Diana Preston - The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth

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THE EPIC VOYAGE OF THETHAT FOREVER CHANGED OUR VIEW OF LIFE ON EARTH

DIANA PRESTON

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2022 by Diana Preston

Map by Martin Lubikowski, ML Design, London

Jacket design by Cindy Hernandez

Jacket collage images: painting of ship, HMS Beagle under command Cpt. FitzRoy with Charles Darwin on board off coast of Tierra del Fuego 1832/33, by Olaf Rahardt ullstein bild /Granger; map of the Strait of Magellan, and portrait of Charles Robert Darwin (Lithograph by T. H. Maguire, 1849) courtesy of the Wellcome Trust (Public Domain)

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FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: October 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-6018-8

eISBN 978-0-8021-6019-5

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

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When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of speciesthat mystery of mysteries

Opening words of Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species, 1859

In the early afternoon of December 27, 1831, just beyond the breakwater of Plymouth harbor, a tall, ruddy-complexioned, gray-eyed young man transferred from a small yacht to HMS Beagle after enjoying a convivial last lunch ashore. Though the weather had recently calmed, the Beagles crew had labored for three hours to tack her into open water to begin her long voyage under her commander Robert FitzRoy. His demanding mission was to survey the coast of South America from Buenos Aires to Lima and complete a circumnavigation of the world, taking longitudinal measurements as well as returning to Tierra del Fuego three of its inhabitants he had virtually kidnapped on the Beagles previous voyage and brought to England.

The new arrival clambering aboard the Beagle was the expeditions supernumerary and self-financed gentleman naturalist, twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin. His excitement was tempered by justifiable apprehension. Could he withstand the physical and mental rigors of the voyage? Would he be seasick? Would he get along with his diverse companions in the ships cramped confines and lack of privacy? Could he really bear parting from family and friends for so long? And, perhaps above all, did he know enough about the various fields of science he would be expected to cover? Writing in his diary two weeks earlier, he had tried to reassure himself that the voyage was a opportunity of improving myself that must not be thrown away.

Because of its twin scientific and philosophical consequences for humanity, the voyage of HMS Beagle was to become one of the most important ever undertaken, arguably surpassing the expeditions of Leif Erikson, Ibn Battuta, Zheng He, Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus, and James Cook, and even the first moon landing. Yet when the Beagle departed England, little suggested the intellectual revolution to follow. Charles Darwin was a conventional young man, but as the voyage progressed, he began to develop unconventional ideas. The theories that grew from his research on the voyage would redefine perceptions of humanity and its relationship to other species, showing it had evolved from earlier life forms and was not the divinely created and ordained apex of an unchanging hierarchy. Darwins thinking would consign the first chapter of Genesis, and with it Adam and Eve, to a mythological limbo, though he would never become a declared atheist himself.

At the time, Darwin would have appeared an unlikely radical thinker. From a wealthy middle-class background, he was, by his own admission, comfortably used to being the focus of family attention, not least from his devoted sisters. He had accepted his medical doctor fathers prescription for his unfocused son of a quiet life as a country parson until unexpectedly offered the opportunity to sail on the Beagle. He anticipated the coming voyage would show him the glories of tropical places so vividly described by his hero, the explorer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt.

Sociable, usually good-natured, and eager to please, Darwin was well suited to fit in on a small naval vessel. His uncle Josiah Wedgwood II, son of the founder of the Wedgwood potteries, had already spotted that Darwin was risk of his turning out an idle man.

Like many of his contemporaries, Darwin was cheerfully and unashamedly chauvinistic, nationalistic, and sexist, as the diary he kept aboard the Beagle as well as his subsequent writings reveal. However, though far from radical, his political views were liberal for the time and deep-seated. He opposed slavery, and during the voyage his abhorrence was reinforced by seeing slave-owning societies firsthand. While he believed that different peoplessuch as the indigenous Aboriginal peoples of Australia and the Fuegians subsisting near-naked in twig wigwams in chill Tierra del Fuegomight be at differing stages of civilization, he never wavered from the belief that all humankind belongs to a single species.

By its eventual lengthnearly five yearsand the fact it circumnavigated the world, returning from South America across the Pacific via Polynesia, New Zealand, and Australia, the Beagle voyage gave Darwin a rare opportunity to gather a massive collection of data. These enabled him to examine with growing confidence geological strata and compare and contrast flora and fauna, whether on opposite sides of the Andes or within islands such as the Falklands, St. Helena, Ascension, and the Galapagosalthough contrary to popular myth, he did not have a eureka moment about evolution in the latter. He was able to collect fossils of extinct species, prompting lines of thought about their connections to species still living. In Chile he felt the ground shudder beneath his feethis first experience of an earthquakeseeming proof that the earths crust was in perpetual motion.