"A grain in the balance may determine which individuals shall live and which shall die" (Charles Darwin)
Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12th February 1809 in Shrewsbury. He was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, a notable scientific writer, and son of Dr. Robert Waring Darwin. He was the fifth child of a rich and sophisticated English family.
After completing his schooling in Shrewsbury in 1825, Darwin started to study medicine, but after two years he abandoned the course and entered Cambridge University to prepare himself to become a priest in the Church of England. His father, worried by his lack of conviction and clarity, encouraged him to read the works of the German Alexander von Humboldt, which were devoted to the natural sciences.
In 1831, at the age of 22, he took his first great decision… to sail as naturalist in HMS Beagle in her scientific surveying voyage around the world, which would last 5 years.
On his return to Britain a record of his travels and researches was published, now commonly known as The Voyage of the Beagle. Before long, Darwin, the puny, sickly child, had become a scientific celebrity.
His theory constituted nothing less than a scientific revolution. His contradiction of Holy Scripture earned him blazing criticism from the clergy and most contemporary biologists, who defended the thesis that the species were eternally fixed and divinely ordered groups.
It is impossible to reflect on the state of the American continent without astonishment. Formerly it must have swarmed with great monsters; now we find mere pygmies compared with the antecedent, allied races.
HMS Beagle sailed from Plymouth under the command of Captain FitzRoy on 27th December 1831. The voyage took Darwin round the coast of South America, and the vessel returned home in the final year by way of the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Mauritius and South Africa.
The mission was to complete the survey of the coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego which Captain King had begun between 1826 and 1830. They had to chart the coasts of Chile, Peru and some of the Pacific islands, and carry out a series of chronometric observations.
During the voyage, the crew studied the coastal waters, took soundings and indicated the great ocean currents. Darwin frequently left the vessel to undertake long overland expeditions, during which he collected a vast number of specimens. He viewed with amazement the diversity of the fauna and flora which he encountered in different places.
The study of geology was initially the factor which was most important in converting the voyage into Darwin's real training as an investigator, since it brought with it the obligation to reason.
Day by day, Darwin's self confidence grew as he rationalised what he observed. Little by little he began to understand that it was geographical separation and differing environmental conditions which caused populations to change independently of one another.
What a history of geological changes does the simply-constructed coast of Patagonia reveal!
When he first set foot on Patagonian soil, in the middle of December 1832, Darwin met the Ona aboriginal indians (the three Yagans on the ship, taken to England on a previous voyage, begged him to shoot, insisting that they were “Onas, bad men”). The voyage continued south round Cape Horn, in search of the western entrance of the Beagle Channel. On the way they encountered Yagan families, and given the apparent peacefulness of the indians, FitzRoy chose an accessible beach on Navarino Island to disembark the three natives. This was Wulaia, on the west shore of the Murray Channel. Here three roofed huts were constructed and the indians were disembarked, with all the presents which they had received in Europe, and accompanied by an enthusiastic young priest, Richard Matthews, whose mission was to preach to the indians. This was the first attempt to found an Anglican mission in Tierra del Fuego.
Darwin sailed in the ship, which undertook a brief exploration of the channel, returning after nine days. Things had not gone well. They found the priest alone and hysterical, the indians having robbed him of all his belongings and disappeared.
Finally, Darwin and Fitz Roy travelled through the channels of Tierra del Fuego in open boats for 21 days, ranging as far as 200 Km. from the Beagle.
Darwin was somewhat religious, but after reading Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which treated of geological changes, his ideas were transformed and he became the first glaciologist of Patagonia, declaring that it was glaciers which had transformed the landscape, creating today’s fiords and channels.
Darwin returned to England on 2nd October 1836; the change he had undergone in these years was so remarkable that his father was amazed at how “his mind had changed completely”. From his return until the beginning of 1839 were the most active months of Darwin's life. He worked on his journal of the voyage (published in 1839) and on two other texts which would present his geological and zoological observations.
In his notebooks appear his new opinions about the "transmutation of species", which he adopted more firmly as he reflected on his own observations on the classification, affinities and instincts of animals.
As his father said, the Charles Darwin who sailed from Plymouth under the command of Captain FitzRoy on the 27th December 1831 was a different man when he returned in 1836.
He was no longer the young, unpaid naturalist of the Beagle… he was Charles Darwin the discoverer, who laid the basis for the Theory of Evolution.
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