Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [1]
On the morning that Darwin chose to answer this question, it became evident that in one way, at least, evolution had failed the iguana: It had given it no recourse at all for dealing with thrill-seeking British naturalists. Darwin strode across the craggy rocks toward a napping “imp of darkness,” cornered it, snatched it by the tail, and hurled it into a pool left by the receding tide. The iguana, no doubt wondering what had gone wrong on a day that had started so pleasantly, swam straight back to its sunning rock.
Charles Darwin was a scientist at heart, and a good scientist always repeats his experiment. As the aggrieved beast climbed dripping from the pool, Darwin jumped forward again, clasped the iguana firmly in hand, and drew back. And then, in the name of science, discovery, and swimming iguanas, he hurled it into the sea.
In his five-year stint as geologist, naturalist, and traveler on the HMS Beagle, a gloriously happy Darwin galloped with Patagonian gauchos, stormed Montevideo armed with cutlasses and a knife between his teeth, beat his bare chest to properly greet an indigenous man in Tierra del Fuego, chased exotic birds, beetles, and butterflies through the jungles of Brazil, and, of course, took up iguana-tossing. He lived the swashbuckling explorer ’s life that modern travelers desire and almost never achieve, and he penned the book detailing the places and adventures that travelers hope to experience. A sense of exhilaration pervades The Voyage of the Beagle—exhilaration totally dissonant with the Charles Darwin we remember today as a wrinkled, heavy-eyebrowed, white-bearded, finch-beak measurer. In the United States, at least, Darwin exists as an almost mythical figure: praised or reviled, overemphasized or over-criticized, beyond personality and beyond the affable cheeriness that defined most of his life. Critical creationists want to see Darwin as an old tormented evolutionist, unhappy with his work and shut up in his country house in England. Many evolutionists want to see him as a rigid scientist, a pristine visionary beyond the petty events of daily life. Biographers tend to approach the young, happy, excitable Darwin as merely a training ground for what would come later, picking apart his journals for clues to his thinking on evolution and discarding many of his early energetic adventures.
Darwin never forgot these experiences. “The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I feel sure that it was this training which has enabled me to do whatever I have done in science.”
The science was pretty much the extent of what I knew until I happened across The Voyage of the Beagle for the first time, and read about the iguana-lobbing, and immediately went green with nineteenth century naturalist envy. The guy got to chase, catch, and throw iguanas—repeatedly—and call it research! But I’d seen the pictures— Darwin was some old tormented guy with facial fungus like Santa Claus. Well, how the hell did that happen?
My introductory encounter with The Voyage of the Beagle came in the late afternoon of a snowy day in Ushuaia, Argentina, the self-proclaimed southernmost city in the world. I was there in the very last days of a long trip, trying to put as much distance as possible between myself and a frustrating post-college stab at employment. Trying, in fact, to put seven thousand, one hundred, forty-three-point-four miles between us—I really loathed that job. For two years I’d worked