Evolution's Captain (10 page)

He might have paid less heed to this had it not been for the essential failure of his Fuegian enterprise. This had crucially undermined his confidence in his judgment; he found himself, for the first time in a brilliant career, faltering, unsure. He was suddenly afraid of being so alone.

In August, as work progressed aboard the
Beagle
, he approached Beaufort with an unusual request.

FitzRoy was asking if he might take a companion.

Beaufort agreed, even thought it a good idea, and wrote to a friend, George Peacock, a mathematics professor and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, asking him to recommend some “savant” to serve as a naturalist aboard the
Beagle
.

Were it not for Robert FitzRoy's concern over the sexual tension between Fuegia Basket and York Minster, this second voyage of the
Beagle
would not have occurred at that moment and under the circumstances that it did. Had the timing, or FitzRoy's need, or his new sense of his own fallibility, been any different, the door would never have opened for a Shropshire doctor's son—an undistinguished bachelor of arts graduate who, for want of ambition, was preparing to become a clergyman—to voyage around the world and shatter and remake the way we think of ourselves in the profoundest way.

But he almost didn't go. He was hardly anyone's first choice.

P
erhaps only the dawn of the Internet, and the computer
technology that coalesced with it into a global ethos at the end of the twentieth century, can give any idea of the excitement generated by the sciences of the physical world in the early nineteenth century.

Geology was preeminent among these, for its findings had recently shaken the widely held belief that the earth had existed for a mere few thousand years. Calculations from biblical and historical records had previously indicated that the epic first week of creation, described in the book of Genesis, had begun on October 22, 4004
B.C.
Six days later, by October 28, Earth and all its glories, including Man, were in place; and on October 29, God rested.

Science and the Bible had for a time even become comfortable bedfellows. The perennial discovery of fossilized sea creatures far inland seemed to support the biblical story of the great flood that had once washed over the earth.

The cubit, the biblical unit of measurement, was generally thought to be the length of a man's arm from elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Men differed, but Sir Isaac Newton set the matter at rest by determining that the cubit must be 20 ½ inches, and was then able to calculate that Noah's ark, at 300 cubits by 50 cubits, had been 537 feet long, 85 feet wide, 51 feet high, and weighed (Newton must have decided on a unit weight for gopher wood,
Cladrastis lutea,
and construction scantlings) 18,231 tons.

This was science at its most tidy and helpful.

But the deeper geologists looked, the more they saw that confounded them: fossils, and the arrangements of layers and layers of earth that had preserved them, began to indicate subterranean upheavals, erosion, sediment, the existence of ancient seas—signs of tremendous change taking place across the face of the earth. Either these changes had occurred at one cataclysmic moment—during the flood, handily explained by the Bible—or, as geologists began to think, they had taken place over an immense period of time, and were still taking place, continually, but with imperceptible slowness, suggesting such a mind-boggling age to the planet that science and the Holy Word could not be reconciled.

The result, for those who did not cling to the literal word of the Bible, was an abyssal unknown, a spiritual vacuum. Science rushed in to fill it, and its discoveries, coming in tumbling profusion in the early years of the nineteenth century, were greeted with the excitement of bulletins from a war front. Nowhere was this zone hotter, of greater moment, more closely watched, than in the circles of scientific inquiry at Britain's universities. In particular, at Cambridge.

Beaufort's letter to Professor Peacock asking about a companion for FitzRoy tapped into an elite cream of intellectual movers and shakers at the very top of the British establishment. Cambridge professors like Peacock, Adam Sedgwick, John Stevens Henslow, William Whewell, and John Herschel were intimates of men in the government and the armed forces, men like Beaufort, the leading scientific light at the Admiralty, and the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. They were close to mathematicians like Charles Babbage, whose series of increasingly complicated “difference engines” were the world's first computers; to geologists like Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison. Whewell and Herschel wrote books that became, along with Lyell's
Principles of Geology
, the most read, talked-about, and influential books of their day. Herschel's
A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy
inspired and laid the groundwork for much of the scientific induction and explanation that followed its publication in 1831. Whewell's
History of the Inductive Sciences
was acted out in a game of charades at Lord Northampton's Christmas party, achieving the sort of buzz generated by popular television shows a century and a half later. These men created an intellectual aristocracy at the core of the world's greatest empire and shaped the way that world thought.

Beaufort's letter—an invitation to sail away and examine the still largely unknown world aboard a well-stocked floating laboratory—sent a tremor through their community.

Peacock in turn wrote to John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany at Cambridge, who had a wide acquaintance with a number of scientifically inclined young gentlemen who might be suitable for the voyage Beaufort described. Henslow, who had also been a professor of mineralogy, was described as a man “who knew every branch of science.” He was a cornucopia of prevailing scientific knowledge, and his lectures were immensely popular and crowded, attended even by other professors. Harder to get into were Henslow's Friday evening soirées, where ten to fifteen favored students and professors could informally discuss
the latest and headiest intellectual and scientific ideas. He led field trips, on foot, on horseback, by stagecoach or barge, that might end with supper at an inn or tavern.

Henslow's students were mainly well-to-do upper-middle-class young men who came to school with dogs, guns, and horses and set themselves up in private lodgings around Cambridge, attending lectures and their studies only when these were fun. There were a few budding scientists among them, but most were preparing for roles as doctors, barristers, politicians, landowners, and clergymen in the dominant establishment from which they had sprung, a kind of extended family of plutocracy. They were familiar with the classics in their original Greek and Latin, they felt the ease of entitlement in company, they rode, shot, and drank well. They were gentlemen. One of these, with an enthusiasm for the natural sciences perhaps more developed than in his fellows, was what Beaufort, on FitzRoy's behalf, was looking for.

“What treasures he might bring home with him,” Peacock wrote to Henslow, “as the ship would be placed at his disposal, whenever his inquiries made it necessary or desirable…. Is there any person whom you could strongly recommend: he must be such a person as would do credit to our recommendation. Do think on this subject: it would be a serious loss to the cause of natural science, if this fine opportunity was lost.”

For just a moment, Henslow thought of going himself. He was even then considering a trip with several students to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, a place that had been described by Alexander von Humboldt as a scientific paradise. As a young man, Henslow had read François Levaillant's
Travels from the Cape of Good Hope into the Interior Parts of Africa
(1790), the story of the Frenchman's shipwreck on the South African coast and his trek through the country with just a rifle, ten gold ducats, and the clothes he'd washed ashore in. Henslow had become gripped by the urge to make the same expedition and daydreamed of Africa and travel. Now, aged thirty-five, with work, a
wife, and a new baby pinning him to a modest house in England, he held the thought of this incredible voyage around the world in his palm for a moment, then ruefully passed it on.

He sent Peacock's letter on to his brother-in-law, Leonard Jenyns, a Cambridge graduate, now a curate at nearby Bottisham, and an amateur entomologist who was highly respected among the Cambridge naturalists. Jenyns too was immediately gripped by the idea of the voyage, enough to begin thinking about what clothes to take. But he had recently been appointed to his curacy and reluctantly concluded that it was not “quite right to quit for a purpose of that kind.”

To both Henslow and Jenyns, the voyage seemed self-indulgent, the sort of thing a grown man of responsibility could not seriously consider. It appealed to the boys they had once been but felt they could no longer be. They agreed to send Peacock's letter on to such a boy, a Cambridge student, just graduated, who had charmed them both with his naturalist enthusiasms and who was still, unlike them, on the other side of the threshold of responsible manhood.

Charles Darwin, aged twenty-two, was, in fact, the student who had whipped Henslow up about a trip to Tenerife. It was Darwin who had read von Humboldt's
Personal Narrative
of his journey to Tenerife and through the Brazilian rain forest in 1799–1804. That book had instilled in him a sudden, almost urgent desire to travel, and “to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of natural science.” Brazil was far away, an expensive and difficult destination for a brief visit by an amateur naturalist. But Tenerife, off the coast of Morocco, was much closer; von Humboldt's descriptions of the island, visited en route to Brazil, had started Darwin talking to Henslow about a summer expedition there.

But a voyage around the world! Darwin decided immediately to accept, but his father just as quickly expressed his deep disapproval.

To Dr. Robert Darwin, the notion of his son suddenly head
ing off around the world seemed one more sidestep in the pattern of irresolution and disinclination to settle into a profession that Charles had shown since his earliest days at university.

Charles Darwin at 31, shortly after his voyage in the
Beagle
. (
Watercolor of Charles Darwin by George Richmond; by permission of English Heritage and Down House.
)

At sixteen, he was doing so poorly in school that his father
decided he was wasting his time and sent him a year early to Edinburgh to join his older brother Erasmus in studying medicine to become a doctor. Both boys had been keen “scientists” at home, setting up their “laboratory” in an old garden shed. They bought glass-stoppered bottles and heated to incineration with an Argand lamp coins and whatever else would burn in the fireproof china dishes donated by their uncle, the wealthy potter Josiah Wedgwood. They analyzed minerals, chemicals, and compounds supplied by their local chemist in Shrewsbury. Darwin became fascinated by crystallography and began collecting rocks.

Erasmus's chronic ill health made him a poor candidate for a doctor, and their father fastened his hopes on Charles. He also thought Charles's amiable nature would make for a sympathetic bedside manner. But the young Darwin discovered that he was repelled by the practical side of medicine. Apart from the revulsion he felt for dissection, the trade in bodies used in anatomy classes carried its own notorious associations. The subjects were supposedly the dead from hospitals and the poorhouse, or deceased or executed criminals, but they were frequently victims murdered for the sale of their corpses. In 1828, three years after Darwin arrived there, William Hare and Irishman William Burke killed at least sixteen people in Edinburgh's Old Town and sold the bodies for cash—£10 in winter, £8 in summer, when preservation proved more problematical—at the medical school's back door. Other corpses came from grave robbers and body dealers who had them shipped in barrels of cheap whisky from city slums and across the Irish Sea from Dublin.

Darwin found operations on living subjects even less tolerable.

Then, or earlier, Darwin developed a lifelong aversion to blood and a terror of illness of any kind. Unable to admit to his father his growing disinclination for medicine, he concentrated on what he did enjoy at medical school: natural history classes.

At the end of his first year, his older brother Erasmus left Edinburgh to continue his studies in London. The two had been so close that they had made scant efforts at forming outside friendships. Now, alone at school and farther from his family than he had ever been, Darwin was forced to look outward. It was good for him. He joined the Plinian Society, a club of like-minded undergraduates who met regularly to read and discuss papers on natural history. Through the society, he met its former secretary, Robert Grant, who had trained as a doctor but become a noted lecturer and respected naturalist. Reserved, austere, melancholic, a confirmed bachelor, and possibly a homosexual, Grant formed a succession of attachments with favorite students, often later falling out with them. For a time during his second year in Edinburgh, Darwin was one of these.

Grant, who lived in a house on the shore near Leith Harbour, introduced Darwin to marine zoology. Together they collected invertebrates—tiny, gelatinous, spongiform creatures—from rock pools and oyster shells and the muck of fishermen's hauls from the seabed. Grant's fascination for these organisms was contagious. He brought them alive for Darwin, showing him the nature and context of their microworlds: how they lived, adapted, and metamorphosed; how they reproduced; and how to dissect them in seawater under a microscope. In that second year at Edinburgh, the medium of the sea became for Darwin one great microscope slide—a lens that held up to view the macro struggle for existence in the alternate world beneath the waves—and for the rest of his life he remained fascinated by tiny sea creatures.