We have become used to images of Charles Darwin as a venerable old Victorian, with a long snowy white beard. Re-reading his journal of the Voyage of the Beagle is not only a literary delight in itself, and a science lesson written with engaging freshness and enthusiasm. It is the journal of a highly intelligent young scientist who was only 22 when he embarked in 1831 on the five year voyage of a lifetime. The Beagle’s leisurely hydrographic explorations of the coasts of South America in particular gave the young naturalist Darwin ample scope for long and arduous travels ashore.

He was intrepid and highly energetic, hiking up mountains, and riding for 24 days into the highest passes of the Chilean Cordillera or Andes, defying high altitude sickness from the sheer excitement of discovering yet more seashells in the rock strata, enabling him to calculate how the continent of South America had risen by 400 or 500 feet through volcanic eruptions.

His account of the immediate aftermath of a gigantic earthquake along the coast of Chile is incredibly vivid, with the shorelines and sea littered with furniture and the roofs of cottages after the tsunami at Talcuhano.

Yet the scientist was always restlessly questioning, and the way in which the massive earthquakes witnessed by the crew of the Beagle coincided with volcanic eruptions down a line of volcanoes inland led Darwin to the …”conclusion, however fearful it may be, that a vast lake of melted matter, of an area nearly doubling in extent that of the Black Sea, is spread out beneath a mere crust of solid land.”

Charles Darwin’s explorations of the Galapagos Archipelago off the coast of Ecuador are of course one the most famous parts of the Voyage of the Beagle. It was not all serious science – he gives a lively account of the difficulty of balancing when riding a giant tortoise – but his skills as a naturalist and the careful notes that he made of each species and sub-species, when you know the end result of all this careful observation and thought would result in his later work On the Origin of Species, make this a fascinating section of the journal.

To a non-scientist, the journal is of great interest in demonstrating how the work of one scientist informs another, as with Darwin’s reliance on Charles Lyell’s great work on Geology. There is also the impression of a wide collaboration between scientists, as Darwin’s collections of specimens started to arrive back in England, and several leading experts in flora and fauna helped him to analyse and categorise them, always attracting his generous thanks and acknowledgement in the journal. It is also interesting in thoroughly demonstrating how the principles of a theory like that of evolution and the Origin of Species do not always come about through some ‘Eureka’ moment, but can be distilled through years of exploration, observation, thinking, reading, interaction with others.

On the Origin of Species may have detonated a large explosion in Victorian intellectual circles, but it had a long fuse leading up to it.

Thirty years later, at the great debate on the theory of evolution at the British Association in Oxford in 1860, Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce tried to wash Darwinism away with sarcasm, with the famous inquiry where he turned to Professor Huxley and “begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?”

Professor Huxley’s systematic demolition of the Bishop’s arguments concluded with the equally legendary line that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be “ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” The debate was a sensation. One lady in the audience fainted.

Huxley and Wilbeforce as caricatured in Vanity Fair:

Voyage of the Beagle Revisited

On the Origin of Species may have detonated a large explosion in Victorian intellectual circles, but it had a long fuse leading up to it.

Follow Us

Learn More

Voyage of the Beagle Revisited

On the Origin of Species may have detonated a large explosion in Victorian intellectual circles, but it had a long fuse leading up to it.

Climate Connections - Extreme Weather & Heatwaves

Making a Difference with Citizen Science

Follow Us

Learn More