Perhaps only the dawn of the Internet, and the computer technology that coalesced with it into a global ethos at the end of the twentieth century, can give any idea of the excitement generated by the sciences of the physical world in the early nineteenth century.
Geology was preeminent among these, for its findings had recently shaken the widely held belief that the earth had existed for a mere few thousand years. Calculations from biblical and historical records had previously indicated that the epic first week of creation, described in the book of Genesis, had begun on October 22, 4004 B.C. Six days later, by October 28, Earth and all its glories, including Man, were in place; and on October 29, God rested.
Science and the Bible had for a time even become comfortable bedfellows. The perennial discovery of fossilized sea creatures far inland seemed to support the biblical story of the great flood that had once washed over the earth.
And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them: and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood: rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. (Genesis 6: 13–15)
The cubit, the biblical unit of measurement, was generally thought to be the length of a man’s arm from elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Men differed, but Sir Isaac Newton set the matter at rest by determining that the cubit must be 20 ½ inches, and was then able to calculate that Noah’s ark, at 300 cubits by 50 cubits, had been 537 feet long, 85 feet wide, 51 feet high, and weighed (Newton must have decided on a unit weight for gopher wood, Cladrastis lutea, and construction scantlings) 18,231 tons.
This was science at its most tidy and helpful.
But the deeper geologists looked, the more they saw that confounded them: fossils, and the arrangements of layers and layers of earth that had preserved them, began to indicate subterranean upheavals, erosion, sediment, the existence of ancient seas—signs of tremendous change taking place across the face of the earth. Either these changes had occurred at one cataclysmic moment—during the flood, handily explained by the Bible—or, as geologists began to think, they had taken place over an immense period of time, and were still taking place, continually, but with imperceptible slowness, suggesting such a mind-boggling age to the planet that science and the Holy Word could not be reconciled.
The result, for those who did not cling to the literal word of the Bible, was an abyssal unknown, a spiritual vacuum. Science rushed in to fill it, and its discoveries, coming in tumbling profusion in the early years of the nineteenth century, were greeted with the excitement of bulletins from a war front. Nowhere was this zone hotter, of greater moment, more closely watched, than in the circles of scientific inquiry at Britain’s universities. In particular, at Cambridge.
Beaufort’s letter to Professor Peacock asking about a companion for FitzRoy tapped into an elite cream of intellectual movers and shakers at the very top of the British establishment. Cambridge professors like Peacock, Adam Sedgwick, John Stevens Henslow, William Whewell, and John Herschel were intimates of men in the government and the armed forces, men like Beaufort, the leading scientific light at the Admiralty, and the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. They were close to mathematicians like Charles Babbage, whose series of increasingly complicated “difference engines” were the world’s first computers; to geologists like Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison. Whewell and Herschel wrote books that became, along with Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the most read, talked-about, and influential books of their day. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy inspired and laid the groundwork for much of the scientific induction and explanation that followed its publication in 1831. Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences was acted out in a game of charades at Lord Northampton’s Christmas party, achieving the sort of buzz generated by popular television shows a century and a half later. These men created an intellectual aristocracy at the core of the world’s greatest empire and shaped the way that world thought.
Beaufort’s letter—an invitation to sail away and examine the still largely unknown world aboard a well-stocked floating laboratory—sent a tremor through their community.
Peacock in turn wrote to John Stevens Henslow, professor of botany at Cambridge, who had a wide acquaintance with a number of scientifically inclined young gentlemen who might be suitable for the voyage Beaufort described. Henslow, who had also been a professor of mineralogy, was described as a man “who knew every branch of science.” He was a cornucopia of prevailing scientific knowledge, and his lectures were immensely popular and crowded, attended even by other professors. Harder to get into were Henslow’s Friday evening soirées, where ten to fifteen favored students and professors could informally discuss the latest and headiest intellectual and scientific ideas. He led field trips, on foot, on horseback, by stagecoach or barge, that might end with supper at an inn or tavern.
Henslow’s students were mainly well-to-do upper-middle-class young men who came to school with dogs, guns, and horses and set themselves up in private lodgings around Cambridge, attending lectures and their studies only when these were fun. There were a few budding scientists among them, but most were preparing for roles as doctors, barristers, politicians, landowners, and clergymen in the dominant establishment from which they had sprung, a kind of extended family of plutocracy. They were familiar with the classics in their original Greek and Latin, they felt the ease of entitlement in company, they rode, shot, and drank well. They were gentlemen. One of these, with an enthusiasm for the natural sciences perhaps more developed than in his fellows, was what Beaufort, on FitzRoy’s behalf, was looking for.
“What treasures he might bring home with him,” Peacock wrote to Henslow, “as the ship would be placed at his disposal, whenever his inquiries made it necessary or desirable…. Is there any person whom you could strongly recommend: he must be such a person as would do credit to our recommendation. Do think on this subject: it would be a serious loss to the cause of natural science, if this fine opportunity was lost.”
For just a moment, Henslow thought of going himself. He was even then considering a trip with several students to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, a place that had been described by Alexander von Humboldt as a scientific paradise. As a young man, Henslow had read François Levaillant’s Travels from the Cape of Good Hope into the Interior Parts of Africa (1790), the story of the Frenchman’s shipwreck on the South African coast and his trek through the country with just a rifle, ten gold ducats, and the clothes he’d washed ashore in. Henslow had become gripped by the urge to make the same expedition and daydreamed of Africa and travel. Now, aged thirty-five, with work, a wife, and a new baby pinning him to a modest house in England, he held the thought of this incredible voyage around the world in his palm for a moment, then ruefully passed it on.
He sent Peacock’s letter on to his brother-in-law, Leonard Jenyns, a Cambridge graduate, now a curate at nearby Bottisham, and an amateur entomologist who was highly respected among the Cambridge naturalists. Jenyns too was immediately gripped by the idea of the voyage, enough to begin thinking about what clothes to take. But he had recently been appointed to his curacy and reluctantly concluded that it was not “quite right to quit for a purpose of that kind.”
To both Henslow and Jenyns, the voyage seemed self-indulgent, the sort of thing a grown man of responsibility could not seriously consider. It appealed to the boys they had once been but felt they could no longer be. They agreed to send Peacock’s letter on to such a boy, a Cambridge student, just graduated, who had charmed them both with his naturalist enthusiasms and who was still, unlike them, on the other side of the threshold of responsible manhood.
Charles Darwin, aged twenty-two, was, in fact, the student who had whipped Henslow up about a trip to Tenerife. It was Darwin who had read von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of his journey to Tenerife and through the Brazilian rain forest in 1799–1804. That book had instilled in him a sudden, almost urgent desire to travel, and “to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of natural science.” Brazil was far away, an expensive and difficult destination for a brief visit by an amateur naturalist. But Tenerife, off the coast of Morocco, was much closer; von Humboldt’s descriptions of the island, visited en route to Brazil, had started Darwin talking to Henslow about a summer expedition there.
But a voyage around the world! Darwin decided immediately to accept, but his father just as quickly expressed his deep disapproval.
To Dr. Robert Darwin, the notion of his son suddenly heading off around the world seemed one more sidestep in the pattern of irresolution and disinclination to settle into a profession that Charles had shown since his earliest days at university.
Charles Darwin at 31, shortly after his voyage in the Beagle. (Watercolor of Charles Darwin by George Richmond; by permission of English Heritage and Down House.)
At sixteen, he was doing so poorly in school that his father decided he was wasting his time and sent him a year early to Edinburgh to join his older brother Erasmus in studying medicine to become a doctor. Both boys had been keen “scientists” at home, setting up their “laboratory” in an old garden shed. They bought glass-stoppered bottles and heated to incineration with an Argand lamp coins and whatever else would burn in the fireproof china dishes donated by their uncle, the wealthy potter Josiah Wedgwood. They analyzed minerals, chemicals, and compounds supplied by their local chemist in Shrewsbury. Darwin became fascinated by crystallography and began collecting rocks.
Erasmus’s chronic ill health made him a poor candidate for a doctor, and their father fastened his hopes on Charles. He also thought Charles’s amiable nature would make for a sympathetic bedside manner. But the young Darwin discovered that he was repelled by the practical side of medicine. Apart from the revulsion he felt for dissection, the trade in bodies used in anatomy classes carried its own notorious associations. The subjects were supposedly the dead from hospitals and the poorhouse, or deceased or executed criminals, but they were frequently victims murdered for the sale of their corpses. In 1828, three years after Darwin arrived there, William Hare and Irishman William Burke killed at least sixteen people in Edinburgh’s Old Town and sold the bodies for cash—£10 in winter, £8 in summer, when preservation proved more problematical—at the medical school’s back door. Other corpses came from grave robbers and body dealers who had them shipped in barrels of cheap whisky from city slums and across the Irish Sea from Dublin.
Darwin found operations on living subjects even less tolerable.
I…attended on two occasions the operating theatre in the hospital at Edinburgh, and saw two very bad operations, one on a child, but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform.
Then, or earlier, Darwin developed a lifelong aversion to blood and a terror of illness of any kind. Unable to admit to his father his growing disinclination for medicine, he concentrated on what he did enjoy at medical school: natural history classes.
At the end of his first year, his older brother Erasmus left Edinburgh to continue his studies in London. The two had been so close that they had made scant efforts at forming outside friendships. Now, alone at school and farther from his family than he had ever been, Darwin was forced to look outward. It was good for him. He joined the Plinian Society, a club of like-minded undergraduates who met regularly to read and discuss papers on natural history. Through the society, he met its former secretary, Robert Grant, who had trained as a doctor but become a noted lecturer and respected naturalist. Reserved, austere, melancholic, a confirmed bachelor, and possibly a homosexual, Grant formed a succession of attachments with favorite students, often later falling out with them. For a time during his second year in Edinburgh, Darwin was one of these.
Grant, who lived in a house on the shore near Leith Harbour, introduced Darwin to marine zoology. Together they collected invertebrates—tiny, gelatinous, spongiform creatures—from rock pools and oyster shells and the muck of fishermen’s hauls from the seabed. Grant’s fascination for these organisms was contagious. He brought them alive for Darwin, showing him the nature and context of their microworlds: how they lived, adapted, and metamorphosed; how they reproduced; and how to dissect them in seawater under a microscope. In that second year at Edinburgh, the medium of the sea became for Darwin one great microscope slide—a lens that held up to view the macro struggle for existence in the alternate world beneath the waves—and for the rest of his life he remained fascinated by tiny sea creatures.
Grant also talked with Darwin about the heretical theory of evolution. “He one day, when we were walking together, burst forth in high admiration of Lamarck and his views on evolution,” Darwin wrote much later. In 1800, Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested that Earth’s species had not been created in their only and unalterable form at the biblical dawn of Creation, but that they had gradually and continually altered, adapting to a constantly changing environment, becoming and generating new species by transmutation. This was a direct contradiction of the Bible, and in an earlier age Lamarck would have been burned at a stake for his views. In Lamarck’s time, most people, even forward-looking scientists, still believed that God had created Earth, and all life upon it, as a “Great Chain of Being” from the smallest—that is, lowest—creatures, to the highest, Man, with each species occupying its own predetermined, unchangeable link in that chain. Lamarck’s claim that creatures evolved from lower to higher—and that Man had also evolved from lower forms, most recently apes—was a blasphemy. But such views were not new to Darwin. His own grandfather, the first Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a doctor and a naturalist, had been a famous evolutionary thinker in England before Lamarck and had expressed his ideas in the form of popular, if controversial, poetry:
Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
Then as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume.
Views such as these, and Lamarck’s, were heretical thinking in the early nineteenth century. Most scientists saw the clear hand of God in the design and perfection of a well-ordered Heaven and Earth, not a world of destructive change that wiped out whole species through a process of slow attrition. That would surely be a godless Universe, a living anathema, the third, hellish panel of a Bosch triptych. But a few did believe exactly this, and Robert Grant was one of them.
Darwin’s studies with Grant produced his first scientific paper, read to the Plinian Society on March 27, 1827. He had observed through a poor microscope what apparently had not been seen or noted by anyone else: the frenzied swimming of tiny eggs that explained the fertilization of the species Flustra, a seaweed-like creature. Darwin was thrilled by what appeared to be a first, but his pleasure was shortlived. Grant appropriated his findings, without crediting Darwin’s efforts, passing them off as his own observations in a paper read to the more august Wernerian Natural History Society on March 24, 1827, three days before Darwin’s presentation to the Plinian Society. Years later, Darwin told his daughter Henrietta that his first scientific discovery had provided his first glimpse of “the jealousy of scientific men.”
Relations between professor and student cooled, but Grant’s influence on Darwin was profound: it was his first exposure to the deep inductive exploration of a science. The science became the foundation of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, and the scientist provided him with a model for obsession.
At the end of the school year, Darwin came home and told his father he could not continue his studies to be a doctor. Dr. Darwin was furious. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Darwin later agreed with him: “He was very properly vehement against my turning into an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination.”
Darwin’s problem was that he had no ambition. The Darwins were landed gentry, wealthy property owners, and there was no financial incentive for Charles to find a career; he would always be wealthy. He enjoyed shooting and hunting more than anything else. In between such outings, he liked collecting and studying small creatures. It was all he wanted to do. But Robert Darwin wasn’t going to see his son turn into a wastrel and dilettante, so he told him to prepare for the church.
The profession of clergyman was just as respectable as being a medical man, requiring much the same sort of bedside manner. The Church of England was then a gentleman’s club with the most impeccable credentials, and in many places extremely well-appointed. Parish ministers were provided with houses, an adequate income (which Darwin could amply supplement), and instantly acquired social status. They had servants, bred fine dogs and horses, and maintained good wine cellars. The role had the same comfortable, tweedy informality as a schoolmaster’s, but with a higher social profile and a lot more leisure time. For the vicar-with-a-hobby it was a platform upon which to develop a full-blown avocation. Many of the notable writers and scientists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were clergymen who studied and wrote books during their great stretches of spare time. An appointment in the right place would be perfect for him, allowing him to shoot with the gentry, ride with the local hunt, botanize, geologize, collect to his heart’s content, write papers and monographs, and achieve status in the scientific community, if that’s where his enthusiasm led him. Such a man had been the eighteenth-century parson William Paley, whose book, Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity had become a standard textbook for theological students. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, another country parson, wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population that would become one of the most influential works of the next fifty years—it would play a crucial role in the evolution of Darwin’s later thinking. Here were the perfect role models for a scientifically distracted clergyman.
Darwin was happy with his father’s sensible suggestion, as long as he could carry it off in good conscience.
I asked for some time to consider, as from what little I had heard and thought on the subject I had scruples about declaring my belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England; though otherwise I liked the thought of being a country clergyman. Accordingly I read with care Pearson on the Creed and a few other books on divinity; and as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded myself that our Creed must be fully accepted.
The training would not be difficult. A bachelor of arts degree at a university, followed by a period of divinity study, would get him his holy orders. In January 1828, he went to Christ’s College, Cambridge.
There he started having fun. He met a like-minded cousin, William Darwin Fox, also studying for holy orders, and the two were soon spending most of their time together, rambling through the countryside on collecting expeditions and doing only just enough work to pass their exams.
Another major preoccupation at Cambridge was to serve him as well as any of his studies. Darwin had become a crack shot at age fifteen, and he loved shooting a rifle more than anything else. “How I did enjoy shooting,” he wrote later. “If there is bliss on earth, that is it.”
My zeal was so great that I used to place my shooting boots open by my bed side when I went to bed, so as not to lose half a minute in putting them on in the morning…. When at Cambridge I used to practise throwing up my gun to my shoulder before a looking glass to see that I threw it up straight. Another and better plan was to get a friend to wave about a lighted candle, and then to fire at it with a cap on the nipple, and if the aim was accurate the little puff of air would blow out the candle.
Darwin studied books about guns and the practice of shooting. He kept a “game book,” a ledger of everything he shot, and lists of what bores of shot were right for different game. He went on shooting parties with Fox and other Cambridge students. It was as much an accepted and desirable part of a young gentleman’s training for life as anything else, and probably of more subsequent value to Darwin than any of his academic studies.
The only competition for the long hours and days spent shooting was an obsession he picked up from his cousin William Fox.
No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow…. No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephens’ Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, “captured by C. Darwin, Esq.”
Darwin was made for entomology. It sent him outdoors in all weathers, on foot or horseback, to spend hours with friends and dogs, kicking over fallen logs and feeling at the same time, at last, useful. It was early days in the natural sciences, and a dedicated amateur could soon gather a collection of mounted insects that could rival a museum’s. Darwin’s enthusiasm was all-consuming.
One day on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one that I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.
Darwin began his beetle hunting at the beginning of the great Victorian mania for collecting—rocks, fossils, ferns, seashells, natural objects of every possible kind, to be taken home, cataloged, occasionally discovered and named, mounted and set up on boards and in cabinets for display. It was an era of newness in the natural sciences when only the degree of industry separated the enthusiastic amateur from the expert.
The rage for local discoveries produced a wonderful range of collecting jars, tins, nets, and, most importantly, clothing and accoutrements for purchase by the generally well-to-do classes that had the leisure time and the money to follow, and be seen to follow, such pursuits. Darwin naturally outfitted himself completely.
“He would have made you smile,” wrote John Fowles of a young Victorian gentleman, another Charles, and the clothes he wore for a geologizing walk along a beach, in his novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
He wore stout nailed boots and canvas gaiters that rose to encase Norfolk breeches of heavy flannel. There was a tight and absurdly long coat to match; a canvas wideawake hat of an indeterminate beige; a massive ashplant, which he had bought on his way to the Cobb; and a voluminous rucksack, from which you might have shaken out an already heavy array of hammers, wrappings, notebooks, pillboxes, adzes and heaven knows what else. Nothing is more incomprehensible to us than the methodicality of the Victorians; one sees it best (at its most ludicrous) in the advice so liberally handed out to travelers in the early editions of Baedecker. Where, one wonders, can any pleasure have been left? How, in the case of Charles, can he not have seen that light clothes would have been more comfortable? That a hat was not necessary? That stout nailed boots on a boulder-strewn beach are as suitable as ice skates?
Well, we laugh. But…if we take this obsession with dressing the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think, a grave—or rather a frivolous—mistake about our ancestors; because it was men not unlike Charles, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science. Their folly in that direction was no more than a symptom of their seriousness in a much more important one. They sensed that current accounts of the world were inadequate; that they had allowed their windows on reality to become smeared by convention, religion, social stagnation; they knew, in short, that they had things to discover, and that the discovery was of the utmost importance to the future of man.
His disinterest in more formal studies notwithstanding, these pursuits brought Darwin into close contact with other naturalists, notably professors Henslow and Sedgwick. He became a part of their coteries, joined them for field trips, attended Henslow’s soirées. He began to feel his true calling, whether it was something that could be properly considered a profession or not. He began, with considerable excitement, to think of himself as a scientist. He read of naturalists who had ranged far beyond the fen country around Cambridge: von Humboldt’s account of his adventures in Tenerife and Brazil inflamed his imagination. He longed to travel.
Darwin got the news of the voyage around the world after walking across north Wales for three weeks on a geological tour with Cambridge Professor Adam Sedgwick, who was hoping to correct and add to George Greenough’s 1820 map of the geology of England and Wales. He had invited young Darwin along to help him, and also to give Darwin a chance at some practical field geologizing before the Tenerife expedition that he liked to talk about.
The two left from Darwin’s family home in Shrewsbury on August 5th, riding in Sedgwick’s carriage to Llangollen in north Wales. From there they walked along the bald rock-rimmed Vale of Clwyd toward Caernarvon on the coast. At Saint Asaph, Sedgwick sent Darwin off on his own to look for signs of a stratum of Old Red Sandstone shown on Greenough’s map. When they met up again that evening in Colwyn, neither had seen a trace of Old Red. Sedgwick told Darwin that the structure of the Vale of Clwyd would now be revised on the basis of their work. Impressed and grateful for Sedgwick’s trust in him, Darwin was “exceedingly proud.”
He returned to his family home, The Mount, on August 29, to find a note from Henslow accompanying the now dog-eared letter from George Peacock. The invitation was breathtaking; it laid before Darwin opportunities that his training in natural science was only beginning to enable him to imagine. At a stroke it eclipsed von Humboldt’s Tenerife and Brazil. As a peruser of traveling books, he had probably also seen an edition of Captain James Cook’s accounts of his circumnavigations, with drawings and watercolors by his expedition artists William Hodges and John Webber. These (which may be seen today in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England) portray the Englishmen’s idealized views of the noble savages amid the sylvan sublimities of their natural settings in Polynesia and the remote, majestic fjordland of New Zealand—Paradise about to be lost—at the moment of contact with Europeans. Here Man and Nature were believed to still exist in the Edenic state, and fifty years after Cook the untrammeled world was thought to be—and surely was—a naturalist’s paradise.
As soon as he read the letters, Darwin told his three sisters he would go. But his father was so strongly against the idea that Darwin almost immediately gave it up. The next morning he wrote to Peacock and Henslow, thanking them but regretfully turning down the offer.
As far as my own mind is concerned, I should think, certainly, most gladly have accepted the opportunity, which you have so kindly offered me, [he wrote to Henslow]—But my Father, although he does not decidedly refuse me, gives such strong advice against going,—that I should not be comfortable, if I did not follow it.—My Fathers objections are these; the unfitting me to settle down as a clergyman,—my little habit of seafaring,—the shortness of the time & the chance of my not suiting Captain FitzRoy.—It certainly is a very serious objection, the very short time for all my preparations, as not only body but mind wants making up for such an undertaking.—But if it had not been for my Father, I would have taken all risks…. Even if I was to go, my Father disliking would take away all energy, & I should want a good stock of that.—Again I must thank you; it adds a little to the heavy, but pleasant load of gratitude which I owe to you.—
Darwin lived securely and happily wrapped in the community of his family, the second youngest of six children, cosseted and fussed over by his three older sisters who formed the maternal bulwark in his life after the early death of his mother when he was eight. His father was a benign but magisterial presence at the head of the household, a physically immense man, rich, intelligent, influential, a creator of the world around him, a figure of absolute authority to his son. Charles was not a headstrong young man who would go against such a father’s wishes. When Dr. Darwin expressed his disapproval, Charles didn’t argue.
Instead, he packed a gun and rode to his Uncle Jos’s house. Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood II enjoyed a relationship almost as close as father and son. Uncle Jos was not as formidable a man as Robert Darwin, not the authoritarian in Charles’s life, yet he was a strong influence on his nephew. The two enjoyed shooting together so much that Darwin called Maer, the Wedgwood home, “Bliss Castle.” Dr. Darwin respected Wedgwood, his brother-in-law, and the influence he had over his son. As Darwin was leaving for Maer, his father told him pointedly: “If you can find any man of common sense who advises you to go, I will give my consent.” And he gave Darwin a note to take to his uncle:
Charles will tell you of the offer he has had made to him of going for a voyage of discovery for 2 years.—I strongly object to it on various grounds, but I will not detail my reasons that he may have your unbiassed opinion on the subject, & if you think differently from me I shall wish him to follow your advice.
Darwin and his Uncle Jos talked it over. He put his father’s objections on paper for Wedgwood to look at and mull over.
- 1) Disreputable to my character as a Clergyman hereafter
- 2) A wild scheme
- 3) That they must have offered to many others before me, the place of Naturalist
- 4) And from its not being accepted there must be some serious objection to the vessel or expedition
- 5) That I should never settle down to a steady life hereafter
- 6) That my accomodations would be most uncomfortable
- 7) That you should consider it again as changing my profession
- 8) That it would be a useless undertaking
Wedgwood—the “man of common sense” whom Dr. Darwin was plainly referring to—wrote him a letter addressing each of his eight objections:
My dear Doctor
I feel the responsibility of your application to me on the offer that has been made to Charles as being weighty, but as you have desired Charles to consult me I cannot refuse to give the result of such consideration as I have been able to give it. Charles has put down what he conceives to be your principle objections & I think the best course I can take will be to state what occurs to me upon each of them.
1—I should not think it would be in any degree disreputable to his character as a clergyman. I should on the contrary think the offer honorable to him, and the pursuit of Natural History, though certainly not professional, is very suitable to a Clergyman.
2—I hardly know how to meet this objection, but he would have definite objects upon which to employ himself and might acquire and strengthen, habits of application, and I should think would be as likely to do so in any way in which he is likely to pass the next two years at home.
3—The notion did not occur to me in reading the letters & on reading them again with that object in mind I see no ground for it.
4—I cannot conceive that the Admiralty would send out a bad vessel on such a service. As to objections to the expedition, they will differ in each mans case & nothing would, I think, be inferred in Charles’s case if it were known that others had objected.
5—You are a much better judge of Charles’s character than I can be. If, on comparing this mode of spending the next two years, with the way in which he will probably spend them if he does not accept this offer, you think him more likely to be rendered unsteady & unable to settle, it is undoubtedly a weighty objection—Is it not the case that sailors are prone to settle in domestic and quiet habits.
6—I can form no opinion on this further than that, if appointed by the Admiralty, he will have a claim to be as well accomodated as the vessel will allow.
7—If I saw Charles now absorbed in professional studies I should probably think it would not be advisable to interrupt them, but this is not, and I think will not be, the case with him. His present pursuit of knowledge is in the same track as he would have to follow in the expedition.
8—The undertaking would be useless as regards his profession, but looking upon him as a man of enlarged curiosity, it affords him such an opportunity of seeing men and things as happens to few.
You will bear in mind that I have had very little time for consideration & that you and Charles are the persons who must decide.
Wedgwood sent the letter off early on September 1. He and Darwin then tried to distract themselves shooting partridge—it was the first day of the season, an opportunity neither could ignore—but their hearts weren’t in it and they made a poor bag. At 10 A.M., Wedgwood impatiently decided he wanted to talk to the doctor face to face, and uncle and nephew set out in his carriage for The Mount, determined to present their opinion with persuasive arguments.
But they found Dr. Darwin in a compliant mood. He’d had a change of heart, perhaps reflecting on the honor of the invitation by the Admiralty, passed to his son by illustrious professors who clearly thought highly of him. Perhaps his greatest objection was one not mentioned in Charles’s list: he feared for his son’s life on a voyage to the wilder parts of the little known world. Captain Cook himself, despite the protection of a boatload of armed seamen, had been killed in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) by natives who had previously revered him. In the end Dr. Darwin recognized the singular opportunity that was presenting itself, and he had decided to let Charles go—with all the considerable financial assistance and encouragement he could provide.
But by then, it appeared, FitzRoy had asked someone else.