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I proved today the utility of a contrivance which will afford me many hours of amusement & work. It is a bag four feet deep made of bunting; & attached to a semicircular bow this by lines is kept upright, & dragged behind the vessel. This evening it brought up a mass of small animals, & tomorrow I look forward to a greater harvest.
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This was only the second recorded use, following that of the Irish zoologist J. Vaughan Thompson a few years earlier, of a net specifically designed for the capture of plankton, the name adopted sixty years later for the many kinds of small plants (phytoplankton) or animals (zooplankton) found floating or drifting at various depths in the ocean. Unlike John Coldstream’s oyster trawl, whose lower bar was dragged along the bottom of the sea so that it gathered up the organisms that lived there, Charles’s net was intended to collect from the surface of the water. His notes continue:
11
. I am quite tired having worked all day at the produce of my net. The number of animals that the net collects is very great & fully explains the manner so many animals of a large size live so far from land. Many of these creatures so low in the scale of nature are most exquisite in their forms & rich colours. It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.
This was indeed a most auspicious beginning, for Charles was far ahead of his time in his instant perception of the significance of plankton in what nowadays would be called the oceanic food web.
During the next few days a number of interesting animals were captured in the net. One of the first was a Portuguese man-of-war, Physalia, a colonial hydrozoan of the order known as siphonophores,
(#litres_trial_promo) which have a large horizontal float to hold them at the surface of the sea and long tentacles for capturing their prey. This particular species is well known to swimmers in the warm parts of the North Atlantic for its capability of inflicting a painful sting, as Charles quickly found when he got some of the slime on to his fingers, and on accidentally putting them into his mouth felt the disagreeable sensation, familiar to him, that biting the root of the arum lily produces. There were other hydrozoans such as sea butterflies like the By-the-Wind Sailor Velella, with a small sail on its upper surface, some salps growing in long chains, and ‘a very simple animal’ of which Charles produced an excellent picture on the first page of the twenty plates that he drew under his Bancks microscope to illustrate his Zoology Notes. He later found more of these creatures off the coasts of Brazil and Patagonia, where he described their anatomy in greater detail, but he had still not succeeded in classifying them when the Beagle returned to England in 1836. Today they are instantly recognisable as arrow-worms of the genus Sagitta, powerful carnivorous predators on other planktonic animals, which are seized by grasping spines located on either side of the head. They are plankton common in all tropical seas, but they had only been formally named in 1827, in a paper that was not in the Beagle’s library.
On the Beagle’s arrival at St Jago (São Tiago on a modern map) in the Cape Verde Islands on 16 January, Charles divided his time between geology in the mornings, collecting the animals that he found on the seashore in the middle of the day, and examining his specimens and writing his notes in the evening. With FitzRoy and the First Lieutenant John Wickham he visited St Jago’s famous baobab tree of legendary age, whose height was measured with naval accuracy both by triangulation and by being climbed by the Captain and letting down a string from the top. The marine wildlife included a variety of sea slugs (Doris), sea hares (Aplysia), sea urchins, sea anemones, shells, turbellarian flatworms, and some corals, but the highlight was Charles’s encounter with an octopus, of which he wrote:
Found amongst the rocks West of Quail Island at low water an Octopus. When first discovered he was in a hole & it was difficult to perceive what it was. As soon as I drove him from his den he shot with great rapidity across the pool of water, leaving in his train a large quantity of the ink. Even then, when in shallow place it was difficult to catch him, for he twisted his body with great ease between the stones & by his suckers stuck very fast to them. When in the water the animal was of a brownish purple, but immediately when on the beach the colour changed to a yellowish green. When I had the animal in a basin of salt water on board this fact was explained by its having the Chamælion like power of changing the colour of its body. The general colour of animal was French grey with numerous spots of bright yellow. The former of these colours varied in intensity, the other entirely disappeared & then again returned. Over the whole body there were continually passing clouds, varying in colour from a “hyacinth red” to a “Chesnut brown”. As seen under a lens these clouds consisted of minute points apparently injected with a coloured fluid. The whole animal presented a most extraordinary mottled appearance, & much surprised every body who saw it. The edges of the sheath were orange, this likewise varied its tint. The animal seemed susceptible to small shocks of galvanism: contracting itself & the parts between the point of contact of wires, became almost black. This in a lesser degree followed from scratching the animal with a needle. The cups were in double rows on the arms & coloured reddish. The eye could be entirely closed by a circular eyelid, the pupil was of a dark blue. The animal was slightly phosphorescent at night.
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Charles was greatly excited by what he thought was a new discovery, and described it enthusiastically in his first letter to Henslow. But Henslow replied that he too had seen the colour changes of an octopus he had caught at Weymouth, and that the phenomenon had also been reported by others. Cuvier had indeed mentioned the ability of an octopus to outdo a chameleon in this respect, but Charles was nevertheless the first to give an accurate description of the properties of its chromatophores, the pigment cells in the skin whose rapid contraction and expansion under nervous control are responsible for the vivid colour changes in octopus and other cephalopods such as cuttlefish and squid. Their function is not only to camouflage the animals when they move to new surroundings, but as has only been appreciated very recently, to provide a means of communication between them.
In his Autobiography, Charles wrote:
The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important than natural history, as reasoning here comes into play. On first examining a new district nothing can appear more hopeless than the chaos of rocks; but by recording the stratification and nature of the rocks and fossils at many points, always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible. I had brought with me the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which I studied attentively; and this book was of the highest service to me in many ways. The very first place which I examined, namely St. Jago in the Cape Verde Islands, showed me clearly the wonderful superiority of Lyell’s manner of treating geology, compared with that of any other author whose works I had with me or ever afterwards read.
His copy of Volume 1 of Lyell’s Principles was inscribed ‘Given me by Capt. F.R. C.Darwin’, and he had been advised by Henslow to read it ‘but on no account to accept the views therein advocated’.
Charles’s first geological project was to examine the structure of Quail Island, which as it happened was painted by the artist Conrad Martens about eighteen months later, on his way out to join the Beagle at Monte Video (see Plate 1). It was a ‘miserable desolate spot less than a mile in circumference’ in the harbour of Porto Praya, but served Charles usefully as a key to the structure of the main island of St Jago. He wrote in his Autobiography:
The geology of St Jago is very striking yet simple: a stream of lava formerly flowed over the bed of the sea, formed of triturated recent shells and corals, which it has baked into a hard white rock. Since then the whole island has been upheaved. But the line of white rock revealed to me a new and important fact, namely that there had been afterwards subsidence round the craters, which had since been in action, and had poured forth lava. It then first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight. That was a memorable hour to me, and how distinctly I can call to mind the low cliff of lava beneath which I rested, with the sun glowing hot, a few strange desert plants growing near, and with living corals in the tidal pools at my feet.
In the notes made at the time Charles’s interpretation was that both islands were volcanic, and had at some not too distant time been submerged beneath the sea, where they quietly collected beds of marine material, followed by another layer of molten lava.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The whole mass was then raised, since which or at the time there has been a partial sinking. I judge of this from the appearance of distortion, & indeed the distant line of coast seen to the East, which is considerably higher, bears me out.’
This was accompanied by a section drawing of Quail Island showing the successive layers. Tests on specimens from the white layer D showed that it ‘Effervesces readily with Mur: Acid, gives precipitate with Oxalate of Ammonia. – Under Blowpipe becomes slowly caustic, & with heat Cobalt remains of a Violet colour. – Carbonate of Magnesia. (?) Carb. of Lime.’ (The white line may be seen in Plate 1.)
In his first independent geological project, Charles’s careful analysis of the sequence of rocks in Quail Island showed with what great effect he had followed the teaching of Sedgwick and Henslow. His notes also reveal how geology allowed him from the start to exercise to the full his latent passion for argument and theorisation. On completing his notes on Quail Island, he immediately reread them and wrote, ‘I have drawn my pen through those parts which appear absurd,’ and a year later he added a long list of further comments and theories. At the same time he immediately fell in wholeheartedly with Lyell’s gradualist and not yet generally accepted approach that geological changes resulted from slow processes operating over a long period of time. Thus his evidence clearly supported the view that both subsidence and elevation of the land must have taken place over an appreciable area in the not too distant past, and he was led to agree with Lyell that the forces involved might act slowly and evenly so as to leave superficial features of the landscape and buildings undisturbed. Another relevant factor in the story was Charles’s identification of the dust that thickly coated the ship throughout their visit to St Jago, ‘to the great injury of fine astronomical instruments’, as volcanic in origin.
Charles reacted to his first day on St Jago with the enthusiasm that never deserted him:
I returned to the shore, treading on Volcanic rock, hearing the notes of unknown birds, & seeing new insects fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes – he is overwhelmed with what he sees & cannot justly comprehend it. Such are my feelings, & such may they remain.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_4bcb5170-d0d8-529c-8697-84c30550dcc7)
Across the Equator to Bahia (#ulink_4bcb5170-d0d8-529c-8697-84c30550dcc7)
On the day originally fixed for sailing on across the Atlantic to Brazil, FitzRoy was busy on shore complying with Captain Beaufort’s strict instructions that no port should be quitted before not only the magnetic angle, but also the dip and daily variation had been ascertained. On 8 February the instruments were re-embarked, and after swinging the ship and determining less than twenty minutes’ difference in any position of the bearing of the peak eleven miles away, the Beagle weighed anchor and sailed. On 10 February they came alongside the packet Lyra, on passage from London to Rio de Janeiro, and were pleased to find that she was carrying a box of six sounding-leads for them, modified by their designer to operate satisfactorily at depths well below a hundred fathoms. Charles posted a brief letter to his father, in case it might arrive sooner than a long one due to be dispatched from Bahia, in which he said:
I think, if I can so soon judge, I shall be able to do some original work in Natural History – I find there is so little known about many of the Tropical animals.
At sunset on 15 February the St Paul Rocks were seen on the horizon, these being the summit of a sunken mountain, and further from land than FitzRoy had ever seen a group of such small rocks. At daylight next morning the sea was smooth, and while the Beagle sailed round so that Stokes could take angles and make soundings, two boats were sent out to enable FitzRoy, Charles and a party to land on the rocks and examine them. As FitzRoy described it:
When our party had effected a landing through the surf, and had a moment’s leisure to look about them, they were astonished at the multitudes of birds which covered the rocks, and absolutely darkened the sky. Mr Darwin afterwards said that till then he had never believed the stories of men knocking down birds with sticks; but there they might be kicked before they would move out of the way. The first impulse of our invaders of this bird-covered rock was to lay about them like schoolboys; even the geological hammer at last became a missile. ‘Lend me a hammer?’ asked one. ‘No, no’ replied the owner, ‘you’ll break the handle’; but hardly had he said so, when, overcome by the novelty of the scene, and the example of those around him, away went the hammer, with all the force of his own right arm.
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In his own account Charles did not deny that he had been somewhat carried away. So he participated in the slaughter of birds on land while a similar struggle to obtain fish for the cooking pot was also taking place in the surrounding waters, both birds and fish being welcome to men who had been living too long on salt provisions. But he nevertheless found time to note that unlike almost all other isolated rocks in mid-ocean, St Paul was exceptionally not volcanic in origin, but was a mineral unfamiliar to him that incorporated streaks of serpentine.
(#litres_trial_promo) The surrounding waters were very deep, so that it was the tip of a very large and steeply sided mountain. His conclusion was correct, and the modern view is that St Paul is an important example of the primordial material of the earth’s mantle modified to become the basalt layer of the oceanic crust. The only birds to be seen were boobies, a species of gannet, and noddies, a species of tern; and the only other animals of any size were large tropical crabs of the genus Grapsus. Not a single plant, nor even a lichen, could Charles find growing on the rocks. There were some ticks and mites, and a small brown moth feeding on feathers that could have arrived with the birds; a rove beetle and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and a large number of spiders that presumably preyed on the other insects. He reflected that since the first colonists of the coral islets in the South Seas were probably similar, ‘it destroys the poetry of the story to find that these little vile insects should thus take possession before the cocoanut tree and other noble plants have appeared’.
The Beagle sailed on. They were now close to the Equator, and preparations were set in hand for the traditional naval ceremonies that accompanied ‘crossing the line’. Soon after dark they were hailed by the gruff voice of a pseudo-Neptune. The Captain held a conversation with him through a speaking-trumpet, and it was arranged that in the morning he would visit the ship.
The proceedings next day were vividly described from memory nearly sixty years later by the then fourteen-year-old Midshipman Philip Gidley King:
The effect produced on the young naturalist’s mind was unmistakably remarkable. His first impression was that the ship’s crew from Captain downwards had gone off their heads. ‘What fools these sailors make of themselves’, he said as he descended the companion ladder to wait below till he was admitted. The Captain received his godship and Amphitrite his wife with becoming solemnity; Neptune was surrounded by a set of the most ultra-demoniacal looking beings that could be well imagined, stripped to the waist, their naked arms and legs bedaubed with every conceivable colour which the ship’s stores could turn out, the orbits of their eyes exaggerated with broad circles of red and yellow pigments. Those demons danced a sort of nautical war dance exulting on the fate awaiting their victims below. Putting his head down the after companion the captain called out ‘Darwin, look up here!’ Up came the young naturalist in wonderment but yet prepared for any extravagance in the world that seamen could produce. A gaze for a moment at the scene on deck was sufficient, he was convinced he was amongst madmen, and giving one yell, disappeared again down the ladder. He was of course the first to be called by the official secretary, and Neptune received him with grace and courtesy, observing that in deference to his high standing on board as a friend and messmate of the Captain his person would be held sacred from the ordinary rites observed in the locality. Of course Mr Darwin readily entered into the fun and submitted to a few buckets of water thrown over him and the Captain as they sat together by one of the youngsters as if by accident.
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From Charles’s own account, he was treated with rather less courtesy than King remembered:
Before coming up, the constable blindfolded me & thus lead along, buckets of water were thundered all around. I was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. They then lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop. A signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me & ducked me. At last, glad enough, I escaped. Most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths & rubbed on their faces. The whole ship was a shower bath, & water was flying about in every direction, of course not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.
Although FitzRoy condemned the practice as an absurd and dangerous piece of folly, he also defended its survival on the grounds that ‘its effects on the minds of those engaged in preparing for its mummeries, who enjoy it at the time, and talk of it long afterwards, cannot easily be judged of without being an eyewitness’.
The Beagle’s next port of call on 20 February was at Fernando Noronha, another isolated group of small islands, where the most prominent feature was a conical hill on the principal island rising very steeply to a peak a thousand feet high, and seemingly overhanging the shore on one side. Near its summit a permanently manned lookout station was maintained by the Brazilian government. According to Beaufort’s programme, FitzRoy was required to verify some measurements of longitude made a few years earlier by another survey ship in pendulum experiments conducted in the Governor’s house.
With the Beagle lying offshore that evening before anchoring in the harbour, Lieutenant Sulivan skilfully harpooned a large porpoise, and moments later ‘a dozen knives were skinning him for supper’. In the morning, landing despite the high surf as near as possible to the house where the previous observations had probably been made, FitzRoy took his shots of the sun and compared his chronometers with those used on shore, while Charles spent ‘a most delightful day in wandering about the woods’. He concluded that unlike the St Paul Rocks, Fernando Noronha consisted of a volcanic rock called phonolite,
(#litres_trial_promo) which had probably been injected in a molten state among yielding strata, but was not of very recent origin. The island was thickly covered with trees, often coated with delicate blossoms, though because of the low rainfall their growth was not luxurious, and FitzRoy noted that firewood collected by the crew was full of centipedes and other noxious insects. There were no gaudy birds, no humming birds, and no flowers, so Charles felt that he had not yet seen the full grandeur of the Tropics.
At noon on 28 February the Beagle anchored in the great Bay of All Saints (Baia de Todos os Santos) on the mainland of Brazil, on the north side of which the fine old town of Bahia, now known as Salvador, was situated. The view of the town itself was magnificent, and when next morning Charles had ventured ashore, he wrote in his journal of what he saw with a characteristic aesthetic appreciation, coupled with a strictly practical conclusion:
The day has passed delightfully: delight is however a weak term for such transports of pleasure – I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest. Amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking. The general luxuriance of the vegetation bears the victory: the elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end. A most paradoxical mixture of sound & silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud that in the evening it can be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore. Yet within the recesses of the forest when in the midst of it a universal stillness appears to reign. To a person fond of Natural History such a day as this brings with it pleasure more acute than he ever may again experience. After wandering about for some hours, I returned to the landing place. Before reaching it I was overtaken by a Tropical storm. I tried to find shelter under a tree so thick that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain, yet here in a couple of minutes, a little torrent flowed down the trunk. It is to this violence we must attribute the verdure in the bottom of the wood. If the showers were like those of a colder clime, the moisture would be absorbed or evaporated before reaching the ground.
He took many more walks with King or another companion, and after collecting numerous small beetles and some geological specimens, reflected that:
It is a new & pleasant thing for me to be conscious that naturalizing is doing my duty, & that if I neglected that duty I should at the same time neglect what has for some years given me so much pleasure.
Sometimes it was driver ants that caught his attention:
Some of the smaller species migrate in large bodies. One day my attention was drawn by many spiders, Blattaæ [a species of cockroach] & other insects rushing in the greatest agitation across a bare bit of ground. Behind this every stalk & leaf was blackened by a small ant. They crossed the open space till they arrived at a piece of old wall on the side of the road. Here the swarm divided & descended on each side, by this many insects were fairly enclosed: & the efforts which the poor little creatures made to extricate themselves from such a death were surprising. When the ants came to the road they changed their course & in narrow files reascended the wall & proceeding along one side in the course of a few hours (when I returned) they all had disappeared. When a small stone was placed in the track of one of their files, the whole of them first attacked it & then immediately retired: it would not on the open space have been one inch out of their way to have gone round the obstacle, & doubtless if it had previously been there, they would have done so. In a few seconds another larger body returned to the attack, but they not succeeding in moving the stone, this line of direction was entirely given up.
On another day he shot a most beautiful large lizard, but he complained that both here and at Rio de Janeiro, birds seemed to be unexpectedly scarce in the tropical jungle. Had he, however, set up a modern mist net in a clearing, and left it unobserved for an hour, he would have been better impressed by the large number of small birds that would have been caught in it.
Confined on board the Beagle by a badly swollen knee for a couple of weeks, Charles captured a puffer fish Diodon swimming in its unexpanded form alongside the ship, and since he was always interested in the mechanics of animal movements, wrote a closely analysed account of its behaviour, as usual unafraid to contradict the authorities if necessary:
On head four soft projections; the upper ones longer like the feelers of a snail. Eye with pupil dark blue; iris yellow mottled with black. The dorsal, caudal & anal fins are so close together that they act as one. These, as well as the Pectorals which are placed just before branchial apertures, are in a continued state of tremulous motion even when the animal remains still. The animal propels its body by using these posterior fins in same manner as a boat is sculled, that is by moving them rapidly from side to side with an oblique surface exposed to the water. The pectoral fins have great play, which is necessary to enable the animal to swim with its back downwards. When handled, a considerable quantity of a fine “Carmine red” fibrous secretion was emitted from the abdomen & stained paper, ivory &c of a high colour. The fish has several means of defence, it can bite hard & can squirt water to some distance from its Mouth, making at the same time a curious noise with its jaws. After being taken out of water for a short time & then placed in again, it absorbed by the mouth (perhaps likewise by the branchial apertures) a considerable quantity of water & air, sufficient to distend its body into a perfect globe. This process is effected by two methods: chiefly by swallowing & then forcing it into the cavity of the body, its return being prevented by a muscular contraction which is externally visible; and by the dilatation of the animal producing suction. The water however I observed entered in a stream through the mouth, which was distended wide open & motionless; hence this latter action must have been caused by some kind of suction. When the body is thus distended, the papillæ with which it is covered become stiff, the above mentioned tentacula on the head being excepted. The animal being so much buoyed up, the branchial openings are out of water, but a stream regularly flowed out of them which was as constantly replenished by the mouth. After having remained in this state for a short time, the air & water would be expelled with considerable force from the branchial apertures & the mouth. The animal at its pleasure could emit a certain portion of the water & I think it is clear that this is taken in partly for the sake of regulating the specific gravity of its body. The skin about the abdomen is much looser than that on the back & in consequence is most distended; hence the animal swims with its back downwards. Cuvier doubts their being able to swim when in this position; but they clearly can not only swim forward, but also move round. This they effect, not like other fish by the action of their tails, but collapsing the caudal fins, they move only by their pectorals. When placed in fresh water seemed singularly little inconvenienced.
The prevailing rock in Bahia was gneiss-granite.
(#litres_trial_promo) An interesting point was that in the immediate neighbourhood of Bahia, the foliations tended to be lined up with the coastline striking E 50°N, in agreement with the observations of Humboldt in Venezuela and Colombia.
It was at Bahia that one of Charles’s most violent quarrels with FitzRoy arose. When he first landed there he was horrified to find himself in a country that was still a haven for ‘that scandal to Christian Nations, Slavery’ by legally importing slaves from Africa. This practice continued, thanks to the dependence of the Brazilian coffee-growers on slave labour, until it was abolished a quarter of a century later in response to sustained pressure from the British government. Slavery was an issue that always aroused Charles’s strongest emotions, brought up as he had been in a family where both of his grandfathers had played prominent parts in the anti-slavery movement during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, and which numbered influential Whig campaigners for the abolition of slavery among their friends. Two weeks later, Captain Paget of HMS Samarang, when dining with FitzRoy on the Beagle, regaled the company with horrific facts about the practice of slave owners in Brazil. As Charles recorded in his journal, Paget also proved the utter falseness of the view that even the best-treated of the slaves did not wish to return home to their countries. What Charles did not record at the time, but only revealed much later, was the sequel:
Early in the voyage at Bahia in Brazil, FitzRoy defended and praised slavery, which I abominated, and told me that he had just visited a great slave-owner, who had called up many of his slaves and asked them whether they were happy, and whether they wished to be free, and all answered ‘No’. I then asked him, perhaps with a sneer, whether he thought that the answers of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything. This made him excessively angry, and he said that as I doubted his word, we could not live any longer together. I thought that I should have been compelled to leave the ship; but as soon as the news spread, which it did quickly, as the captain sent for the first lieutenant to assuage his anger by abusing me, I was deeply gratified by receiving an invitation from all the gun-room officers to mess with them. But after a few hours FitzRoy showed his usual magnanimity by sending an officer to me with an apology and a request that I would continue to live with him.
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As on other occasions, FitzRoy’s anger was short-lived. Moreover, as he had already shown by his actions, he was always very sympathetic to natives, slaves and underdogs of all kinds, so that his outburst was perhaps more a reflection of his Tory political views than of his true feelings for humanity. Charles’s point was well taken, and when writing from Monte Video to Beaufort in July 1833, FitzRoy said, ‘If other trades fail, when I return to old England (if that day ever arrives) I am thinking of raising a crusade against the slavers! Think of Monte Video having sent out four slavers!!! … The Adventure will make a good privateer!!’ And by the end of the voyage his views on the evil of slavery in Brazil were fully in agreement with those held by Charles.
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CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_ffe74c6c-75d9-55b8-8824-bf3232905794)
Rio de Janeiro (#ulink_ffe74c6c-75d9-55b8-8824-bf3232905794)
On 18 March, after taking further soundings for the chart of the Bay of All Saints, the Beagle sailed slowly out in a light wind, and headed for the Abrolhos, a group of uninhabited islets off the coast of Brazil some 350 miles south of Bahia. Five days later the wind was still light, but there was a sufficient swell to make Charles uncomfortable. Occupation was always the best cure, so he settled down at his microscope to examine a mould called mucor growing on ginger from the steward’s cupboard. He wrote in his notes:
Mucor growing on green ginger: colour yellow, length from 1/20 to 1/15 of an inch. Diameter of stalk .001, of ball at extremity .006. Stalk transparent, cylindrical for about 1/10 of length, near to ball it is flattened, angular & rather broarder:
(#litres_trial_promo) Terminal spherule full of grains, .0001 in diameter & sticking together in planes: When placed in water the ball partially burst & sent forth with granules large bubbles of air. A rush of fluid was visible in the stalk or cylinder. If merely breathed on, the spherule expanded itself & three conical semitransparent projections were formed on surface. (Much in the same manner as is seen in Pollen) These cones in a short time visibly were contracted & drawn within the spherule.
Unfortunately the specimen of the mould Mucor (Mucoraceae) was not well preserved, and Henslow wrote to Charles in January 1833 after receiving the first consignment from the Beagle, ‘For goodness sake what is N
. 223; it looks like the remains of an electric explosion, a mere mass of soot – something very curious I dare say.’
Around the Abrolhos there were shallow rocky shoals stretching far out to the east. One of the tasks allotted to the Beagle by Beaufort was to determine the precise extent of these shoals. FitzRoy therefore steered south-east to the latitude of the Abrolhos, and then turned west, sounding all the time, until a well-defined rocky bank was reached at a roughly constant depth of thirty fathoms. After spending two days surveying parts of the Abrolhos that had not been properly covered by a French expedition under Baron Roussin in 1818–21, perhaps because of the disconcertingly sudden changes in depth called by the French ‘coups de sonde’, two parties landed on 29 March. Charles launched an attack on the rocks and insects and plants, while members of the crew began a much more bloody one on the birds, of which an enormous number were slaughtered. Charles reported to FitzRoy that the rocks, rising to about a hundred feet above the sea in horizontal strata, were of gneiss and sandstone. The general description of the islands entered in his notes was:
The Abrolhos Islands seen from a short distance are of a bright green colour. The vegetation consists of succulent plants & Gramina [grasses], interspersed with a few bushes & Cactuses. Small as my collection of plants is from the Abrolhos I think it contains nearly every species then flowering. Birds of the family of Totipalmes [an old group name for some web-footed sea birds] are exceedingly abundant, such as Gannets, Tropic birds & Frigates. The number of Saurians is perhaps the most surprising thing, almost every stone has its accompanying lizard: Spiders are in great numbers: likewise rats: The bottom of the adjoining sea is thickly covered by enormous brain stones [solitary stony corals similar in appearance to a brain]; many of them could not be less than a yard in diameter.
The Beagle sailed on towards Rio, and on 1 April all hands were busy making fools of one another. The hook was easily baited, and when Lieutenant Sulivan cried out, ‘Darwin, did you ever see a Grampus: Bear a hand then,’ Charles rushed out in a transport of enthusiasm, and was received by a roar of laughter from the whole watch.
Eighty miles from Rio they passed close to the promontory of Cape Frio, where not many years ago gleaming white sand still covered the shore, but today there is a line of skyscrapers. FitzRoy was anxious to revisit the scene where, on the evening of 5 December 1830, the frigate HMS Thetis, bound urgently for England with a cargo of treasure, had been battling desperately against contrary winds and was carried far off course by an unsuspected current, until in strong rain and very poor visibility she had sailed at nine knots directly on to the cliffs at Cape Frio, bringing down all three of her masts and injuring many men. In the subsequent struggles, with waves breaking heavily on the hull, twenty-five members of the crew were lost, and the ship quickly sank. FitzRoy had at one time served as a lieutenant on the Thetis, and concluded his deeply felt account of this tragic accident with the words:
Those who never run any risk; who sail only when the wind is fair; who heave to when approaching land, though perhaps a day’s sail distant; and who even delay the performance of urgent duties until they can be done easily and quite safely; are, doubtless, extremely prudent persons: but rather unlike those officers whose names will never be forgotten while England has a navy.
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Arriving at Rio de Janeiro on the evening of 4 April, Charles proudly noted that ‘In most glorious style did the little Beagle enter the port and lower her sails alongside the Flagship … Whilst the Captain was away with the commanding officer, we tacked about the harbor & gained great credit from the manner in which the Beagle was manned & directed.’ As Philip Gidley King remembered it:
Though Mr Darwin knew little or nothing of nautical matters, on one day he volunteered his services to the First Lieutenant. The occasion was when the ship first entered Rio Janeiro. It was decided to make a display of smartness in shortening sail before the numerous men-of-war at the anchorage under the flags of all nations. The ship entered the harbour under every yard of canvas which could be spread upon her yards including studding sails aloft on both sides, the lively sea breeze which brought her in being right aft. Mr Darwin was told to hold to a main royal sheet in each hand and a top mast studding sail tack in his teeth. At the order ‘Shorten Sail’ he was to let go and clap on to any rope he saw was short-handed – this he did and enjoyed the fun of it, afterwards remarking ‘the feat could not have been performed without him’.
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In view of the political instability at that period of Brazil and the newly liberated countries on its southern borders, the Royal Navy maintained a squadron of ships at the magnificent harbour of Rio de Janeiro for the general protection of British interests in South America. It was commanded by Admiral Sir Thomas Baker. While Charles was assisting the Beagle so skilfully to shorten sail, the Captain was receiving orders from the Commander-in-Chief for the exact position to be taken up by the Beagle and other ships of the squadron in case marines had to be landed to assist in quelling a mutiny that had broken out among the troops in the town. Fortunately the need did not arise, and all on the Beagle settled down happily to read their accumulated mail from home.
The next morning, Charles landed with the ship’s first official artist Augustus Earle at the Palace steps. Earle had once lived in Rio for some while, and after he had introduced Charles to the centre of the city, they found themselves ‘a most delightful house’ at Botafogo which would provide them with excellent lodgings. Its situation, as painted by Conrad Martens when he was passing through Rio a few months later (Plate 2), was an attractively rural one, but nowadays the shore of Botafogo is regrettably occupied by a sprawling network of multi-lane superhighways. The house was in due course also shared with ‘Miss Fuegia Basket, who’, remarked Charles, ‘daily increases in every direction except height’, with the Sergeant of the ship’s marines, and with young Philip Gidley King, who wrote of it with affection:
At Rio Janeiro Mr Darwin thoroughly enjoyed the new life in a tropical climate. Hiring a cottage at Botafogo, a lovely land-locked bay with a sandy beach of a dazzling whiteness, Mr Darwin took for one of his shore companions the writer, who from having been in the former voyage with his father although then of tender years was able to remember and to recount to the so far inexperienced philosopher his own adventures. “Come King” he would say “you have been round Cape Horn and I have not yet done so, but do not come your traveller’s yarns on me”. One of these was that he had seen whales jump out of the water all but their tails, another that he had seen ostriches swimming in salt water. For disbelieving these statements however, Mr Darwin afterwards made ample reparation. The first was verified one fine afternoon on the East coast of Tierra del Fuego. A large number of whales were around the ship, the Captain, the “Philosopher” and the Surveyors were on the poop, presently Mr Darwin’s arm was seized as a gigantic beast rose three fourths of his huge body out of the water. “Look Sir look! Will you believe me now?” was the exclamation of the hitherto discredited youth. “Yes! anything you tell me in future” was the quick reply of the kind-hearted naturalist.
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It was in the Beagle Channel on 28 January 1833 that Charles was thus enlightened:
the day was overpowringly [sic] hot, so much so that our skin was burnt; this is quite a novelty in Tierra del F. The Beagle Channel is here very striking, the view both ways is not intercepted, & to the West extends to the Pacific. So narrow and straight a channell & in length nearly 120 miles, must be a rare phenomenon. We were reminded that it was an arm of the sea by the number of Whales, which were spouting in different directions: the water is so deep that one morning two monstrous whales were swimming within stone throw of the shore.
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Charles at once set about organising an expedition on horseback to the Rio Macaé, some one hundred miles to the north-east of Rio. His ‘extraordinary & quixotic set of adventurers’ consisted firstly of an Irish businessman, Patrick Lennon, who had lived in Rio for twenty years and owned an estate near the mouth of the Macaé that he had not previously visited; he was accompanied by a nephew. Then there was Mr Lawrie, ‘a well informed clever Scotchman, selfish unprincipled man, by trade partly slave merchant partly Swindler’, with a friend who was apprentice to a druggist, and whose elder brother’s Brazilian father-in-law Senhor Manuel Figuireda owned a large estate on the Macaé at Socégo. As a guide for the party Charles took along a black boy. The first obstacle was to obtain passports for an excursion to the interior. The local officials were somewhat less than helpful, ‘but the prospect of wild forests tenanted by beautiful birds, Monkeys & Sloths, & Lakes by Cavies & Alligators, will make any naturalist lick the dust even from the foot of a Brazilian’.
The exotic cavalcade set out on 8 April, and Charles was entranced by the stillness of the woods – except for the large and brilliant butterflies which lazily fluttered about, with blue the prevailing tint – and by the infinite numbers of lianas and parasitical plants, whose beautiful flowers struck him as the most novel object to be seen in a tropical forest. In the evening the scene by the dimmed light of the moon was most desolate, with fireflies flitting by and the solitary snipe uttering its plaintive cry while the distant and sullen roar of the sea scarcely broke the quiet of the night. The inn at which they spent their first night sleeping on straw mats was a miserable one, though at others they fared sumptuously with wine and spirits at dinner, coffee in the evening, and fish for breakfast. The five days needed for the journey to the mouth of the Macaé were often strenuous, and the amount of labour that their horses could perform was impressive, even on the occasion when the riders had to swim alongside them to cross the Barro de St João.
On 13 April they rested at Senhor Figuireda’s luxurious fazenda at Socégo, where Charles was relieved to see how kindly the slaves were treated, and how happy they seemed. Two days later he had a very different impression of slavery when Mr Lennon threatened to sell at a public auction an illegitimate mulatto child to whom his agent was much attached, and even to take all the women and children from their husbands to sell them separately at the market in Rio. Despite his feeling that Mr Lennon was not at heart an inhumane person, Charles reflected ruefully on the strange and inexplicable effect that prevailing custom and self-interest might have on a man’s behaviour. It was agreed that Senhor Manuel should be asked to arbitrate in the quarrel, which he presumably did in favour of the slaves, although Charles did not report on the outcome. Charles returned to Socégo, where he spent the most enjoyable part of the whole expedition collecting insects and reptiles in the woods, and admiring the trees:
The forests here are ornamented by one of the most elegant, the Cabbage-Palm, with a stem so narrow that with the two hands it may be clasped, it waves its most elegant head from 30 to 50 feet above the ground. The soft part, from which the leaves spring, affords a most excellent vegetable. The woody creepers, themselves covered by creepers, are of great thickness, varying from 1 to nearly 2 feet in circumference. Many of the older trees present a most curious spectacle, being covered with tresses of a liana, which much resembles bundles of hay. If the eye is turned from the world of foliage above, to the ground, it is attracted by the extreme elegance of the leaves of numberless species of Ferns & Mimosas. Thus it is easy to specify individual objects of admiration; but it is nearly impossible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings which are excited; wonder, astonishment & sublime devotion fill & elevate the mind.
For the journey home, when Charles was accompanied only by Mr Lennon, the same route was followed, though back in Rio, having carelessly lost their passports, they had some difficulty in proving that their horses were not stolen. Charles returned to the Beagle, where he learnt that the surgeon Robert McCormick had been ‘invalided’, that is to say had quarrelled with the Captain and the First Lieutenant, and was about to go back to England on HMS Tyne. The news did not greatly distress Charles, for he had decided even before leaving Devonport that ‘my friend the Doctor is an ass … at present he is in great tribulation, whether his cabin shall be painted French Grey or a dead white – I hear little excepting this subject from him’. And at St Jago McCormick had revealed himself as ‘a philosopher of rather an antient date; at St Jago by his own account he made general remarks during the first fortnight & collected particular facts during the last’. Robert McCormick was an ambitious Scot, determined to make a career for himself as a naval surgeon, who had sailed to the Arctic in 1827 with William Edward Parry as assistant surgeon on the Hecla. His nose was put thoroughly out of joint on the Beagle by finding that Charles had been introduced by the Captain to look after natural history, one of the traditional responsibilities of the ship’s surgeon. He subsequently sailed to the Antarctic as surgeon on the Erebus, and took part in the search for Franklin in the Arctic in 1852–53. But when he finally retired in 1865, the professional recognition that he had sought for so long still eluded him. He was succeeded as acting surgeon on the Beagle by Benjamin Bynoe, with whom Charles remained on the best of terms for the rest of the voyage.
On 25 April Charles suffered on a small scale what he described as some of the horrors of a shipwreck, when two or three large waves swamped the boat from which he was landing his possessions to transfer them to Botafogo, though nothing was completely spoiled. The following day he wrote an account of the disaster to his sister Caroline, also reporting to her:
I send in a packet, my commonplace Journal. I have taken a fit of disgust with it & want to get it out of my sight. Any of you that like may read it, a great deal is absolutely childish. Remember however this, that it is written solely to make me remember this voyage, & that it is not a record of facts but of my thoughts, & in excuse recollect how tired I generally am when writing it … Be sure you mention the receiving of my journal, as anyhow to me it will be of considerable future interest as an exact record of all my first impressions, & such a set of vivid ones they have been must make this period of my life always one of interest to myself. If you will speak quite sincerely, I should be glad to have your criticisms. Only recollect the above mentioned apologies.
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During the next few days Charles was taken by FitzRoy to dine more than once with Mr Aston, representative of the English government, at meals which to his surprise ‘from the absence of all form almost resembled a Cambridge party’. He also dined with the Admiral, Sir Thomas Baker, no doubt with the greater formality of the Navy, and was taken to watch the impressive spectacle of an official inspection of the seventy-four-gun battleship Warspite.
A week later the Beagle sailed back to Bahia to find an explanation for the discrepancy of four miles in the meridian distance between the Abrolhos Islands and Rio de Janeiro shown in Baron Roussin’s chart as compared with the Beagle’s measurements. In a private letter to FitzRoy, Beaufort later commended his ‘daring’ for thus having turned back without prior instruction from the Admiralty.
(#litres_trial_promo) It turned out that Baron Roussin’s placing of the Abrolhos was correct, but not that of Rio, confirming that FitzRoy’s twenty-two chronometers and his dependence on a connected chain of meridian distances was the most reliable method of finding the precise longitude. This information was duly conveyed to the French commander-in-chief at Rio.
A less happy piece of news was that three members of a party who had sailed in the ship’s cutter to the river Macacu shortly before the Beagle’s departure – an extraordinarily powerful seaman called Morgan, Boy Jones who had just been promised promotion, and Charles’s young friend Midshipman Musters – had been stricken with fatal attacks of malaria a few days later, and were buried at Bahia. FitzRoy considered that the danger of contracting the disease appeared to be greatest while sleeping, while Charles found it puzzling that the fever so often came on several days after the victim had returned to a seemingly pure atmosphere. The full details of the role of mosquitoes as the vector in the transmission of malaria were made clear by Sir Ronald Ross only in 1897.
For the next two months Charles assiduously explored Rio and the surrounding country, and on alternate days wrote up his notes and sorted out the specimens that he had collected, for he found that one hour’s collecting often kept him busy for the rest of the day. He noted that whereas ‘The naturalist in England enjoys in his walks a great advantage over others in frequently meeting something worthy of attention; here he suffers a pleasant nuisance in not being able to walk a hundred yards without being fairly tied to the spot by some new & wondrous creature.’ A discovery that particularly thrilled him was to find in the forest what was evidently a species of flatworm related to Cuvier’s Planaria, but which he thought was generally regarded as a strictly marine animal. He wrote:
June 17
. This very extraordinary animal was found, under the bark of a decaying tree, in the forest at a considerable elevation. The place was quite dry & no water at all near. Body soft, parenchymatous,
(#litres_trial_promo) covered with slime (like snails & leaving a track), not much flattened. When fully extended, 2 & ¼ inches long: in broardest parts only .13 wide. Back arched, top rather flat; beneath, a level crawling surface (precisely resembles a gasteropode [snail], only not separated from the body), with a slightly projecting membranous edge. Anterior end extremely extensible, pointed lengthened; posterior half of body broardest, tail bluntly pointed.
Colours: back with glossy black stripe; on each side of this a primrose white one edged externally with black; these stripes reach to extremities, & become uniformly narrower. sides & foot dirty “orpiment orange”. From the elegance of shape & great beauty of colours, the animal had a very striking appearance.
The anterior extremity of foot rather grooved or arched. On its edge is a regular row of round black dots (as in marine Planariæ) which are continued round the foot, but not regularly; foot thickly covered with very minute angular white marks or specks. On the foot in centre, about 1/3 of length from the tail, is an irregular circular white space, free from the specks. Extending through the whole width of this, is a transverse slit, sides straight parallel, extremities rounded, 1/60th of inch long, tolerably apparent (i.e. with my very weak lens).
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