This is the eighth installment of an abridged version of my book Reef Madness: Alexander Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and the Meaning of Coral. (Earlier installments are listed at bottom.) Here we meet Charles Darwin — first he experiences the thrilling geology of Chile, and then, in a flashback, as a young man who showed little promise of becoming the century’s most influential scientist.

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The Beagle, having spent much of the preceding few months in dismal weather off Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, reached the sunny Chilean port of Valparaiso on July 23, 1834. “After Tierra del Fuego,” wrote Darwin, the dry, clear climate “felt delicious.” He was entranced with the sight of the mountains, some as high as 23,000 feet, dozens of miles away. Securing horses and a guide, he rode into the foothills. His interest rose with the landscape. As Alex would later, Darwin found fascinating the uplift suggested by the steep terrain. “Who can avoid wondering at the force which has upheaved these mountains, and even more so at the countless ages which it must have required to have broken through, removed, and leveled whole masses of them?” he wrote in the Voyage of the Beagle.

In his first trip he headed north along the coast to Quintero “to see the beds of shells, which stand some yards above the level of the sea.” — almost certainly the same shells, blanketing seaside terraces several hundred yards high, that Alex would examine four decades later. To both men these benches spoke of remarkable, repeated rises in the land. For Alex it was these “ancient Sea beaches,” along with coral he found several thousand feet up in the Andes, that made him “wish I could have time to remain here to study the uprising of the land; there is a good deal to do and quite interesting work…. I believe however Darwin has already done something in this line.”

Darwin indeed had, for he spent the sort of extended time in the Andes that Alex didn’t allow himself. For much of 1834 and 1835, while the Beagle mapped the coasts of Chile and Peru, Darwin explored the Andes, climbing and riding up their peaks and cutting across their valleys, “geologizing,” as he called it, to his heart’s content. These landlocked months in the Andes contributed as much to his coral reef theory as the Galapagos visit did to his evolutionary theory. In fact they probably shaped his scientific approach as much as anything on the voyage. For it was here, studying uplift, that he began to indulge the broad-scale, speculative theorizing that characterized both his spectacular successes, like the theory of evolution, and his embarrassing mistakes, such as at Glen Roy.

The young man who hammered rock in the Andes is unrecognizable as the sedentary, dyspeptic thinker who dominates our popular historical picture of Darwin. He was a healthy, insatiably curious man just twenty-four, younger by more than a decade than Alex was when he rode through the Andes and, during this time of his life, just as rugged if more innocent. The man who from his mid-thirties on would rarely travel (and then usually only to take a “water cure” or some other palliative for his gastric torments) was at this point strong and lithe, quick to travel amid real dangers posed by bandits, rebels, and deadly weather. While no Thoreau (he was less wild and irreverent; indeed, he hated rocking the boat), he was hardly untouched by the age’s Romantic vision of wild nature as a transformative place. He took a Wordsworthian pleasure in his rambles. “I cannot tell you how I enjoyed some of these views,” he wrote his Cambridge mentor John Henslow. “It is worth coming from England once to feel such intense delight. At an elevation from 10-12000 ft. there is a transparency in the air & a confusion of distances & a sort of stillness which gives the sensation of being in another world.” He also found exciting his own growing comfort in these distant heights, so remote and rarefied that even most animals forsook them. “We unsaddled our horses near the spring,” he wrote of one excursion he took into the mountains with two cowhands as guides,

and prepared to pass the night. The setting of the sun was glorious, the valleys being black whilst the snowy peaks of the Andes yet retained a ruby tint. When it was dark, we made a fire beneath a little arbour of bamboos, fried our charqui (or dried slips of beef), took our matte and were quite comfortable. There is an inexpressible charm in thus living in the open air. The evening was so calm and still; the shrill noise of the mountain bizcacha & the faint cry of the goatsucker were only occasionally to be heard. Besides these, few birds or even insects frequent these dry parched up mountains.

Though such wilderness was new to him, Darwin was no stranger to the outdoors. He had been an avid bird hunter and walker throughout his youth. Born in Shrewsbury in 1809 (a year before Louis Agassiz), he was the fifth of six children. He lost his mother when he was eight. His father, Robert Darwin, a doctor successful and rich, was a mercurial and sometimes harsh man. Yet he indulged a certain idleness in his youngest boy, whose namesake was the doctor’s older brother, whose death at twenty had devastated his entire family. The second Charles also had another, more reliably benevolent patriarch in his uncle Josiah Wedgwood, brother to Charles’s dead mother and founder of the Wedgwood china dynasty. Josiah lived 30 miles from the Darwins on a huge estate called Maer, where Charles was always welcome. There Charles spent much time hunting, riding, walking, and, in the waning light after a day outdoors, happily conversing with his uncle, aunt, cousins, and their friends.

He especially loved to hunt. Under the tutelage of his uncle, his own older brother, and Maer’s gamekeepers, he became a crack shot. He soon outhunted everyone, spending weeks each fall exercising a “zeal … so great,” he recalled in his charming and disarming Autobiography, that “I would place my shooting-boots open by my bedside so as not to lose a half-minute putting them on in the morning.” He was obsessed. In off-seasons he refined his upland bird technique by practicing his gun-raising before a mirror and shooting out the flames of moving candles with an airgun. In season, he carefully tallied each bird he shot. The seriousness with which he took this head-count led two hunting friends to conspire one day to claim, every time he downed a bird, to have fired also, faking a reload of their guns and telling him to please not count that last one, as they had shot at the same moment and it might have been one of them rather than he who downed the bird. After some hours, he recalled later (almost 50 years later, actually, and still with some pique), “they told me the joke, but it was no joke to me, for I had shot a large number of birds, but did not know how many, and could not add them to my list, which I used to do by making a knot in a piece of string tied to a button-hole. This my wicked friends had perceived.”

Shooting gripped him far more than school did. The man who would later eclipse Louis Agassiz (who, one year younger, was already energetically pursuing his career plan in Germany and Paris) was in his youth a decided underachiever. He was as distractible as Louis was focused. He had originally planned to follow his father’s profession, but when he showed no stomach for it while studying medicine at Edinburgh (witnessing his first surgery sickened him), his father pressed him to enroll at Cambridge so that he could become a country parson. Though Charles did not care for the dogma of the Church of England (he was raised a Unitarian), he went along gamely, for he recognized that otherwise he indeed might, as his father feared, “[turn] into an idle sporting man, which then seemed my probable destination.”

“How I did enjoy shooting!” he confessed in his Autobiography. “But I think that I must have been half-consciously ashamed of my zeal, for I tried to persuade myself that shooting was almost an intellectual employment; it required so much skill to judge where to find most game and to hunt the dogs well.”

Cambridge did not immediately reverse this. When he arrived he had to take remedial Greek and Latin, for he found that he had forgotten almost every word he’d supposedly learned in earlier schooling. Almost immediately he fell into a “sporting set … [of] dissipated low-minded young men” with whom he “sadly wasted” much time — though apparently not too sadly.

We used often to dine together in the evening … and we sometimes drank too much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards. I know that I ought to feel ashamed of days and evenings thus spent, but as some of my friends were very pleasant, and we were all in the highest spirits, I cannot help looking back to these times with much pleasure.

Such was his later regret about his student indifference. He found boring almost every subject but geometry, so beautiful in its deductions, and chemistry. The one new thing that excited him as much as shooting and cards — the one new thing that engaged this bright young man surrounded by his culture’s greatest minds and libraries — was hunting beetles. By his own account, this beetle-gathering was “a mere passion for collecting,” with no real scientific discipline. It was certainly a passion. Once, having grabbed a rare beetle with each hand and seeing a third, he popped one of the hand-held beetles into his mouth so he could grab the new one. (It ejected a liquid so foul that he spat it out, losing it and the new one as well.) But he said later there was no rigor to it; it was mere accumulation, not study. He had no real curiosity about their function in the natural order.

However, chasing beetles did nudge Darwin nearer his final vocation, focusing his outdoorsmanship more toward biology. He moved closer yet when he began attending public lectures given by John Henslow, the Cambridge reverend-professor and a leading naturalist who became his primary mentor. Darwin so admired the clarity of Henslow’s thinking and the beauty of his illustrations that he began going on the weekly natural history walks Henslow led. Henslow was intrigued by some combination of energy and intelligence in this young underachiever. He took in Darwin much as Cuvier would take in Agassiz a year later. Almost daily they took long walks on which the lecture-leery but quick-eyed Darwin absorbed a field education in botany, entomology, and geology. Henslow also invited Darwin to weekly gatherings at his home, and frequently to dinner. The two spent so much time together in Darwin’s last year at Cambridge that the dons took to calling Darwin “the man who walks with Henslow.” Through Henslow, Darwin came to know many of Britain’s most prominent scientists, most notably the scientist-philosopher William Whewell, whose empiricist principles were then beginning to exert immense influence on British science, and Charles Lyell, whose work in geology Darwin would soon find so inspiring.

Henslow also introduced Darwin to a work that “stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.. It was the great Alexander von Humboldt’s 1819 Personal Narrative, a six-volume account of his five years exploring South America. Darwin’s encounter with this book marked his birth as a serious student and scientist. He read it several times in his last year at Cambridge, reveling in this tale of geologizing and collecting in the Andes and the South American rainforest. He fantasized endlessly about taking such a trip. Thus Humboldt profoundly influenced Darwin even as he directly mentored Louis Agassiz 250 miles south in Paris.

Darwin had fantasies but no expectations of following Humboldt. He tried to organize a trip that summer to the Canary Islands, but it fell though for lack of funds and companions. Otherwise he had nothing going. Henslow and Humboldt had fired his enthusiasm for natural science, but the flame was hardly focused. As he neared graduation he was still noodling over whether to join the clergy, allowing his father to push him slowly closer. A quiet country parsonage, he rationalized, would allow him to do the sort of natural history that pastor-naturalist Gilbert White had described in yet another favorite book, A Natural History of Selbourne. Beyond that, he had no agenda other than paying off his school debts and enjoying the opening day of partridge season September 1.

Yet if Darwin lacked the drive of Humboldt’s more direct protégé, he shared Louis’s luck with mentors. Just before graduating in spring 1831, he was invited by one of Henslow’s friends and fellow reverend-professors, Adam Sedgwick, to go geologizing in Wales that August. He accepted, and after idling most of the summer he joined Sedgwick in August. The two walked for miles hunting fossils and mapping strata, having some fair luck and a good time — though they missed the glacial scarring that would leap into view for Darwin a decade later when he had learned of Louis Agassiz’s Ice Age theory. Still, the three weeks of geologizing did not exactly fire in Charles a calling. When he finished the trip with no other real plans, he could find direction only in the most literal way: “I left Sedgwick and went in a straight line by compass and map across the mountains to Barmouth [where he visited some old Cambridge friends], never following any track unless it coincided with my course. I thus came on some strange wild places, and enjoyed much this manner of traveling.” Then he headed home to collect his guns and hunting togs and go to his uncle’s estate. For it was two days short of September 1, and “at that time I should have thought myself mad to give up the first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other science.”

Yet he would, quite soon. Arriving  home to collect his hunting things, he found a letter from Henslow informing him that Henslow had recommended him for a berth as naturalist on the round-the-world voyage of the HMS Beagle, a trip projected to take two to three years. To claim the spot he had only to happily impress the captain, Robert Fitzroy, who at twenty-six was only four years older than Darwin.

Had Darwin never read Humboldt’s Personal Narratives, he might have blanched at such a lengthy commitment. But coming on the heels of Humboldt and his own aborted Canary Island plans, the invitation inflamed his tropical travel lust. He told his father he would very much like to go.

His father forbid it. He feared the trip would stop forever his son’s halting walk toward the clergy. The son, disappointed but nonetheless happy enough to resume his shooting plans, wrote Henslow his regrets the day after receiving the invitation. The next morning he rode to his uncle’s, where he told Wedgwood of the vetoed invitation. Uncle Jos was not happy with this turn of events; he immediately wrote Dr. Darwin, answering each of the doctor’s objections and appealing his decision, and the next day, doubly determined that his nephew not miss such an opportunity, Wedgwood stopped Charles as he was heading off to the shooting fields, put him in a carriage, and rode with him the 30 miles to Dr. Darwin’s house. They arrived to find the doctor already convinced by Wedgwood’s letter. After all, he allowed, he had told Charles he would agree to the trip if he could find even one sensible man who thought it a good idea, and he could hardly call Wedgwood otherwise.

Thus Darwin, shoved back in the right direction by his uncle, decided to claim the job of naturalist on the Beagle. To console his still-doubting father, Charles told him that at least aboard the Beagle he would not be able to overspend his allowance, as he had so consistently at Cambridge, “unless I was deuced clever.”

His father responded, “But they tell me you are very clever.”

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Prior excerpts:

Introduction

Reef Madness Begins: Louis Agassiz, Creationist Magpie

Reef Madness 2: The One Darwin Really DID Get Wrong: Rumble at Glen Roy

Reef Madness 3: Louis Agassiz, TED Wet Dream, Conquers America

Reef Madness 4: Alexander Agassiz Comes of Age

Reef Madness 5: How Charles Darwin Seduced Asa Gray

Reef Madness 6: The Death of Louis Agassiz

Reef Madness 7: Alex Finds a Future

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