The Evolution of Charles Darwin by Diana Preston

Author:Diana Preston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

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At midday, July 6—the day FitzRoy oversaw the embarkation of the Challenger men—the Beagle, with Darwin aboard, left Copiapo, and after crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, arrived six days later in the small Peruvian port of Iquique (today in Chile, following the war between Chile and a Bolivian-Peruvian alliance in 1879–1884). It lay beneath “a great steep wall of rock about 2000 feet high,” and Darwin thought its inhabitants as isolated as those on board a ship. Everything they needed—water, wine, food, firewood—had to be brought from elsewhere. The Beagle’s arrival in this remote spot made the inhabitants uneasy since Peru was in a state of anarchy, with Iquique caught between contending factions. To add to the political turmoil, crime was rife. Churches had recently been looted, and enraged inhabitants, convinced “heretics” must be to blame, had “proceeded to torture some Englishmen” and, Darwin recorded, would have shot them had the authorities not intervened.

In the tense situation, Darwin had some difficulty hiring mules and a guide to take him to some local saltpeter works. Ascending a zigzag track of fine, white sand, he reached a desert plateau strewn with the carcasses of pack animals that had collapsed from fatigue. Except for a few vultures gorging on them, he saw “neither bird, quadruped, reptile or insect” and decided this was “the first true desert I have ever seen; the effect … was not impressive.” Even while traveling from Coquimbo to Copiapo, he had seen some vegetation, however sparse. Here the ground was covered by a thick salt crust and “saliferous” sandstone—“incontestable proof of the dryness of the climate.” He slept the night in the house of the owner of one of the saltpeter works, who grumbled about the heavy expense of running it.

Darwin did not enjoy the Beagle’s onward voyage to Callao. His consistently negative comments suggest not only homesickness but, as he himself hinted, that any sense of novelty was wearing thin—“custom excludes the feeling of sublimity …” Though the steady rolling passage to Callao reminded him of the Atlantic, there was a significant difference. In the Atlantic there was “an ever varying and beautiful sky; the brilliant day is relieved by a cool refreshing evening … The ocean teems with life, no one can watch the flying-fish, dolphin and porpoises without pleasure. At night in the clear heavens, the European traveller views the new constellations which foretell the new countries to which the good ship is onward driving.—Here in the Pacific … in the winter, a heavy dull bank of clouds intercepts during successive days even a glimpse of the sun … in approaching these low latitudes I did not experience that delicious mildness, which is known … in the spring of England, or in first entering the tropics in the Atlantic.”

The Beagle anchored at Callao on July 19, where Darwin soon learned more about the parlous condition of Peruvian politics, convincing him that “no state in S. America, since the declaration of independence, has suffered more

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