Archive blog: Darwin and the vivisectionists

No one who witnessed the launch of HMS Beagle at Woolwich naval dockyard on the Thames on May 11, 1820, could possibly have imagined that this unremarkable, not to say dowdy, craft was destined to sail into the pages of history on one of the most famous voyages of scientific discovery ever undertaken.

Ships like the Beagle, ten-gun brigs (two-masted square-rigged vessels) displacing barely 250 tonnes - a tenth of the size of Nelson's Victory - were regarded as one of the lowest forms of naval life. Their nickname “coffin brigs” expressed the generally held belief in the Navy that once out at sea in any kind of heavy weather, they shipped unacceptable amounts of water and were highly likely to sink.

Planned as a class of ship for inshore blockading operations as the Napoleonic wars drew to a close, they were produced in droves, but after 1815 no immediate use could be found for them. Beagle never saw action. Instead she spent the first few years of her naval life in reserve, moored afloat.

Times Archive, 1859: Letter: Works of art in the drift

Our race has multiplied rapidly but there are more regions uninhabited than occupied. Could this be so if man had existed on earth 14,000 years ago?

• Reply from Mr. John Evans

• Broken flint in 'drift'

• Works of art in the drift: Sir Charles Lyell

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Things looked up for the Beagle in 1825. She was given a third mast, which improved her sea-keeping qualities, and adapted as a survey ship. Even so, her first voyage from Plymouth beginning in May 1826 to conduct a hydrographic survey of the coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego under the command of Captain Pringle Stokes was far from auspicious.

Stokes became so depressed by the problems of surveying in the dreary, dangerous waters around Tierra del Fuego that he locked himself in his cabin for a fortnight before shooting himself and eventually dying after lingering for 12 days, on August 14, 1828. That might well have been the end of the Beagle's career of exploration, given the unsuitable conditions - cramped, ill-lit and noisome - below her decks.

There was to be a second chance, this time under the command of Robert Fitzroy, a surveyor and meteorologist whose brief was to take the Beagle on what became a five-year round-the-world voyage of hydrographic survey. An understanding man who was aware of a history of mental illness in his own family, Fitzroy knew only too well the dangers of succumbing to depression for a captain isolated in sole command on a long voyage.

This awareness was to be the making of Charles Darwin, at that time a young naturalist of no great reputation. He was recommended to Fitzroy as a self-funded “gentleman companion” whose pleasing chatter at the captain's table might perhaps help to alleviate the rigours of a second voyage to the Pacific to complete the aborted South American survey.

It was a most unlikely conjunction of temperaments - and experience. Although a man who loved the outdoors, at 22 Darwin's sole experience of seagoing was a single cross-Channel passage. As he confided to his diary in November 31, 1831: “My notions of the inside of a ship were about as indefinite as those of some men on the inside of a man, viz. a large cavity containing air, water & food mingled in hopeless confusion.”

More fundamentally, Fitzroy was an austere religious conservative, and as staunch a Tory by political conviction as Darwin was a thorough-going Whig and unrelenting opponent of slavery, which he regarded as a “scandal to Christian Nations”. Remarkably, none of these differences seemed to matter to Fitzroy. His guest's five path-breaking years that were to shake the religious assurance of 19th-century England to its foundations with the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species, were, to the end, to leave his own religious and moral convictions unmoved.

The key to the coexistence of two so radically dissimilar men lay in what seems to have been a genuine perception of each other's qualities. Darwin admired Fitzroy's own scientific qualifications, his endurance and his sheer capacity for getting things accomplished. “If he does not kill himself, he will, during this voyage, do a wonderful quality of work.” For his part, Beagle's skipper continued to find Darwin “a very pleasant mess-mate” - which had, after all, been the object of the exercise.

The Beagle finally got away from Plymouth at the end of December 1831 after being several times forced back by adverse winds. By this time, after a total refit, she was a very different vessel from the lowly rated coffin brig of 1820. “No vessel has been fitted out so expensively, and with so much care,” Darwin observed.

Splendid interior fittings were one thing; Beagle's sailing qualities were soon to be put to the test. With her extra weight from a sheath of two-inch plank, and a raised upper deck, Fitzroy at first had some difficulty in getting her into sailing trim. It was a problem he worked on relentlessly, redistributing weight, including her guns, both above and below decks as well as altering her rigging. At last he was satisfied. By the end of December 1832 the ship was again entering the Straits of Magellan.

Darwin had by that time long got over the seasickness that made his early days on board such wretched ones for him; paradoxically it was Fitzroy, strong-minded as he was, who was now in the worse mental shape. By this time the gentleman companion of the outset of the voyage was transforming himself into something quite different. Not content merely with collecting specimens, he was making deductions about what he found that were to alter man's perception of the evolution of animate things.

Over the five years of the voyage, Darwin went ashore at every opportunity while the Beagle continued her survey work at sea. On her first stop, at St Jago in the Cape Verde Islands, he had discovered fossil sea shells high in volcanic cliffs; in Patagonia he was astonished to discover fossilised large mammals; to these, as the passage up the coast and islands of South America continued, were added reptiles and fossils of primitive trees. The Galapagos Islands gave his theories of evolution a new and potent impetus that would challenge mankind's view of the Creation. When organising his notes as the Beagle sailed home Darwin first used the term “origin of species”. By the time the Beagle returned to Plymouth on October 2, 1836, her captain's “gentleman-companion” of five years before was already a celebrity in scientific circles.

The differences between Darwin and Fitzroy became clearer in the years after the voyage. When On the Origin of Species was published, Fitzroy could not contain his opposition to Darwin's theory and wrote a letter to The Times, under a pseudonym, claiming that Darwin was contradicting the Book of Genesis.

Then, succumbing to the family tendency to mental illness that had, in 1822, caused his uncle, Viscount Castlereagh, to commit suicide, he took his own life by slashing his throat with a razor in 1865. He was 59.

Iguana: Observing animals such as this green iguana in their natural environments led Darwin to believe the animals' habitats had led to their distinctive colouring and character

Mockingbirds: In the Galapagos Darwin collected a mockingbird on San Cristobal Island. On the next island, Floreana, he found another, and saw differences between the birds. Examining them on the voyage home, Darwin questioned “the stability of species”. This eventually led him to the idea of evolution, though he did not use that word until many years later

Beetles: In his biography Darwin recalls finding two rare beetles on a tree. He seized one in each hand but then saw a third, new kind. When he popped one of them between his lips to catch the third, it ejected an acrid fluid, burning his tongue and causing him to spit out the beetle, losing it as well as the third one.

Toxodon: Darwin found the fossil skull of the Toxodon, a large, extinct hoofed mammal, in a stream near the Rio Negro. He sent it to Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum in London, for him to identify. The skull is one of 15,000 Darwin specimens still held at the museum today.

Armadillo: Among Darwin's most dramatic finds was the fossil of a glyptodont, an immense shelled animal. He noticed that its giant shell was like those he had seen on armadillos scurrying about in Argentina, and wondered why one species had died out, only to be replaced by a similar one.

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