The Invention of Nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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