By Gary Topping–
Many years ago my son gave me, as a birthday present or something, a copy of Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, his diary of his five-year circumnavigation (1831-36) aboard a British naval vessel during which he accomplished most of the research that went into his Origin of Species (1859). I appreciated the gift, recognizing that it was an IMPORTANT BOOK, but like several other such books, it remained unread in my library. My interests, as a professional historian, of course rest more in the humanities than the sciences. But the book stayed there on the shelf, its black cover glaring at me accusingly each morning when I went downstairs for my workout. Last week, for some inexplicable reason, it piqued my interest at last and I began to read it. To my surprise, in some kind of deferred gratification, I have been loving the book, even while reading it, as I have to, from a humanistic perspective.
As we all know, Darwin’s great contribution to science was to see Nature as a dynamic phenomenon, constantly growing and dying and changing and evolving, rather than the static interpretation advocated by conservative Biblical students, who held that God created the world in the very form in which we see it today. Darwin did not fully develop the idea until after his return to England, but it already comes across in Beagle in his geological observations. He had gotten that idea from the great geologist Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which shows mountains coming into existence, then eroding away, continents shifting, and so forth. It remained for Darwin to extend that dynamic interpretation throughout the animate world.
What does come across in the book in a very invigorating and engaging way is Darwin’s almost childish glee in his observations of all aspects of Nature, from mountain ranges to jungles to microscopic one-celled creatures. This is what delights my humanistic eye, his breathless tone and his poetic and metaphoric prose. Like a starving man gorging himself on a Thanksgiving dinner, Darwin opens his eyes and his heart to take in his observations in great gulps, as though he were discovering the natural world for the first time—as indeed he was, in some ways.
We first encounter this only a few lines into his very first journal entry, reporting his observations on one of the Cape Verde Islands, the ship’s first stop just off the west African coast. The island, he observes, was a volcanic desolation with almost no vegetation, but its mountains were unforgettably spectacular: “The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is of great interest; if, indeed, a person, fresh from the sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of any thing but his own happiness.” (For perspective, it should be noted that Darwin, who suffered agonizingly from seasickness, hated every wave of every ocean and detested life aboard ship. Fortunately, the Beagle made such frequent and lengthy stops for scientific observation that he actually spent much of his five-year voyage on land.)
For Darwin, who had spent his life among the meticulously sculpted English gardens, stepping ashore into a Brazilian jungle was an almost overwhelming immersion into the wild tangle of Nature. Noting that a day spent there “has passed delightfully,” he goes on to add that “Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has been wandering by himself in a Brazilian forest. . . .To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this, brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope again to experience.”
Nor was Darwin the scientist content to confine himself to observations of rocks and birds and insects, for he was keenly aware of the human inhabitants of the lands he visited, and his notes about their cultures and economies would delight an anthropologist. (Anthropology did not yet exist as a separate field of science.) And those notes are tinged with a strong moral element. During much of Darwin’s life the British people had been increasingly ridden with guilt over their participation in the slave trade and the presence of slavery throughout their expanding colonial possessions. Led by abolitionists like William Wilberforce, Parliament had outlawed the slave trade within the empire in 1807. Slavery itself was still a current issue during the voyage of the Beagle, and in 1833, mere weeks before Wilberforce’s death, slavery was at last outlawed throughout most of the empire.
On one of Darwin’s overland trips, this time to a village some one hundred miles east of Rio de Janeiro, his party passed a place where at one time a group of escaped slaves had established a hardscrabble encampment where they were eventually discovered by soldiers, whereupon “the whole were seized with the exception of one old woman, who sooner than again be led into slavery, dashed herself to pieces from the summit of the mountain. In a Roman matron,” Darwin sarcastically points out, “this would have been called the noble love of freedom: in a poor negress it is mere brutal obstinacy.”
My reading of Voyage of the Beagle has only to this point reached Chapter III, and I have not exhausted the literary delights even in that brief selection. One can only imagine what is awaiting me in the remainder of what I once feared would be a dreary recitation of scientific data. Onward!
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.
