The Invention of Nature

He was walking in a new world, Darwin wrote to his father. ‘I am at present red-hot with Spiders,’ he exulted, and the flowers would ‘make a florist go wild’. There was so much that he wasn’t sure what to look at or pick up first – the gaudy butterfly, the insect crawling into an exotic bloom or a new flower. ‘I am at present fit only to read Humboldt,’ Darwin wrote in his journal, for ‘he like another Sun illumines everything I behold.’ It was as if Humboldt gave him a rope on which to hold tight so as not to drown in these new impressions.

The Beagle sailed south to Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, and then on to the Falkland Islands, Tierra del Fuego and Chile – over the course of the next three and a half years often retracing the route to ensure the accuracy of their survey. Darwin regularly took leave from the ship for several weeks at a time to go on long inland excursions (having arranged with FitzRoy where to rejoin the Beagle). He rode through the Brazilian rainforest and joined the gauchos in the Pampas. He saw the wide horizons over the dusty plains of Patagonia and found giant fossil bones at the coast of Argentina. He had become, he wrote to his cousin Fox, ‘a great wanderer’.

When he was on board the Beagle, Darwin followed a routine that never changed much. In the mornings he joined FitzRoy for breakfast and then both men turned to their respective tasks, the captain surveying and dealing with his paperwork while Darwin investigated his specimens and wrote up his notes. Darwin worked in the poop cabin at the big chart table where the assistant surveyor also had his maps. In one corner Darwin had set up his microscope and notebooks. There he dissected, labelled, preserved and dried his specimens. The space was cramped but he thought it was the perfect study for a naturalist because ‘everything is so close at hand’.

Outside on deck the fossil bones had to be cleaned and jellyfish had to be caught. In the evenings, Darwin shared his meals with FitzRoy but once in a while he was invited to join the rest of the crew in the more boisterous mess-room which he always enjoyed. With the Beagle sailing up and down the coast working on the survey, there was plenty of fresh food available. They ate tuna, turtle and shark, as well as ostrich dumplings and armadillos which, Darwin wrote home, without their armoured shells looked and tasted just like duck.

Darwin adored his new life. He was popular with the crew who called him ‘Philos’ and ‘flycatcher’. His passion for nature was infectious and soon many of the others became collectors too, helping to augment his specimens. One officer teased him about the ‘damned beastly bedevilment’ of barrels, crates and bones on deck, saying that ‘if I were the skipper, I would soon have you and all your mess out of the place.’ Whenever they arrived at a trading port from where vessels were sailing to England, Darwin would dispatch his trunks filled with fossils, bird skins and pressed plants to Henslow in Cambridge, as well as sending letters home.

As they sailed on, Darwin felt even more urgently the need to read everything that Humboldt had written. When they reached Rio de Janeiro, in April 1832, he had written home, asking his brother to send Humboldt’s Views of Nature to Montevideo in Uruguay where he would be able to pick it up at a later stage. His brother duly sent books – not Views of Nature but Humboldt’s latest publication Fragmens de géologie et de climatologie asiatiques which was the result of the Russian expedition, as well as the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain.

Throughout the Beagle’s voyage, Darwin was engaged in an inner dialogue with Humboldt – pencil in hand, highlighting sections in Personal Narrative. Humboldt’s descriptions were almost like a template for Darwin’s own experiences. When Darwin first saw the star constellations of the southern hemisphere, he was reminded of Humboldt’s descriptions. Or later when he saw the Chilean plains after days of exploring the untamed forest, Darwin’s reaction exactly echoed Humboldt’s on entering the Llanos in Venezuela after the Orinoco expedition. Humboldt had written of ‘new sensations’ and the delight of being able to ‘see’ again after the long weeks in the dense rainforest, and now Darwin described how the views were ‘very refreshing, after being hemmed in & buried amongst the wilderness of trees’.

Similarly, Darwin’s diary entry about an earthquake that he experienced on 20 February 1835, in Valdivia in southern Chile, was almost a summary of what Humboldt wrote about his first earthquake in Cumaná in 1799. Humboldt had remarked how the earthquake in ‘one instant is sufficient to destroy long illusions’ – in Darwin’s journal it became ‘an earthquake like this at once destroys the oldest associations.’³