The historian Diana Preston travelled around the world to retrace Charles Darwin’s momentous voyage aboard the HMS Beagle for her new book, The Evolution of Charles Darwin. She tells Historia about her own voyage of discovery in his wake.
After months of planning, I finally arrived on the densely-forested island of Chiloe, off Chile’s south-western coast, in rain so heavy it bounced off the ground. My guidebook warned of one of Chile’s wettest places – “nothing but an amphibious animal could tolerate the climate”, the author grumbled.
It wasn’t the usual travel guide – no recommendations about places to sleep or eat – nor the usual sort of travel writer. The author was Charles Darwin and the guide was the diary he kept during the voyage of HMS Beagle, sending it home to England in instalments and worrying what his family would make of it.
Since writing A Pirate of Exquisite Mind about an earlier circumnavigator, the polymath buccaneer and the first Briton to land in Australia, William Dampier, I’d been intrigued by the intellectual links between him and Darwin. Writing in the late 17th century, Dampier was the first to identify the concept of ‘sub-species’, a term he used about similar wading birds in Brazil. In the Galapagos Islands he described “bastard” green turtles which differed from those he’d seen in the Caribbean and elsewhere, suggesting location dependent differences within species.
In both cases Dampier was prefiguring Darwin’s thinking. Curious about what Darwin knew of Dampier’s work, I began reading Darwin’s writings to find them peppered with references to Dampier. I also discovered Dampier’s books were on the cramped shelves of the Beagle’s library.
Deciding to write about Charles Darwin himself was a natural progression. Just as Dampier’s transition from pirate to pioneer of descriptive zoology and botany intrigued me, so did Darwin’s personal evolution during the Beagle voyage. The more I read – especially Darwin’s shipboard diary, the small notebooks he filled during those five years and his many letters home – the clearer the impact of the voyage became.
The uncertain young man destined at his father’s urging for a career in the church who embarked in December 1831 was quite different from the confident figure who returned in 1836 determined to make his name in science.
By its length, and the fact it circumnavigated the globe, returning from South America across the Pacific via Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, the voyage allowed Darwin to collect a mass of specimens and data. With growing confidence he examined geological strata and compared and contrasted flora and fauna, whether on opposite sides of the Andes or within island groups such as the Falklands and Galapagos.
He collected fossils of extinct species, prompting him to think about their connections to species still living. In Chile he felt the ground shudder beneath his feet – his first experience of an earthquake – seeming proof of geologist Charles Lyell’s theory that the earth’s crust is in perpetual motion.
As Darwin’s writing reveals, when the voyage began he thought of himself primarily as an inexperienced geologist. However, in its later stages he turned increasingly to zoology and botany and, as the Beagle headed home through the South Atlantic, was already making notes on the potential evolution of species.
Everything he had seen of indigenous peoples from those of remote Tierra del Fuego to Tahitian islanders to Aboriginal communities in Australia had convinced him, unlike so many others of his time, that all humankind belongs to a single species whatever their stage of development, a view from which he never deviated.
How a young man, fussed over by adoring sisters in a wealthy middle-class Shrewsbury home, coped during the voyage intrigued me. In his diary Darwin admits frankly that before the Beagle sailed he fretted over whether he could live in the ship’s cramped crowded conditions – the Beagle was a mere ninety feet long. Yet the diary also reveals how curiosity and excitement overcame his misgivings.
While the Beagle’s commander, the highly-strung, volatile Robert FitzRoy, oversaw the painstaking surveying and longitudinal measurements that were the voyage’s primary purpose, Darwin rushed ashore whenever he could, sometimes for months on end. His experiences were often challenging.
In Patagonia he witnessed the war of extermination waged by the authorities against the indigenous peoples of the pampas. In Brazil, the widespread ownership and ill-treatment of slaves appalled him as a committed abolitionist.
Darwin’s boldness surprised me. He penetrated remote, sometimes hazardous, hinterlands, though usually taking the pistols FitzRoy insisted he purchase before sailing. In Argentina, Darwin relished the gauchos’ free and independent lifestyle, lassoing cattle with their bolas – stones attached to hide thongs – hacking slabs of meat from the carcass and roasting it over crackling fires of animal bones. Like the gauchos, he grew used to sleeping on his saddle beneath the starry southern hemisphere skies.
He embraced new experiences, sampling his first banana in the Cape Verde Islands and drinking tortoise urine in the Galapagos. He coped well in harsh climates such as the extreme cold of remote Tierra del Fuego. Such resilience seemed interestingly at odds with the semi-invalid he became not long after his return to England.
To appreciate better how Darwin altered during the voyage, I retraced his path where I could, especially in South America where the Beagle spent some two thirds of its time. In Chile, as well as that ‘amphibian’ island of Chiloe, I walked through the forests near Valdivia where Darwin experienced his first earthquake. From Santiago I replicated his journey over the high Andes to Mendoza in Argentina during which he discovered fossilised trees that had once flourished at sea level. In the Atacama desert I saw the pale lunar landscapes, smoking volcanoes and brilliantly coloured rock strata that so impressed him.
I visited many of the Beagle’s other destinations like Tierra del Fuego, Brazil, the Falklands, Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand. In the Galapagos I crunched across the cindery islands where Darwin landed and which he found less than beautiful, comparing them “to what we might imagine the cultivated arts of the infernal regions to be”.
Because the islands are so closely associated with Darwin’s theories it’s surprising to find he had no ‘eureka’ moment there and, indeed, inadequately labelled his famous specimens of Galapagos finches. Today the tame mockingbirds and finches are still numerous, as are the marine and land iguanas Darwin recorded, though sadly not the giant tortoises like the one he cheerfully rode upon.
With Darwin’s diary as my guide, I learned how his interest in the natural world developed into a consuming passion during the voyage. That’s not to say that he didn’t sometimes long to be home, especially when during his frequently bouts of seasickness. Yet realising the rare opportunity it had given him, he never seriously contemplated abandoning the voyage.
Initially it amazed me that after the Beagle’s return Darwin never went abroad again. In many ways, though, that was logical. Those five eventful, thought-provoking years had equipped him with virtually everything he needed for the explorations of the mind that would consume the rest of his life.
The Evolution of Charles Darwin: The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth by Diana Preston is published on 17 November, 2022.
Further reading:
https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk (Darwin Correspondence Project)
https://darwin-online.org.uk (Darwin Online Project)
Find out more about this book.
Diana studied Modern History at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her book tracing the development of atomic science from Marie Curie to Hiroshima, Before the Fallout, won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Science and Technology and her last book, Eight Days at Yalta, about the 1945 Yalta Conference, was honoured in 2021 by the United States Society of Presidential Descendants.
Diana has written Historia features on two controversial subjects, Finding empathy – the complexities of writing Robert Clive and Mutiny on the Bounty.
You may be interested to know that Charles Darwin’s descendant, Emma, is also Historia’s writing agony aunt, Dr Darwin. Emma has written about why she didn’t (couldn’t) use her well-known family as the basis for a historical novel in This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin, which was published in paperback on 12 February, 2022.
Images:
- Quarter Deck of a Man of War on diskivery or interesting Scenes on an Interesting Voyage, caricature of the crew of HMS Beagle, 1832, probably by Augustus Earle (detail; Darwin is centre right, in the top hat): Wikimedia (public domain)
- Charles Darwin’s first diagram of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species, 1837: Wikimedia (public domain)
- HMS Beagle at Tierra del Fuego by Conrad Martens, 1831–36: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Charles Darwin by George Richmond, 1840: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Giant Galapagos tortoise: author’s own photo
