Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near that great fact--mystery of mysteries--the first appearance of new beings on this earth...
Charles Darwin

Were I more studious I might actually read Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the various countries visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the World (1839) and The Origin of Species (1859). Instead I have turned to a popular book of Darwin's autobiographical writings edited by Christopher Ralling, The Voyage of Charles Darwin (1979), to satisfy my curiosity about this amazing giant. And a very good book it is.

Darwin (1809-1882) had a first-rate education. Although there's mention made hereⁱ of his instructors and course work in the natural sciences, there is almost no description of what training in grammar, rhetoric, or logic he may have received.ⁱⁱ But it's hard to believe that these subjects weren't part of his curriculum. To the extent that there is some sense of his writing habits and where they grew from, it probably lies in the fact that the work of observation requires copious note taking. Of course, the objects of Darwin's attention, the things that he chose to observe, were far different than what a writer hones in on. Or so it would seem.

Of his reading at this early age he is a little more forthcoming. Although he would lose the taste for poetry later in life, as a schoolboy he had taken pleasure in Byron and Sir Walter Scott. He read the historical plays of Shakespeare. But the book that made the deepest impression on him was titled Wonders of the World. To this volume he believes he owed his desire to travel.

His famous voyage began in 1831 and would last for five years. He was twenty-two at the time that he set sail. In Ralling's book you'll see a rudimentary map of the Beagle's route. The captain of the Beagle was charged with the task of surveying the coasts of South America and other distant shores to allow England's shipping industry to expand its trade routes. Darwin's responsibilities as the expedition's natural scientist were not the primary focus of the mission. Where the ship went was dictated by this work mapping the South American coastline and not Darwin’s research interests.

Although the observations that Darwin made in his diary have the character of an inventory, a kind of counting, the idea of mapping things is present in his mind. And not a small part of his work was a description of the geology of South America. Even in the Galápagos a significant portion of his notes are devoted to the relatively recent volcanic origins of the islands. These geologic studies will specifically culminate in maps of substrata, an exercise he had already performed in England while still a student at Cambridge. As for the classification of species into genera, phyla and so on... aren't all such schema an abstract sort of mapping? A complex variation on a navigational chart that will show the spatial connection between various plants--their nearness or distance in form and function?

In summary, you could make the case that Darwin's great discovery of the laws of evolution represented an innovative form of mapping. To the horizontal dimensions of scientific classification he added the spatial representations of height and depth.ⁱⁱⁱ In so doing, he could then write of the "descent" of man.

Mapping the World

In several of these books that I have previously mentioned there are maps that permit the reader to follow the writer's travels. Offhand I can remember maps like this in the collection of Carl Sauer's letters and Christopher Isherwood's travel diary. Not surprisingly these are nonfiction works. The implication one might draw is that fiction isn't connected to maps or the real world.

The first time I was in Mexico I had traveled with several friends. For reasons that I've now forgotten we had a falling out in Mexico City and agreed to go our separate ways, at least for a time. On the spur of the moment I decided to hike from the federal district all the way to the Pacific. Several nights before I planned to set off I described my intentions to a young Mexican as we were riding in the comforts of a taxi. He was incredulous and immediately began to discourage me. There were dangerous "an nee mals" outside the city he said, his eyes wide with unspecified horror.

The following day I visited a number of government offices in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain detailed topographic maps for the state of Guerrero. At every department I was told to go somewhere else, to check with the forestry division, or the interior bureau. I was finally shuffled to a bare office within the war ministry, where I conversed with a very skeptical civilian employee. There were no maps of that region, he claimed. Furthermore, to go through Guerrero wasn't just foolhardy, it was crazy. The area was a haven for illegal crops and strangers would be risking their lives to travel on foot. Better I think of something else to do, he advised.

So it was that I ended up leaving the hotel with nothing more than the crudest of road maps and walking under the blistering sun beyond the limits of the shanty towns, that ring of misery. By following the old highway south I eventually walked over 60 miles to Cuernavaca, in what proved to be a five-day endurance trial.

My first night spent sleeping outdoors was terrifying. Just before it got dark I climbed up on a hillside and lay down on a level stretch of a meager footpath. I was close enough to the road to be able to hear an occasional truck pass by, but the loneliness, heightened by a feeling of being far from anything familiar. was overpowering. None of the vegetation on the hillside was recognizable. I imagined prehistoric creatures, vaguely resembling pictures of iguanas that I had seen in the National Geographic, slithering around in the twilight brush. Before the last tints of daylight faded, I examined my map trying to guess how far I had walked.

Even though I was exhausted I lay in my sleeping bag staring into suspicious shadows for what seemed like hours. Then, without realizing it, I must have fallen asleep.

My next awakening also took place without conscious transition. From the unholy snarling and angry yelps that surrounded me, I knew that a horde of dogs, or what I took to be dogs, were going to tear me to pieces. My shouts instantly inflamed them and set off a wild scrambling as they crowded in around each other to get closer. Some tumbled downhill in the melee. Others backed up the steep slope, frantically struggling to find a footing in the dark. I leapt up, but had nowhere to run. The animals had me hemmed in.

I have no idea how long this standoff with the pack lasted. They must have come loping down the hill and were as startled as I was to find an intruder on their private track. When they finally deigned to depart--with one last angry warning of rebuke--I immediately retrieved my knife from my pack and opened it for business. It was a while before I regained enough composure to climb back in the sleeping bag, the knife still firmly clenched in my hand. Several more hours then passed in frightful anticipation of the return of the wolves. Having been awake for almost twenty-four hours, my skin scorched to the brittleness of century-old newspapers, my whole body aching with the exertion of the long march through the slums, I felt I could not last a moment longer. My head would loll to one side and I snapped back to consciousness, clutching the knife and stabbing at invisible jaws. Finally I lay prone thinking this was it. What was going to happen would happen. Unlike when I had first dozed off, now I made the final decision and gave myself up to the universe.

Which, it seems to me, is much like the best writing, wherein the author has acquiesced to go wherever the world takes one. And if my experience of lying down with the dogs is any reflection of the process, the act of surrender is quite conscious and active, more so than one might be inclined to think. In any event, for some writers then, the work of art, the book, is a map of the world revealed.

In his chapter on the the Galápagos Darwin notes in passing that there was a small colony of two or three hundred inhabitants on Charles Island, all of whom had been banished from Ecuador for political reasons. Which is to say that the islands were being used as a prison. One wonders whether witnessing the deliberate isolation of these people of color was yet another key unlocking Darwin's great imaginative leap.

At the close of Ralling's compilation he has again made use of extracts from Darwin's autobiography. In these final thoughts Darwin returns to matters of reading and writing, confessing that in his old age he had fallen upon novels with a passion. His youthful interest in poetry and music may have dried up but imaginative prose struck him as nothing short of marvelous. However, he wished a law might be passed prohibiting unhappy endings.

In any event, this book is fascinating reading for all sorts of reasons.^iv It's not hard to see why the journal was so popular in Victorian England, nor why Darwin's books are still read today.^v

Although I am a fairly knowledgeable reader of Herman Melville (1819-1891), I was floored when recently rereading his short story "Encantatas, or the Enchanted Isles."^vi This is a piece of writing about which I had no small store of information (insomuch as I'm familiar with the seeds for Hunilla's tale, as well as the original Nantucket setting that inspired it,) but, in light of Darwin's account, I'm not at all sure I know what Melville was doing here.

Even without a biography of Melville at hand, I'm quite certain that he must have been in the Galápagos after Darwin's stop in 1835. The story (if this is the right word to describe this work) begins with a series of sketches of the turtles and the volcanic scenery. Altogether there are 10 separate chapters or divisions in the tale. Only in the eighth does Melville get down to writing about Hunilla and her husband, who were dropped off in the islands to hunt turtles. Unfortunately her husband accidentally drowns and Hunilla is left for years to survive alone because the whaling captain who had brought them didn't fulfill his promise to return.

Melville's story was first published in Putnam's Magazine, fifteen years after Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle. It was eventually collected with other work (including "Bartleby") in Piazza Tales (1856). Although The Origin of Species would not appear until 1859, I'm now wondering if Melville wasn't writing in direct dialogue with Darwin, caught up in a general question about the nature and merit of scientific knowledge versus the literary variety.

There's no doubt that Melville was immersed in the whole spectrum of contemporary thought, particularly during this period in his life. His reading was prodigious and encompassed everything from the Bible to Kant. The pages and pages of epigrams at the beginning of Moby Dick (1851) are some indication of how avid an intellect Melville possessed. Accounts of whalers and oceanic exploration were high on his reading list. Is it possible he hadn't read Darwin's journal? It doesn't seem likely.^vii

The very first sketch, apparently focused on the strange turtles, makes it clear that Melville's hunt is only marginally concerned with reptiles. The setting itself isn't entirely reliable. For one thing the islands are hard to locate. They have been inaccurately charted by previous buccaneers and whalers. They are called the Encantatas by some and the Galapágos by others. (In Melville's story the islands belong to Peru.) The currents are perilous and shrouds of fog can obscure the archipelago. Nevertheless, the desolate lava landscape supports a population of gigantic turtles and on the back of one of them the narrator has found some words carved into the shell.

This sign of a human presence is the foreshadowing of a slowly building inventory of the living world of the Galápagos. Like Darwin, Melville records the geology, the botany and the birds. Just as Darwin has included a table^viii comparing the variety of species found on each island, so too does Melville take a fanciful survey of the lizards, snakes, spiders and "man-haters" and "devils." It's as if Melville has borrowed all of the conventions of a naturalist's report and subverted them for his own purpose.

When Melville's narrator discovers a stone bench fashioned by a buccaneer it's clear what really interests him. Even the captured turtles that are brought on board ship are less important than the narrator's vivid experience listening to them crawl around on deck while he tries to sleep below. The forbidding environment of the islands is a prelude to a depiction of the human qualities that allow one to survive in this setting. And some of those qualities are ones that Melville admires unreservedly. There are very few women in Melville's fiction. Hunilla's tenacity is probably the most heroic portrait of a female character in all of his work. Several other character sketches, of the Creole king who founded the Charles Island colony, or the Misanthrope of Hood Island, suggest that not all of the isolates who have lived on the islands are as praiseworthy as Hunilla.

Darwin's chapter on the Galápagos is not a long one. Melville's story, although longer, falls far short of a novella. But what extraordinary depths are plumbed here. These two men, among the most notable minds of the 19th century, were both enthralled by this remote island chain. Paired together their brief records are terrific examples of the great gulf separating art and science. As well as some of the shared concerns: the requirements for intense observation, the drive to generalize, and, unexpectedly for both men, the inspirations of life and love.

-May 2, 1998

Endnotes

ⁱ Ralling has cut and pasted from Darwin's autobiography, the journal (now titled The Voyage of the Beagle), and the original diary from which the journal was drawn. The result is a chronological ordering of the material that Ralling describes as a voyage around the world as well as the voyage of a man's mind. The first portion of the book is an excerpt from the autobiography, wherein Darwin sketches his early life and schooling at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities.

ⁱⁱ In the realm of rhetoric he does take passing note of being forced to recite Homer, Virgil, and Horace. Otherwise he characterizes his education in these three disciplines under the general label 'classical.'

ⁱⁱⁱ Darwin's addition of a vertical axis to a system of species classification has been investigated in several ways, but I've never seen it formulated in exactly this manner. Literary critics have illuminated Darwin's use of metaphor to portray his idea. In this view "organic" metaphors favored by the Romantic poets may explain the origins of Darwin's reliance upon an image of "the tree of life" to describe evolution. (See this page from the Victorian Web at: http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/victorian/science/darwin/darwin7.html for an excerpt of Darwin's full analogy between the branching of a tree and the processes of evolution.)

Even more suggestive insights have been singled out by investigators examining modes of scientific thinking. One such effort I am aware of attempts to distinguish Darwin's approach as a "visualization," as distinguished from "concept maps" or "flow charts."

^iv The full text of The Voyage of the Beagle and Origins of the Species can be found online at http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/ I have consulted the text of the original chapter on the Galápagos to compare it with this edited volume by Ralling. By judiciously selecting and carefully ordering these excerpts he has created an absorbing book that really does convey the voyage and Darwin's character.

^v Needless to say Darwin's theories are still the basis of considerable scientific investigation. In 1994 a book titled The Beak of the Finch presented field work conducted in the archipelago that demonstrated a direct observation of natural selection. Under drought conditions, some finches were surviving at higher rates. The birds with stronger beaks, that would enable them to crack open the hardened seeds, were being favored over finches less suitably adapted.

^vi An excerpt of this story, as well as a number of other works by Melville, can be found online at http://www.melville.org

^vii Melville scholars may well have answered this question and even drawn a comparison between these two texts. Be that as it may, in blissful ignorance, I'll plod ahead.

^viii This table does not appear in Ralling's book. See Chapter 17 of the full, online text of The Voyage of the Beagle at http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf