The Invention of Nature

At ninety feet long, the Beagle was a small ship, but packed to the rim – from thousands of tin cans filled with preserved meat to the latest surveying instruments. FitzRoy had insisted on taking as many as twenty-two chronometers to measure time and longitude, as well as lightning conductors to protect the ship. The Beagle carried sugar, rum and dried peas as well as the usual remedies against scurvy such as pickles and lemon juice. ‘The hold would contain scarcely another bag of bread,’ Darwin noted in admiration about the tight packing.

The Beagle’s first landfall was at Santiago, the largest of the Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic Ocean, some 500 miles off the western coast of Africa. Stepping ashore on to the tropical island, new impressions rushed into Darwin’s mind. It was confusing, exotic and thrilling. Palms, tamarind and banana trees vied for his attention, as did the bulbous baobab tree. He heard the melodies of unfamiliar birds, and saw strange insects settling into the blooms of even stranger flowers. Like Humboldt and Bonpland on their arrival in Venezuela in 1799, Darwin’s mind was a ‘perfect hurricane of delight & astonishment’ as he examined volcanic rocks, pressed plants, dissected animals and pinned moths. As Darwin hacked off rocks, scraped off bark and looked for insects and worms under stones, he collected everything from shells and huge palm tree leaves to flatworms and the tiniest insects. In the evenings, when he returned, ‘heavily laden with my rich harvest’, he couldn’t have been happier. Darwin was like a child with a new toy, Captain FitzRoy laughed.

It was ‘like giving to a blind man eyes’, Darwin wrote in his journal. To describe the tropics was impossible, he explained in his letters home, because it was all so different and bewildering that he felt at a loss how to begin or end a sentence. He advised his cousin William Darwin Fox to read Humboldt’s Personal Narrative to understand what he was experiencing and told his father, ‘if you really want to have a notion of tropical countries study Humboldt.’ Darwin was seeing this new world through the lens of Humboldt’s writing. His diary was filled with comments such as ‘much struck by the justness of one of Humboldt’s observations’ or ‘as Humboldt remarks’.

There was only one other publication that shaped Darwin’s mind to a similar extent and that was Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, a book that itself was steeped in Humboldt’s ideas. In it Lyell quoted Humboldt dozens of times, ranging from his idea of global climate and vegetation zones, to information about the Andes. In Principles of Geology Lyell explained that the earth had been shaped by erosion and deposition in a series of very slow movements of elevation and subsistence over an unimaginably long period of time, punctuated by volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. As Darwin looked at the rock strata along the cliffs of Santiago, everything that Lyell had written made sense to him. Here Darwin could ‘read’ the creation of the island by looking at the layers of the sea cliffs: the remains of an old volcano, then further up a white band of shells and corals and above that a layer of lava. The lava had covered the shells and since then the island had been slowly pushed up by some subterranean force. The undulating line and irregularities of the white band were also testimony to more recent movement – Lyell’s forces that were still active. As Darwin rushed across Santiago, he saw the plants and animals through Humboldt’s eyes and the rocks through Lyell’s. When Darwin returned to the Beagle, he wrote a letter to his father, announcing that inspired by what he had seen on the island ‘I shall be able to do some original work in Natural History.’

A few weeks later, when the Beagle reached Bahia (today’s San Salvador) in Brazil at the end of February, Darwin’s amazement continued. Everything was so dream-like that it might have been a magical scene in the Arabian Nights, he explained. Again and again, he wrote that only Humboldt came close to describing the tropics. ‘My feelings amount to admiration the more I read him,’ he declared in one letter home, and ‘I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him’ in another. Humboldt’s descriptions were unparalleled, he said on the day he saw Brazil for the first time, because of the ‘rare union of poetry with science’.