Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [32]
He nodded and turned to me.
“But the doctor’s not in,” he said.
The woman opened the door for me. The room was plain white, with an uncluttered desk, a flat-screen computer monitor, and a small, framed display hanging on the wall that commemorated the site of Darwin’s birth. It was empty and quiet. A window overlooked the front lawn and a mulberry bush that appeared old enough to have entertained a ten-year-old Charles. The woman watched as I did a quick turn around the room, and then walked me back downstairs and outside.
Nathan didn’t have to work the next day, and he picked me up in the morning and drove me fifty miles to the west. In a packed parking lot at the base of Snowdon mountain, day-hikers in colorful parkas lined up to ascend the peak while less adventurous travelers skipped the exercise and boarded a smoke-belching rail car, which creaked its way up along an ancient track to the summit. Nathan and I walked, slipping on bathtub-smooth rocks and loose shale. Sheep clambered across landslides, bleating, and their wan cries drifted through the clouds. When we startled sheep they bounded away down the trail, long, cat-like tails swinging. This long tail surprised me; I pointed it out to Nathan. “That sheep has a really long tail!” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said, completely deadpan. “That’s where the Welshman grabs hold.” (Seriously, the English and their sheep jokes.
We continued up through the fog. When we finally reached the summit, we were rewarded with a view of white sky and mist-enveloped, dripping black rocks. I thought of the young Darwin, his entire travel experience forged between here, Shrewsbury, and Cambridge, at the time a fairly suburban university town. He had gone backpacking near Snowdon after graduating from college in August 1831 because he hoped a few days of geologizing might help him to sort out his future. Darwin’s family had secured him a job as a clergyman, and such a post would allow him to continue living in the country, hiking and casually researching natural history. It was a secure, safe future—and one that his restlessness, and desire for new opportunities for observation, wouldn’t abide.
Darwin left the mountains and the fog behind in August 1831, at the age of 22, and returned to Shrewsbury, where he found a letter from his favorite college professor, J.S. Henslow, inviting him on a surveying voyage to South America. It took him less than a week to commit to traveling around the world for the next five years. I could easily see Nathan, and a great many Englishmen who found their home island simply too small to contain their desire to fill in the lines on the atlas, grasping at the promise of such adventures. It would be, obviously, cheeky not to.
But then we’re still back at that question, about the power of specific examples versus the power of traveling. Darwin’s insatiable curiosity and mania for observation were formed by his childhood and focused by his travels. He obviously needed the scientific findings from South America to help think up evolution. But he spent five years on the Beagle and had plenty of learning experiences that had nothing to do with natural history. And some of them were just as influential in Darwin’s mental development as his observations of the varying-beaked finches.
6: SALVADOR DA BAHIA
Beginning and End
If to what Nature has granted the Brazils, man added his just & proper efforts, of what a country might the inhabitants boast. But where the greater parts are in a state of slavery, & where this system is maintained by an entire stop to education, the mainspring of human actions, what can be expected; but that the whole would be polluted by its part.
—BEAGLE DIARY, MARCH 17, 1832
THERE ARE THINGS AN ENGLISH or American background can prepare you for when you travel in South America, whether you’re traveling now or in the 1830s. Politics, for example. You can read about political history in books and then show up and get a pretty firm grasp on Hugo Chavez (in the modern era) or Juan Manuel de Rosas (in Darwin’s time; more