The Red Notebook

February 20th. – This day has been memorable in the annals of Valdivia, for the most severe earthquake experienced by the oldest inhabitant. I happened to be on shore, and was lying down in the wood to rest myself. It came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes, but the time appeared much longer. The rocking of the ground was very sensible. The undulations appeared to my companion and myself to come from due east, whilst others thought they proceeded from south-west: this shows how difficult it sometimes is to perceive the directions of the vibrations. There was no difficulty in standing upright, but the motion made me almost giddy: it was something like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; – one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced. In the forest, as a breeze moved the trees, I felt only the earth tremble, but saw no other effect. Captain Fitz Roy and some officers were at the town during the shock, and there the scene was more striking; for although the houses, from being built of wood, did not fall, they were violently shaken, and the boards creaked and rattled together. The people rushed out of doors in the greatest alarm. It is these accompaniments that create that perfect horror of earthquakes, experienced by all who have thus seen, as well as felt, their effects. Within the forest it was a deeply interesting, but by no means an awe- exciting phenomenon. The tides were very curiously affected. The great shock took place at the time of low water; and an old woman who was on the beach told me that the water flowed very quickly, but not in great waves, to high- water mark, and then as quickly returned to its proper level; this was also evident by the line of wet sand. The same kind of quick but quiet movement in the tide happened a few years since at Chiloe, during a slight earthquake, and created much causeless alarm. In the course of the evening there were many weaker shocks, which seemed to produce in the harbour the most complicated currents, and some of great strength.

—Charles Darwin
The Voyage of the Beagle, Ch. 14

The earthquake that Darwin witnessed first-hand in 1835 destroyed the town of Concepcíon. Here’s hoping today’s massive Concepción earthquake is less severe.

Charles Darwin to John Stevens Henslow (18-May-1832):

St Jago [modern-day Porto Praya in the Cape Verde Islands] is singularly barren & produces few plants or insects.—so that my hammer was my usual companion, & in its company most delightful hours I spent.—

On the coast I collected many marine animals chiefly gasteropodous (I think some new).— I examined pretty accurately a Caryophyllea & if my eyes were not bewitched former descriptions have not the slightest resemblance to the animal.— I took several specimens of an Octopus, which possessed a most marvellous power of changing its colours; equalling any chamaelion, & evidently accommodating the changes to the colour of the ground which it passed over.—yellowish green, dark brown & red were the prevailing colours: this fact appears to be new, as far as I can find out.

Darwin was hopelessly wrong about the colour-changing ability of octopuses being a new observation. But never mind: the good news is that one of Darwin’s St Jago octopuses is still alive and kicking preserved for posterity in Cambridge, and I have photos to prove it:

Darwin’s octopus

The accompanying label

175 years ago today, this happened:

The Beagle laid ashore, Santa Cruz River, 16th April 1834.

I have written one of my rambling posts about the event over at the Beagle Project blog.

Paul Nettlefield as Charles Darwin.

Looks as if I missed an opportunity to meet Charles Darwin in the flesh this week. Well, nearly.

Half a mile from where I work, Paul Nettlefield was playing the part of my hero at the World Museum, Liverpool. And get this, for a prop, he had a 100% genuine specimen from the Beagle voyage: an ovenbird [Cinclodes patagonica] which Darwin collected in Wolsey Sound in the Straits of Magellan in 1834. It still bears the label Darwin tied to it.

Note to self: must get down to the museum one lunchtime. There’s a Darwin display!

You can read the full story in the Liverpool Daily Post.

Charles Darwin took justifiable pride in his powers of observation. In his autobiography written towards the end of his life, he wrote:

On the favourable side of the balance, I think that I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.

Yet even Darwin’s legendary attention to detail occasionally let him down. Such as the time recorded in his Beagle Diary, when he managed to travel an entire day with gauchos in Patagonia without realising that the people wearing chaps weren’t all chaps:

The Spaniards, whom we some time since thought were Indians, have been employed hunting for us & have generally bivouacced near the coast. — They offered to lend me a horse to accompany them in one of their excursions; of this I gladly accepted. — The party consisted of 9 men & one woman; the greater number of the former were pure Indians, the others most ambiguous; but all alike were most wild in their appearance & attire. — As for the woman, she was a perfect non descript; she dressed & rode like a man, & till dinner I did not guess she was otherwise. —

Apparently, Charles Darwin didn’t have much of an eye for the ladies.

Syms Covington
(c. 1816–1861)

On Sunday, I was pleased to see in the Sydney Morning Herald (my butler reads it) that the post office built by Syms Covington in the gold-rush town of Pambula, New South Wales is still standing, and in good working order.

Syms Covington was a cabin-boy aboard HMS Beagle. Sixteen months into the voyage, Darwin hired him as his servant, the arrangement lasting for the remainder of the voyage and beyond. In addition to more menial duties, Covington accompanied Darwin on a number of inland trips and assisted him in the collection and preparation of specimens.

On returning to England, Covington remained in Darwin’s employ until 1839, when he emigrated to Australia. The two old shipmates continued to correspond intermittently until Covington’s death in 1861. Covington had suffered from deafness from his youth and, on one occasion, Darwin posted him an ear-trumpet.

Syms Covington’s Beagle journal is available online. His post office is now a Thai restaurant, named, rather pleasingly, Covington’s Thai.

I’m not a particularly adventurous traveller, yet the only time my travels have crossed paths with those of HMS Beagle (albeit 164 years apart) happened on what is for me is the opposite side of the world, in Sydney, Australia. I arrived there in November, 2000; HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, arrived there 173 years ago today, on 12th January, 1836.

Here’s how Darwin described his initial feelings on arriving in Australia in chapter 19 of ‘The Voyage of the Beagle’:

January 12th, 1836. – Early in the morning a light air carried us towards the entrance of Port Jackson. Instead of beholding a verdant country, interspersed with fine houses, a straight line of yellowish cliff brought to our minds the coast of Patagonia. A solitary lighthouse, built of white stone, alone told us that we were near a great and populous city. Having entered the harbour, it appears fine and spacious, with cliff-formed shores of horizontally stratified sandstone. The nearly level country is covered with thin scrubby trees, bespeaking the curse of sterility. Proceeding further inland, the country improves: beautiful villas and nice cottages are here and there scattered along the beach. In the distance stone houses, two and three stories high, and windmills standing on the edge of a bank, pointed out to us the neighbourhood of the capital of Australia.

At last we anchored within Sydney Cove. We found the little basin occupied by many large ships, and surrounded by warehouses. In the evening I walked through the town, and returned full of admiration at the whole scene. It is a most magnificent testimony to the power of the British nation. Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many more times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America. My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman. Upon seeing more of the town afterwards, perhaps my admiration fell a little; but yet it is a fine town. The streets are regular, broad, clean, and kept in excellent order; the houses are of a good size, and the shops well furnished. It may be faithfully compared to the large suburbs which stretch out from London and a few other great towns in England; but not even near London or Birmingham is there an appearance of such rapid growth. The number of large houses and other buildings just finished was truly surprising; nevertheless, every one complained of the high rents and difficulty in procuring a house. Coming from South America, where in the towns every man of property is known, no one thing surprised me more than not being able to ascertain at once to whom this or that carriage belonged.

Darwin was to spend less than a month in New South Wales, before Beagle headed for Tazmania on the next leg of her long journey home.

BBC: Pink iguana rewrites family tree

A spectacular pink type of Galapagos iguana promises to rewrite the family’s evolutionary history in the islands.

Rosada was missed by Charles Darwin during his 1835 visit, but appears to indicate the earliest known divergence of land animals in the archipelago.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers say rosada split from other land iguanas about 5.7 million years ago.

A wonderful discovery, with publication timed nicely for the Darwin bicentenary celebrations. A new type of iguana is a remarkable find. Especially a pink one.

But why do so many news stories about this find say that Darwin ‘missed’ the pink igunanas? They are only found on a small volcano that he didn’t even visit. If Darwin missed them, then so did the Archbishop of Canterbury and Abraham Lincoln.

I’ve finally got round to posting a mini-review of Keith S Thomson’s HMS Beagle: the ship that changed the course of history.

Good book. You’d enjoy it.

One day back in 1831, a young English gentleman took up his pen and wrote his name and new address in the front of his German New Testament. Call me biased, but it must surely rank as the most awesome book inscription ever:

Inscription in Charles Darwin’s German New Testament
© The Charles Darwin Trust and reproduced with their kind permission

The young Charles Darwin had no way of knowing that he was about to embark on a journey which would lead to a paradigm-shifting scientific revolution, and hammer the final nail in the coffin of the conflicting creation myths described in the first couple of chapters of Genesis.

But why on Earth would a young, English naturalist want to take a German New Testament with him on a voyage of discovery? Apparently, it was to help him brush up on his German during the long months at sea. His intentions were good, but I suspect he didn’t do much brushing up: many years after the voyage, Charles Darwin was still having to have German texts translated for him.

Darwin’s German New Testament still exists, and is in the possession of the Charles Darwin Trust, which has kindly given those awfully nice chaps at the Beagle Project permission to make use of the above image—and they have very generously let me have this nice little scoop. Thanks, chaps!

Now, go over there and give them a whole pile of your money so that one day soon, some other young scientist will be able to inscribe one of their books with the address H.M.S. Beagle.

I am frequently asked if I know where to obtain a copy of the 1978 TV drama series, The Voyage of Charles Darwin. I do now: it’s on YouTube. Enjoy it while you still can!

One-hundred and fifty- seventy-seven years ago today, on 24th August, 1831, the 22-year-old Charles Darwin received news that Captain Fitzroy was looking for a naturalist and companion for his forthcoming voyage to survey the southern extremity of America.

For more on this subject, see my post from two years ago entitled Henslow’s letter.

Darwin later described the Voyage of the Beagle as ‘by far the most important event in my life’. It’s wonderful to think that, some day in the not-too-distant future, young scientists will once again set sail on a new Beagle.

Postscript: Oops!

A minuscule Charles Darwin yesterday.

Who is that minuscule man standing at the pointy end of that minuscule HMS Beagle? Why, it is none other than a minuscule Charles Robert Darwin!

But lo! What is that thing that the minuscule Darwin is holding in his minuscule left hand? Could it be? Surely not! Yes, it is! It is nothing less than a minuscule Red Notebook!

The minuscule Darwin’s red notebook was spotted by a [B]eagle-eyed Karen ‘Nunatak’ James and photographed by her Beagle Project sidekick Peter ‘I don’t have a nickname’ ‘Merk’ McGrath. No doubt we will be hearing more about the minuscule Beagle on their blog soon.

Thanks, chaps. You made my day!

I was just re-watching an old BBC TV documentary about the hunt for the final resting place of HMS Beagle. At one point, they showed this remarkable photograph (apologies for the poor quality: it’s a frame-grab from a VHS tape showing a close-up from a book):

HMS Kangaroo, Paglesham Marshes, Essex

HMS Kangaroo was one of HMS Beagle’s sister ships, and, by a pleasing co-incidence, finished her days just like Beagle, as a static customs and excise watch vessel in Paglesham Marshes, Essex. The documentary explained how researchers have now pinpointed the exact location in the marshes at which Beagle’s remains lie buried.

HMS Kangaroo’s figurehead

As far as I know, no photographs survive of Darwin’s Beagle—if, indeed, any were ever taken. So this could well be the closest we shall ever come to seeing the original Beagle in all her faded glory. Until they dig up her remains from the marshes, it is to be hoped. (Note to would-be Beagle excavators: I am a trained archaeologist, and have my own trowel.)

But there was something in particular that delighted me about this photograph of HMS Kangaroo. Previously, I have mused wistfully about whether Beagle had a figurehead in the shape of a beagle. Now, I am convinced she must have. For there, in plain view on this wonderful old photograph, is very clearly a figurehead in the shape of a kangaroo.

If Kangaroo had a kangaroo, then Beagle must have had a beagle. It stands to reason!

Postscript:

It would seem that HMS Kangaroo was not the only one of Beagle’s sister ships to end her days on the Essex marshes. More here.

Charles Darwin never comes across as a particularly red-blooded male with regards to his appreciation of the fairer sex. True, there was the brief relationship with Fanny Owen in his pre-Beagle days—a relationship which seems never to have got much further than some slightly flirty correspondence. And I remember, when visiting Down House, reading with delight on the page that happened to be open in his Beagle diary that day, some rather yearnful comments regarding the Spanish ladies of Buenos Ayres.

But then Darwin came home and married his cousin, having decided that a wife would be better than a dog, the hopeless romantic.

And that’s about it. Charles Darwin remained a happily married man for the rest of his days, casting never so much as a glance at any woman other than his beloved Emma.

Or so I thought…

Then, I came across the following in a letter Darwin wrote to his eldest son, William, and I began to see old Charlie in a new light:

Aunt Catherine comes here for fortnight next Monday.— Mammie & Lizzie are gone to lunch today with the Normans; as we declined a dinner invite, which the beautiful Miss Norman brought us.—

Charles, you old rogue! You’re old enough to be her father! Shame on you! But seriously, though, good on you, mate! I was starting to get a bit worried about you.

An editorial footnote to the letter explains: In a letter written shortly before this one, Emma Darwin told William: ‘… Papa admires Miss N[orman]. very much, which I do not she smiles too constantly & a smile is never a sweet one that is constant’.

Sour grapes, Emma?

See also: Books – The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, volume 7: 1858–1859

The geneticist Steve Jones has written a typically entertaining, albeit belated, review of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle in today’s Wall Street Journal:

The joy of the journey was that it had a point. Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux have each written great travel books about South America—but why, in the end, did they bother? The smell of the agent, the contract and the advance hangs around their pages, but for Darwin (who was in no need of money) every paragraph exudes instead the heady scent of discovery.

Exactamundo, Prof. J! And, with his trademark mix of science and humour, Jones notes:

On the island of James he [Darwin] “lived entirely on tortoise meat… the young tortoises make excellent soup.” In those lumbering creatures, Darwin saw, without realizing it at the time, his first hint of evolution, for animals from James were subtly distinct from those on Indefatigable and Albemarle nearby. In a rare conjunction of taxonomy with gastronomy, he noted that the James specimens were “rounder, blacker, and had a better taste when cooked”—which at the time seemed little more than a curiosity but was in fact his introduction to the biology of change.

The review is well worth reading in its entirety.

On 21st February, 1854, Charles Darwin wrote to his old HMS Beagle midshipman shipmate, Philip Gidley King, who was now living in Australia:

My dear King

I can hardly tell you how pleased I was, about a week ago, to receive your letter dated the 26^th. of October. I lead a rather solitary life, & in my walks very often think over old days in the Beagle, & no days rise pleasanter before me, than sitting with you on the Booms, running before the trade wind across the Atlantic.

Reminiscing two decades after the event about sitting with a friend high above the deck of a tall ship with a trade wind in your hair. What better reason could there possibly be for building a new Beagle?

The Beagle Project’s Peter McGrath, FCD, has a great post about visiting the Woolwich Dockyard where HMS Beagle was built. He was accompanied by a couple of other Beagle groupies. Photos and a radio programme are to follow.

I am consumed with jealousy yet again.

Postscript: Peter’s photos are now online.

[For any non-Brits out there, the title of this post is a reference to a poem by William Blake, which was turned into a rather magnificent yet jingoistic hymn.]

On this date in 1833, whilst in the Falkland Islands, Capt. Robert FitzRoy bought a schooner to accompany HMS Beagle:

Captain FitzRoy’s Journal: 9th March, 1833

At this time I had become more fully convinced than ever that the Beagle could not execute her allotted task before she, and those in her, would be so much in need of repair and rest, that the most interesting part of her voyage—the carrying a chain of meridian distances around the globe—must eventually be sacrificed to the tedious, although not less useful, details of coast surveying…

I had often anxiously longed for a consort, adapted for carrying cargoes, rigged so as to be easily worked with few hands, and able to keep company with the Beagle; but when I saw the Unicorn, and heard how well she had behaved as a sea-boat, my wish to purchase her was unconquerable…

FitzRoy’s decision to buy Unicorn, which he promptly renamed Adventure, was to earn him a sharp, long-distance reprimand from the Admiralty. This reprimand was probably a factor in FitzRoy’s subsequent nervous breakdown later in the voyage.

But FitzRoy’s unapproved purchase of the schooner meant that he was indeed able to achieve far more surveying work during the Beagle voyage.

Darwin’s Beagle Diary, 8th September, 1832

… The Gauchos were very civil & took us to the only spot where there was any chance of water. — It was interesting seeing these hardy people fully equipped for an expedition. — They sleep on the bare ground at all times & as they travel get their food; already they had killed a Puma or Lion; the tongue of which was the only part they kept; also an Ostrich, these they catch by two heavy balls, fastened to the ends of a long thong. — They showed us the manner of throwing it; holding one ball in their hands, by degrees they whirl the other round & round, & then with great force send them both revolving in the air towards any object. — Of course the instant it strikes an animals legs it fairly ties them together.

Darwin later had a go at throwing bolas himself. He described his attempt in chapter 3 of The Voyage of the Beagle:

One day, as I was amusing myself by galloping and whirling the balls round my head, by accident the free one struck a bush, and its revolving motion being thus destroyed, it immediately fell to the ground, and, like magic, caught one hind leg of my horse; the other ball was then jerked out of my hand, and the horse fairly secured. Luckily he was an old practised animal, and knew what it meant; otherwise he would probably have kicked till he had thrown himself down. The Gauchos roared with laughter; they cried out that they had seen every sort of animal caught, but had never before seen a man caught by himself.

Darwin brought his bolas home with him. They can still be seen on display at Down House.

(via Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary weblog)