The lessons of the Beagle
It was through john Henslow, professor of botany at Cambridge, that Darwin, despite initial opposition from his father, was invited to sail, both as a naturalist and as personal companion to Robert FitzRoy. A strange, brooding, but highly efficient naval officer, FitzRoy had been given command of HMS Beagle for a long voyage to complete a survey of the coasts of South America. And so it came about that from December 1851 until October 1836, Darwin was given a unique opportunity to study first-hand a wide range of geological, biological and anthropological phenomena - an opportunity denied to all the well-known previous advocates of the transmutation of species, like his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), whose speculative notions had been based on the study of books and museum specimens.
On his voyage of discovery, Darwin took with him Principles of Geology, the influential book by the British geologist Charles Lyell (17971875), who had published the first of three volumes in 1830. In this Lyell argued for a “steady state" view of geological history. The shape and disposition of the present-day landscape - its mountains and valleys, volcanoes, coastlines, rivers, lakes and Cliffs-could all be explained as having developed through the long-term uniform action of the forces of erosion and change which were seen in action today: heat, ice, wind, rain and sear Lyell contrasted this (often referred to as the “uniformitarian” theory) to the more “Catastrophist” explanations of most other British geologists They preferred to interpret fossils as signs of the violent extinction of life during several past epochs by floods, earthquakes and other violent cataclysms.
According to Lyell’s opponents, such as the French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the Earth’s history suggested “direction”, rather than “steady-state", for, following each catastrophe, it seemed that the Creator must have restocked the Earth with plants and animals of an "improved" or more advanced pattern. An Age of Invertebrates had been followed by ones of fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals It seemed, then, that God’s most recent and “highest” creation, man, was the intended result of past violent, but progressive, creativity. While Lyell agreed that the world had been designed for man, he disagreed that it showed any signs of progress, He may well have feared that if “progress” was admitted it would be only a small step to argue that animals had “evolved” from one another; and Lyell’s notebooks clearly show that the idea that man was linked with the animals was abhorrent to him.
Darwin’s problem was to reconcile Lyell’s uniformitarian geology, which he soon found made good sense when he studied the South American landscape, with the equally clear progressive nature of paleontological evidence. As he noted later in his Autobiography;
“During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armour like that on the existing armadillos; secondly by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southward over the Continent; and thirdly by the South American character of most productions of the Galapagos archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which they differ slightly on each island of the group, none of these islands appearing to be very ancient in a geological sense. It was evident that such factors as these, as well as many others, could be explained on the supposition that species gradually became modified; and the subject haunted me,"
The emphasis here is on the fact that the transmutation of species could be the explanation In fact, while he was actually on the Beagle voyage, there is no evidence that he thought of evolution as more than an idle speculations For - again as he noted in his Autobiography - how could the environment or the “desire” of a plant or animal to change itself possibly “account for the unnumberable cases in which organisms of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life"?
Nevertheless, from hindsight we can see, as Darwin did later, that there were certain factors which he found increasingly hard to reconcile with the notion of the fixity of species designed by a benevolent deity. For example, there was, first, the traditional geological problem of species which had disappeared from the Earth, as fossil evidence showed; second, the extraordinarily complicated geographical distribution of plants and animals (“a grand game of chess with the world as a board", as Darwin described it); and, third, the astonishing divergence of forms of plants and animals living on different islands, notably of those on the Galapagos Islands.
We know from ornithological notes that he made toward the end of his voyage in 1856 that he was speculating whether the many different and highly specialized mocking birds he had seen on the Galapagos Islands could be varieties of one basic stock, in which case “the stability of species" would be undermined, Later, Darwin’s friend, the artist and taxidermist John Gould, pointed out to him that Galapagos finches were individually adapted to their different island habitats.
Advances in hydrography
Hydrography, the science which deals with the study and mapping of seas, coasts, ocean depths, tides and currents, has always been important for maritime nations. Although the British Admiralty’s Department of Hydrography was only founded in 1795, the first accurate maps of coasts and inshore waters date from the reign of Henry VIII. In the 17th century several Fellows of the Royal Society, including the astronomer Edmund Halley, helped to perfect the trigonometrical methods and instruments of marine surveying which are still in use today. The ability to determine longitude using chronometers standardized to London time, was an 18th-century development and allowed long voyages round the world to be undertaken with confidence. Between 1829 and 1855, under the aegis of the government hydrographer, Sir Francis Beaufort, not only was a “grand survey" of British coastal waters completed, but survey ships began detailed mapping of all the world’s shipping lanes.
The captain of the “Beagle”
Robert FitzRoy, the captain of HMS Beagle during Darwin’s circumnavigation of the globe between 1831 and 1836, was a Tory aristocrat, being descended from both the Duke of Grafton and the Viscount Castlereagh. He entered the Royal Navy in 1818, receiving what was in effect a first-class scientific education at the Royal Naval College in Portsmouth, before ascending rapidly through the ranks until he took command of the Beagle following her captain’s suicide in the Magellan Straits in 1828.
The Beagle, a 10»gun brig of 242 tons launched in 1820, together with its mother ship the Adventure had already spent two years surveying the southern coasts of South America for the Admiralty under the overall command of the hydrographer Captain Philip King.
FitzRoy and the “scientific person” In June 1831 the Admiralty appointed FitzRoy to complete King’s South American survey in the Beagle. “Anxious that no opportunity of collecting useful information during the voyage should be lost", FitzRoy recommended to the Admiralty that “some well-educated and scientific person should be sought for who would willingly share such accommodation as l have to offer, in order to profit by the opportunity of visiting distant countries yet little known." And so it came about that the landlubber, Charles Darwin, shared FitzRoy’s tiny cabin from 27 December 1831, until 2 October 1836. Because he traveled as a private gentleman, not as a regular crew, Darwin had to pay his own way at a cost of some £500 per annum.
Darwin’s conversations and observations obviously disturbed FitzRoy’s sincerely-held belief that the world was designed. In 1860, at the famous Oxford meeting of the British Association he publicly declared that “he regretted the publication of Mr. Darwin’s book Origin of Species and denied Professor Huxley’s statement that it was a logical arrangement of facts."
A failed conversion
It was the survey of the Magellan Straits by the Beagle which awakened FitzRoy’s interest in the primitive peoples of Tierra del Fuego When the first South American survey ended in 183ofitzRoy returned to England with tour Fuegians - a girl aged nine he named Fuegia Basket, together with Jemmy Button (14), York Minster (26) and Boat Memory (20), The latter soon died of smallpox, but the other three were educated at FitzRoy’s expense, his idea being to return them to their cold and uninviting country as Christian missionaries When sent back on the Beagle, however, they soon reverted to their former life-style, as FitzRoy found on a return visit to the settlement,