named Alfred Russel Wallace was onto a similar idea. (A paper by Wallace
appeared in the same issue of the Journal.) Newton read Darwin’s essay
very soon after it came out, staying up late into the night to finish it, and
he immediately became a convert. “It came to me like the direct
revelation of a higher power,” he later recalled, “and I awoke next
morning with the consciousness that there was an end of all the mystery
in the simple phrase, ‘Natural Selection.’” He had, he wrote to a friend,
developed a case of “pure and unmitigated Darwinism.” A few years later,
Newton and Darwin became correspondents—at one point Newton sent
Darwin a diseased partridge’s foot that he thought might be of interest to
him—and eventually the two men paid social calls on each other.
Whether the subject of the great auk ever came up in their
conversations is unknown. It is not mentioned in Newton and Darwin’s
surviving correspondence, nor does Darwin allude to the bird or its recent
demise in any of his other writings. But Darwin had to be aware of human-
caused extinction. In the Galápagos, he had personally witnessed, if not
exactly a case of extinction in action, then something very close to it.
Darwin’s visit to the archipelago took place in the fall of 1835, nearly
four years into the voyage of the Beagle. On Charles Island—now Floreana
—he met an Englishman named Nicholas Lawson, who was the
Galápagos’s acting governor as well as the warden of a small, rather
miserable penal colony. Lawson was full of useful information. Among the
facts he related to Darwin was that on each of the islands in the Galápagos
the tortoises had different-shaped shells. On this basis, Lawson claimed
that he could “pronounce from which island any tortoise may have been
brought.” Lawson also told Darwin that the tortoises’ days were
numbered. The islands were frequently visited by whaling ships, which
carried the huge beasts off as portable provisions. Just a few years earlier,
a frigate visiting Charles Island had left with two hundred tortoises
stowed in its hold. As a result, Darwin noted in his diary, “the numbers
have been much reduced.” By the time of the Beagle’s visit, tortoises had
become so scarce on Charles Island that Darwin, it seems, did not see a
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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