Charles Darwin* (5 page)

But whenever they hit shore, he regained his stamina. He was always first to disembark, and then would work at full speed to collect. With no guarantee he’d ever be returning to any locale, he worked like a demon to maximize his time. He arranged with FitzRoy to stay longer on land whenever he could.

Floating around Bahia Blanca Bay, he noticed fossils embedded in the banks. On the spot, he dug up what he could. The next day he returned to dig up the head of a bizarrely big animal. Not until several hours after dark was he able to get the beast’s head on board. It was later identified as an extinct giant sloth Megatherium, one of the largest animals ever to walk the earth. Farther on, he found more fossilized Megatherium bones, as well as bones from another extinct creature, one that resembled a gigantic armadillo. These fossils were among his most amazing discoveries. They interested Darwin because the extinct creatures seemed to be giant versions of animals currently living on Earth. Were they related? If so, how? Had the extinct creatures “transmutated” into animals the nineteenth century world knew?

In the 1830s little was known about fossils. The first fossil bones to be identified as coming from large extinct reptiles had only been found in 1822. Scientists now understood that long ago certain creatures had lived on Earth and then disappeared. But what accounted for their disappearance remained a mystery. Some attributed their extinction to the flood in the time of Noah.

By now Darwin’s collections of specimens sometimes threatened to take over the ship. With every single one, he asked questions: Why was it like this? How did this shape or form develop?

His mind was wide open, and this was his real education. “I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind,” he wrote. He had the luxury of all this time to contemplate, without pressure to publish or conform to some professor’s teachings. And since Dr. Darwin was paying for all Charles’s mounting expenses, Darwin owned his collections, everything he found. It became important to him to retain control, as he planned to donate his collection to the best and most central museum he could find in England.

Whenever he reached a port city, he shipped boxes of specimens back to Henslow for real experts to analyze. He also picked up his mail, often finding books he’d asked Ras to send. Late in 1832, pulling into Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was glad to receive his copy of volume two of Lyell’s
Principles of Geology
.

In Patagonia, he reported the massacre of native Patagonians by the Chilean army: “Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian, civilized country?”

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.