The Invention of Nature

In mid-July 1831 Darwin reminded Henslow to read more Humboldt ‘to fan your Canary ardor’. His letters gushed with excitement and were peppered with newly learned Spanish expressions. ‘I have written myself into a Tropical glow,’ he told his sister. But then, just as they were preparing to leave, Henslow cancelled because of work commitments and his wife’s pregnancy. Darwin also realized that few British ships sailed to the Canary Islands – and those few only in the early summer months. They were too late in the season, and he would have to defer the trip to the following year.

Charles Darwin (Illustration Credit 17.2)

Then, a month later, on 29 August 1831, everything changed when Darwin received a letter from Henslow. A certain Captain Robert FitzRoy, Henslow wrote, was looking for a gentleman naturalist to travel as his companion on the Beagle – a ship that was due to leave four weeks later on a circumnavigation of the globe. This was a much more exciting prospect than Tenerife. But Darwin’s enthusiasm was immediately dampened when his father refused his permission and the much needed financial assistance to pay for his son’s passage. It was ‘a wild scheme’, Robert Darwin told his son, and a ‘useless undertaking’. A voyage across the globe didn’t seem a necessary prerequisite for being a country clergyman.

Darwin felt crushed. Of course the voyage would not be cheap but his family could afford it. His father was a successful doctor who had made most of his money as a canny investor, and Darwin’s grandfathers had made the family famous and prosperous. The celebrated potter Josiah Wedgwood was his maternal grandfather – a man who had applied science to manufacturing and thereby industrialized the production of chinaware. Wedgwood had died a rich and respected man. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather, the physician, scientist and inventor Erasmus Darwin, was equally illustrious. In 1794 he had published the first radical evolutionary ideas in his book Zoomania in which he had claimed that animals and humans descended from tiny living filaments in the primordial sea. He had also turned Carl Linnaeus’s botanical classification system into verse in his hugely popular poem Loves of the Plants – which Humboldt and Goethe had read in the 1790s. There was a pride of achievement in the family, maybe even a sense of greatness, to which Charles Darwin certainly also aspired.

In the end it was an uncle who helped to convince Darwin’s father of the value of the trip. ‘If I saw Charles now absorbed in professional studies,’ Josiah Wedgwood II wrote to Robert Darwin, it would not be advisable to interrupt them, ‘but this is not, and I think will not be, the case with him’. Since Charles was only interested in natural history, his uncle concluded, the expedition would be a great opportunity to leave his mark in the world of science. The next day Darwin’s father finally agreed to underwrite his son’s expenses. Darwin was to go around the world.

The first three weeks of the voyage, as the Beagle sailed south, were rather uneventful. After they had passed Tenerife, Darwin was feeling better. As the days became warmer, he changed into lighter clothes. Darwin caught jellyfish and other small marine invertebrates, occupying himself with dissecting them. It was also a good time to get to know the rest of the crew. Darwin shared his cabin with the nineteen-year-old assistant surveyor and one of the midshipmen who was fourteen at the time. There were seventy-four men on board, including sailors, carpenters and surveyors as well as an instrument maker, an artist and a surgeon.² At twenty-six, Captain FitzRoy was only four years older than Darwin. He came from an aristocratic family and had spent all his adult life at sea. This was his second voyage on the Beagle. As the crew quickly discovered, the captain could be bad-tempered and morose – especially in the early mornings. With an uncle who had committed suicide, FitzRoy often worried that he might be prey to similar predispositions. At times, the captain fell into deep depressions that were ‘bordering on insanity’, Darwin thought. FitzRoy alternated between seemingly boundless energy and silent melancholy. But he was intelligent, fascinated by natural history and worked incessantly.

FitzRoy was heading a government-funded expedition with the goal of circumnavigating the globe to make a full circle of longitudinal measurements – using the same instruments in an attempt to standardize maps and navigation. He had also been instructed to complete a survey of the southern coast of South America where Britain hoped to gain economic dominance among the newly independent South American nations.