Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle

Charles himself rode straight over to Maer, where he found his uncle and cousins full of enthusiasm for his embarking on the voyage, and by the evening all were urging him to reopen the case with his father. On 31 August, with Uncle Josiah at his elbow, he wrote an extremely apologetic note to his father, ending on a separate piece of paper with the list of objections to be answered:

I am afraid I am going to make you yet again very uncomfortable. I think you will excuse me once again stating my opinions on the offer of the Voyage. My excuse and reason is the different way all the Wedgwoods view the subject from what you & my sisters do … But pray do not consider that I am so bent on going, that I would for one single moment hesitate if you thought that after a short period, you should continue uncomfortable.

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 [sic] would be most uncomfortable

7 That you should consider it as again changing my profession

8 That it would be a useless undertaking46

Enclosed with this letter was one from Josiah to Robert:

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 principal 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 that 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 apply 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 my 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 accommodated 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 curiousity, it affords him such an opportunity of seeing men and things as happens to few.

You will bear in mind that I have very little time for consideration & that you and Charles are the persons who must decide. I am / My dear Doctor / Affectionately yours / Josiah Wedgwood47

Uncle Jos had thus with calm sense disposed effectively of Robert’s rather exaggerated qualms, and his description of Charles as ‘a man of enlarged curiousity’ was truly prophetic.

The two letters were dispatched to Shrewsbury early on 1 September, leaving Josiah and Charles to take out their guns for what would normally have been a specially enjoyable occasion for them, the opening day of the partridge season. They both had much on their minds, and Charles had only brought down a single bird when at ten o’clock Josiah did what ‘few uncles would have done’, bundled him into a carriage, and whisked him off to Shrewsbury to do battle in person with Robert. But there they found to their relief that Robert had already changed his mind, and was now ready to give ‘all the assistance in my power’.

On this same day Beaufort had conveyed the news to Robert FitzRoy that ‘I believe my friend Mr Peacock of Triny College Cambe has succeeded in getting a “Savant” for you – A Mr Darwin grandson of the well known philosopher and poet – full of zeal and enterprize and having contemplated a voyage on his own account to S. America.’ And that afternoon Charles himself sat down at Shrewsbury and wrote for the first time directly to Beaufort, explaining that the situation had changed since he had sent his refusal to Henslow and Peacock, and that if the appointment was still unfilled ‘I shall be very happy to have the honor of accepting it’.

On Saturday, 2 September, Charles returned to Cambridge, and spent Sunday closeted with Henslow, ‘thinking what is to be done’. Henslow explained how he himself had nearly accepted the appointment, but turned it down because of his wife’s unhappiness at the prospect, while Leonard Jenyns had done the same because he could not desert his parish at Swaffham Bulbeck. At Henslow’s, Charles met Alexander Charles Wood, a cousin and good friend of FitzRoy, and currently an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, and pupil of Peacock. At Peacock’s urging, Wood had written to recommend Charles to FitzRoy, which he had dutifully done, taking the precaution of warning his Tory cousin that Charles was politically a Whig and decidedly liberal in outlook. FitzRoy had just replied in a letter which Charles felt was ‘most straightforward & gentlemanlike, but so much against my going, that I immediately gave up the scheme’. However, Henslow firmly urged him not to make up his mind until he had had serious consultations with Beaufort and FitzRoy, so on Monday morning he took the coach to London, and had his first encounter with his sometimes erratic ‘beau ideal of a captain’.

The two young men, FitzRoy being then only twenty-six years old, and Charles four years younger, at once put themselves out to be agreeable. Charles wrote to his sister Susan, ‘Cap. Fitzroy is in town & I have seen him; it is no use attempting to praise him as much as I feel inclined to do, for you would not believe me.’ FitzRoy proposed that they would mess together, with no wine and the plainest dinners, fully sharing such limited working space as was available in so small a vessel. The trip would inevitably be stormy and uncomfortable, though if Charles found it too much for him he would always be at liberty to withdraw, and during the worst weather he might spend two months ashore in some healthy, safe and nice country. Such openness quickly restored all Charles’s enthusiasm for the voyage, leaving only a slight doubt – soon laid to rest by Beaufort – as to whether the Beagle would indeed sail back across the Pacific and thus circumnavigate the world. Charles wrote later that:

On becoming very intimate with FitzRoy I heard that I had run a very narrow risk of being rejected, on account of the shape of my nose! He was an ardent disciple of Lavater,* and was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage. But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.

To his sister Charles concluded, ‘There is indeed a tide in the affairs of men, & I have experienced it, & I had entirely given it up until 1 to day.’

There ensued some frenzied activity in London, while Charles followed up introductions given him by Henslow to experts for advice of all kinds, from naturalists knowledgeable on what to collect and how best to preserve the specimens, to suppliers of instruments, glassware, paper, books and guns. His sisters looked after his wardrobe, buying him strong new pairs of shoes and shirts marked with his name for the ship’s laundry. His friend John Coldstream advised him to use an oyster-trawl of the ordinary size for collecting marine animals, to provide himself with a few lobster pots, and when at anchor to ‘shoot’ some deep-sea fishing lines baited with small pieces of worm-eaten wood and hooks. He met Captain P.P. King, FitzRoy’s senior officer on the previous expedition, and, unasked, King said that FitzRoy’s temper was perfect, and that he was sending his own son Philip Gidley King on the Beagle as a midshipman. Charles lashed out and bought an expensive portable dissecting microscope made by Bancks, of the type recommended to him by the eminent botanist and microscopist Robert Brown. With the help of the bookseller and ornithologist William Yarrell he ordered a rifle and a brace of pistols for £50, flattering himself with the thought that FitzRoy would have spent £400. They might be needed, he told a friend, ‘for we shall have plenty of fighting those d— Cannibals’. On 8 September, when all the shops were closed, he found an excellent seat from which to watch the procession at the coronation of King William IV, who ‘looked very well, & seemed popular: but there was very little enthusiasm, so little that I can hardly think there will be a coronation this time 50 years’. In other spare moments he worked at astronomy, ‘as I suppose it would astound a sailor if one did not know how to find Lat & Long’.

On 11 September Charles embarked with FitzRoy on the three-day passage in a steam packet along the south coast to Plymouth, where his first view of the Beagle in the dockyard at Devonport was an unflattering one, ‘without her masts or bulkheads, & looking more like a wreck than a vessel commissioned to go round the world’. The trip gave FitzRoy an initial chance to evaluate Charles’s sea legs, and to indoctrinate him more fully in the Admiralty’s plans for the Beagle and what had been achieved during her previous voyage. The ship was disconcertingly small, ninety feet long and twenty-four-and-a-half feet wide amidships, with a displacement of 235 tons. Inside the poop cabin, measuring ten feet by eleven, and filled mainly by a large chart table and three chairs, Charles would work with Midshipman Philip Gidley King and the Assistant Surveyor John Lort Stokes (no relative of the Beagle’s former Captain), and sleep in a hammock slung above the table. Stokes’s bed was in a cubicle outside the door, and King’s was on a lower deck. They would eat in the gunroom, but Charles would have the run of the Captain’s cabin on the deck below, where they would take their meals together. Sixty years later, King drew from memory for an edition of Charles’s Journal of Researches a picture of the internal layout of the ship.

Charles sped back to London by coach, ‘wonderful quick travelling, 250 miles in 24 hours’. Here he had a useful talk to Beaufort, who told him that the normal naval practice was for any collections made by the ship’s surgeon automatically to become the property of the government. But as Charles’s appointment was not an official one, he would be best advised to retain for himself the disposal of his collection amongst the different bodies in London. Which of those bodies would be the most suitable ones was an issue that greatly concerned him in subsequent correspondence with Henslow. But the first step was to spend a couple of days in Cambridge, making detailed arrangements for Henslow and a brother of his in London to receive, and keep safely in store until the return of the Beagle, consignments of specimens that in due course would be shipped from South America. Henslow’s parting gift to Charles was a copy of an English translation of the first two volumes of Humboldt’s Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the new continent, inscribed ‘J.S. Henslow to his friend C. Darwin on his departure from England upon a voyage round the world. 21 Sept. 1831.’

Back at home in Shrewsbury for his last ten days, Charles packed up his clothes and books, and settled his complicated and sometimes overstrained financial affairs. He wrote to Henslow that his father was much more reconciled to the idea of the voyage now that he had become accustomed to it, and was in fact treating him with a generosity wholly belying the reputation he once had for being an extremely severe parent. Earlier in the summer ‘the Governor’ had handed over a £200 note, no less, to meet Charles’s debts at Cambridge. The cost of equipping him for the voyage amounted to some £600, not far from that of two years’ support at Cambridge, while the Admiralty was exacting £50 per annum for his board and lodging. Charles tried to console his father by saying that he would have to be ‘deuced clever to spend more than my allowance whilst on board the Beagle’, to be answered with a smile, ‘But they all tell me you are very clever.’

On 2 October, Charles said goodbye to his father and sisters. But his best-loved neighbour Fanny Owen, ‘the prettiest, plumpest, Charming personage that Shropshire possesses’, to whom in their correspondence he was ‘Dr Postillion’ and she was ‘the Housemaid’, was away from home in Exeter, and could only write two long letters expressing her grief that she would not see him for two years or more, ‘when we must be grown old & steady’. Charles went to London, and thanks to further delays in the Beagle’s readiness to sail imposed by the dockyard, remained there for three weeks. During this period he wrote to FitzRoy to apologise for the bulkiness of the luggage that he had dispatched to Devonport, and was assured that it was acceptable. In a second letter accompanying yet another parcel containing some talc, which Charles may have required for taxidermy, he enquired whether FitzRoy had a good set of mountain barometers, for ‘Several great guns in the Scientific World have told me some points in geology to ascertain, which entirely depend on their relative height.’ FitzRoy’s reply is not recorded, but Charles did obtain a set of aneroid barometers, of which he made extensive use during the voyage in his investigations of the rise and fall of the land on either side of the Andes. His copy of Jones’s companion to the mountain barometer & tables survives among his papers in the Cambridge University Library.

After a pleasant drive from London, Charles arrived in Devonport on 24 October, and next day found the Beagle ‘moored to the Active hulk & in a state of bustle & confusion’. The carpenters were busy fitting up the drawers in the poop cabin, and ‘My own private corner looks so small that I cannot help fearing that many of my things must be left behind.’ Later on he was wont to refer a little unfairly to the next two months as spent at ‘that horrid Plymouth’. From his letters to his sisters and the entries in the private journal that he kept from 24 October 1831 to 4 October 1836, it is evident that the principal defect of Plymouth in his eyes was its not infrequent storms and rain at the best of times, for ‘It does not require a rain gauge to show how much more rain falls in the Western than in the Central & Eastern parts of England.’ Even more aggravating had been the long series of south-westerly gales in December that forced the abandonment of several attempts to sail. Apart from this, however, Charles’s chief complaint was having had more social engagements than he wished, although they included dinners with the Commander-in-Chief Admiral Sir Manley Dixon at which everyone except for him was a naval officer and of course the conversation was almost exclusively nautical. However, he confessed that this made the evening very pleasant to him.

He dined with the ship’s nine gunroom officers for the first time on 29 October, and was regaled with horrific accounts of the manner in which he would be treated by Neptune on crossing the Equator. The following day he had lunch with the midshipmen, and after being taken for a sail to Millbrook, went for a long scrambling walk with Stokes and Charles Musters, a young Volunteer First Class hoping to become a midshipman. On other occasions he walked with various friends to Cawsand, Rame Head and Whitesand Bay, but his favourite walk, on which he took his brother Erasmus during a week’s farewell visit at the beginning of December, was to the park at Mount Edgcumbe, with what he described as its ‘birds eye view’ of Devonport, Stonehouse and Plymouth.

On 31 October Charles went with Stokes to the Plymouth Athenaeum, where space had been reserved to set up an ‘astronomical house’ for the Beagle in which observations were to be carried out with a dipping needle for the determination of the angular depression of the earth’s magnetic field. During the next weeks he had several sessions with FitzRoy at the needle, which he first described as a ‘very long & delicate operation’, though later he said less enthusiastically that he had been ‘unpleasantly employed in finding out the inaccuracies of Gambey’s new dipping needle’. At the Athenaeum one evening he attended a lecture by a Mr Harris on the virtues of the new system of lightning conductors with which the Beagle was fitted, and whose utility would be tested. He was taken out by FitzRoy to the breakwater protecting Plymouth Sound, where bearings were being taken to connect a particular stone, from which Captain King had based his longitudes for the previous voyage, with the quay at Clarence Baths where the true time was then taken. And he was assigned a regular task every morning of taking and comparing the differences in the Beagle’s barometers. His education in navigation and meteorology therefore proceeded apace.

Charles’s relations with FitzRoy were mostly very cordial, though he later recalled an example of the storms that could suddenly arise, and as quickly be quelled:

At Plymouth before we sailed, he was extremely angry with a dealer in crockery who refused to exchange some article purchased in his shop: the Captain asked the man the price of a very expensive set of china and said ‘I should have purchased this if you had not been so disobliging.’ As I knew that the cabin was amply stocked with crockery, I doubted whether he had any such intention; and I must have shown my doubts in my face, for I said not a word. After leaving the shop he looked at me, saying You do not believe what I have said, and I was forced to own that it was so. He was silent for a few minutes and then said You are right and I acted wrongly in my anger at the blackguard.

On 14 November FitzRoy moved his twenty-two chronometers on to the ship, but the paint was still wet in the poop cabin, so his books could not yet be arranged. A week later, Charles carried all his books and instruments on board the Beagle, after which two hard days’ work with Stokes reduced the poop cabin to ‘very neat order’. The Beagle had now sailed from Devonport to her moorings at Barnett Pool under Mount Edgcumbe ready for her final departure. On 28 November FitzRoy gave a magnificent luncheon for about forty people as a ship’s warming, with waltzing that continued until late in the evening.

On 4 December, in the first journal entry written on board ship, Charles wrote:

I intend sleeping in my hammock. I did so last night & experienced a most ludicrous difficulty in getting into it; my great fault of jockeyship was in trying to put my legs in first. The hammock being suspended, I thus only succeeded in pushing it away without making any progress in inserting my own body. The correct method is to sit accurately in centre of bed, then give yourself a dexterous twist & your head & feet come into their respective places. After a little time I daresay I shall, like others, find it very comfortable.

The next morning was tolerably clear, and sights were obtained, so now the Beagle was ready for her long-delayed moment of starting. But at midday a heavy gale blew up from the south, making the ship move so much that Charles was nearly sick, and ruling out any escape from the harbour. ‘In the evening dined with Erasmus,’ he wrote. ‘I shall not often have such quiet snug dinners.’ However, gales from that unlucky point south-west recurred daily, and Charles had more last dinners and one more walk to Mount Edgcumbe with Erasmus. On 10 December the wind dropped more hopefully, and the Beagle sailed at ten o’clock with Erasmus on board, dropping him off after doubling the breakwater. But in the evening the barometer gave notice of yet another gale, and after a wild and very uncomfortable night it was determined to put back to Plymouth and there remain for a more fortunate wind. Charles reflected ruefully that although he had done right to accept the offer of the voyage, ‘I think it is doubtful how far it will add to the happiness of one’s life. If I keep my health & return, & then have strength of mind quietly to settle down in life, my present & future share of vexation & want of comfort will be amply repaid.’

Two days later, while the weather still showed little sign of improvement, Charles made some serious resolutions:

An idle day; dined for the first time in Captain’s cabin & felt quite at home. Of all the luxuries the Captain has given me, none will be so essential as that of having my meals with him. I am often afraid I shall be quite overwhelmed with the numbers of subjects which I ought to take into hand. It is difficult to mark out any plan & without method on ship-board I am sure little will be done. The principal objects are 1st, collecting observing & reading in all branches of Natural history that I possibly can manage. Observations in Meteorology. French & Spanish, Mathematics, & a little Classics, perhaps not more than Greek Testament on Sundays. I hope generally to have some one English book to hand for my amusement, exclusive of the above mentioned branches. If I have not energy enough to make myself steadily industrious during the voyage, how great & uncommon an opportunity of improving myself shall I throw away. May this never for one moment escape my mind, & then perhaps I may have the same opportunity of drilling my mind that I threw away whilst at Cambridge.

The wind remained obstinately in the wrong point, until on 21 December there was a light north-westerly which encouraged the Beagle to try again to depart. After going aground off Drake’s Island and taking several hours to get off again, the ship sailed out of the harbour, and once in the open sea Charles was soon overcome by sickness and retreated first to the Captain’s cabin and then to his hammock. But during the night the wind strengthened and shifted back yet again to the south-west, and Charles awoke to find himself once more back in Plymouth Sound.

On Christmas Day, Charles went ashore to church, to find an old Cambridge friend preaching. He then lunched in the gunroom, where the dullness of the conversation made him ‘properly grateful for my good luck in living with the Captain’. In the meantime the crew exercised their traditional custom of making themselves so drunk that Midshipman King was obliged to perform the duty of sentry. Boxing Day was greeted with an excellent wind for sailing, but the ship was still in a state approaching anarchy, with the worst offenders in heavy chains. At long last, on 27 December, the Beagle tacked with some difficulty out of the harbour, accompanied by the Commissioner Captain Ross in what Charles described as his ‘Yatch’. After lunching with Captain Ross on mutton chops and champagne, Lieutenant Sulivan and Charles ‘joined the Beagle about 2 o’clock outside the Breakwater, & immediately with every sail filled by a light breeze we scudded away at the rate of 7 or 8 knots an hour – I was not sick that evening but went to bed early’. The voyage of the Beagle had begun.