Although this would be FitzRoy’s second mission as captain of the Beagle, he was only 27 years old. He was the product of an aristocratic family with vast estates in England and Ireland, and at the Royal Naval College he had been a sharp student of mathematics and science. He had served in the Mediterranean and in Buenos Aires, and in 1828, at age 23, he became captain of the Beagle. The previous captain had gone mad trying to survey the wave-battered islands of Tierra del Fuego, as his crew developed scurvy and his bad maps led him in desolate circles. “The soul of man dies in him,” the captain had written in his logbook, and then shot himself.
FitzRoy was a jumble of propriety and passion, of aristocratic tradition and modern science, of missionary zeal and solitary desperation. While he was on his first mission as captain of the Beagle, surveying Tierra del Fuego, one of his boats was stolen by Indians. FitzRoy retaliated by capturing hostages, most of whom escaped. Those who remained behind, two men and a girl, seemed happy to stay on board, and FitzRoy suddenly decided that he would take them to England, educate them, and bring them back to convert their fellow Indians. On the way home he picked up a fourth Indian, whom he bought with a mother-of-pearl button. Back in England, one of the Indians died of smallpox, but FitzRoy planned to civilize the other three and return them to Tierra del Fuego on his second voyage, along with a missionary who would stay behind to educate the tribes.
FitzRoy had decided that he needed a companion for the coming voyage. Captains did not socialize with their crews, and the enforced solitude could be maddening—the previous captain’s suicidal ghost practically haunted the ship. And FitzRoy had an extra worry. His uncle, a politician whose career had disintegrated, had slit his own throat. Perhaps FitzRoy was susceptible to the same dangerous gloom. (His hunch was a good one. Some three decades later, deeply depressed at his own failing naval career, FitzRoy cut his own throat.)
FitzRoy asked the organizer of the expedition, Francis Beaufort, to find him a friend to keep him company. They agreed that this traveling companion would also act as an unofficial naturalist, to document the animals and plants the Beagle would encounter. FitzRoy wanted him to be a gentleman as well, someone who could hold a refined conversation, to help him stave off desolation.
Beaufort contacted his friend Henslow at Cambridge. Although the post sounded tempting, he decided he couldn’t abandon his wife and child for so long. Henslow offered it to a recent Cambridge graduate, Leonard Jenyns, who went so far as to pack his clothes but then had a change of heart; he had just been appointed to a parish and didn’t think it wise to quit so suddenly. So Henslow turned to Darwin. The journey was far beyond Darwin’s dream of the Canary Islands, and without a family or post holding him back, he jumped at the chance.
His father was not so eager. He worried about the brutal, filthy conditions on sailing ships; he imagined his son drowning. Besides, the navy was no place for a gentleman to be, and it was disreputable for a future clergyman to be heading off into the wilderness. If Charles went, he might never settle down in a proper life. Charles glumly wrote to Henslow that his father disapproved.
Yet Robert Darwin had not completely made up his own mind. When his son traveled to the Wedgwood estate to distract himself with hunting, Robert sent a note to his brother-in-law, Joseph Wedgwood. He explained his disapproval of the voyage but wrote that “if you think differently from me I shall wish him to follow your advice.”
Charles explained the situation to Wedgwood, who bucked up his nephew’s spirits. He then wrote a letter to Robert to argue that the pursuit of natural history was very suitable to a clergyman, and that it was a rare opportunity “of seeing men and things as happens to few.” After sending off the letter in the early morning, Wedgwood tried to occupy Charles with partridge shooting, but by 10 o’clock the two of them set out for the Mount to argue the case in person. They discovered that Robert Darwin had already read the letter and relented. He gave his son money for the trip; Darwin’s sisters gave him new shirts.
Darwin sent a letter to Francis Beaufort, telling him to ignore his previous letter to Henslow: he would be joining the Beagle. He began arranging for the voyage, although he hadn’t yet actually met FitzRoy. And soon he heard rumors that the captain was having second thoughts. In one of his typical reversals, FitzRoy had started telling people that the position was already taken by a friend of his, and word got back to Darwin.
Darwin was baffled and heartsick, but he kept an appointment with FitzRoy in London despite the rumors. As he stared out the coach window, he worried that this voyage would evaporate as quickly as the first.
When FitzRoy and Darwin met, FitzRoy immediately tried to make out the voyage to be awful—uncomfortable, expensive, and perhaps not even completely around the world. But Darwin would not be deterred. Instead, he charmed FitzRoy with his congenial parson’s manner, his ample scientific training, his cultivated Cambridge tone, and his tactical deference. By the end of the meeting FitzRoy was won over. It was agreed: they would sail together.
“Woe unto ye beetles of South America,” Darwin declared.
When Darwin arrived at Plymouth in October 1831, with his trunks full of books and scientific equipment, he also brought with him the ideas of his day about Earth and the life that inhabits it. His teachers at Cambridge taught him that by learning about the world, one could learn about God’s will. Yet the more British scientists discovered, the harder it was to rely on the Bible as an unerring guide.
British geologists, for example, no longer accepted that the world was only a few thousand years old. It had once been enough to accept the literal word of the Bible, that humanity was created in the first week of creation. In 1658, James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh, had used the Bible along with historical records to pinpoint the age of the planet. He declared that God had created it on October 22, 4004 B.C. But it soon became clear that Earth had changed since its creation. Geologists could find fossils of shells and other signs of marine life in the layers of rock exposed in cliff faces. Surely God had not placed them there when He created Earth. Early geologists interpreted the fossils as the remains of animals killed during Noah’s Flood. When the oceans covered Earth, they were buried in the muck that washed to the bottom. The sediment formed layers of rock on the ocean floor, and when the waters subsided, some of the layers collapsed. In the process, the fossil-strewn cliffs and mountains were created.
By the end of the 1700s, though, most geologists had given up trying to fit Earth’s history into a few thousand years, with the only chance for change a single catastrophic flood. Some argued that when the planet had been formed it was covered in a global ocean, which slowly deposited granite and other kinds of rock on top of one another. As the ocean retreated, it exposed parts of the rock, which eroded and formed new layers.
Other geologists argued that the forces creating Earth’s surface were coming from within. James Hutton, a Scottish gentleman farmer, envisioned a hot molten core of the planet pushing up granite from below, creating volcanoes in some places and uplifting vast parts of Earth’s surface in others. Rains and wind eroded mountains and other raised parts of the planet, and this sediment was carried to the ocean, where it formed new rock that would be raised above sea level later, in a series of global cycles of creation and destruction. Hutton saw Earth as a finely crafted perpetual-motion machine, always keeping itself habitable for humans.