Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
The famous British naturalist Charles Darwin traveled around the world, wrote several books, and
developed the theory of natural selection and evolution. Charles Robert Darwin was born on
February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, in the west of England. His father, Robert Darwin, was
a wealthy doctor and financier, and his mother Susannah (née Wedgwood) died when he was eight
years old. He was a grandson of Erasmus Darwin, a prominent physician, on his father’s side and
Josiah Wedgwood, from the pottery family, on his mother’s side. Charles Darwin went to
Shrewsbury School and then to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine; he also learned how
to stuff birds by a freed South American slave who worked at the Edinburgh Museum. His father was
disappointed at his son’s lack of progress at Edinburgh and decided to move him to Cambridge.
Darwin proceeded to Christ’s College, where he had the idea of becoming a clergyman and studied
theology. It was during this time that he started collecting beetles and developing a keen interest in
entomology. With the H.M.S. Beagle sailing to South America to chart the coastline, Darwin decided
that he might join the crew as an unpaid assistant to the ship’s captain, Robert FitzRoy. Darwin
realized that it would give him an unparalleled opportunity to study the geological features of many
islands around the world, as well as to study wildlife. He had been inspired by accounts of the
German explorer Alexander von Humboldt. His father was unhappy about the idea of a two-year
voyage (it later turned out to last for five years), but Josiah Wedgwood, his grandfather, supported
the trip.
Darwin set off on December 27, 1831, collecting and sending back large numbers of natural history
specimens. The ship stopped at the Cape Verde Islands, and Darwin proceeded to study oyster shells
and note the changes in the land. On arriving in South America, at Bahia (modern-day Salvador),
Darwin went to study the rain forest. He was angered by the treatment of the slaves in Brazil. He
spent some months in the rain forest and then in July 1832 went to Montevideo, Uruguay, which
was going through one of its many confl icts after becoming independent. Darwin met the Argentine
dictator General Juan Manuel de Rosas and found the way the Argentine government treated the
people of Tierra del Fuego bordering on systematic extermination.
The Beagle sailed to the Falkland Islands and then back to Argentina. In October 1833 Darwin caught
a fever in Argentina and in July 1834 fell ill in Valparaíso. He spent a long time in Chile, climbing the
Andes and studying the fossils in the Andean foothills. Darwin went to Peru and to the Galápagos
Islands.
Darwin proceeded on to Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia, although he never went to the
settlement in the north of the country that now bears his name. In New Zealand, he was saddened
at the treatment of the Maoris and even more disappointed in the way he saw the aboriginal people
of Australia being treated. The Beagle then headed off to the Indian Ocean, where the ship called in
at the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Already formulating his idea of animal species developing over very
long periods of time, Darwin started to try to draw some conclusions on the final leg of his journey
back to England, where he landed in October 1836, returning to Shrewsbury to rejoin his family.
During the 1840s Darwin was refi ning his concept of evolution but initially had no intention of
immediately publishing his treatise on natural selection. By 1854 Darwin had finished working out
the order in which many species had evolved and had written about 250,000 words when, on June
18, 1858, he received a letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, an English socialist and natural history
enthusiast who was in the Malay Archipelago. Wallace raised a similar idea of evolution to that of
Darwin, with extracts of both scholars’ work read at the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. This
encouraged Darwin to finish his book, which he called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Darwin retreated to the
North York moors when the book was released on November 22, 1859. There were 1,250 copies
printed, and the entire stock had been oversubscribed by orders received by booksellers.
As Darwin had suspected, the book caused a storm of protest, and he kept a book of press cuttings,
review articles, satires, parodies, and caricature cartoons. Dissenters saw merit in his book, but the
members of the Anglican community at Cambridge were upset at Darwin’s ideas, which they saw as
directly challenging those in the Bible. Darwin, had deliberately not stated that he believed that
humans had evolved from apes, but this was what many of his readers interpreted, with many
reviewers talking about “men from monkeys.” This denied the special status of humans, but Darwin
found support from Thomas Huxley, writing his own book Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature,
which was published in 1863.