Reading the Rocks by Brenda Maddox

Author:Brenda Maddox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

12

DARWIN THE GEOLOGIST

While Charles Darwin is inescapably identified with biology, his enduring scientific love was always geology. Arriving at a new place and trying to puzzle out its past from its rocks and fossils was, he wrote to his sister in May 1832, more fun than ‘the first day’s partridge shooting’. Nothing could compare ‘to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue’.1 Having begun his journey round the world on the Beagle in December 1831, he found that he could hardly sleep at night for thinking about the geological phenomena he was seeing.

As a sixteen-year-old enrolled to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Darwin thought he had dismissed geology for ever. He abandoned his medical studies because he could not stand the blood and suffering he witnessed. On visiting an operating theatre he saw what he described as ‘two very bad operations, one on a child . . . I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform.’ He also gave up geology. Its lectures were so dull, he recalled in his autobiography, that he vowed ‘never so long as I lived to read a book on Geology or in any way to study the science’.2

He changed his mind, however, in January 1828 when he moved to Cambridge and fell under the spell of the brilliant Adam Sedgwick. Three years of study culminated in 1831 in their joint field trip to Wales to trace the junction of limestone cliffs and the Old Red Sandstone. Like Sedgwick, Darwin did not travel light. A young acquaintance, Robert Lowe, who accompanied him part of the way, remembered that Darwin ‘carried with him, in addition to his other burdens, a hammer that weighed 14 pounds’. So much did Lowe admire Darwin that ‘I walked twenty-two miles with him . . . a thing which I never did for anyone else before or since.’3

On returning from Wales, Darwin learned that his Cambridge mentor and friend, the botanist John Henslow, had recommended him to go as intellectual companion to Captain Robert FitzRoy on a journey to circumnavigate the globe. Darwin had the additional advantage of being a naturalist, although in fact there was an official naturalist on board the Beagle.

On the voyage Darwin brought an alert curiosity to his reading of Lyell’s Principles, the book Captain FitzRoy had shrewdly given to him before they left England. FitzRoy was acquainted with Lyell, who had asked him to look out for several features when he got to South America.

After an infuriating succession of delays, the Beagle eventually sailed from Plymouth on 27 December 1831. Its first stop came in January at the island of St Jago (São Tiago) in the Cape Verde islands, west of the bulge of North Africa. The tropical lushness of the island dazzled Darwin. He had never seen anything like its jungle, birds, insects, flowers and volcanic rocks.

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