In Search of Beetles and Respectability

Darwin had grown up along the banks of the Severn River in Shropshire, collecting pebbles and birds, completely unaware of the fortunes that made his life pleasant. His mother, Susannah, came from the wealthy Wedgwood family, which made china of the same name. Although his father, Robert, came from less wealthy stock, he built up a fortune of his own by working as a doctor and discreetly lending money to his patients. He eventually became rich enough to build his family a large house, the Mount, on a hillside overlooking the Severn.

Charles and his older brother Erasmus had the close, practically telepathic connection that brothers sometimes have. As teenagers they built themselves a laboratory at the Mount where they would dabble in chemicals and crystals. When Charles was 16, Erasmus went to Edinburgh to study medicine. Their father sent Charles along with him to keep Erasmus company, and ultimately to go to medical school as well. Charles was happy to tag along, for the company of his brother and for the adventure.

When they arrived in Edinburgh, Charles and Erasmus were shocked by the squalor and spectacle of the city. These two boys, raised in the genteel countryside where Jane Austen set her novels, encountered slums for the first time. Politics raged around them as Scottish nationalists, Jacobites, and Calvinists jostled over church and country. At Edinburgh University they faced a rabble of rough students shouting and shooting off pistols in the middle of lectures. Charles and Erasmus recoiled into each other’s company, spending their time talking together, walking along the shore, reading newspapers, and going to the theater.

Charles realized very quickly that he hated medicine. The lectures were dreary, the dissected corpses a nightmare, the operations–often amputations without anesthesia–terrifying. He kept himself busy with natural history. But although Charles knew that he could not become a doctor, he had no appetite for standing up to his father. When he came home to the Mount for the summer, he avoided bringing up the matter, spending his days instead shooting birds and learning how to stuff them. He would continue to avoid confrontations for the rest of his life.

Over the summer Robert Darwin decided to send Erasmus to London to continue his studies. Charles returned to Edinburgh alone in October 1826, with only his natural history to distract him from a life he had come to hate. He became friends with naturalists in Edinburgh, including a zoologist named Robert Grant, who took him under his wing. Grant had been trained as a doctor but had given up his practice to become one of the country’s great zoologists, studying sea pens, sponges, and other creatures that scientists of the time still knew almost nothing about. Grant proved a good mentor. “He was dry and formal in manner, but with much enthusiasm beneath this outer crust,” Darwin later wrote. He showed Darwin the tricks of zoology: how, for instance, to dissect marine creatures in seawater under a microscope. And Darwin in turn proved to be a bright apprentice; he was the first person ever to see the male and female sex cells of seaweed dance together.

In 1828, at the end of his second year in Edinburgh, Darwin went back home to the Mount. He could no longer avoid his father, and he finally confessed that he couldn’t become a doctor. Robert Darwin was furious. He told Charles, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat‑catching and you will be a disgrace, to yourself and all your family.”

Robert was not an ogre of a father. His son would become a rich man, and Robert wanted him to be more than idly rich. If Charles wouldn’t become a doctor, Robert could imagine only one other respectable profession that was still left open to his youngest son: the clergy. The Darwins were not particularly religious–Robert Darwin even privately doubted whether God existed–but in Britain religion brought security and respectability. Although Darwin had never felt any great passion for the church, he agreed, and the following year he went to Cambridge for a degree in theology.

Darwin did not turn out to be a hardworking student; he was less likely to be studying the Bible than hunting for beetles. He searched for the insects on the heaths and in the forests; to find the rarest species, he hired a laborer to scrape moss off trees and muck out the bottom of barges filled with reeds. And as for the future, Darwin wasn’t dreaming of a parsonage but of leaving England altogether.

He read about Alexander von Humboldt’s travels through the Brazilian rain forest and over the Andes, and he wanted to travel as well, to discover something about how nature worked. Humboldt had praised the Canary Islands, with their dense lowland jungles and rugged volcanic flanks, and Darwin began scheming an expedition. He found a Cambridge tutor, Marmaduke Ramsay, who was willing to travel to the Canaries with him. He honed his skills at geology by working as an assistant to the Cambridge geologist Adam Sedgwick for several weeks in Wales. When he returned from the expedition, ready to start making serious preparations for his trip to the Canary Islands, he got a message. Marmaduke Ramsay was dead.

Darwin was devastated. He traveled home to the Mount with no idea what to do. But when he arrived, there was a letter from another of his professors at Cambridge, John Stevens Henslow. Henslow wanted to know whether Darwin cared to take a trip around the world.

The Lonely Captain

The offer came from Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle. FitzRoy was charged with two missions: to use a new generation of precisely engineered clocks to navigate a trip around the world and to map the coastlines of South America. Argentina and its neighbors had just been freed from Spain’s control, and Britain needed to chart the waters as it set up new channels of trade.

Although this would be FitzRoy’s second mission as captain of the Beagle, he was only 27 years old. He was the product of an aristocratic family with vast estates in England and Ireland, and at the Royal Naval College he had been a sharp student of mathematics and science. He had served in the Mediterranean and in Buenos Aires, and in 1828, at age 23, he became captain of the Beagle. The previous captain had gone mad trying to survey the wave‑battered islands of Tierra del Fuego, as his crew developed scurvy and his bad maps led him in desolate circles. “The soul of man dies in him,” the captain had written in his logbook, and then shot himself.

FitzRoy was a jumble of propriety and passion, of aristocratic tradition and modern science, of missionary zeal and solitary desperation. While he was on his first mission as captain of the Beagle, surveying Tierra del Fuego, one of his boats was stolen by Indians. FitzRoy retaliated by capturing hostages, most of whom escaped. Those who remained behind, two men and a girl, seemed happy to stay on board, and FitzRoy suddenly decided that he would take them to England, educate them, and bring them back to convert their fellow Indians. On the way home he picked up a fourth Indian, whom he bought with a mother‑of‑pearl button. Back in England, one of the Indians died of smallpox, but FitzRoy planned to civilize the other three and return them to Tierra del Fuego on his second voyage, along with a missionary who would stay behind to educate the tribes.

FitzRoy had decided that he needed a companion for the coming voyage. Captains did not socialize with their crews, and the enforced solitude could be maddening–the previous captain’s suicidal ghost practically haunted the ship. And FitzRoy had an extra worry. His uncle, a politician whose career had disintegrated, had slit his own throat. Perhaps FitzRoy was susceptible to the same dangerous gloom. (His hunch was a good one. Some three decades later, deeply depressed at his own failing naval career, FitzRoy cut his own throat.)

FitzRoy asked the organizer of the expedition, Francis Beaufort, to find him a friend to keep him company. They agreed that this traveling companion would also act as an unofficial naturalist, to document the animals and plants the Beagle would encounter. FitzRoy wanted him to be a gentleman as well, someone who could hold a refined conversation, to help him stave off desolation.

Beaufort contacted his friend Henslow at Cambridge. Although the post sounded tempting, he decided he couldn’t abandon his wife and child for so long. Henslow offered it to a recent Cambridge graduate, Leonard Jenyns, who went so far as to pack his clothes but then had a change of heart; he had just been appointed to a parish and didn’t think it wise to quit so suddenly. So Henslow turned to Darwin. The journey was far beyond Darwin’s dream of the Canary Islands, and without a family or post holding him back, he jumped at the chance.

His father was not so eager. He worried about the brutal, filthy conditions on sailing ships; he imagined his son drowning. Besides, the navy was no place for a gentleman to be, and it was disreputable for a future clergyman to be heading off into the wilderness. If Charles went, he might never settle down in a proper life. Charles glumly wrote to Henslow that his father disapproved.

Yet Robert Darwin had not completely made up his own mind. When his son traveled to the Wedgwood estate to distract himself with hunting, Robert sent a note to his brother‑in‑law, Joseph Wedgwood. He explained his disapproval of the voyage but wrote that “if you think differently from me I shall wish him to follow your advice.”

Charles explained the situation to Wedgwood, who bucked up his nephew’s spirits. He then wrote a letter to Robert to argue that the pursuit of natural history was very suitable to a clergyman, and that it was a rare opportunity “of seeing men and things as happens to few.” After sending off the letter in the early morning, Wedgwood tried to occupy Charles with partridge shooting, but by 10 o’clock the two of them set out for the Mount to argue the case in person. They discovered that Robert Darwin had already read the letter and relented. He gave his son money for the trip; Darwin’s sisters gave him new shirts.

Darwin sent a letter to Francis Beaufort, telling him to ignore his previous letter to Henslow: he would be joining the Beagle. He began arranging for the voyage, although he hadn’t yet actually met FitzRoy. And soon he heard rumors that the captain was having second thoughts. In one of his typical reversals, FitzRoy had started telling people that the position was already taken by a friend of his, and word got back to Darwin.

Darwin was baffled and heartsick, but he kept an appointment with FitzRoy in London despite the rumors. As he stared out the coach window, he worried that this voyage would evaporate as quickly as the first.

When FitzRoy and Darwin met, FitzRoy immediately tried to make out the voyage to be awful–uncomfortable, expensive, and perhaps not even completely around the world. But Darwin would not be deterred. Instead, he charmed FitzRoy with his congenial parson’s manner, his ample scientific training, his cultivated Cambridge tone, and his tactical deference. By the end of the meeting FitzRoy was won over. It was agreed: they would sail together.

“Woe unto ye beetles of South America,” Darwin declared.

Building the Earth

When Darwin arrived at Plymouth in October 1831, with his trunks full of books and scientific equipment, he also brought with him the ideas of his day about Earth and the life that inhabits it. His teachers at Cambridge taught him that by learning about the world, one could learn about God’s will. Yet the more British scientists discovered, the harder it was to rely on the Bible as an unerring guide.

British geologists, for example, no longer accepted that the world was only a few thousand years old. It had once been enough to accept the literal word of the Bible, that humanity was created in the first week of creation. In 1658, James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh, had used the Bible along with historical records to pinpoint the age of the planet. He declared that God had created it on October 22, 4004 B.C. But it soon became clear that Earth had changed since its creation. Geologists could find fossils of shells and other signs of marine life in the layers of rock exposed in cliff faces. Surely God had not placed them there when He created Earth. Early geologists interpreted the fossils as the remains of animals killed during Noah’s Flood. When the oceans covered Earth, they were buried in the muck that washed to the bottom. The sediment formed layers of rock on the ocean floor, and when the waters subsided, some of the layers collapsed. In the process, the fossil‑strewn cliffs and mountains were created.

By the end of the 1700s, though, most geologists had given up trying to fit Earth’s history into a few thousand years, with the only chance for change a single catastrophic flood. Some argued that when the planet had been formed it was covered in a global ocean, which slowly deposited granite and other kinds of rock on top of one another. As the ocean retreated, it exposed parts of the rock, which eroded and formed new layers.

Other geologists argued that the forces creating Earth’s surface were coming from within. James Hutton, a Scottish gentleman farmer, envisioned a hot molten core of the planet pushing up granite from below, creating volcanoes in some places and uplifting vast parts of Earth’s surface in others. Rains and wind eroded mountains and other raised parts of the planet, and this sediment was carried to the ocean, where it formed new rock that would be raised above sea level later, in a series of global cycles of creation and destruction. Hutton saw Earth as a finely crafted perpetual‑motion machine, always keeping itself habitable for humans.

Hutton discovered evidence for his theory in the rocks of Scotland. He found veins of granite reaching up into sedimentary rocks. He found exposures where the uppermost sedimentary rock layers were arranged in proper horizontal fashion, but then just under them, other layers were tilted practically vertically. The lowest layers, Hutton argued, had been deposited in some ancient body of water, but were then tilted and lifted above sea level by subterranean forces and then gradually eroded by rain. Later, the tilted layers were covered in water, and a new set of horizontal layers of sediment covered them. And finally, the entire sequence had been pushed back up out of the water, producing the outcrops that Hutton saw.

“A question naturally occurs with regard to time,” Hutton said when he first presented his new theory to the public. “What had been the space of time necessary for accomplishing this great work?”

His answer was, a lot. In fact he envisioned an “indefinite space of time.”

Hutton had discovered a fundamental principle about how Earth changes: that imperceptibly slow forces at work today have been reshaping the planet throughout its history. For that, he’s a hero to many geologists today. But in his own time, he was roundly opposed. A few critics complained that his theory went against Genesis. But most geologists disputed him on his assumption that Earth’s history had no direction, that it ran through self‑sustaining cycles of creation and destruction without beginning or ending. As they looked more closely at the geological record, they saw that the world had not always been the same.

The best evidence came not from the rocks themselves but from the fossils that they encased. In France, for example, a young paleontologist named Georges Cuvier compared the skulls of living elephants to the fossils of elephants that had been unearthed in Siberia, Europe, and North America–all places where no elephants are found today. Cuvier sketched out their massive jaws, their teeth fused together into corrugated slabs. He demonstrated that the fossil elephants (called mammoths) were fundamentally different from those alive today–“as much as, or more than, the dog differs from the jackal and the hyena,” he wrote. It would be hard to claim that such a distinctive giant was wandering around without anyone noticing it. For the first time, a naturalist had shown that species had become extinct in the past.

Cuvier went on to demonstrate that many other mammals had gone extinct as well. His discoveries, he wrote, “seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe. But what was this primitive earth? What was this nature that was not subject to man’s dominion? And what revolution was able to wipe it out, to the point of leaving no trace of it except some half‑decomposed bone?”

Cuvier went even further. There had not been a single catastrophe that had wiped out mammoths and other extinct mammals, but a whole series of them. The fossils of the different ages were so distinct that Cuvier could even use them to identify the rock formation where they had been found. Exactly what had caused the catastrophes Cuvier didn’t know for sure. He speculated that revolutions might be caused by a sudden rise of the ocean or a drastic cold snap. Afterward, new animals and plants appeared either by migrating from elsewhere on the planet or by being somehow created. But Cuvier was sure of one thing: revolutions were common in the history of Earth. If Noah’s Flood was real, it had been only the most recent in a long succession of catastrophes; each had wiped out a slew of species, and most had taken place long before humans existed.

To work out the true pace of life’s history, British geologists such as Adam Sedgwick set out to chart the entire geological record of the planet, layer by layer. The names they gave to the formations, names like the Devonian and the Cambrian are still used today. But while British geologists in the early 1800s were a long way from a literal reading of the Bible, they still saw their work as a religious calling. They were convinced their science could reveal God’s work–even His intentions. Sedgwick himself referred to nature as “the reflection of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God.”