Читать книгу Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle - Richard Keynes - Страница 8

Prologue

In the autobiography written by Charles Darwin near the end of his life for the benefit of his children and descendants,¹ he said:

The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career; yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose. I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind. I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were already fairly developed.

There is no dispute with Darwin’s own estimate of the importance of the voyage of the Beagle in the subsequent development of his scientific career. He himself provided a classical description of the voyage in his Journal of Researches,2 but his biographers other than Janet Browne have not covered his scientific research on the Beagle in much detail, while Alan Moorehead’s Darwin and the Beagle3 was mainly concerned with the affair as the exciting adventure that it undoubtedly was, and gave a distinctly misleading picture of the relations between Darwin and FitzRoy. The purpose of this book is to retell the whole story, starting from the haphazard events in Tierra del Fuego that led Robert FitzRoy to take the Beagle there again, with a ‘well-educated and scientific person’ as companion. Then it is shown how FitzRoy’s scientist had precisely the right talents to make highly effective use of the array of new scientific facts that were presented to him in South America and in the countries visited by the Beagle homeward bound round the far side of the world. And lastly it is explained how Charles Darwin’s findings on the Beagle soon started him on the path that in due course led him to the discovery of the principle of Natural Selection and of the Origin of Species.

My interest in South America was first aroused in 1951, when I had the good fortune to be invited by Professor Carlos Chagas Filho to be Visiting Reader that summer at the Instituto de Biofisica in Rio de Janeiro. My ignorance about Brazil was profound, but I did know that Professor Chagas had a good supply of electric eels at his laboratory. Moreover, Alan Hodgkin, leader of our group working at the Physiological Laboratory in Cambridge on the mechanism of conduction of the nervous impulse, had just developed an important new technique for recording electrical activity in living cells that I could usefully apply to investigate the properties of what Charles Darwin had described as the ‘wondrous’ organs⁴ in certain fishes that generated their powerful electrical discharges, though he had been puzzled about the manner of their evolution. So I spent two and a half happy months in Rio that summer, successfully unravelling the mystery of how the additive discharge of the electric organ was achieved.⁵ The job complete, and having accumulated a pocketful of cruzeiros in payment for my efforts, I then took the recently established direct flight in a Braniff DC-6 from Rio to Lima over the Mato Grosso and the Andes, and made the first of many journeys to Peru, briefly calling on fellow physiologists in Chile and Argentina on the way home, and getting back to Cambridge for the Michaelmas term at the beginning of October.

In August 1968 I had been visiting a Chilean colleague at Viña del Mar, near Valparaiso, for discussions on a joint study of the biophysics and physiology of giant nerve fibres, and was flying home via Buenos Aires. Here the British Council representative, knowing me to be a member of the Darwin family, asked me whether I had seen the Darwin collection belonging to Dr Armando Braun Menendez. I had not previously taken any particular interest in the voyage of the Beagle, but fortunately the Argentinian professor who was showing me round knew Dr Braun Menendez, and took me to call on him. His impressive collection of papers and books was concerned with the exploration of the southern seas, and the Darwin item consisted of two little portfolios of pencil drawings and watercolours made on board the Beagle by Conrad Martens, of whom I knew vaguely as the second of the ship’s official artists. I opened one of the portfolios to find the picture labelled by Martens as ‘Slinging the monkey. Port Desire – Decr 25, 1833’, which portrayed the ship’s crew engaged on the Royal Navy’s traditional celebration of Christmas Day, with the Beagle and Adventure anchored in the background. The picture bore the initials ‘RF’ at the top right-hand corner, though the Beagle’s Captain, Robert FitzRoy, evidently did not approve of every detail, because Martens had written below: ‘Note. Mainmast of the Beagle a little farther aft – Miz. Mast to rake more’. This graphic document, and others in the portfolios, opened an exciting new window for me on to the voyage of the Beagle, and launched me on an entirely new and rewarding field of part-time study.

On my return home, I consulted Nora Barlow, my godmother and mentor, and like my mother a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Through her pioneer editions of Charles Darwin’s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. “Beagle” (1933), Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle (1945), Darwin’s Autobiography (1958), his Ornithological Notes (1963), and Darwin and Henslow: The Growth of an Idea. Letters 1831–1860 (1967), Nora Barlow was the true founder of what is often known nowadays as the Darwin Industry. Her wisdom and kindness had no bounds, and my debt to her is immense.

With Lady Barlow’s encouragement, I set about assembling a catalogue of all the extant drawings and paintings made by Conrad Martens during his initial journey from England to Montevideo, where on 3 August 1833 he joined the Beagle as a replacement for the ship’s first official artist, Augustus Earle, who had been taken ill. Then I listed the drawings and paintings that he made in Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, the Straits of Magellan, Chiloe and around Valparaiso, until in December 1834, there being no longer any space for him on the Beagle, he set sail for Australia. Here he established himself in Sydney as the leading artist of the period, and at the same time continued to paint developments of his Beagle drawings in watercolour, some of which he sold to Darwin, and others to Robert FitzRoy to be engraved as illustrations for the published accounts of the voyage. Selections from this material were reproduced in the first book that I edited, The Beagle Record (1979), to illustrate some of the places and people actually seen by Darwin and FitzRoy in South America. For the most immediate written records, I drew upon the vivid accounts in letters from Darwin to his sisters and to his mentor in Cambridge, Professor John Stevens Henslow, and also in what he himself called his ‘commonplace journal’, but which will be referred to here as the ‘Beagle Diary’ to distinguish it from his subsequently published Journal of Researches. In addition I made use of FitzRoy’s published account,⁶ his few surviving diaries, and some of his letters.

Fifty years after its publication, Nora Barlow’s edition of The Beagle Diary had long since gone out of print. Darwin’s splendid description of his daily life on the Beagle and ashore, sent home at intervals to his family in Shrewsbury, is one of the major classics of scientific exploration. My next task was therefore to produce a new version revised according to modern standards of transcription, with Nora Barlow’s very rare errors put right, and a new introduction and footnotes. This was published in 1988, and has recently been reprinted in paperback.⁷

Two substantial Darwin manuscripts still remained unpublished at the Cambridge University Library, namely the Zoology Notes⁸ and the Geology Notes⁹,¹⁰ made on the Beagle. Apart from a brief account of some observations made in Edinburgh in 1827,¹¹ these were his first scientific writings, containing a detailed record of all that he observed and collected during the four-and-three-quarter years of the voyage. Their importance is that here, and in his letters to Henslow,¹² it is possible to trace the first beginnings of Darwin’s thinking about the evolution not only of the animal kingdom but also of the face of the earth.

After retiring in 1986 from administration and teaching in Cambridge, I had more time at my disposal, so in addition to visiting the marine laboratory at Roscoff in Brittany every autumn for continuation of some experimental work, I embarked on a transcription¹³ of Darwin’s Zoology Notes and Specimen Lists. They comprise some hundreds of quarto pages of notes, with descriptions of 1500 specimens preserved in Spirits of Wine, and some 3500 not in Spirits. In order to identify the insects and marine invertebrates collected by Darwin, I needed a great deal of help from experts on their taxonomy, but the vertebrates had mostly been covered in the five parts of The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle published in 1839–1843.¹⁴ Completion of the task has kept me busy for about ten years, but it has now at last been finished. The Geology Notes have not as yet been transcribed and published, occupying as they do around four times as many pages as the Zoology Notes. However, articles by Secord,¹⁵ Herbert¹⁶ and Rhodes¹⁷ have discussed them helpfully, as has Janet Browne’s account of the voyage.¹⁸ Moreover, photocopies of the MSS are available at the Cambridge University Library for study by anyone well practised at reading Darwin’s reasonably legible handwriting.

If any of my readers feel that they would like to become better acquainted with one of their forebears, I can recommend the course that I adopted thanks to that chance introduction in Buenos Aires in 1968. When you have transcribed several hundred thousand words of his writings, concerned with places a few of which you have seen for yourself not too greatly changed 160 years later, you may once in a while almost feel that you are talking to him. But it helps to be lucky enough to have a forebear who was as friendly to all men, and as constructively critical and honest about his own ideas, as Charles Darwin always was.

Richard Darwin KeynesCambridge, July 2001