A Child of His Time

 

Even what Charles wrote is not the complete key to his train of thought.  He had his own biases welling up from assumptions, of which even he was mostly unaware.  As we all are, Charles was a child of his time and all that led up to that time.  Therefore, to properly interpret what Charles was thinking and feeling, we have to explore the history and philosophy and culture and society that influenced his thinking and feeling.  A daunting task indeed!

 

Charles was born five years before Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.  Charles’s parents’ generation was traumatized by the French Revolution and the following surge of Napoleon’s armies across the Continent.  The society in which he was an impressionable teenager, as all teenagers are, was the society of Jane Austen’s novels.  English culture was absorbing and adjusting to Enlightenment philosophy, its countercurrents, and its conflicts with orthodox Christianity, which overlay the disruption of the traditional social order by the emerging Industrial Revolution and its new classes of beneficiaries and victims.  Just think of the profound influence of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam and Watergate on the assumptions of my generation.  Charles could not have made full sense of our writings on any philosophical issue without knowing these great influences on our worldviews.  Likewise, we cannot interpret Charles without knowing the context of his life.

 

Charles the Family Man

 

And there was Charles’s family.  His enormous physician father, Robert, and physician-philosopher-poet grandfather, Erasmus, who was an early and well-known proponent of evolutionary thought.   And the Wedgwood family of his mother, founders of the famous Wedgwood line of fine china and old-style Unitarians (among the many Dissenter sects of Christianity, tolerated just barely by the Church of England and the Crown).  And there was his brother, Erasmus (Ras to the family) who kept a bachelor’s salon for London intellectuals, including notably Thomas Carlyle and his wife, whom Charles knew fairly well.  And his close friends, Charles Lyell the famous geologist, Joseph Hooker the famous botanist, and Thomas Huxley, the famous anatomist and firebrand advocate of Charles’s theory (up to a point).  And, of course, there was his wife and first cousin and closest friend, Emma Wedgwood, who was well-educated and worldly, having done the Grand Tour of Europe’s cultural treasures while Charles visited Europe only once, a brief trip to Paris a few years before his voyage on the Beagle, after which he never again left England.  To understand Charles, we have to understand Emma, too.  She was religious in a way Charles was not, but she was hardly orthodox.  In the Anglican church of Downe, the Darwin family’s home village for decades, Emma is reported to have regularly required their eight children to turn their backs with her to the altar as the Confession of the Faith was chanted, all the while glaring at the rest of the congregation!  Perhaps this embarrassing scene explains why Charles preferred to stroll the village while the family attended Sunday service.

 

Understanding the Object of Rejection

 

I think understanding the context of a person’s life is particularly important, because as I have repeatedly discovered in my own career, it is often impossible to understand why a person so passionately promotes an idea without understanding what the person is thereby rejecting.  Yet people seldom cite this object of rejection in building the rationale for the idea.  Indeed, the person may not even be fully aware of what is being rejected or perhaps is reluctant to admit it.  Guarding against the strong temptation to psychoanalyze, we can use the context of the person’s life to surmise what the person is likely reacting against and thereby come closer to understanding fully.

 

Learning from Analogy with Ourselves

 

Even if all these pieces of evidence and context can be assembled, there will have to be interpretation – educated guesses – of what was going on in Charles’s mind.  Aside from assembling the pieces, I hope to contribute my own understanding from my “friendship” with Charles.  We learn very often by analogy.  When we cannot directly know the nature of what we are trying to understand, we find an analogy to something we know already and say “if it is truly like this, we can imagine how it would react to that.”  Charles was a well-educated, well-traveled, perceptive and sensitive man, not unlike you and me, perhaps.  If we can establish how he was similar and how he was different from us, we can use ourselves as a useful analogy to make good guesses about how he thought and felt about things about which you and I think and feel.  This must be done very cautiously, guarding diligently against wishful thinking and unconscious bias.  It cannot be fully successful. But it can move us much closer than we were before to understanding the man.

 

Why is this important? 

 

Charles Darwin has become a touchstone for our modern world.  The “bumper battle” of the fish symbols leaves no doubt of this.  Commentators in the Science-Religion Debate, with all its political implications and consequences, often use Darwin as their point of reference, either to support or refute assertions about matters at hand.  The Darwin name will be taken in vain regardless of how hard we try to set the record straight, but those of us who honor intellectual honesty and historical accuracy should have ready access to the real man and what were mostly likely his true views on the issues that are now so controversial.  Surely this better understanding only improves the debate.  We also owe this consideration to such a remarkable, decent and likeable man.  Providing ready access to Charles, the real person, is the ultimate purpose of Darwin Watch. 

  

I am reading a series of books and articles and compilations of letters and will provide you “book reviews” and short essays commenting on what I’ve read.  You may expect to see something new from me at least once a month.  In the process, you will see the “book” take shape.  Your comments, advice, and corrections will help the process along.  Post a comment with your thoughts.  This daunting task cannot be done by one person alone.

 

Copyright 2008 by Chris Dunford.  May be quoted in part or in full only with attribution to Chris Dunford (www.darwinwatch.wordpress.com)