Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [3]
During the trip, Darwin kept three journals, two scientific and one personal. He wrote in them almost every day, filling the personal diary with his adventures and observations and the scientific ones with descriptions of plants, animals, fossils, and geology. He took any opportunity to mail his completed work home, and when he returned to England after nearly five years on the Beagle, he published a combination of his two journals as a book titled The Voyage of the Beagle: Journal of Researches Into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World.
With its publication, Darwin became a famous and well-recognized naturalist, explorer, and author, twenty years before writing The Origin of Species. He could have stopped there and been remembered forever as an amiable, moderately accomplished scientist and left the evolution-related mud-slinging for Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, or Alfred Russel Wallace, the scientist who came up with a theory of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. But he did not stop, and so became the name and face of one side in a debate so rancorous it threatens to obliterate his real personality.
That personality shines through the pages of The Voyage of the Beagle. Three years after Darwin’s death, his wife, Emma, picked up his journal and started reading as a way to remember her husband. “It makes me feel so happy as if I was going with him; only I want to ask him so many questions,” she wrote in a letter to their son William. She had recently read Darwin’s description of a brightly colored black-and-vermillion toad, which, in a reference to seventeenth century English author John Milton, he called “a fit toad to preach in the ear of Eve.” Upon encountering one of these toads on a dry plain, Darwin, “thinking to give it a great treat, carried it to a pool of water; not only was the little animal unable to swim, but I think without help it would soon have been drowned.”
To Emma Darwin, this incident captured her husband’s charm perfectly. “The real man comes out constantly,” she wrote in her letter, “e.g. thinking to give a toad in a dry place in Rio Plata ‘quite a treat’ by taking it to a pond & nearly drowning it.”
It is neither possible nor desirable to follow the Beagle chronologically (unless you’ve got five years). The ship spent so much time traveling up and down the South American coast, poking into inlets and taking soundings as it went, that a journey in Darwin’s exact footsteps would be tedious at best. But once the Beagle passed Cape Horn and started to explore the west coast of Chile, it didn’t return to the east coast (except for the weeklong pit stop in Bahia on its way back to England). So I conceived of a journey in two parts, one visiting Darwin highlights on the east coast—from Brazil in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south—the other tracing the Beagle on the west coast, from southern Chile to the northern desert.
But there’s more to following Darwin than just standing where he stood. One of the things that most impressed me about The Voyage of the Beagle was how much Darwin sounded like twenty-somethings swapping stories in a h o stel bunk room. I hoped that a return visit to South America, this time with Darwin’s diary in hand, would deepen my understanding of the legends and people that fascinated Darwin when he wasn’t working. I hoped I’d be able to trace the historical roots of some of South America’s most persistent travelers’ tales, like the challenging