Evolution's Captain (22 page)

He was swamped. Deciphering the handwritten logs of two other men, King and Stokes, going over their every word, checking each estimation of time or distance for mistakes or inconsistencies—it would be their accounts but his name would testify to it all—proved the most serious drudgery. This was not writing, not the creative effort that returns some glow of satisfaction for long hours in a chair.

He dined out, spent time with Mary and his new daughter, took walks—from his house in Onslow Square, which faced a garden, it was a ten-minute stroll to the Royal Geographic Society, or Hyde Park, a short cab ride from Admiralty House, Whitehall, Mayfair,
or his club in St. James—but always the enormity of the work to be done gnawed in his mind and pulled him back to his study. It pulled him out of sleep with a jolt in the predawn hours, and it kept him bent over his desk late into the night. The two volumes, and a third comprised of essays and appendixes, amounted to 1,650 pages and over half a million words (six times the size of this book), and none of it could be done by anybody else. He still had his servant from the
Beagle
, Fuller, whom he'd recruited to be his clerk after Hellyer's death, to assist him, to run errands, to help arrange for the engravings of plates for illustrations, but no assistant or clerk could check what only FitzRoy knew. The work pulled FitzRoy's high tension wires tighter.

 

He and Darwin saw each other rarely after the voyage. Even
when both were living in London, they seemed to grow farther apart.

In the spring of 1837, Darwin came to tea with the FitzRoys. “So very beautiful & religious a lady,” he thought Mrs. FitzRoy. But the visit was probably less for social reasons than to confer about specimens both had taken from the Galapagos Islands: Darwin needed FitzRoy's help to identify his birds.

It was not a happy reunion. Darwin came away bristling over FitzRoy's ill humor, firing off several letters about his former messmate.

And he wrote to Charles Lyell, with whom he had now become close friends.

Nevertheless, FitzRoy gave him what he asked for.

Darwin had sent his bird, mammal, reptile, and insect specimens to the London Zoological Society for identification. One of its fellows, John Gould, undertook the classification of his birds. Gould was a widely respected ornithologist and taxonomist, so Darwin had to believe what Gould told him about his Galapagos collection: three mockingbirds Darwin had collected from three different islands were not variations of South American birds but three new and distinct species. A number of birds Darwin had labeled variously as finches, wrens, and blackbirds, were all finches, Gould claimed, of a new group unknown beyond the Galapagos Islands. Their very different beaks made them finches of different species, and Gould believed that, like the mockingbirds, each species came from a different island.

Or so it appeared, but here Darwin's collecting had been uncharacteristically clumsy. He had commingled specimens from several islands, never imagining that different but identical islands, not far apart, might produce different birds. Gould needed more Galapagos finches, properly labeled. Darwin could hardly return to the Pacific, so he had approached FitzRoy to borrow birds the captain, his assistant Fuller, and various seamen had clubbed and taken away from the islands, which FitzRoy had already presented to the British Museum. Despite their quarrel over tea, FitzRoy had two sets of bird skins sent to Darwin. Syms Covington had his own four birds from the Galapagos. All these were examined by Darwin and Gould and com
pared with Darwin's lists and catalogs, in an effort to confirm what Gould claimed: different islands, different species.

One genus; different species. The finches with varying beaks that Darwin found at the Galapagos Islands. (Narrative of HMS
Adventure
and
Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy
)

Another fellow from the Royal Zoological Society, Thomas Bell, who had been identifying Darwin's reptiles, came back with a parallel conclusion: each island of the Galapagos chain had produced its own distinct species of iguana lizard.

Darwin received this news in the spring of 1837 while he was deep in the writing of his book about the voyage. It concurred with a remark the islands' vice governor had made to him while he was there eighteen months earlier, something about the markings on the shells of the islands' tortoises. He hadn't taken much notice at the time, but now the memory of it pealed through his mind. He put it all together in his chapter on the Galapagos Islands.

On March 14, while Darwin was preoccupied with identifying his finches, he attended a lecture given by Gould at the Zoological Society, on the subject of the South American
Rheas
, or ostriches, specimens of which Darwin had brought back and presented to the society. In northern Patagonia, ostriches were common. The gauchos who ate them had told Darwin of a similar but much rarer bird they called the
Avestruz petiso
(“little ostrich”). Darwin had looked for this bird with no success, until farther south, at Port Desire in January 1834, he was eating what he thought was an ostrich, shot by one of the
Beagle
's company, when he noticed it was smaller. The meal was over and the bird fully consumed by the time Darwin realized it was an
Avestruz petiso
. But rooting through the spat-out bones, skin, feathers, and leftovers, he came up with “a very nearly perfect specimen” that was later exhibited at the Zoological Society. But it was not the rarity he had been led to believe.

Gould did Darwin the honor of naming the smaller, southerly ostrich
Rhea darwinii
, after the man who had eaten it. The point of his lecture was that the
Rhea darwinii
was just as common in southern Patagonia as the bigger bird was farther north, yet there were differences enough between the two to classify them as different species. Different places, different birds, though of essentially the same feather. Just like the finches.

Why, Darwin began to wonder, had the creator bothered with such subtle differences? Why not make one species of finch and let it suffice for one small group of islands? Why make a baker's dozen? Why two ostriches where one would do?

A little over a year earlier, on a sunny afternoon in January 1836, while out hunting kangaroo in New South Wales, Australia, such questions hadn't troubled him.

Darwin did not, in January 1836, question why the creator had bothered to make two different versions of the same insect. Like most nineteenth-century scientists and thinkers, he did not question that a creator had been behind it all. Time, he suggested, like a good Lyellian geologist, had simply made the creator rethink his model. It didn't occur to Darwin then that the place, which after all looked not unlike England, might have something to do with it.

Fourteen months later, however, he
was
questioning the creator's efforts. Nevertheless he transcribed this diary entry almost exactly into the book he was writing—his questions had not yet led him to a solid conclusion. (By 1845, when the second, revised, edition of his book was published, that conclusion had come, and Darwin relegated this incident with the lion ant to a footnote, shorn entirely of his ruminations about what a disbeliever might think of the creator's scheme of things. By then he had become, in his own words, “an unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason.”)

Darwin's reasoning brought him to an inescapable idea: perhaps the creator had not created, at the beginning of time—on day five according to the Book of Genesis—all those different finches and placed them on the Galapagos. It seemed more reasonable that the islands might have been populated by South American birds, which, in time, could have adapted to the peculiarities and food sources on each island, until they became so distinctly, consistently different that they had become a new species. The same was possible with the South American ostriches. One species might have evolved from another.

It wasn't a new idea, and certainly not to Darwin: his own grandfather had been an evolutionist. The Frenchman Lamarck had suggested the same thing almost forty years earlier, but in far
more controversial terms: that humans had evolved from apes. Lamarck believed each plant, each animal, contained a “nervous fluid” that enabled it to generate in new directions, adapting to its local environment. The ancestors of giraffes, he suggested, extended their necks over time by stretching to eat the leaves on overhead trees, causing their nervous fluid to flow into their necks which, over successive generations, grew longer. Apes might similarly have dropped to the ground from trees and found that walking or running upright was the more efficient posture.

However clever or reasonable an idea this might have seemed, it was religious heresy. It suggested a godless world propelled by ungoverned, earthly forces. Such an anarchy of creation would produce a nightmare world of incessant haphazard mutation, of gargoyle monsters. And that could not be so, people believed, for the order and beauty of the world was everywhere apparent.

But Darwin saw a middle way: the transforming of one species into another, a process guided by nature, not by God, whereby a plant or animal gradually selected the physical peculiarities best adapted to its environment.

Inescapably with this came the corollary that Adam and Eve were not the semi-angels created by God in the Garden of Eden, but animals descended from other animals, most closely and recently from monkeys. Nothing encouraged this notion more than Darwin's acquaintance with Fuegians. “Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world,” he had written in his voyaging diary.

He had found it difficult to believe that he and they were one species. Bent, hulking, primitive, living in shelters far less complex than a bird's nest, the Fuegians had seemed to provide a picture of Man at the dawn of his transformation from ape, perhaps closer to the root they had sprung from than to the apotheosis represented by European man. At the Zoological Society in London he had observed an orangutan named Jenny throwing a tantrum when her keeper would not give her an apple.