Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [34]
Jean, my forest guide in the Tijuca Forest near Rio de Janeiro, had mentioned Captain FitzRoy’s pro-slavery sympathies while we hiked in the forest. “The Captain,” he asked me. “What was his name?”
“FitzRoy?”
“Yes, FitzRoy,” Jean said. “He talked a lot of bullshit.”
In the years since Darwin’s visit, Bahia has morphed from the center of Brazilian slavery into the best spot in Brazil to celebrate and study African culture and the legacy of the slavery that Darwin so abhorred. The English had essentially forced the end of the slave trade in Brazil by blockading harbors and attacking slaving ships; I wondered if Darwin’s impassioned anti-slavery remarks were still remembered. The descendants of slaves make up an estimated eighty percent of the population in Bahia, and their culture—food, religion, and most especially music—is the city’s biggest tourist draw. Stepping out of the airport terminal at Bahia, I was greeted by a group of black women in flowing white robes operating a small food stand outside where they sold palm hearts fried in dendê oil.
Modern Salvador da Bahia is a sprawling city of more than two million inhabitants, and the jungle that Darwin enjoyed—“The town is fairly embosomed in a luxuriant wood,” he wrote—has been cut away to well beyond city limits. Government-sponsored billboards lining the main roads cheered on growth and development. Hardhatted workers posed in front of oil wells and manufact u ring plants; “Bahia is growing,” the caption promised. “Bahians, too.”
I checked into a hostel in Porto Barra, a block from the beach at the crux where the Atlantic Ocean met All Saints Bay. The hostel décor screamed tropics: a canary yellow exterior lined with cherry-red hibiscus, bright orange paint in the kitchen, and sunburned European tourists napping shirtless in hammocks strung across the common spaces.
I had arranged to meet a Salvadoran friend-of-a-friend named Silas Giron there that evening, and he arrived around 8 P.M. after getting off work at a local music store. He looked nothing like I had imagined—I had pictured someone short, dark, and athletic, like all the people I’d seen in Rio de Janeiro and on the streets of Bahia as I drove from the airport to the hostel. Instead, Silas turned out to be an illustration of Brazilian diversity: tall and waif-thin, with mocha skin and long, dreadlocked blond hair that he wore tied up in a net. He played the guitar and talked seriously about his musical influences, which represented a typical modern Bahian mixture of samba, swing, reggae, rock, and pop, and seemed to owe particular inspiration to legendary Bahian-born guitarist Gilberto Gil, who had recently been made Brazil’s minister of culture. Although his grandfather was in the hospital undergoing chemotherapy—which he didn’t tell me until later—Silas offered to help me as best he could. Darwin, with the very last line of The Voyage of the Beagle, made a brief argument in favor of travel for young naturalists, concluding that “Traveling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance.” Silas, for me, was one of those kind-hearted people.
After we had introduced ourselves and chatted for a while, Silas suggested we go for a walk through Porto Barra, the hostel’s quiet beach neighborhood a few miles south of the city center. The waterfront extended to a sharp point marked with a lighthouse, and sandy public beaches curled away from the point. We walked along the promenade overlooking the bay-side beach, which was fairly crowded even at close to 10 P.M. The groups of people lounging, sitting on towels, even trying the water, were diverse—mostly black, but also whites and those of obviously mixed race. I asked Silas about the diversity on the beach, as it often seemed to me that Brazil had succeeded admirably in integrating different