Charles Darwin by Charles Darwin- A Biography Vol 1- Voyaging (epub)

Author:Charles Darwin- A Biography, Vol 1- Voyaging (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2003-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

Tahitian women, he went on to say, were some way “inferior to the men”: they were in great need of a “becoming costume,” though the habit of wearing a flower in the hair was pretty, he conceded. Strait-laced in words at least, Darwin must have been the only man ashore, apart from an equally strait-laced FitzRoy, who objected to this flower-decked nudity. Perhaps he would have written more if his diary had not been intended for reading aloud by his sisters, cousins, and father. It seems likely that most of what he really thought was easier to express when describing the men.

Darwin also saw no incongruity in repeating a turn of phrase he had previously used for describing the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. This time, however, he put it in reverse. Where he characterised the Fuegians’ primitiveness as unbearably wild, too savage to contemplate, he thought the Tahitians’ unsophisticated state made them natural gentlemen, the “finest men I ever beheld.” He found no problem in thinking of one group of natural human beings as savages and of another as noble. In the first case, he saw himself as inexpressibly superior, the educated product of a long process of civilization; in the latter, as he artlessly said, he felt like an overdomesticated, etiolated greenhouse plant. No matter which way he approached it his English ideology was always in the right. Like those of countless other travellers in similar situations, his metaphors invariably supported his prejudices.

The hospitality extended to the Beagle visitors on Tahiti was universal. Darwin entered several of the houses, and afterwards he and FitzRoy joined a “very pretty scene” on the beach, where circles of women and children around a fire were singing songs related to the ship’s arrival: “one little girl sang a line which the rest took up in parts, forming a very pretty chorus,—the air was singular & their voices melodious.” It made him unequivocally aware that he was, at last, seated on the palm-fringed shores of an island in the South Seas.

As soon as FitzRoy began his measurements on Point Venus, the same promontory where Cook and Banks had worked, Darwin made a two-day trip into the interior. Even in the Andes, he had never had such a vertiginous experience, edging along narrow paths in the wake of his guides, hanging on to the hillside, climbing up precipitous cliffs, and at one point moving from one level to another up a tree trunk notched and leaned against the mountain wall as a makeshift ladder. Waterfalls cascaded around him.

Suspended, as it were, on the side of the mountain, there were glimpses into the depth of the neighbouring valleys; & the highest pinnacles of the central mountains towering up within sixty degrees of the Zenith, hid half the evening sky. Thus seated it was a sublime spectacle to watch the shades of night gradually obscuring the highest points. . . . The Tahitians with their naked tattooed bodies, their heads ornamented with flowers, & seen in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.