The Invention of Nature

On 2 October 1836, almost five years after leaving England, the Beagle sailed into Falmouth harbour on the south coast of Cornwall. In order to complete his survey, Captain FitzRoy had still to take one more longitudinal measurement in Plymouth, at exactly the same location where he had taken his first. Darwin, though, disembarked in Falmouth. He couldn’t wait to catch the mail coach to Shrewsbury to see his family.

As the carriage rattled north, he stared out of the window, watching the undulating patchwork of fields and hedgerows unfold. The fields seemed much greener than usual, he thought, but when he asked the other passengers to confirm his observation, they looked at him blankly. After more than forty-eight hours in the coach, Darwin arrived late at night in Shrewsbury and quietly slipped into the house because he didn’t want to wake his father and sisters. When he walked into the breakfast room the next morning, they couldn’t believe their eyes. He was back and in one piece – but ‘looking very thin’, his sister said. There was so much to talk about, but Darwin could only stay a few days because he had to go to London to unload his trunks from the Beagle.

Darwin returned to a country that was still ruled by the same king, William IV, but two important Parliamentary Acts had been passed during his long absence. In June 1832, after immense political battles, the controversial Reform Bill had become law – a big first step towards democracy as it gave cities that had grown during the Industrial Revolution seats in the House of Commons for the first time and extended the vote from wealthy landowners to the upper middle classes. Darwin’s family, who supported the bill, had kept Darwin up to date about the wrangling in parliament as best they could through the letters they sent him during the Beagle

voyage. The other exciting news was the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in August 1834, while Darwin had been in Chile. Though the slave trade had already been banned in 1807, this new Act now prohibited slavery in most parts of the British Empire. The Darwin and Wedgwood families, who had long been part of the anti-slavery movement, were delighted as, of course, was Humboldt who had fiercely argued against the enslavement of fellow human beings ever since his Latin America expedition.

Most important for Darwin, though, was news from the scientific world. He had enough material to publish several books and the idea of becoming a clergyman had long since evaporated. His trunks were stuffed with specimens – birds, animals, insects, plants, rocks and giant fossil bones – and his notebooks were tightly filled with observations and ideas. Darwin now wanted to establish himself in the scientific community. In preparation he had already written to his old friend, the botanist John Stevens Henslow, a few months earlier from the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, asking him to ease his entrance into the Geological Society. He was keen to show off his treasures, and British scientists, who had followed the Beagle’s adventures through letters and reports that had been circulated by newspapers, were longing to meet him. ‘The voyage of the Beagle,’ Darwin later wrote, ‘has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career.’

In London Darwin dashed through town to meetings at the Royal Society, the Geological Society and the Zoological Society, as well as working on his papers. He had the best scientists examining his collections – anatomists and ornithologists as well as those classifying fossils, fish, reptiles and mammals.⁴ One immediate project was to edit his journal for publication. When the Voyage of the Beagle

was published in 1839, it made Darwin famous. He wrote about plants, animals and geology but also about the colour of the sky, the sense of light, the stillness of the air and the haze of the atmosphere – like a painter with lively brushstrokes. Like Humboldt, Darwin recorded his emotional responses to nature, as well as providing scientific data and information about indigenous people.

When the first copies came off the printing presses in mid-May 1839, Darwin sent one to Humboldt in Berlin. Not knowing where to direct his correspondence, Darwin asked a friend ‘for I know no more than if I had to write to the King of Prussia & the Emperor of all the Russias’. Nervous about sending the book to his idol, Darwin employed flattery and wrote in his covering letter that it had been Humboldt’s accounts of South America that had made him want to travel. He had copied out long passages from Personal Narrative, Darwin told Humboldt, so that ‘they might ever be present in my mind’.