theory only after his return to England, when other naturalists sorted out
the jumble of specimens he had shipped back.
It would be more accurate to describe the voyage of the Beagle as the
period when Darwin discovered Lyell. Shortly before the ship’s departure,
FitzRoy presented Darwin with a copy of volume one of the Principles.
Although he was horribly seasick on the first leg of the journey (as he was
on many subsequent legs), Darwin reported that he read Lyell
“attentively” as the ship headed south. The Beagle made its first stop at St.
Jago—now Santiago—in the Cape Verde Islands, and Darwin, eager to put
his new knowledge to work, spent several days collecting specimens from
its rocky cliffs. One of Lyell’s central claims was that some areas of the
earth were gradually rising, just as others were gradually subsiding. (Lyell
further contended that these phenomena were always in balance, so as to
“preserve the uniformity of the general relations of the land and sea.”) St.
Jago seemed to prove his point. The island was clearly volcanic in origin,
but it had several curious features, including a ribbon of white limestone
halfway up the dark cliffs. The only way to explain these features, Darwin
concluded, was as evidence of uplift. The very first place “which I
geologised convinced me of the infinite superiority of Lyell’s views,” he
would later write. So taken was Darwin with volume one of the Principles
that he had volume two shipped to him for pickup at Montevideo. Volume
three, it seems, caught up with him in the Falklands.
While the Beagle was sailing along the west coast of South America,
Darwin spent several months exploring Chile. He was resting after a hike
one afternoon near the town of Valdivia when the ground beneath him
began to wobble, as if made of jelly. “One second of time conveys to the
mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection could never
create,” he wrote. Several days after the earthquake, arriving in
Concepción, Darwin found the entire city had been reduced to rubble. “It
is absolutely true, there is not one house left habitable,” he reported. The
scene was the “most awful yet interesting spectacle” he’d ever witnessed.
A series of surveying measurements that FitzRoy took around
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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