Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle

At around the same time Charles read two books that ‘stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science’. One was the classical account by the German naturalist, geophysicist, meteorologist and geographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) about his travels through the Brazilian rain forest to the Andes and beyond with the botanist Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858).

(#litres_trial_promo) The second was the recent book by the astronomer and physicist John Herschel (1792–1871) on the study of natural science.

(#litres_trial_promo) Charles insisted on inflicting long readings from Humboldt on his friends, and worked out plans for an expedition to the Canary Islands in July to inspect the volcanic cone of the Pico de Teide on Tenerife, whose summit had been closely inspected by Humboldt in 1799 on his way out to South America. Some of the requirements of his plan were tiresome to meet, such as taking ‘intensely stupid’ lessons in Spanish, though he was not to know how useful they would prove to have been when later on he was riding with gauchos across the pampas in Patagonia. A number of prospective participants were enlisted, but on enquiring about the sailing of passenger vessels to the Canaries, Charles found that his planning was already too late, for the boats were scheduled for departures only in June. The trip would therefore have to be postponed to 1832.

It was pointed out by Henslow that such an enterprise would require a basic knowledge of geology. He therefore advised Charles on the purchase in London of the instrument for the measurement of the inclination of rock beds known as a clinometer, and showed him how to use it. Soon Charles could boast from Shrewsbury that ‘I put all the tables in my bedroom at every conceivable angle & direction. I will venture to say I have measured them as accurately as any Geologist going could do.’

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Most significantly of all for Charles’s training as a geologist, Henslow prevailed on Adam Sedgwick to take Charles with him for part of his usual field excursion during the summer vacation. Sedgwick was renowned as a field geologist, skilled at the recognition of regional patterns of strata from details that were strictly local, and in August he was planning to visit North Wales in continuation of a project to describe all the rocks in Great Britain below the Old Red Sandstone.

(#litres_trial_promo) The first nights of the trip were spent by Sedgwick with the Darwins at Shrewsbury, where he made a great impression, especially on Charles’s sister Susan, often teased by the accusation that ‘anything in coat and trousers from eight years to eighty was fair game to Susan’. Charles had been practising his geology in the neighbourhood, and later related the story of the important scientific lesson that he learnt on that occasion:

Whilst examining an old gravel-pit near Shrewsbury a labourer told me that he had found in it a large worn tropical Volute shell, such as may be seen on the chimney-pieces of cottages; and as he would not sell the shell I was convinced that he had really found it in the pit. I told Sedgwick of the fact, and he at once said (no doubt truly) that it must have been thrown away by someone into the pit; but then added, if really embedded there it would be the greatest misfortune to geology, as it would overthrow all that we know about the superficial deposits of the midland counties. These gravel-beds belonged in fact to the glacial period, and in after years I found in them broken arctic shells. But I was then utterly astonished at Sedgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell being found near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

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Sedgwick had of course appreciated that the shell could not possibly be a genuine find in such a place. His scepticism taught Charles a valuable lesson, and brought home to him the importance of assembling plenty of mutually compatible observations to support any new scientific theory. Thereafter he would keep his mouth tightly shut until sufficient evidence had been accumulated.

Sedgwick’s aim was to follow the line of contact along the Vale of Clwyd between the Carboniferous Limestone cliffs and the Old Red Sandstone, shown in the geological map with ribbons crossing the Vale at several points, starting at Llangollen and finishing at Great Ormes Head on the coast.

(#litres_trial_promo) At a quarry near Ruthin they found a possible outcrop of the Old Red, and north of Henllan there was red sand and earth, but Sedgwick was not sure that this established with certainty the nature of the underlying strata. Charles was therefore dispatched on a traverse of his own from St Asaph to Abergele via Betwys-yn-Rhos, crossing a substantial band of Old Red shown on the map. Finding in some places a few loose stones and some reddish soil, he noted: ‘It was in such points as these where the strata have been much disturbed, that I observed the greatest number of bits of Sandstone, but in no place could I find it in situ.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Near Abergele the soil was indeed ‘very red’, but this he attributed ‘entirely to the very ferruginous [rich in iron] seams in the rock itself, & not to the supposed sandstone beneath it’. That evening he told Sedgwick that there was no true Old Red to be seen, and to the end of his life could remember how pleased his teacher had been with this new evidence that the Vale of Clwyd did not have a complex structure as had been supposed, but was a simple trough-like syncline

(#litres_trial_promo) resulting from a stretching of the strata. Although his experience of geology in the field was thus limited to just one week, Charles had sat at the feet of a master, and had solved his first problem with conspicuous success.

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Geological map of part of North Wales, redrawn by Secord

(#litres_trial_promo) after Greenough,

(#litres_trial_promo) with Charles’s route from Llangollen to Penmaenmawr as a dotted line. In the second edition of Greenough’s map, published in 1839, the Old Red Sandstone had disappeared.

Among other sites of geological interest in the Vale were the famous caves in the limestone cliffs at Plas-yn-Cefn, above the River Elwy. Here the owner had excavated vertebrate fossils in the largest cave that included the tooth of a rhinoceros, and there were other bones in the mud. Charles’s imagination was fired by the prospect of making similar discoveries from past worlds in his projected trip to the Canaries, though his hopes were not in fact realised until his arrival in 1832 at the cliffs of Punta Alta in Patagonia. After a week, Charles and Sedgwick separated at Capel Curig in the neighbourhood of Bethesda, and Charles strode on across the central mountains of Wales, steering by map and compass, to join some Cambridge friends at Barmouth.

Reaching home at Shrewsbury on 29 August 1831 after two weeks of shooting with his Uncle Jos at Maer, ‘for at that time I should have thought myself mad to give up the first days of partridge shooting for geology or any other science’, Charles found the fateful letter from Henslow proposing that he should sail on the Beagle. The clock must next be turned back to explain its origin.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_bbe7a153-23ba-5ec1-9110-d4d832eac649)

The Strange Consequences of Stealing a Whale-Boat (#ulink_bbe7a153-23ba-5ec1-9110-d4d832eac649)

On 25 September 1513 the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the narrow isthmus joining the two halves of the American continent to discover on the far side the Mar del Sur, later named the Pacific Ocean. The town of Panama was built on the Pacific shore, and became the base for a rapid expansion by the Spaniards. While Hernán Cortés was conquering the Aztec empire in Mexico, Francisco Pizarro was overcoming the Incas in Peru. During the next three hundred years prosperous Spanish colonies were established in the western and southernmost parts of South America, while in the east the Portuguese took over a large area in Brazil.

The English were jealous of their success, but for a long time could only benefit from it by robbery, following the example of Sir Francis Drake when he returned from his circumnavigation in 1580 with a rich cargo of treasures stolen from the Spanish colonies at Queen Elizabeth’s behest. In 1806 Buenos Aires was attacked by a British force, which was successfully repelled, giving the Argentinians the confidence to join the other Spanish colonies in breaking away from Spain. By 1820 they were all independent countries, though not always at peace with one another.

The Hydrographic Office of the Royal Navy, founded in 1795, was initially responsible for looking after the Admiralty’s collection of navigational charts, and of the ‘Remark Books’ about foreign shores and harbours that all naval captains were required to keep. In 1817 the second Hydrographer, Captain Hurd, was empowered to recruit some surveyors of his own, and had soon built up a programme of a dozen Admiralty surveys in home waters and abroad. Trade was quickly building up with the new governments of South America, and there was a need both for a British naval presence in South American waters, and for accurate charts of the coastline to assist shipping. Hence it came about that:

In 1825, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty directed two ships to be prepared for a Survey of the Southern Coasts of South America; and in May of the following year the ADVENTURE and the BEAGLE were lying in Plymouth Sound, ready to carry the orders of their Lordships into execution. These vessels were well provided with every necessary, and every comfort, which the liberality and kindness of the Admiralty, Navy Board, and officers of the Dock-yards, could cause to be furnished.

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HMS Adventure was a ‘roomy’ ship of 330 tons, without guns, under the command of Captain Phillip Parker King. HMS Beagle was a smaller vessel of 235 tons, rigged as a barque carrying six guns, and commanded by Captain Pringle Stokes. On 19 November 1826, Adventure and Beagle sailed south from Monte Video, and until April 1827 carried out surveys in the south of Patagonia and in Tierra del Fuego, around the Straits of Magellan. In June 1827 they arrived back at Rio de Janeiro. Six months later, now accompanied by a schooner named Adelaide to assist in the surveys – for whose purchase Captain King had prudently obtained Admiralty approval in advance, unlike Captain FitzRoy when in 1833 he bought the second and smaller Adventure – they sailed south again. In January 1828 the Adventure was anchored for the winter at Port Famine. Captain Stokes was ordered in the Beagle ‘to proceed to survey the western coasts, between the Strait of Magalhaens and latitude 47° south, or as much of those dangerous and exposed shores as he could examine’, and to return to Port Famine (Puerto Hambre) by the end of July. Captain King allotted himself a more comfortable task in the Adelaide, charting the southern parts of the Strait relatively close at hand, and collecting birds and plants.

When at the appointed time the Beagle returned to Port Famine with her difficult assignment conscientiously completed, Captain Stokes was found to be in a state of acute depression thanks to the extreme privations and hardships that he and his crew had suffered from very severe weather, both stormy and wet, when working in the Gulf of Peñas. On 1 August 1828 he tried unsuccessfully to shoot himself, and although the surgeons thought for a while that he might recover, he died in great pain on 12 August. He was interred at the Adventure’s burial ground, the so-called English Cemetery two miles from Port Famine. (The tablet erected to his memory has since been moved to the Museo Saleciano in the modern town of Punta Arenas, some forty miles away along the Straits of Magellan.)

The Adventure and the Beagle, temporarily commanded by her First Lieutenant, William Skyring, sailed back to Rio de Janeiro in October for repairs and replenishment of their stores. Here Admiral Otway, Commander-in-Chief of the South American Station, appointed his young Flag Lieutenant, Robert FitzRoy,

(#litres_trial_promo) to take over command of the Beagle in succession to Captain Pringle Stokes. His choice was successful, and FitzRoy had soon overcome the handicap of restoring the morale of a demoralised ship’s company well enough to continue the charting of one of the world’s most inhospitable coasts.

During 1829 the Adventure, Beagle and Adelaide conducted independent surveys at various points between Tierra del Fuego and Chiloe, coming together at Valparaiso in November. On 19 November the Beagle departed to survey more of the southern coasts of Tierra del Fuego before rejoining the Adventure at Rio de Janeiro for the final return to England. Working among the Camden and Stewart Islands to the south of the mouth of the Cockburn Channel, FitzRoy found tiresome anomalies in his compass bearings, and wrote in his journal for 24 January 1830:

There may be metal in many of the Fuegian mountains, and I much regret that no person in the vessel was skilled in mineralogy, or at all acquainted with geology. It is a pity that so good an opportunity of ascertaining the nature of the rocks and earths of these regions should have been almost lost. I could not avoid often thinking of the talent and experience required for such scientific researches, of which we were wholly destitute; and inwardly resolving, that if ever I left England again on a similar expedition, I would endeavour to carry out a person qualified to examine the land; while the officers and myself would attend to hydrography.

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A week later it was reported to FitzRoy that the ship’s five-oared whale-boat, manned by Mr Murray, the Master, and a small crew, had been stolen during the night by the Fuegians near Cape Desolation, ‘now doubly deserving of its name’. The bad news was brought to the Beagle by two of the sailors, paddling a basket-like canoe that they had thrown together for the purpose, and whose curious structure was commemorated in the names given both to the small island on which Cape Desolation was located, and to the first of the Fuegians taken hostage by FitzRoy.

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On the Beagle’s map of the Strait of Magalhaens (sic),

(#litres_trial_promo) Basket Isle was inserted near the western end of Tierra del Fuego, with Thieves Sound to the north, and Whale Boat Sound to the east. In a modern map the area lies on the coast of Tierra del Fuego due south of Punta Arenas. FitzRoy responded to the theft with a campaign to capture hostages for return of the whale-boat, but the move failed, largely because the Fuegians showed no interest in exchanging their booty for their comrades, who remained quite happily on the ship. So he was left with the young girl Fuegia Basket, ‘as broad as she was high’, and the men York Minster, taken in Christmas Sound near the cliff of that name, and Boat Memory captured later nearby. He soon began to appreciate the practical difficulties that would arise in returning them immediately to their own peoples, and to consider the possibility of taking them back to England for a period of education before they were repatriated.

While a replacement for the whale-boat was being built at Doris Cove, situated on an island beside Adventurer Passage, Mr Murray was dispatched in the ship’s cutter to explore the waters to the north and east of Nassau Bay. Not far to the north, but a long way to the east, he sailed through a channel little more than a third of a mile wide which became known as the Murray Narrow, and which ‘led him into a straight channel, averaging about two miles or more in width, and extending nearly east and west as far as the eye could reach’. He had discovered the Beagle Channel, whose precise orientation on the map would provide grounds for legal dispute long afterwards in arguments between Argentina and Chile over territorial rights in the Antarctic. The new country was thickly populated, and on 11 May 1830, when the Beagle herself was in the Murray Narrow, some canoes full of natives anxious for barter were encountered. FitzRoy wrote: ‘I told one of the boys in a canoe to come into our boat, and gave the man who was with him a large shining mother-of-pearl button.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Jemmy Button, as the boat’s crew called him, quickly settled down in his new surroundings, and there were now four Fuegians in FitzRoy’s little group.

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At the end of June the Beagle sailed back to the Rio Plata. While in Monte Video, FitzRoy tried to have the Fuegians vaccinated against smallpox, whose ravages were all too often fatal to unprotected natives, but the vaccination did not take. At the beginning of August the Beagle rejoined the Adventure in Rio de Janeiro, and together they made a ‘most tedious’ passage to Plymouth, where they anchored on 14 October.

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FitzRoy’s first thought was for the Fuegians. Landing after dark, they were taken to lodgings where next day they were vaccinated for the second time. With the Beagle’s coxswain James Bennett to look after them, they were then transferred to a farmhouse in the country near Plymstock, where they could enjoy the fresh air and hopefully avoid infection by other virus diseases, without attracting public attention. Meanwhile the Beagle was stripped and cleared out, and on 27 October her pendant was hauled down.

During the voyage home, FitzRoy had addressed through Captain King to John Barrow,

(#litres_trial_promo) Second Secretary of the Admiralty, a long account of the manner in which he had taken the four Fuegians on board the Beagle,38 and of his proposal to return them to their country after they had received some education. Mr Barrow’s response, although it was negatively worded and predictably lacking in enthusiasm, said that their Lordships would not interfere with FitzRoy’s benevolent intentions towards the Fuegians, would afford him facilities towards their maintenance and education, and would give them a passage home again. Their Lordships’ promise was duly kept when early in November Boat Memory was taken ill with smallpox, and instructions were at once given for the Fuegians to be admitted to the Royal Naval Hospital at Plymouth for vaccination and treatment. Unhappily Boat Memory, who was FitzRoy’s favourite among them, could not be saved, but the other three were successfully re-vaccinated. Fuegia Basket was in addition taken home by the doctor in charge of them in order to be exposed to measles with his own children. She duly had a favourable attack and quickly recovered with a strengthened immune system.

Through contacts with the Church Missionary Society, the Fuegians were next taken to Walthamstow just outside London for schooling in charge of the Revd William Wilson, and remained in his care until October 1831, still with James Bennett to keep an eye on them. Fuegia Basket and Jemmy Button were very receptive pupils, but the older man York Minster was not. He would reluctantly assist with practical activities like gardening, but firmly refused to learn to read. He also took what seemed to be an unhealthy interest in the ten-year-old Fuegia, following her everywhere, keeping her well away from other men, and treating her as if she was his personal possession. At this time there was no suggestion that anything sexual took place between them, though on board the Beagle later on she was deemed to be officially engaged to York in order to avoid embarrassment, and back in Tierra del Fuego she did become his wife. During that summer the Fuegians were taken to St James’s Palace at King William IV’s request, and Queen Adelaide honoured Fuegia Basket by placing one of her own bonnets on the girl’s head and a ring on her finger, and gave her some money to buy clothes for returning home.

FitzRoy had been led by Captain King to suppose that the Adventure and Beagle’s surveys in South America would need to be continued by some other ship, giving him an opportunity to restore the Fuegians to their native land. But having in March 1831 completed his official obligations with respect to the Beagle’s 1826–1830 cruise, for which he was officially commended, FitzRoy discovered that the Admiralty’s plans had for no stated reason been altered, and that their Lordships no longer intended to complete the survey. Feeling that he could not trust anyone but himself to return the Fuegians to the precise places from which they had been taken, he obtained twelve months’ leave of absence from the Navy. In June he made at his own expense an agreement with the owner of a small merchant ship to take him with five companions, the Fuegians, and a number of goats to Tierra del Fuego, where he proposed to stock some of the islands with goats and deposit his protégée and protégés. This agreement did not, however, have to be put into effect, for FitzRoy happened one day to mention his problem to one of his aristocratic and politically influential uncles, the fourth Duke of Grafton, and the former Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh’s half-brother Lord Londonderry. After some effective wire-pulling at the Admiralty, their Lordships were persuaded to appoint FitzRoy to command the Beagle once again for a second surveying cruise.

The greatest of hydrographers, Captain Francis Beaufort, who had taken charge of the Hydrographic Office in 1829, embraced with enthusiasm the opportunity of filling in some of the many blank spaces in the existing maps of the coast of Argentina and Tierra del Fuego, and extending the naval charts to cover not only Argentina and the Falkland Islands, but also more of the coasts of Chile and Peru as far north as Ecuador. FitzRoy would also be entrusted with the task of carrying a chain of meridian distances, which measured the difference in longitude between an established location and a new one, all the way round the world by sailing back across the Pacific. The Beagle was therefore instructed to return via the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia – calling at Port Jackson observatory in Sydney, Hobart, and King George Sound – the Cocos Keeling Islands, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, St Helena, Ascension, and so home. Beaufort’s long Memorandum to FitzRoy,

(#litres_trial_promo) carefully explaining this plan, included a note forbidding senior officers whom he might encounter to take from him any of his instruments or chronometers; instructions for sedulous observations of the eclipses of Jupiter’s third and fourth satellites; and advice on the best way of handling natives. Lastly, the Beagle was the first ship in the Navy to be issued with Beaufort’s list of the Figures, still in popular use today, to denote the force of the wind, based at the lower end on the speeds at which a man-of-war with all sails set would be driven, and at the upper end on what set of sails could just be carried safely at full chase. A second list of letters was drawn up to describe the state of the weather, but this has now fallen out of use.