The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin, 1839
Five years around the world on a small naval ship. Bones of extinct giants in the Pampas, an earthquake that lifted the coast of Chile, tortoises that differ from one Galapagos island to the next, and rings of coral in the middle of the ocean. Darwin shows how hundreds of observations add up to a picture of a slowly changing world, and teaches you to look the same way.
Who it is for
For anyone who loves travel and nature and wants to see how the young Darwin learned to notice what others walked past.
He may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates.
A day words could not hold
On 29 February 1832 a young Englishman wanders alone for the first time through a tropical forest near the Brazilian town of Bahia. The insects are so loud that they can be heard even on board the ship anchored hundreds of metres offshore, while deep in the forest there is silence. That evening he will write that delight itself is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest for the first time.
This is Charles Darwin. Captain FitzRoy wanted to take a man of science on the voyage and even gave up part of his own cabin to him. HMS Beagle left England on 27 December 1831 to survey the coasts of South America and sail around the globe. She came home on 2 October 1836, almost five years later. This book grew out of the journal of that voyage, and Darwin himself shortened it for the general reader.
There is no finished theory here. There is a man who looks, compares and asks every day: why just here? Why do the bones of extinct giants lie next to the shells of molluscs that are still alive today? Why does the land rise before his eyes? Why do neighbouring islands have different tortoises? Twenty-odd years later, On the Origin of Species will grow out of these questions.
Ahead are seven discoveries of this voyage and the habits that helped make them. You can take these habits for yourself: test the obvious, write down where everything came from, and look for the slow cause behind great changes. Let's go aboard.
A rhinoceros doesn't need a jungle
Patagonia, the south of South America: thorny bushes, brown dry grass, hardly anything alive for hundreds of kilometres. At a place called Punta Alta, Darwin digs the bones of extinct beasts the size of elephants out of a bank. What did such giants live on? The books of his day answered with confidence: lush forests, since a huge animal needs huge amounts of greenery.
Darwin writes that he does not hesitate to call this view completely false. He guesses where it came from: from India, where elephants, forests and jungles had long merged into one picture. And he tests the picture against facts. The traveller Dr Andrew Smith told him about southern Africa. By Darwin's estimate, it has about a tenth of the vegetation of Britain, and ox wagons drive in any direction almost without stopping. Yet in a single day's march Smith saw between a hundred and a hundred and fifty rhinoceroses of three species. By Darwin's rough reckoning, the ten largest plant-eaters of Africa on average weigh about twenty-four times as much as the ten largest of South America.
It was no small mistake. In Darwin's view, theories of sudden catastrophes grew out of it: since rhinoceroses and elephants lie in the ice of Siberia, it must once have been tropically warm there, and then the climate changed abruptly. He does not dispute that the climate changed. He shows something else: as far as the amount of food goes, the tropics were not needed.
Everyone is sure that the condor finds carrion by smell. In a garden in Valparaiso, Darwin wraps meat in white paper and walks to and fro with it three paces from a row of tethered birds: not one looks. He lays the parcel almost right next to an old male, which looks at it and turns away. Darwin pushes the parcel closer and closer with a stick, and only when the beak touches the paper does the bird tear it open, and the whole row starts flapping its wings. You could not fool a dog like that, Darwin remarks.
The method is simple and uncomfortable: before repeating what “everyone knows”, find out what that knowledge rests on. Sometimes under it there is just one vivid picture, like the Indian jungle.
About the author
Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, creator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. This book, the journal of his five-year voyage on the Beagle, came out twenty years before On the Origin of Species.
All books by this author: Charles Darwin
Terms from the book
- FitzRoy
- Beagle
- naturalist
- Patagonia
- Smith
- Lawson
- Mocking-thrush
- Dodo
- Bahia: A port city in north-east Brazil, today's Salvador. Here Darwin saw a tropical forest for the first time.
- Punta Alta: A headland on the bay of Bahía Blanca in Argentina, where Darwin found the bones of extinct giant mammals.
- Condor: A huge South American vulture that feeds on carrion. The condor Darwin shot had a wingspan of about two and a half metres.
- Toxodon: An extinct South American beast the size of an elephant. Its teeth link it to the rodents, although in other features it resembles the thick-skinned animals.
- Pampas: Grassy steppe plains in Argentina and Uruguay.
- Niata: A rare breed of short-faced cattle with a jutting lower jaw, which Darwin came across in Uruguay.
- Macrauchenia: An extinct South American beast the size of a camel, with a long neck. Darwin found its skeleton in Patagonia.
- Guanaco: A wild relative of the llama that lives on the plains and in the mountains of South America.
- Capybara: The water-hog, the largest rodent on Earth, living by the rivers and lakes of South America.
- Valdivia: A town in the south of Chile.
- Concepcion: A city in Chile. The earthquake of 20 February 1835 destroyed it almost completely.
- Talcahuano: A port town near Concepcion, destroyed by the wave after the earthquake of 1835.
- Andes: The mountain system that runs along the whole western edge of South America, the longest on Earth.
- Uspallata: A mountain pass and range in the Andes, on the way from Mendoza in Argentina to Chile.
- Tierra del Fuego: An archipelago at the very southern tip of South America with a cold, rainy climate.
- Button: Jemmy Button, a native of Tierra del Fuego whom Captain FitzRoy took to England and brought home a few years later. He was named after the button he was bought for.
- Matthews: Richard Matthews, an English missionary whom they tried to leave in Tierra del Fuego together with Jemmy Button.
- Galapagos: Volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean, on the equator, about a thousand kilometres from Ecuador.
- Finches: Small birds with strong beaks. The Galapagos finches later became a famous example of one species giving rise to many.
- Hawfinch: A European songbird with a very thick, powerful beak that it uses to crack fruit stones.
- Gauchos: The herdsmen and horsemen of the South American plains.
- Atoll: A ring-shaped coral island surrounding a shallow lagoon.
- Polyp: A tiny soft-bodied sea animal. Colonies of coral polyps build reefs out of lime.
- Sounding lead: A weight on a long line that sailors use to measure depth. Tallow was put into its base to find out what the bottom was like.
- Barrier reef: A coral reef that runs along a coast at some distance and is separated from the land by a wide, deep channel.
- Bora Bora: A volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean surrounded by a barrier reef.
All terms
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