Evolution's Captain (28 page)

This was important, historic work, though it wasn't recognized at the time. But grinding away in his office, FitzRoy was promoted to the rank of rear admiral, and enjoyed the first taste of career satisfaction in twenty years. He married again, Maria Smyth, the daughter of a distant cousin. For a time, he found a balance in life.

But beyond the walls of his shipshape home and productive little office, the world was changing. Unholy currents were abroad, and the unholiest of these was snaking toward him.

I
n October 1838…I happened to read for amusement
Malthus on
Population
,” Darwin wrote in the slim autobiography he penned for his family near the end of his life.

He was referring to “An Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, one of those natural-philosophizing English country parsons Darwin might have turned into had he never met Robert FitzRoy. He began reading it on September 28 and finished on October 3. Hardly amusing, it was a grim little monograph. Malthus had stated that unless checked by some means, human population could double, quadruple, and continue to multiply geometrically until it quickly grew beyond any possibility of feeding itself with a food supply that could only increase arithmetically and never keep up with demand. Continual global famine was the only possible mathematical result.

But Malthus observed that this didn't happen, that natural “checks”—disease, war, periodic localized famine, sexual abstinence, and early death—kept population numbers roughly at sustainable levels.

This was what Darwin, with all his cogitation, had been waiting to read. Doors opened in his brain.

The theory supported his developing ideas about the transmutation of species: that adaptation to a hostile world which kept population numbers steady by attrition would, in time, produce better-adapted, survivalist species. But the implications of such a theory—godless creation, and humans from apes—were so inflammatory that Darwin resisted putting his thoughts in writing until he had the roundest possible argument to support it.

It is almost impossible today to understand the reluctance Darwin felt about publishing his ideas. While scientists, clergymen, and liberal thinkers might debate the literal or metaphorical length of the “days” of creation in the book of Genesis, the public and private acceptance of God's responsibility for it all, whether it had taken six days or six million years, was absolute. To suggest otherwise, particularly if well-supported by scientific argument, would change the way mankind perceived itself. Whether people wanted to believe it or not, Darwin's argument threatened to undermine the deepest faith. The idea of expressing it, he wrote to Joseph Hooker, an eminent botanist to whom he sounded his theory, felt “like confessing a murder.”

Instead, he simply made notes. Years went by as he studied and published his findings about barnacles and other natural mysteries, while refining his thoughts about this Malthusian-style natural preservation, or survival, of the fittest individuals of any genus.

Darwin was in no hurry. Although in time his books would become best-sellers and bring him an enviable income, he felt no financial need to publish. He had a good income from his father,
and in 1839 he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his favorite uncle Josiah, the Wedgwood pottery tycoon who had proved so influential in his youth, particularly supporting his voyage aboard the
Beagle
when his father had disapproved. Emma brought with her real wealth, and removed forever any worry Darwin might have felt about money. This enabled him to concentrate solely on his work for its own sake, writing up his conclusions—or not—without regard to any schedule. To pursue this without the demands and distractions of London, the Darwins moved to Downe, a small village in Kent; today just on the southern edge of greater London, but then quite a rural retreat. There, with the modern equivalent of a millionaire's income and fifteen household servants, Darwin settled down to work.

He almost never went anywhere else again, except to spas for his health. Oddly, after the robustness he showed throughout his five-year voyage around the world, Darwin soon became sickly in the manner of many eminent Victorians: he suffered from chronic nausea, vomiting, headaches, indigestion, dizziness, and insomnia. The reasons remain inconclusive despite much inquiry during and after his lifetime. He may have become infected by some virus or parasite, possibly contracting Chagas' disease, during his epic travels, particularly in South America, where he ate and drank adventurously in the wild and was bitten by all sorts of insects. It may have been psychosomatic; Darwin was a great worrier about the health of his family, and his own health certainly deteriorated after the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie in 1851. His own education and experience in medicine made him prone to a vividly imaginative hypochondria. Visits anywhere, and having guests at Downe, only made his health worse, and after his move to the country in 1842, Darwin gradually assumed the life of an invalid. He went for walks in his garden, and occasionally farther afield, but mostly he remained indoors in his cluttered study.

From here he maintained contact with the outside world through an enormous correspondence. His work depended com
pletely on it, and perhaps no one benefited more from the remarkable efficiency of the British postal system when, during the mid-Victorian era, 25,000 postmen handled over 600 million letters a year. Newspapers, books, packages, and money orders moved around the country as fast as steam locomotives could carry them. In London there were up to eleven deliveries a day. The telegraph has been called the Victorian Internet, but its use was restricted to specialized services. It was the postal system, cheap and fantastically efficient, available to everyone, that made by far the bigger impact on people's lives and their perception of the world.

Darwin employed this incredible engine of communication to obtain data, opinions, and specimens. It acted as an enormous reference library for him. It became as crucial to his work and eventual conclusions as the great voyage that had prompted them.

 

Holed up in seclusion, Darwin turned away from the world and
made a life of rumination and study. As he refined his ideas about species and the laws of nature, he was ineluctably led to a reappraisal of his religious beliefs.

Darwin had at last become “an unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason.”

His eventual atheism may have helped ease his concerns over committing his ideas about species to paper. In June 1842, “I first allowed myself the satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of my theory in pencil in 35 pages.” Two years later Darwin enlarged this to 230 pages. But still he made no move to publish it—except to write a letter to Emma giving her very specific instructions for its publication in case of his death. But for the indefinite future he was in no hurry.

Years more went by while Darwin continued to make notes, and busy himself with other publications—volumes on the zoology of the
Beagle
voyage (as editor), new editions of his
Journal of Researches
, books and monographs on geology, volcanic islands, coral reefs, and barnacles. He went no further in writing out his ideas on the “species question” than in letters to friends, scientists like Lyell, and Joseph Hooker.

However, the question of how species came into existence was, in the late 1850s, gaining considerable attention. A number of naturalists and scientists were beginning to write about it, from all points of view, and Lyell knew enough about Darwin's work to advise him to go public and make this issue his own. In 1856, at Lyell's urging, Darwin finally began to write out a definitive examination of his ideas on the transmutation of species.

His treatment of it was so exhaustive that he might have gone on for a decade but for the slim package that came with the mail one day in June 1858. It was from one of Darwin's far-flung correspondents, Alfred Russel Wallace, posted from Ternate, a remote dot in the spice islands, or Moluccas, on the far side of
the world. It was dated February 1858, and had been making its way to Darwin for four months.

Wallace, a thirty-five-year-old English naturalist, was halfway through eight years of wandering through the Malay Archipelago, the vast scattering of large and small islands astride the equator, across 45 degrees of longitude and three time zones, comprising roughly what is now the Republic of Indonesia. He was a very different sort of traveler than Charles Darwin. He came from impoverished circumstances and there was no one underwriting his travels. He had previously spent four years in Brazil, supporting himself by shipping specimens back to England and selling them to museums and collectors through an agent. In 1852 he lost all his own specimens, notes, and equipment when the ship carrying him back to England from Brazil caught fire and sank (the suggestion for A. S. Byatt's story, and the eventual film,
Angels and Insects
). In England Wallace published a book,
Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro
that impressed nobody, sold poorly, and was soon remaindered. Undaunted, he went to Southeast Asia. With the help of Sir Roderick Murchison of the Royal Geographic Society he got a free ride aboard a government ship to Singapore, and then made his way to Borneo. From there he began again sending specimens back to England for money. His best-sellers were orangutan hides, but his most sought-after item was the rare and impossibly gorgeous bird of paradise.

In Wallace's travels through the jungles of Borneo, the volcanic island of Java, the Celebes and Banda Seas, and the fragrant Moluccas, he came across an unimaginable variety of plant and animal species. He grew keenly aware of the geographic and physical differences between them, and also between the natives of Asia, Malaysia, and Polynesia. He observed and plotted across a map of Southeast Asia a line dividing the Indo- and Austro-Malayan regions, on either side of which all the plants, animals, and even humans, belonged to these two distinct regions. Today this is still called the Wallace Line.

Wallace had also read Malthus, and his observations soon got him thinking along lines that history (always written by the victors) has termed Darwinian. He put some of these thoughts in a paper he sent to England that was published in the
Annals and Magazine of Natural History
in September 1855. Wallace later summarized the conclusions of that paper.

Wallace's paper aroused various reactions. A number of naturalists felt this was pointless theorizing. Darwin read it and wrote a letter to Wallace telling him, “I can plainly see that we have thought much alike and to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions.” Darwin also mentioned that Lyell too had enjoyed his paper. Wallace, whose naturalizing wanderlust had been directly inspired by both Lyell's
Principles of Geology
and Darwin's
Journal of Researches
, was pleased and encouraged. This was praise from the top. He continued his correspondence with Darwin and sent him a Javanese chicken and other skins.

In February 1858, Wallace was struck by malaria. Shivering and sweating with fever, he lay in his bed in a palm-thatched house in Ternate. Around him sat boxes of pinned butterflies, the skins and bones of birds and animals, his books, his glasses, a gun, and his sweat-stained clothing. The Malthusian question, “Why do some live and some die?” spun around and around in his fevered mind. How do some escape the natural checks on populations—and why? Hungry, lightheaded, but with a growing lucidity, the threads of all his thinking came together in an
elegant conclusion. He rose from his soaked bed, staggered to his table and began writing.

Wallace worked on his thesis for three days, making it as clear and simple as he could. Finally he had a 4000-word essay that excited him. “The more I thought it over,” he wrote much later, “the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.”

He signed and dated it and sent it to Darwin, together with a letter asking if he would read it and, if he thought it worthwhile, forward it to Lyell, and perhaps help him arrange for its publication.