Transmutation. “Evolutio,” if you wanted to be fancy and Italian about it. Whatever you want to call it, the grand unrolling of one type into another, connecting all living things into a single tree of life was all the rage among the society gentlemen. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an influential Scottish judge in the 1700s, had said shocking things about it. Monboddo’s metaphysics separated humans from brutes by only the thinnest slice of cognition. And imagine how he scandalized the chattering classes when, according to rumor anyway, he suggested perhaps tails even lingered, dangling from the spinal cords of the underdeveloped. They called him an “eccentric,” a fusty, argumentative judge and a voracious reader. Perhaps too learned – genius and madness, you know.

But mostly, Monboddo used this advocacy for monogenism (the idea that all humans, no matter their external appearance or race, descend from a single ancestral source – and not necessarily a human one if you go back far enough) to poke at Henry Home, Lord Kames, his intellectual sparring partner. Yet even Kames agreed that humans had once been primitive and had changed, grown, developed, evolved (again, if you wanted to show off and use the Latinate term for it). Granted, Kames insisted that somewhere back in the mists of time, and less time than Monboddo insisted upon, all human races had their own, independent, non-related, quite separate origin story. He was a polygenist to Monboddo’s monogenism.

This is perhaps why Darwin got involved. Not Charles Darwin. We’re talking about his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, MD (1731–1802; Figure 1.1). Polygenism undergirded slavery. Different races, different species, no scientific reason standing against members of one race owning or exterminating another. And Kames was totally fine with that. Polygenism suggested that of the several races – by then they’d settled on four or five – Caucasians ruled the others. That was the natural way of things. Science had shown it.

Figure 1.1 Erasmus Darwin.

(grandfather of Charles)

Dr. Erasmus Darwin, though, supported abolishing the slave trade, like his old friend Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), whose renowned pottery workshop pounded out the medallion promoting the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade as well as all the fancy Wedgwood plates and cups adorning the homes of the nouveau riche. Because of Wedgwood, the plea “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” dangled from wrists and adorned hairpins of the fashionable across the Empire until, finally, Member of Parliament for Yorkshire and ardent Anglican, William Wilberforce, overwhelmed pro-slavery opposition to ban the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1807. Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood were members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, so called because its now-famous members – also including Matthew Boulton, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, and James Watt – preferred to return home from their meetings under the light of a full moon. They hung together in the 1770s and 80s in part from the close relationship between Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, cemented in 1796 when Dr. Darwin’s daughter would marry Wedgwood’s son. But what if all humans were related, truly, down to their primate roots?

Erasmus Darwin teased evolutionary ideas in a medical work, Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794–1796), a text that contained in embryonic form much of what would be considered evolutionary theory for the next 50 years. Dr. Darwin started with the realization that the Earth was very old – a concept he learned from his father, Robert Darwin of Elston, who procured a fossil, later identified as a plesiosaur, and donated it to the Royal Society of London. Fossils prove that living things have had millions of years to adapt, said Erasmus Darwin. Any competent naturalist can see the “great similarity of structure which obtains in all the warm-blooded animals, as well quadrupeds, birds, and amphibious animals, as in mankind.” Examine the paws of a mouse, the wings of a bat, the feet of an elephant, or the flipper of a fossilized plesiosaur and “one is led to conclude that they have alike been produced from a similar living filament.” Examine embryonic development and a careful observer could witness with their own eyes the markers of deep history. Common descent with modification – many, if not all, organisms related to one another over the vast expanse of time.

In some cases, Dr. Darwin pointed out, organisms, as they descended from earlier less specialized stock, “acquired hands and fingers, with a fine sense of touch, as in mankind.” But other organisms evolved out of the same starter package “claws or talons, as in tygers [sic] and eagles” or “toes with an intervening web, or membrane, as in seals and geese” or “cloven hoofs [sic] as in cows and swine; and whole hoofs [sic] in others, as in the horse.” Even in birds, Dr. Darwin insisted, one could see the evidence of common descent, in this case shared with mammals. Over millions of years, similar hard parts (e.g., bones, teeth, horns, beaks) in an overall body-plan were tweaked just so to produce very different organs with different functions: “in the bird kind this original living filament has put forth wings instead of arms or legs, and feathers instead of hair. In some it has protruded horns on the forehead instead of teeth in the fore part of the upper jaw; in others, tushes [short tusks] instead of horns; and in others, beaks instead of either.” He saw the same evidence of evolutionary descent in plants, as he publicized in 1791 in The Botanic Garden. Truly, as Dr. Darwin proclaimed in Zoonomia, “the whole is one family of one parent.” Evolution, transmutation, unrolling, common descent, whatever – it was all part of God’s master plan, a law from the start, like gravity, according to Erasmus Darwin.

In the posthumously published poem Reference DarwinThe Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society, published in 1803, Erasmus Darwin went even further in detailing his evolutionary vision. And because it was presented poetically, modern scholars like to dismiss it. But take a look; Dr. Darwin packed the margins around the poem full of detailed footnotes and then tacked on multiple appendices, totaling almost 200 pages. This was no flight of fancy. Dr. Darwin laid out a detailed evolutionary vision several years before his better-known grandson was even born. He even beat the other “father of evolution,” Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (more on him later).

Humans, Dr. Darwin said in Temple of Nature, descended from ancestors who probably originated in the place we now call Syria. This conjecture belonged to eccentric Monboddo, who had deduced it from studying human languages. But those human ancestors, Dr. Darwin insisted, had their own primate ancestors: “one family of monkeys on the banks of the Mediterranean; who accidentally had learned to use the adductor pollicis, or that strong muscle which constitutes the ball of the thumb, and draws the point of it to meet the points of the fingers….” With their advanced thumbs, accidentally acquired and passed on through the generations, these Mediterranean monkeys began to pick up all the other specialized things we humans do. Eventually, they crossed some sort of a line; they became us. This, explained Dr. Darwin, was the descent of man.

Yet he speculated that this evolution of humanity by passing on acquired characteristics was just a more specialized case of the process beginning at the beginning, when heat and water gave birth to the first cells: “Nursed by warm sun-beams in primeval caves, Organic Life began beneath the waves.” And here’s what I find especially interesting. Very rough outlines of most aspects of evolutionary theory that we study today were already present in Erasmus Darwin’s work. For instance, he realized that early living creatures must have had the power to lock-in some of their common experiences through heredity, but that they also varied substantially generation to generation. Variation likely came as a result of different environmental conditions including the climate, food, their use-and-disuse of parts to get at food and to escape death, and even disease: “The clime unkind, or noxious food, instills / To embryon nerves hereditary ills; / The feeble births acquired diseases chase, / ’Till Death extinguish the degenerate race.” He even had a theory for the genesis of sexual reproduction itself. Sex originated in order to combat disease, Dr. Darwin speculated. “As the sexual progeny of vegetables are thus less liable to hereditary diseases than the solitary progenies,” Erasmus Darwin reasoned in Reference DarwinThe Temple of Nature, “so it is reasonable to conclude, that the sexual progenies of animals may be less liable to hereditary diseases, if the marriages are into different families, than if into the same family….” This, interestingly, is a leading theory of the origins of sex today.

Moreover, once differentiated into male and female sexes, Erasmus Darwin saw yet another mechanism for biological diversity: competition for mates. Antlers, tusks, showy plumage and the like all served to attract females and ward off competing males – what we now call “sexual selection.” We call it that because Erasmus’s grandson called it that almost three-quarters of a century later in the book Reference DarwinThe Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871 .

Erasmus Darwin even anticipated what Charles Darwin would write in the book that followed a year after the Descent of Man, entitled Reference DarwinThe Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. To those who objected that far more complex behaviors – language, for instance, or tool use – could not be a result of evolution, Dr. Darwin responded by highlighting how animals imitate sounds and behaviors of each other just like humans. Of course, our sound and behavior imitations are, to us anyway, more faithful, more nuanced, more sophisticated. But that basic process of learning by observation, trial, and error, much like evolution itself, Dr. Darwin suggested, can be best described as imitation with small deviations – a kind of common descent with modification visible in psychology as well as biology.

I think it’s fair to say many ideas that would reappear in the works of Erasmus’s better-known grandson Charles already hovered in Darwin family literature and thought. It’s difficult to ascertain, however, how directly these traits passed down to grandson Charles Robert Darwin. Given the relationship between Erasmus and his fourth child, Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848), perhaps not all that much. Accounting is inexact, but Erasmus Darwin fathered as many as fifteen children with as many as four women. After his first wife, Mary “Polly” Howard (1740–70) died when fourth-child Robert was only four years old, Erasmus hired a governess, seventeen-year-old Mary Parker (1753–?), to care for Robert. From 1771 to 1774, Erasmus fathered three more daughters, two with Mary Parker (1772 and 1774), and a third supposedly with a woman named Lucy Swift in 1771, before marrying again, this time to the newly widowed and quite wealthy Elizabeth Pole (1747–1832). Erasmus and Elizabeth bore seven additional offspring, including Frances Ann Violetta Darwin (1783–1874), the mother of Francis Galton (1822–1911); after attacking his cousin Charles Darwin’s concept of inheritance in the 1860s and 1870s, a concept borrowed in part from Erasmus Darwin’s works, Galton went on to coin the word “eugenics” in 1883. Convinced by Galton and his followers, German and American eugenicists would sterilize hundreds of thousands of men and women in the name of eugenics in the years leading up to the Holocaust, though that event had nothing to do with a Darwin, as we will see later.

Josiah Wedgwood had promised Erasmus that his daughter, Susannah “Sukey” Wedgwood (1767–1817), would marry Robert Waring Darwin as soon as Robert had made something of himself. By 1787, 21-year-old Robert had completed medical training both at the prestigious University of Edinburgh and then at Leiden University in the Netherlands. A year later, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society on the basis of a medical dissertation some historians suspect Erasmus helped research. Robert, now a physician, returned to the ancestral home in Shropshire to take patients. Rather than biology or medicine like his father, however, Robert loved financial investing. He dumped capital into canals and a highway, and they paid off. So, by 1795, Josiah Wedgwood gave the nod to a well-funded Robert Darwin and Sukey Wedgwood engagement. When the old potter unexpectedly gave up the ghost soon after, £25,000 (roughly £2.3 million today) went to Sukey. In other words, the newlywed Darwin-Wedgwoods began married life quite comfortably.

Grandfather Erasmus died in 1802. Robert Waring continued to practice medicine for the well-to-do. The Darwins built a large, three-storey brick Georgian house on the southern bank of the River Severn in Shrewsbury, not far from the Welsh border, and called it “The Mount.” It made a respectable, soft nest for their brood (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 “The Mount,” Shrewsbury (c. 1860), Charles Darwin’s boyhood home.

The Leisure Class

Charles Robert Reference DarwinDarwin (1809–82) was the name Susannah and Robert gave to their second son when he was born there on 12 February. By coincidence, that same day Nancy Hanks Lincoln gave birth to her second child, Abraham (1809–65), thousands of miles west in much less opulent surroundings in rural Kentucky. Both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin lost their mothers at young ages – Darwin at eight, Lincoln, nine – and were left in the care of elder sisters. Both boys feared and admired their fathers; both Robert Waring Darwin and Thomas Lincoln scolded their sons for being lazy, for preferring books over hard work. Yet, after undistinguished educational trajectories, both boys would develop solid habits as they grew into men with minds sharper than most of their peers. Then – again at nearly the same moment in time, 1859–60 – Lincoln and Darwin each changed the world.

That would have been hard to guess had you met Charles Darwin in the 1820s. At the Shrewsbury School, a public school of some academic stature run by Archdeacon Samuel Butler (grandfather of the author and later frenemy of Darwin by the same name), Charles found it impossible to keep up with his Classics lessons. “Gas,” his classmates called him, because he cared enough about his brother’s chemistry studies to be teasable – and not much else. Charles was helping older brother Erasmus, nicknamed “Ras” to distinguish him from the distinguished grandfather, assemble chemical experiments according to those brother Erasmus was learning at Christ’s College, Cambridge. In 1825, after a summer assisting his physician father, the mostly miserable Charles followed Ras to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine.

They boarded at 11 Lothian Street, just a couple of city blocks from the Medical School on Teviot Place and right in the heart of the great university. Charles didn’t like it there either. The lanky teenager seemed the opposite of his portly, nose-to-the-grindstone father. Charles mostly skipped lectures; he found medicine stressful, pain and suffering of others acutely distressing. He took a geology class instead. But it wasn’t much better; though he showed some interest in the subject, he found Regius Professor of Natural History Robert Jameson’s lectures boring.

Like so many undergraduate men propped up by family wealth, he much preferred the sporting life over academic work, which in those days meant horse riding and hunting. Ras didn’t fare much better at rigorous Edinburgh than Charles did and departed in the summer of 1826 to head back to Christ’s College, Cambridge University. Later, Ras used those connections to construct a life of socializing into which his younger brother would dip in and out. Charles outlasted Ras at Edinburgh, but instead of consulting the scholars of renown that surrounded him, Darwin shot things. Birds, mostly. And, because he wanted to display his handiwork, he took them to a taxidermist whose shop stood at 37 Lothian Street, directly on the path from the Darwin brothers’ rooms to the Medical School.

John Edmonstone was the name of the taxidermist. Or at least that was the name he adopted in Scotland. What his real name was, we may never know. He came recommended by Andrew Duncan, the still active 80-year-old former president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. At the time, Darwin called him merely a “blackamoor” and sought him out chiefly because his services were inexpensive. Perhaps also because Darwin was just a little sheepish about remaining “most shockingly idle,” at this world-class medical program, spending time reading novels and hoping to “get tipsey” by huffing “[Ni]tric oxide” with school friends, according to one of his private letters (sourced from the Darwin Correspondence Project, Reference DarwinDCP 22). But whatever the initial reason for their interaction, Edmonstone’s almost unacknowledged influence on Darwin would prove profound.

John Edmonstone had, until recently, been enslaved at a plantation south of Georgetown in what was then British (and before that, Dutch) Guiana, South America. He traveled to Scotland, perhaps around 1817, in the company of one of the largest slave owners in that part of British Guiana, Charles Edmonstone, and his wife, Helen Reid (Reid was herself supposedly a daughter of Arawak “Princess Minda”). Charles Edmonstone was also a well-known slave catcher and had led so many expeditions into the rainforest to capture and kill escaped slaves (maroons) that the colonial governors had exempted him from taxation. Whether Charles Edmonstone manumitted John or John just slipped away upon reaching the British Isles is unclear – by 1778, slavery was illegal inside Scotland, despite the fact that many prominent Glasgow and Edinburgh families gleaned their ostentatious wealth from the blood and sweat of enslaved people. John Edmonstone set up his taxidermy shop on Lothian St. in 1824, perhaps after serving as Dr. Andrew Duncan’s servant, to attract university students and faculty. By all accounts, it was a shrewd choice. His method was novel; his taxidermic specimens more lifelike than anyone else’s. He had learned it directly from famed explorer Charles Waterton (1782–1865), another wealthy son from plantation money.

The Watertons owned the Walton Hall island estate in Wakefield, near Yorkshire. Decades later, Charles Darwin would visit them there. The Watertons also owned Walton Hall sugar plantation and two others in British Guiana. Combined, those plantations kept enslaved over 500 African- and Native-descended men, women, and children. Though he claimed to deplore slavery and ardently support monogenism just like a Darwin or Wedgwood, Charles Waterton worked as a manager of all his family’s plantations until 1812 and remained defensive about how friendly his own family was to those they held in slavery. After the men in his family who directly owned the plantations died, Reference WatertonWaterton gradually sold them off while continuing to travel throughout Guiana and northeastern South America, returning on four occasions to collect animal specimens and visit plantations. His Wanderings in South America, the North-west of the United States, and the Antilles in the Years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824, published in 1825 and reprinted frequently over the whole nineteenth century, became a touchstone for aspirational explorers, including Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Waterton peppered his narrative with exciting and at times humorous accounts of encounters with dangerous jungle animals. Most famously, four natives and two enslaved men helped Waterton capture and “ride” a 10-foot-long black caiman before dissecting and stuffing it in 1820 (Figure 1.3). Charles Edmonstone owned one of the unnamed enslaved men sent on Waterton’s caiman-riding adventure; Waterton was training him to stuff birds also.

Figure 1.3 Tales of Charles Waterton in Guiana in the 1820s inspired colonial collector/explorers like Darwin and Wallace.

Waterton’s process of preservation may not have been revolutionary, but it preserved the color of bird feathers uncommonly well in the humid jungle and made the resulting animals displayed incredibly lifelike. Waterton-esque specimens still dot the great natural history museums of England. Mostly, his method involved cotton. Lots and lots of cotton. Wires, he said, were right out. You needed to stuff the body full, give it the look of a supple living thing, leave no voids inside as the outside dried and the skin collapsed in on itself after death. The animal needed to be quickly and very carefully dissected, skinned, cleaned of almost all internal blood and soft tissue, leaving only, at least in the case of birds, small segments of bone with which to give the preserved animal firm structure and something hard to which the taxidermist could attach thread. He also dipped the outside of the animal and cleaned a good number of its internal parts with mercury chloride (HgCl₂), a toxic white powder nevertheless employed in medicines and as an antiseptic until the advent of antibiotics in the twentieth century. Waterton called it “corrosive sublimate,” dissolved in alcohol. This was the key. It was this mercury chloride poison solution absorbed by the specimen that killed the insects (and likely the bacteria) that would otherwise consume the animal skin and feathers after preservation. Mercury chloride ensured the specimens made it all the way back to London.

Still, this application was only the preserver’s finishing touch. The taxidermist, Waterton insisted, must possess hands nimbler than a surgeon’s and a “complete knowledge of ornithological anatomy”; they must also be able to sit very still with the specimen balanced upon their knee, cutting without tearing, since that was the only reliable way to smoothly raise and lower the animal toward the taxidermist while keeping feathers perfectly intact and avoiding “lassitude.” By all accounts, John Edmonstone, though certainly prevented by virtue of his own skin from becoming a surgeon himself, knew how to skin a bird like a surgeon, stuff it, preserve it for museums, make it appear as if the bird would soon take flight. These skills John passed on to the wealthy, “idle” Charles Darwin, who paid one guinea for two months of bird preservation lessons in 1826. This Guianan taxidermist gifted Darwin a free primer on tropical birds and animals along the way.

Here’s the pay-off to this side story. Without John Edmonstone’s hands, his intimate knowledge of ornithology, and Waterton’s toxic mercury chloride, fewer of Darwin’s stuffed animals would have survived the slow, multiclimate ocean voyage from South America and beyond to London ornithologists, birds with beaks and features so intact that you can still see their feather coloration and beak differences today, two centuries later – traits that reveal slight modifications island to island.

Perhaps even without knowing it, young Charles Darwin also imbibed two major scientific debates swirling around the faculty of Edinburgh that directly impacted his future trajectory. The first debate raged over the age and composition of the Earth itself. Robert Jameson, who had been a vocal proponent of German “Neptunism” – the geological theory that Earth was originally covered with water, and rocks precipitated out of the water (a moderately old-Earth account that nonetheless comported with the Bible) – began converting to Scottish “Vulcanism” – the competing theory that Earth’s crust forever recycles as molten rock. Vulcanism (also called Plutonism) meant no definitive “In the Beginning…” could be found in rock, given the even more immense age of the Earth conjectured. It also meant that whatever the ground appeared like now, it would one day be remade in fire. Permanence, even when Earth was concerned, flew out the window.

A second, even more dramatic controversy erupted in 1826 over an anonymous article published in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, edited by Robert Jameson (more on this article later). The article seemingly endorsed ideas of species transformism or transmutationism coming out of France under the names of Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Painstaking historical research has recently revealed that the anonymous article was not written by Jameson. Nor was it written by the more radical “Edinburgh Lamarckian” Robert Edmond Grant, MD (1793–1874), a young comparative anatomist and burgeoning marine biologist – a sponge hunter, in other words (Figure 1.4). The anonymous article was a translation of a German article. Yet, for many years, historians regarded Grant as the most likely author because Grant read Erasmus Darwin and swallowed common descent with modification. That’s important, because, when he had the chance in 1826, Grant nabbed Erasmus Darwin’s grandson.

Figure 1.4 Robert E. Grant, one of young Charles Darwin’s influences at the University of Edinburgh.

Grant met Charles Darwin along the Firth of Forth near Leith, where Grant resided. From there Grant hunted for marine invertebrates and, as well as inviting him into the exciting world of sponges and sea slugs, he introduced young Darwin to the cadre of Edinburgh students interested in natural history. Darwin skipped Jameson’s lectures and any others he didn’t care for, but he attended Plinian Society meetings and Wernerian Society meetings in the evenings, both natural history groups full of excited men ready to pile into basement meeting rooms to argue over geology and transmutation theories. During the day, he walked with Grant or learned about the classification of plants in the Edinburgh University Museum. The Plinians inducted Darwin as a member on 28 November 1826 based on the testimony of William Alexander Francis Browne, president of the society, and he felt immediately a part of something bigger than himself. Interesting ideas floated around these meetings. Radical ideas. A fellow inductee, William Rathbone Greg, announced at the time that he would give a talk showing that “lower animals possess every faculty and propensity of the human mind” – a topic Darwin would eventually address almost five decades later. Darwin cut his teeth doing public science presentations on findings of the larval sea mat (Flustra) he came across on one of those expeditions with Grant. Perhaps most importantly, on more than one occasion Grant “burst forth” in praise of the transmutationist theories. It turns out Grant had absorbed the writings of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, around the same time he traveled to post-Napoleonic France to meet the French transmutationists firsthand. Seemingly embarrassed, Darwin admitted that he’d read Zoonomia (though he didn’t mention the more explicitly transmutationist Reference DarwinThe Temple of Nature) but didn’t know what to make of it.

Darwin asserted these readings and interactions meant little to him, aside from increasing his thirst to make some mark in the world of science. In fact, he claimed that the entire period in Edinburgh was basically a waste and denied that evolutionary theories were “in the air” before his major publications in the middle of the nineteenth century. But when we recall Darwin’s days spent learning about birds from Edmonstone and his nights discussing transmutation with Edinburgh’s radical scientists, it is hard to take his word for it.

Captured by C. Darwin, Esq.

With prodding from his daughters, Robert Darwin agreed to pull Charles out of Edinburgh, just as he had the Shrewsbury School, sending him instead to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where Ras had earned his M.B. degree, a college with a reputation for being less academically rigorous than others, also attended by other Wedgwood-Darwins. There Charles would have a chance to develop into a churchman with credentials, a country parson with plenty of time for hunting sponges or shooting birds or whatever. Older Charles, looking back on it, was just as amused as you might be in learning that the intended path could have produced Rev. Charles Darwin, Church of England.

But the 19-year-old son of Darwin-Wedgwood money from “The Mount,” Shrewsbury, Shropshire, was accustomed to gentlemanly, not necessarily religious, tastes, most of these acquired with minimal effort on his part. He did not study theology. He merely needed to pass two examinations to receive his B.A. When he matriculated in 1828, he brought a favorite horse from home, doubled down on partying, and attended classes even less than he did at Edinburgh in 1826–27. One of his favorite games was to shoot his rifle at a moving candle held by his inebriated friends inside his college rooms. Needless to say, the gun had no ammunition in it – the explosive cap produced enough wind to puff out the candle if he was on target. This very realistic first-person-shooter game occurred so often it led one Fellow of the College passing by to inquire why he heard Darwin constantly cracking his horse-riding whip indoors.

Beetles replaced sea sponges as his passion at Cambridge. William Darwin Fox, a slightly older second cousin through grandfather Erasmus Darwin’s sister, introduced Charles to the gentlemanly pursuit of bug collecting. It turned out to be potentially the most important thing that happened to collegiate Charles Darwin. Through 1829–31, he spent an inordinate amount of time hunting beetles; not studying them, per se, just hunting: “It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external characters with published descriptions….” Still, when he saw “captured by C. Darwin, esq.” attached to an entry in James Francis Stephens’ Illustrations of British Entomology (1829–32), he was ecstatic. That electric feeling of being noticed by the scientific community pushed him through much of the rest of his life.

In terms of actual education, though, it seemed not to help much. His father had already upbraided him for his laziness, and Charles never forgot the sting: “To my deep mortification, my father once said to me, ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’” So, he did do some studying, eventually, if only to please his father. And eventually he did graduate as an ordinary degree student since he didn’t take the more advanced Tripos honors exam offered by the university. In his quiet moments, Darwin regretted he “threw away” his time at Cambridge just as he had at Edinburgh.

But that’s not quite fair. He may not have appreciated what he was imbibing (other than beer and cigar smoke – he lived above a tobacconist his first term at Cambridge; today it’s a Boots Pharmacy). He did read, though he deviated from some of the assigned curriculum to read other books more interesting to him. Reference PaleyWilliam Paley, the liberal, anti-slavery, pro-American moral philosopher who once taught at Christ’s College Cambridge left a particular impression on Darwin. Two Paley books, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, published in 1794, and Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, published in 1785, served as pillars of Cambridge theology education for the entire nineteenth century. Darwin also read on his own Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, published in 1802, in which Paley popularized the lasting “watchmaker” argument. Darwin later claimed he practically memorized that book.

The watchmaker argument goes something like this. Imagine you are on a long walk in an unpopulated place, and you accidentally kick a watch on the path; you immediately intuit that it is a designed thing (i.e., it requires a designer) because it’s very complex. Funny thing is, said Paley, living organisms are way more complex than watches. So shouldn’t we regard organisms as designed, too? And if making an Apple Watch takes all of a megacorporation to pull off, and given that even a simple coronavirus is much more complex than an Apple Watch – it can reproduce itself by hijacking another living thing to replicate millions of copies of itself without outside help, for instance – shouldn’t we regard the designer of viruses, birds, trees, the human hand, and so on, as impossibly more advanced than any human designer?

Biologists and philosophers mock Paley’s metaphorical argument today. But that’s because they aren’t Charles Darwin. Today’s biologists are woefully unacquainted with Paley’s actual motivation for writing Natural Theology, not to mention Darwin’s reasons for reading it, retaining it, dusting it off, and sparring with it to the end of his days. It’s one of the great misunderstandings about Darwin’s work that Darwin intentionally killed off Paley. It’s truer to say that Darwin refined Paley, fitting Paley’s argument to new evidence. Darwin left Cambridge a pretty committed Paleyite, and not just because of the books themselves.

Two Cambridge professors, the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, a botanist, and the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, a geologist, regularly reinforced that message of natural theology to Darwin. Partly, Henslow proved convincing to Darwin simply because the professor was genuinely good, patient, selfless, and kind to the underachieving student. “My intimacy with such a man,” Darwin reflected years later, “ought to have been and I hope was an inestimable benefit.” Darwin spent so much time imbibing this message from Henslow in 1830–31 that even other Cambridge dons referred to him not as “the inveterate horse-whip cracker” nor “the beetle maniac” but as “the man who walks with Henslow.” Sedgwick, too, took a special interest and invited the newly graduated Darwin to Wales in 1831 on a geologic expedition. He stitched the notion of deep time together with natural theology and gave Darwin the critical experience that made him at least somewhat more ready for the greater research task of the HMS Beagle voyage that would follow.

In the natural world, these natural theologians insisted, everything fit. In the natural world, everything was adapted to its environment. In the natural world, everything was, as the Psalmist said, beautifully and wonderfully made. Pain and suffering, awkward creatures, non-adaptive traits – these were only puzzles, apt to mislead, born of our ignorance of God’s larger adaptative design. Charles Darwin would deviate from much of traditional religion, but he retained that conviction of the natural theologians that, despite appearances to the contrary, despite the ignorance, cruelty, and greed of human pursuits regarding rocks and plants and animals, nature worked together for good somehow.

The Luckiest Guest

In retrospect, Darwin was profoundly lucky. The Beagle voyage invitation, which would make him science-famous enough to have his On the Origin of Species taken seriously decades later, arrived at The Mount in August 1831. Henslow had just convinced Darwin to “begin the study of geology” that summer by examining rocks around Shrewsbury and coloring in a survey map. Initially the navy directed its request to Cambridge mathematician George Peacock, who in turn asked Henslow to intercede with a brother-in-law, accomplished naturalist and vicar Leonard Jenyns. But young gentleman-collector Darwin seemed less tied down than Jenyns, so Henslow passed the opportunity to the unfocused Shropshire-doctor’s son. Though with limited geological experience, Darwin would play the role of ship’s naturalist and companion – “a gentleman,” Henslow stressed – to mercurial Captain Robert “Hot Coffee” FitzRoy (1805–65) on a two-year-long second expedition of the relatively small, six-gun, barque-rigged HMS Beagle down the eastern coastline of South America (DCP 105).

That now well-known trip had an interesting, if less known, prelude. And, because of what occurred on that first voyage of the Beagle, FitzRoy needed to lean on important family connections within the Royal Navy, including expending a considerable amount of his own personal money along the way, for this second Beagle expedition to occur. Even given his noble lineage and pressure from his father, General Lord Charles FitzRoy (a well-known abolitionist and aide-de-camp to King George III), the navy proved quite reluctant to send HMS Beagle out to South America a second time. Captain FitzRoy persisted, renting an ocean-going ship himself and taking leave from the navy, so anxious was he to return. As well as sampling flora and fauna from land and sea along the southern edge of South America and completing the mapping of the difficult sea passages around the southern tip of the continent aborted during the first mission, FitzRoy aimed to return something important. Or, rather, someones.

In January 1830, during the first voyage of the Beagle, the newly minted Captain FitzRoy took onboard four Aboriginal Fuegians, initially as bargaining chips to regain a stolen whaling boat. When those negotiations failed, purportedly for lack of interest in a trade by the Fuegians, FitzRoy transported “Fuegia Basket” (a pre-teen girl whose Fuegian name was Yokcushlu), “James ‘Jemmy’ Button” (a teenage boy; Fuegian name Orundellico), “York Minster” (an adult man, perhaps 26; Fuegian name Elleparu), and “Boat Memory” (another young man, perhaps 20, and FitzRoy’s favorite) to England (Figure 1.5). The English names, of course, were made up by the sailors. FitzRoy insisted they receive an initial inoculation against smallpox even before leaving South America – he knew firsthand what European diseases did to native peoples around the world. When in England, he had them immediately inoculated a second time, then set them up in a country farmhouse where they could acclimate and avoid public attention and disease. Nevertheless, Boat Memory died of smallpox at the Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth; his infection may have been the one introduced by the second inoculation. Over the next year, the remaining three received an education at the new St. Mary’s Infant School in Walthamstow, a northeastern town in Greater London, chosen because the kindly instructor Rev. William Wilson practiced radical “instruction by amusement” with plenty of games and exercise. Fuegia/Yokcushlu and Jemmy/Orundellico quickly took to the lessons. And, in the spring, FitzRoy presented them to King William IV and Queen Adelaide at St. James’ Palace. The school relegated older York/Elleparu, on the other hand, to menial tasks around the campus. Instead, he took to young Fuegia/Yokcushlu. On their return trip to South America, they were considered “engaged” and, once back in Tierra del Fuego, married. Many years later, Darwin learned of their fates. Jemmy/Orundellico had a son, then grandchildren. Fuegia/Yokcushlu, too, made life work in her Patagonian world. Her husband York/Elleparu, however, died in an argument with another Fuegian.

Figure 1.5 Captain FitzRoy’s depiction of the three surviving Fuegians who traveled on the Beagle’s first and second journeys.

Eventually, the navy relented and gave FitzRoy command of HMS Beagle for a return journey. It was not just a mercy-mission to return Fuegians. The Admiralty directed FitzRoy to correct Spanish charts of the whole coastline of South America. They outfitted the Beagle with azimuths, chronometers, and telescopes as well as the usual nautical instruments. FitzRoy should measure magnetic variation in the Earth, capture tides, currents, barometric pressures, wind speeds more precisely than “the ambiguous terms ‘fresh,’ ‘moderate,’ etc., in using which no two people agree,” slopes of the land, coral reefs, instances of vulcanism, and the salt-to-fresh water transition in estuaries. This was to be an overtly scientific mission, carefully observing “eclipses, occultations, lunar distances, and moon-culminating stars” from different latitudes. He must keep records of eclipses of Jupiter’s moons, especially Ganymede and Callisto. He had to capture observations of comets as well as other “remarkable phenomena” that might prove “highly interesting to astronomers.”

With this long list, FitzRoy immediately requested he be permitted a geologically trained savant, the position Charles Darwin filled. He justified this request because of his frustratingly inaccurate compass readings during the first Beagle voyage, which hinted that nearby mountains contained a high degree of magnetic ore. But historians have long speculated that FitzRoy harbored other darker reasons for requesting an educated companion, and the Admiralty granting that request.

The original captain of the Beagle, Pringle Stokes, attempted suicide due to loneliness and the stress of command in dangerous seas at the southern tip of South America. The bullet didn’t immediately kill him but stayed lodged in his head; infection painfully claimed Captain Stokes two weeks later. Already an accomplished flag lieutenant on the surveying ship HMS Ganges, the 23-year-old FitzRoy found himself the new captain of HMS Beagle. From December 1828 to spring 1830, he got a taste of what Stokes experienced in those tempestuous southern oceans. Perhaps that alone frightened him.

But he had even more reason to worry the same fate might lie in store for him: though under suicide-watch, FitzRoy’s distinguished uncle, Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, managed to successfully slit his own throat with a penknife in 1822. What if depression and suicidal tendencies ran in the family? If he wondered this, FitzRoy was prescient. Depression, supposedly instigated by a reprimand from the Admiralty, pushed him to temporarily relinquish command of the Beagle while separated from Darwin off the coast of Chile in 1834. And, sadly, on 30 April 1865, the 60-year-old FitzRoy, who was by then a pioneering meteorologist, would finish his morning correspondence, quietly lock the door to his room behind him, and imitate his uncle Lord Castlereagh with a razor of his own.

Though only four years apart in age, the captain and his companion were not social equals. FitzRoy (Figure 1.6) possessed social status and adhered to strict military discipline. Darwin appeared soft to FitzRoy; his face, especially the shape of his nose, gave it away. (Curiously, Darwin later claimed in his autobiography that FitzRoy followed Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), a Swiss Calvinist promoting materialism, much like Charles’ grandfather, Erasmus.) Upon closer inspection, Darwin didn’t seem exactly the experienced geologist that FitzRoy hoped for. This was one of Robert W. Darwin’s objections to Charles going on the voyage in the first place – Charles didn’t have the qualifications. The Admiralty never conferred an official title or salary on Darwin at all. These facts and others have led historians for a half-century to debate whether Darwin was the “official naturalist” on the Beagle. Perhaps Surgeon Robert McCormick was the true ship’s naturalist.

Figure 1.6 Captain Robert FitzRoy.

Though more recent historical sleuthing suggests that indeed Darwin was ship’s naturalist, surgeons often also played the role of naturalists in the British Navy. McCormick seemed especially well-suited for that task. He had studied at Edinburgh, like Darwin. Indeed, he had pursued a full year of natural history courses with geologist Robert Jameson, the professor whose classes Darwin couldn’t quite work up the wherewithal to attend. (After leaving the Beagle voyage in 1832, McCormick would serve as ship’s surgeon on the HMS Terror, then the HMS Erebus on its 1839 Antarctic expedition. Both ships, famously, would later be lost attempting to find the Northwest Passage. McCormick’s assistant surgeon on Erebus was Joseph Hooker, a future confidant of Charles Darwin’s.) But McCormick quickly came to resent being cooped up on the Beagle, apparently disallowed the freedom to explore he expected. He asked to be transferred from the Beagle less than half a year into the voyage.

Several other Beagle passengers assisted Darwin in collecting after McCormick’s departure, including ship’s artist Augustus Earle and Edward H. Hellyer, FitzRoy’s personal clerk, who drowned on the Falkland Islands in March 1833 while pursuing a unique species of duck that he wanted to preserve and send back to naturalists in England. Benjamin Bynoe, assistant surgeon, and McCormick’s replacement, bagged mammals, birds, and other animals and plants regularly, accompanying Darwin on many inland expeditions. But only Darwin filled the ecological-social niche FitzRoy needed, and his favor found the Cambridge-trained gentleman of leisure. The Beagle captain soon sealed their camaraderie with a gift to Henslow’s young “geologist”: a copy of Charles Lyell’s new Principles of Geology, volume 1, which FitzRoy had already read. In retrospect, it was the most influential gift Darwin ever received.

Lyell’s book codified the geological assertions made decades earlier by James Hutton, a Scottish acquaintance of Charles’s grandfather, Erasmus, that Earth was very, very old, formed not by a snap of God’s fingers on Day Three, but by internal heat pushing up and out followed by eons of erosion pulling in and down. No matter the geological formation, it formed through the same gradual processes that had been at work for all of Earth’s history. Earthquakes and volcanoes, as violent as they appeared, were only minor blips in the imperceptible up and down of the “rock cycle.” By extension, no global catastrophe, like Noah’s flood, say, would account for the arrangement of fossils embedded in rocks. All Earth’s features, even once biological ones like tree ferns and dinosaurs, became part of the geologic story very, very gradually. Water and wind sculpted grand canyons, isolated islands, and sky-scraping mountains imperceptibly slowly by uplift and erosion, said Lyell.

Presumably FitzRoy found Lyell’s account important enough to foist it on wide-eyed Charles Darwin, who would have to stuff the tome, along with his other possessions for their two-year journey, in the 10′ × 11′ poop-cabin alongside two other companions, the large table for maps and charts, and hundreds of other books in the ship’s library. Darwin had mostly planned on taking books on natural history. Henslow gifted him the seven-volume translation of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, the most celebrated account of a European scientist’s exploration of South America. Darwin also intended to devote his time to studying “French, Spanish, Mathematics & a little Classics, perhaps not more than Greek Testament on Sundays.” He was hoping to get a lot of reading done.

The two-year journey turned into three, then four, then almost five.

A year after departing England, at the height of the Tierra del Fuegian summer in January 1833, they successfully sailed up Tekenika Bay on the east coast of Hoste Island at the bottom tip of South America to return the Fuegians to “Woollӯa,” Jemmy Button/Orundellico’s ancestral home. The crew constructed three “wigwams” and planted a large vegetable garden for the Fuegians and for missionary Richard Matthews, who sailed with the Beagle and befriended the Fuegians for over a year on ship. Matthews settled into his wigwam. FitzRoy, Darwin, and the others traveled west to continue surveying.

A few days later, a shocking sight. FitzRoy witnessed familiar looking fine English cloth adorning a strange native woman – cloth last seen on Fuegia Basket/Yokcushlu. Frantically, they returned east. There they found Matthews, unharmed but shaken. It had only been one week, yet Matthews had already been robbed, roughed up, and threatened with stoning. The vegetable garden stood in tatters. Only Jemmy/Orundellico remained, and he seemed socially isolated, only able to communicate with his brothers. After a quick discussion, Matthews abandoned his Christianizing mission until a more opportune time. A longer stay, he firmly believed, would have resulted in his death at the hands of unfamiliar Fuegians drawn to his cabin by the rumors of strange visitors bearing useful gifts, easily procured.

Upon revisiting Woollӯa over a year later in March 1834, FitzRoy found only Jemmy/Orundellico, a handful of his family, and the three huts remaining. Though happy enough, Jemmy/Orundellico appeared destitute, having been robbed by York Minster/Elleparu in collaboration with Fuegia/Yokcushlu and other members of a neighboring tribe. Though dispirited, FitzRoy nevertheless held onto hope that “a ship-wrecked seaman may hereafter receive help and kind treatment from Jemmy Button’s children; prompted, as they can hardly fail to be, by the traditions they will have heard of men of other lands; and by an idea, however faint, of their duty to God as well as their neighbour.” Years later, these hopes brought Rev. Matthews and others back to (re)establish the South American Mission near that spot.

Darwin spent much of the Beagle journey ashore in South America, a blessing, given how seasick he got. And, even when he wasn’t with FitzRoy, he wasn’t alone either. Teenaged fiddler and poop-cabin attendant Syms Covington (1816–61) proved a loyal servant for Darwin on land and sea, even if Darwin found him disagreeably odd at first. Covington helped with procuring fresh food and potable water, digging, shooting, preserving (perhaps according to the taxidermy skills Darwin learned from Edmonstone in Edinburgh), shipping specimens to Henslow, copying manuscripts, and most of the other functions that would eventually lead to Darwin’s naturalist fame back in England. They excavated fossil bones from the beach at Bahía Blanca in September 1832. They traveled with gauchos across Patagonia. Covington transcribed work on coral that became Darwin’s first major publication. They survived fevers and cold and heat and earthquakes and gales. FitzRoy let Darwin hire Covington as a personal manservant at £60 a year (around £9,000 today) in 1833, but then agreed to keep paying half to feed and supply Covington. He continued to serve the Darwins through the 1830s, in London after debarking from the Beagle in 1836, even at The Mount in Shropshire, until Covington moved to Australia to pursue a non-servant’s career and raise a family after Charles’s marriage.

Darwin and FitzRoy got along for the most part, despite FitzRoy’s tempestuous perfectionism. And the quarrels they did have Darwin courteously remembered as merely the effect of close quarters in the Beagle for so many years upon end. They had only one truly memorable fight, resolved the same day it occurred. That fight, in Darwin’s recollection many decades later, was over slavery. Or at least this is how some modern scholars have parsed Darwin’s words in his autobiography:

FitzRoy recanted that outburst almost immediately. And note that FitzRoy’s anger smoldered around Darwin’s manner or the fact that he questioned the captain at all in his own rooms, not the principle of the argument. (Indeed, the fact that Darwin didn’t fully believe FitzRoy caused another dispute between them before the Beagle left port in 1831.) Furthermore, FitzRoy would ascend to the governorship of New Zealand in 1843, but then he would be recalled only two years later because of his fierce defense of the native Māori against white settlers. Still, popular accounts both pit this episode as racist hothead FitzRoy versus abolition-minded Darwin and mark it as a central theme of their relationship throughout the 1831–36 voyage. At best, that’s an exaggeration.

Their other major conflict, as it is often told and retold, occurred a few years later, on the Galápagos Islands, which poke out of the Pacific on the opposite side of South America over 600 miles west of Ecuador. This conflict arose from FitzRoy’s commitment to Biblical literalism, including the associated Young-Earth Creationism – or at least this is how this myth goes. I’ll address Darwin’s religious proclivities in a later chapter. First, I want to turn to misconceptions over what happened on those crucial islands and what it meant for evolutionary theory.