Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [10]
“It was a huge shame,” Jean said.
Park workers had driven iron spikes into the rock around the stairs and strung thick metal cable between the posts as a swaying handhold. The way the posts poked out at odd angles, some of them leaning temptingly over sheer cliff edge, it looked safer to try and hang onto the steps themselves. After ten minutes of climbing, we hauled ourselves up onto a small grassy knoll that marked the top and looked down through the thin layer of smog. Below us to the east, the winding Guanabara Bay glittered in the afternoon sun, and the city of Nitteroi, on the opposite shore, appeared faint in the coastal haze. To the south, dramatic posts of jungle-covered rock cut into our view of the famous white sand crescents of Copacabana and Ipanema. In the north, planes took flight from the airport, and teeming slums climbed up the hillsides until the forest took over. The view west encompassed nothing but forest, rolling, tumultuous green hills stretching into haze.
The spectacular view left me exhilarated. I thought back to Darwin, who wrote in his first letter home from Brazil, “The exquisite glorious pleasure of walking amongst such flowers, & such trees cannot be comprehended, but by those who have experienced it.” The contradiction between his repeated attempts to describe the forest, and his inability to pick enough adjectives to adequately communicate it, had been much on Darwin’s mind in Brazil. His rainforest accounts were heavily influenced by a travelogue written just before his birth by the famed wandering German Alexander von Humboldt, a man who liked his descriptors. (Darwin really took to him, writing at one point, “He like another sun illumines all I behold.”)
Darwin’s infatuation with von Humboldt lasted for several months and extended to his writing style, so that at one point his oh-so-very-English sister wrote him a letter asking him to knock off with the “flowery French expressions,” and stick more to “your own simple straight forward & far more agreeable style.” Gradually, he did. Almost exactly three years later, Darwin climbed a mountain peak in the high Andes and compared the view to “watching a thunderstorm” or “hearing in full Orchestra a Chorus of the Messiah.” That’s not just better and more mature writing, it’s a sign that Darwin was starting to realize that actually, you can comprehend the glorious pleasure of a mountain peak or a Brazilian forest without experiencing it. The scenery had given him an adrenaline shot, but, he realized, perhaps you’ve got your own soul-awakener somewhere else, at the art museum, or the beach, or even (why not?) the football stadium. Now, as Jean and I stood there, with the entire world seemingly arrayed below us in a tossed mixture of greenery, rock, cement, sand, and ocean, I felt like I had earned a taste of Darwin’s Brazilian chaos of delights.
2: PORT DESIRE
Darwin’s Rhea
What we had for dinner to day would sound very odd in England. Ostrich dumplings & Armadilloes; the former would never be recognized as a bird but rather as beef.
—BEAGLE DIARY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1832
ANY GOOD DARWIN ACCOUNT should feature the story of the small South American ostrich known as Darwin’s rhea, because it so nicely sums up the spirit of nineteenth century adventure. It is, first of all, a story about the thrill of being the first to discover a new species. It is also a story about the thrill of finding that you are accidentally discovering a new species while eating it.
In December 1834, three years into its journey, the Beagle anchored in the expansive natural harbor at Port Desire on a dry, flat coastal stretch of Argentine Pa t a-gonia. After leaving Rio de Janeiro, the Beagle had never returned to Brazil and instead spent two years surveying back and forth, up and down the Patagonian coast, arriving now in what was becoming a familiar