The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin, 1839
I tried reading Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species about 20 years ago but gave up half-way through as I found it rather boring and over-wordy, and he seemed to take a long time to get to a point. So after recently reading Wallace’s
The Malay Archipelago I thought I’d give the
Voyage of the Beagle a go, thinking there’d be similarities. And there are similarities, but there’s also a lot of differences.
Like
Malay,
Voyage is more of a travelogue in diary form but, unlike Wallace, Darwin’s book is in roughly chronological order. However, while this book has Darwin’s footnotes, it’s not annotated like my version of Wallace’s book to clarify places, people, animals and words - something I now know was more beneficial than I realised at the time. For instance, I had to google words and locations I had never heard of like infusoria, animalcula, confervae***, Banda Oriental and the Low Islands; Darwin measures distance in leagues and I had to look that up to get an idea of the distances he was talking about (he also uses miles at times). He refers to rheas as ostriches and makes references to Bizcachas a few times, and some birds he uses local names for and frequently I have no idea what species he’s talking about. Other times he uses family names – especially for insects – or scientific names which are no longer valid, again making it difficult to identify the subjects. He only refers to the Andes by name twice (that I remember); the rest of the time he simply refers to the mountains as “the Cordillera”. And his use of the word sterile has puzzled me, as he described the Eucalypt forests around Sydney as such; it seems that unless the vegetation is lush and dense it can’t be considered fertile. I also got the impression that he thought if people who lived on fertile soil weren’t clearing the land to grow vast amounts of crops, the land was being wasted.
So although the Beagle was at sea from December 1831 to October 1836, Darwin spent most of his time ashore (three years and three months) and only 18 months at sea – apparently he suffered greatly from sea-sickness. If the vessel was staying in Port for some time he might even rent a place in town to stay for the duration. Often he would travel inland for a few weeks exploring, or travel cross-country for a few weeks to meet the Beagle at another port – a risky business in Argentina where there were rebel Indians who had raiding parties that were killing farmers and travellers alike. He travelled on foot, on horseback, or on donkeys. In many locations he would climb the local mountain or volcano; in Chile he crossed the Andes into Mendoza (Argentina) and then crossed back again at another location, finding a petrified forest on the way.
Although Darwin is most famous for zoology, most of his discussions in this book are of geology, and when he goes ashore he writes about the strata, the rocks he found, the shells he found in the rocks and the altitude at which he found them. He also has a habit of comparing the environment at certain latitudes with the Northern Hemisphere latitudinal equivalent in Europe, something that is wasted on persons not familiar with the different parts of Europe and their normal environment and weather patterns. Zoological discussions appear periodically where he describes in a few paragraphs, or a few pages, the zoology of a region. While much of what he writes is easy enough to read, there are times when he gets carried away with his writing. For instance, the following sentence:
"It may naturally be asked, how it comes that, although no extensive fossiliferous deposits of the recent period, nor of any period intermediate between it and the ancient tertiary epoch, have been preserved on either side of the continent, yet that at this ancient tertiary epoch, sedimentary matter containing fossil remains, should have been deposited and preserved at different points in north and south lines, over a space of 1100 miles on the shores of the Pacific, and of at least 1350 miles on the shores of the Atlantic, and in an east and west line of 700 miles across the widest part of the continent?"
After a shorter sentence he follows with:
"Considering the enormous power of denudation which the sea possesses, as shown by numberless facts, it is not probable that a sedimentary deposit, when being upraised, could pass through the ordeal of the beach, so as to be preserved in sufficient masses to last to a distant period, without it were originally of wide extent and of considerable thickness: now it is impossible on a moderately shallow bottom, which alone is favourable to most living creatures, that a thick and widely extending covering of sediment could be spread out, without the bottom sank down to receive the successive layers."
He finishes the paragraph with:
"Hence, if prolonged movements of approximately contemporaneous subsidence are generally widely extensive, as I am strongly inclined to believe from my examination of the Coral Reefs of the great oceans – or if, confining our view to South America, the subsiding movements have been coextensive with those of elevation, by which, within the same period of existing shells, the shores of Peru, Chile, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, and La Plata have been upraised – then we can see that at the same time, at far distant points, circumstances would have been favourable to the formation of fossiliferous deposits of wide extent and of considerable thickness; and such deposits, consequently, would have a good chance of resisting the wear and tear of successive beach-lines, and of lasting to a future epoch."
Those three sentences are all in the one paragraph, and take up three-quarters of a page. (pg 307-308 in my copy; just prior to May 21st, 1835).
Although the Beagle circumnavigated the world, and Darwin is famous for his work on the Galapagos finches, for the four years and ten months journey, three years and six months was spent around the coast of South America, and only six weeks in the Galapagos. This is because the Beagle’s primary objective was to complete survey of the southern and western coast of South America, and “
carry a chain of chronometric measurements around the world”. Looking at the geology, the local peoples, and collecting plant and animal specimens was secondary. As a result, of the twenty one chapters in the book, fifteen are around the South American coast, and only one chapter each for the islands in the Atlantic, the Galapagos, Tahiti & New Zealand, Australia, the Cocos-Keeling Islands, and his return to England via Mauritius.
I was a little disappointed by
The Voyage of the Beagle, probably because I was expecting more in the way of zoological content. As I have already mentioned, there was a strong focus on geology – in fact, over the next ten years he only published four works and they were all on geology. He also focussed quite a bit on the various peoples and how they lived. As a result, I found the reading a little tiring/boring at times, not just the content but the style too, and it took me a few weeks to finish the book. Having said that, it is still worth a read and some of the geological bits are interesting – like the giant fossils he found in South America or his theory on the formation of coral atolls – but unfortunately you won’t get many zoological insights.
***
When I saw the word confervae I suddenly thought "Maybe that's what Trump was tweeting about a couple of years ago. And the press, never having heard the word before, was making fun of him. Maybe he's brighter than we think after all. Maybe there's still hope for the USA."
Then I looked up exactly what he said in his tweet, and realised he is just an idiot, after all.
Hix
