Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [36]
“Very much,” the professor said. “The English basically ended the slave trade by attacking Portuguese slaving ships that were leaving the harbor at Bahia.”
“Darwin was an abolitionist,” I told Silas as we both jogged along, now through the bright sunshine outside the classroom, “and he wrote about how bad slavery was in Bahia. His book was very widely read in England. Can you ask if this had any effect on attitudes there and here?”
He repeated my question to the professor, who by now had donned a heavy pair of aviator shades. I found him intimidating, although Silas seemed to find him as approachable as a smiling Labrador retriever.
“Darwin had no effect while he was here,” the professor said. “But when he got home, his writings had a very big effect. He said he would never visit a country that had slavery again.”
The professor turned away to purchase a small cheese-infused piece of bread from a food trolley and started to wolf it down while chatting with a colleague. Before Silas could grab him again, he rushed back to class.
“I really like him,” Silas said as we watched him stride away. “He is very funny.”
Europeans who refused to visit or move to slave-owning countries did, at least, play a role in slavery’s demise. Although British influence had led to an end of the trading of slaves in 1851, slavery itself continued. Without new slaves arriving from Africa, however,Brazilian farmers began to look elsewhere for workers—and, along with much of the rest of South America, looked to European immigrants to fill the plantation workforce gaps. When these potential immigrants refused to go to a country where slavery existed, plantation owners began to think differently. By the time the Brazilian emperor ended slavery in 1888, he enjoyed almost unanimous popular support.
Darwin wrote more about the evils of slavery, and, as if to emphasize his feelings, he placed his most impassioned argument just before the conclusion in the published version of The Voyage of the Beagle. He first set out the horrors he had witnessed or heard of—beatings, whippings, families forcibly separated, and the moans of tortured slaves. Darwin added that he would not have mentioned these had he not “met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil.” Then he summarized arguments for slavery and provided his own counter-arguments in the same meticulous way in which he later documented the case for natural selection.
For a few crucial pages, and at a crucial time in his narrative, Darwin completely sets aside everything he’s famous for—geology, botany, biology—and focuses on the political issue that animated much of his life. Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that abolition wasn’t just a passionate side-cause for Darwin and that it actually influenced his whole career, most particularly Darwin’s second major evolution-related work, The Descent of Man. They argue that those last few lines in The Voyage of the Beagle were in fact a calculated argument inspired by Darwin’s anger at a travelogue published by his close friend Charles Lyell that appeared to accept slavery in the United States. “Darwin retorted by publishing details of the most revolting tortures he could remember,” Moore and Desmond wrote. “He lit the fuse buried in his notebooks and exploded against the ‘sin’ of slavery. Never again would he express himself so thunderously to the world.”
Darwin’s thunderous conclusion, written long after he had returned home and only for an edition of The Voyage of the Beagle published in 1845, still called up all the righteous wrath he had felt in FitzRoy’s cabin thirteen years before: “It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty.