Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle. Richard Keynes
even the geological hammer at last became a missile. ‘Lend me a hammer?’ asked one. ‘No, no’ replied the owner, ‘you’ll break the handle’; but hardly had he said so, when, overcome by the novelty of the scene, and the example of those around him, away went the hammer, with all the force of his own right arm.54
In his own account Charles did not deny that he had been somewhat carried away. So he participated in the slaughter of birds on land while a similar struggle to obtain fish for the cooking pot was also taking place in the surrounding waters, both birds and fish being welcome to men who had been living too long on salt provisions. But he nevertheless found time to note that unlike almost all other isolated rocks in mid-ocean, St Paul was exceptionally not volcanic in origin, but was a mineral unfamiliar to him that incorporated streaks of serpentine.* The surrounding waters were very deep, so that it was the tip of a very large and steeply sided mountain. His conclusion was correct, and the modern view is that St Paul is an important example of the primordial material of the earth’s mantle modified to become the basalt layer of the oceanic crust. The only birds to be seen were boobies, a species of gannet, and noddies, a species of tern; and the only other animals of any size were large tropical crabs of the genus Grapsus. Not a single plant, nor even a lichen, could Charles find growing on the rocks. There were some ticks and mites, and a small brown moth feeding on feathers that could have arrived with the birds; a rove beetle and a woodlouse from beneath the dung; and a large number of spiders that presumably preyed on the other insects. He reflected that since the first colonists of the coral islets in the South Seas were probably similar, ‘it destroys the poetry of the story to find that these little vile insects should thus take possession before the cocoanut tree and other noble plants have appeared’.
The Beagle sailed on. They were now close to the Equator, and preparations were set in hand for the traditional naval ceremonies that accompanied ‘crossing the line’. Soon after dark they were hailed by the gruff voice of a pseudo-Neptune. The Captain held a conversation with him through a speaking-trumpet, and it was arranged that in the morning he would visit the ship.
The proceedings next day were vividly described from memory nearly sixty years later by the then fourteen-year-old Midshipman Philip Gidley King:
The effect produced on the young naturalist’s mind was unmistakably remarkable. His first impression was that the ship’s crew from Captain downwards had gone off their heads. ‘What fools these sailors make of themselves’, he said as he descended the companion ladder to wait below till he was admitted. The Captain received his godship and Amphitrite his wife with becoming solemnity; Neptune was surrounded by a set of the most ultra-demoniacal looking beings that could be well imagined, stripped to the waist, their naked arms and legs bedaubed with every conceivable colour which the ship’s stores could turn out, the orbits of their eyes exaggerated with broad circles of red and yellow pigments. Those demons danced a sort of nautical war dance exulting on the fate awaiting their victims below. Putting his head down the after companion the captain called out ‘Darwin, look up here!’ Up came the young naturalist in wonderment but yet prepared for any extravagance in the world that seamen could produce. A gaze for a moment at the scene on deck was sufficient, he was convinced he was amongst madmen, and giving one yell, disappeared again down the ladder. He was of course the first to be called by the official secretary, and Neptune received him with grace and courtesy, observing that in deference to his high standing on board as a friend and messmate of the Captain his person would be held sacred from the ordinary rites observed in the locality. Of course Mr Darwin readily entered into the fun and submitted to a few buckets of water thrown over him and the Captain as they sat together by one of the youngsters as if by accident.55
From Charles’s own account, he was treated with rather less courtesy than King remembered:
Before coming up, the constable blindfolded me & thus lead along, buckets of water were thundered all around. I was then placed on a plank, which could be easily tilted up into a large bath of water. They then lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop. A signal being given I was tilted head over heels into the water, where two men received me & ducked me. At last, glad enough, I escaped. Most of the others were treated much worse, dirty mixtures being put in their mouths & rubbed on their faces. The whole ship was a shower bath, & water was flying about in every direction, of course not one person, even the Captain, got clear of being wet through.
Although FitzRoy condemned the practice as an absurd and dangerous piece of folly, he also defended its survival on the grounds that ‘its effects on the minds of those engaged in preparing for its mummeries, who enjoy it at the time, and talk of it long afterwards, cannot easily be judged of without being an eyewitness’.
The Beagle’s next port of call on 20 February was at Fernando Noronha, another isolated group of small islands, where the most prominent feature was a conical hill on the principal island rising very steeply to a peak a thousand feet high, and seemingly overhanging the shore on one side. Near its summit a permanently manned lookout station was maintained by the Brazilian government. According to Beaufort’s programme, FitzRoy was required to verify some measurements of longitude made a few years earlier by another survey ship in pendulum experiments conducted in the Governor’s house.
With the Beagle lying offshore that evening before anchoring in the harbour, Lieutenant Sulivan skilfully harpooned a large porpoise, and moments later ‘a dozen knives were skinning him for supper’. In the morning, landing despite the high surf as near as possible to the house where the previous observations had probably been made, FitzRoy took his shots of the sun and compared his chronometers with those used on shore, while Charles spent ‘a most delightful day in wandering about the woods’. He concluded that unlike the St Paul Rocks, Fernando Noronha consisted of a volcanic rock called phonolite,* which had probably been injected in a molten state among yielding strata, but was not of very recent origin. The island was thickly covered with trees, often coated with delicate blossoms, though because of the low rainfall their growth was not luxurious, and FitzRoy noted that firewood collected by the crew was full of centipedes and other noxious insects. There were no gaudy birds, no humming birds, and no flowers, so Charles felt that he had not yet seen the full grandeur of the Tropics.
At noon on 28 February the Beagle anchored in the great Bay of All Saints (Baia de Todos os Santos) on the mainland of Brazil, on the north side of which the fine old town of Bahia, now known as Salvador, was situated. The view of the town itself was magnificent, and when next morning Charles had ventured ashore, he wrote in his journal of what he saw with a characteristic aesthetic appreciation, coupled with a strictly practical conclusion:
The day has passed delightfully: delight is however a weak term for such transports of pleasure – I have been wandering by myself in a Brazilian forest. Amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking. The general luxuriance of the vegetation bears the victory: the elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the foliage, all tend to this end. A most paradoxical mixture of sound & silence pervades the shady parts of the wood. The noise from the insects is so loud that in the evening it can be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore. Yet within the recesses of the forest when in the midst of it a universal stillness appears to reign. To a person fond of Natural History such a day as this brings with it pleasure more acute than he ever may again experience. After wandering about for some hours, I returned to the landing place. Before reaching it I was overtaken by a Tropical storm. I tried to find shelter under a tree so thick that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain, yet here in a couple of minutes, a little torrent flowed down the trunk. It is to this violence we must attribute the verdure in the bottom of the wood. If the showers were like those of a colder clime, the moisture would be absorbed or evaporated before reaching the ground.
He took many more walks with King or another companion, and after collecting numerous small beetles and some geological specimens, reflected that: