From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson

Author:Colin Wilson [Wilson, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: General, History
ISBN: 9780753547205
Google: 3y3EY72VWE4C
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-06-08T13:22:41+00:00

This great revolution in human thinking came about, as everyone knows, because a young naturalist named Charles Darwin set out, in December 1831, to sail to South America on a ship called the Beagle.

The main aim of the voyage, oddly enough, was to take three dark-skinned natives of Tierra del Fuego, off the coast of South America back to their home. The Beagle’s captain, Robert Fitzroy—a devout Christian and supporter of slavery—had purchased them at low cost (he only paid a pearl button for one of them) and intended to use them in England as unpaid servants. (One of them, a pubescent girl, Fitzroy had purchased because he was disgusted to see her walking around naked.) Unfortunately, an anti-slave law had been passed while he was at sea, and he was indignantly ordered to take them back. And to give the expedition some practical purpose, the minister in charge of the Home Office decreed that a scientist should go along too, to study South American flora and fauna. The man chosen was regarded as something of a failure in life. At 22, Charles Darwin was already a failed medical student and a failed clergyman. Then he found he enjoyed zoology and botany, and his professor at Cambridge recommended him for the post on the Beagle.

Darwin also happened to be a good liberal (they were called Whigs in those days), and he entirely agreed that the three natives should be returned. The captain was a lifelong Tory, and told the young scientist that he was being sentimental. In life, the race was won by the fittest and the fastest. The strong survived, the weak died off.

Darwin was not sure he liked this theory. But then, his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written a long poem called The Temple of Nature (1803) in which he argued that all life had originated in the seas, then moved on to the land, where the fishes developed limbs and turned into animals. So perhaps Captain Fitzroy was right. Perhaps competition was responsible for the slow improvement of species...

The return of the three natives to Tierra del Fuego strengthened his opinion. One of them, a youth they had named York Minster, was strong and dominant, and was soon happily settled with his brother savages. He quickly threw off his civilised ways and went about naked, to the distress of a missionary named Matthews who had been sent to try and convert the natives. So did the pubescent girl, whom Fitzroy had named Fuegia. But the youngest and gentlest of the natives, known as Jemmy Button, was bullied and beaten, and tearfully begged to be allowed to return on the Beagle; the captain had to refuse him, and as the Beagle sailed away, it was perfectly obvious that, unprotected by the artificial barriers of civilisation, Jemmy Button was going to have a hard life.

The same proved to be true of Fuegia. Ten years later, a ship full of seal hunters stopped off the island, and Fuegia hastened on board to renew her acquaintance with white men.

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