Charles Darwin — A Stroke of Luck
“Life is the sum of all your choices” — Albert Camus
It is a remarkable thing to write about good luck and suicide in the same sentence. Yet, on August 2, 1828, a feeling of impending gloom overcame a 35-year-old ship captain who had been sailing the seas since he was a teenager. Pringle Stokes walked unsteadily towards the cabinet in his stateroom and withdrew a loaded navy revolver, placing the gun above his earlobe and gently pulled the trigger. The grizzly act inexplicably set in motion a series of events that would forever transform our understanding of human nature, and as a result, suicide turned into good luck.
As the ship’s crew rushed in, they discovered the unconscious skipper was a lousy marksman in addition to other challenges he may have faced. Stokes was bleeding profusely but the errant bullet kept him hanging for twelve days until gangrene set in. The cause of death was listed as a stroke to the brain. It would take nearly 100 years before Sigmund Freud could diagnose what we now called depression in 1917. He wrote that melancholia, a term used since the Middle Ages, could lead to self-loathing and self-harm. Stokes’s journal showed a rare talent for self-diagnosis: “Nothing could be more dreary than the scene around us; and, as if to complete the utter desolation of the scene, even the birds seemed to shun its neighborhood. The weather was that in which the soul of a man dies.”
The HMS Beagle was now without a captain. Robert FitzRoy, who would later become famous for inventing the term “forecast” because he was the first to predict the weather at sea, was selected to finish the expedition. It could have been called a case of the survival of the fittest, a concept whose time was about to come.
Sea captains in the 19th century were the equivalent of computer nerds, and the ocean was Silicon Valley. Ship pilots were lionized for traveling thousands of miles during an era most folks never left the village. People were born where they were born, and their lifetime circumference was measured by where their feet took them. Even a wealthy landowner with a horse and carriage would hesitate to venture more than 30 miles along the dirt pathways of Tudor Britain.
The wealth of sea captains is still evident by stately “captain’s houses” dotting shore roads in the United States and Britain. A Google search reveals listings for “captain’s houses” in Staten Island, Maryland’s shore, and the village of Greenport, Long Island. But the quid pro quo of a well-paying job was the personal price for leaving hearth and home for long stretches at a time. It had a considerable effect on the mood of a ship pilot, and no one was more conscious of this than the Beagle’s new skipper.
Girl on Board
By all accounts, FitzRoy was a lucky man. Not only did Stokes’s untimely death lead to his promotion, but fate intervened again by selecting him for a second voyage that picked up where Stokes left off. The ostensible purpose was to survey the waters off the coast of Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America across from the Strait of Magellan. His orders were to “proceed to survey the coasts or as much of those dangerous and exposed shores as he could examine.”
The purported reason was a fib. When FitzRoy returned from the previous trip, he brought several Fuegian natives as a marvel of uncivilized life. His purpose was sound by pre-Victorian standards, dress them for success and educate the lot in the finest British tradition, presumably to parade them in front of the royal court. Eventually, the Fuegians became celebrities. All was going according to plan except for one thing.
Surprisingly, no one thought about sex.
In 1831, FitzRoy found his crew member having his way with an underage Fuegian girl by the unlikely name of “Basket.” The captain understood the consequences would be dire if word got out and the Admiralty enthusiastically agreed. FitzRoy was given a second South American expedition, ostensibly looking for specimens and charting the coast, but whose real purpose was returning Basket home. If she was pregnant, his journal remained silent on the matter.
FitzRoy was provisioning for the long voyage scheduled to last two years (it would take five) when he began fretting about the long, dreary days at sea. The memory of Stokes certainly weighed on his mind. As if he needed a reminder, the FitzRoy family had a history of depression. He recalled his uncle, Lord Castlereagh, an Anglo Irish statesman who helped defeat Napoleon, died gruesomely after slitting his own throat in 1822. The new captain decided the remedy was to find a mate, as he wrote, ‘a well-educated and scientific person’ as a companion to ward off the blues.’ Except that he had no applicants. Then, a clergyman without seaworthy ability came to see him.
HMS Beagle
There was something impressive about the young man. His grandfather, Erasmus, named for the Dutch Reform scholar of the 18th century, had been a leading physician and philosopher who authored a radical theory of evolution in verse (perhaps to evade the church’s criticism). To FitzRoy, it was a good omen, and he promptly offered the job to Erasmus Darwin’s grandson.
His name, of course, was Charles.
The former parson joined the crew of the HMS Beagle in December 1831. They sailed together out of Devonport harbor in Plymouth, FitzRoy in command and Darwin by his side, their fate and future forever intertwined.
Stormy Seas
The captain and his new mate got on well, at least when they weren’t arguing. Both were profoundly curious about natural phenomena and possessed keen scientific instincts and a rigidity of manner that quickly turned volatile. The captain’s nickname captured the problem eloquently, “Hot Coffee,” reflecting his tendency to blow up at small slights. In his memoir, The Voyage of The Beagle, Darwin recalled raucous quarrels, “which bordered on insanity.”
For example, in March 1832, Darwin witnessed the unfortunate treatment of a slave and argued with FitzRoy. The captain peremptorily responded that he had inquired of a slaveowner who assured him if you ask a slave if he wished to be free, the answer would be no. Darwin replied emphatically when a master poses the question, the slave was unlikely to give a true answer.
The stark contrast between the two became clear. FitzRoy was an enthusiast of the value of slavery; Darwin was an abolitionist. Yet, they managed to get along. He noted the problem in FitzRoy’s personality, “He is an extraordinary but noble character, unfortunately, affected with strong peculiarities of temper. Of this, no man is more aware than himself as he shows by his attempts to conquer them,’ Darwin wrote. He later observed that FitzRoy’s future, ‘under many circumstances…would be a brilliant one, under others I fear a very unhappy one’. (Darwin’s prediction proved prescient. Thirty years later, on Sunday, 30 April 1865, under the influence of a deep, dark depression, Captain Robert FitzRoy would follow his uncle and cut his throat with a razor.)
Back on the HMS Beagle, FitzRoy’s temper nearly brought the voyage to an untimely end. As they sailed into the Falkland Islands harbor (the scene of “Margaret Thatcher’s War”), FitzRoy wished for a smaller schooner so that he could do some close-in surveying. He purchased one with his own funds under the assumption the Admiralty would repay the cost. Instead, as anyone who played loose with an expense account will testify, he was reprimanded. FitzRoy sold the schooner and resigned his command. Once Darwin got wind, he and the crew convinced the captain to rescind his resignation, and the ship continued to the Galapagos, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. It was the voyage that inspired Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
Blasphemy
At first, he greeted the idea with mounting disbelief. It was blasphemous. But as evidenced by the slave incident, Darwin’s uncompromising honesty brought him inexorably down a reluctant path that turned a young man destined for orthodoxy into an unlikely revolutionary. He took a chance.
In Darwin’s time, God created the world in an unending form that represented perfection or so it was rigorously upheld. The legacy of man’s cruelty to man, race to race, gender to gender, and the extinction of species owe their justification in part to a literal and sometimes corrupt reading of biblical scripture. These turn out to be a form of fractal tribalism or the mistrust of others who may look, think, dress, or act differently. This kind of conundrum didn’t pose a problem for the average person in the 19th century. They tucked them into a box called faith.
The collaboration of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace overturned these long-held ideas. Before he would emerge as the most important thinker in modern history, Darwin underwent brutal fights with the religious establishment over his denial of divine creation. In fact, Captain FitzRoy would later disavow his part in Darwin’s discovery. More twists and turns would occur, including a final breakthrough when Wallace outlined his thinking in an 1855 letter.
Natural Balance
Wallace lay in bed with a fever thinking about the 19th-century influential economist Thomas Malthus and his theory of population growth (Malthus was credited with the belief that population grew geometrically, food sources arithmetically). This seemed out of balance with reality. Wallace concocted a plausible hypothesis which contradicted Malthus, putting in writing for the first time a theory of evolution:
It occurred to me that…as animals breed much more quickly than mankind, the destruction every year must be enormous to keep down the numbers of each species as otherwise the world would long ago have been crowded. Vaguely thinking over the enormous and constant destruction, it occurred to me to ask why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, on the whole, the best fitted live…In this way every part of an animal’s organization could be modified, and the unmodified would die….”
After reviewing Wallace’s theory, Darwin wrote back in agreement, adding, “I believe I go much further than you.” They formed a secure circle with the same outlook. Wallace was delighted to be accepted by Darwin, the more famous both by birth and accomplishment by this time. Wallace then took the liberty of sending Darwin his 1858 essay, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type,” and inquired if his friend would seek to have it published. The essay did not use Darwin’s catchphrase, “natural selection,” but it outlined the mechanics of a new theory.
“A-Ha” Moment
It was a case of finding the combination that unlocked the tumblers rotating in Darwin’s mind, a precise summary of his own thinking. Darwin commented to his publisher, “he does not say he wishes me to publish, but I shall, of course, offer to send to any journal.” Wallace’s essay was presented along with Darwin’s letters. This was a key inflection point in both their lives.
By then, Wallace had traveled thousands of miles away in the Malay Archipelago, ensuring communication took months, so he was not aware of the publication.
When he learned he had been presented to the scientific establishment, he was pleased to be included and never expressed bitterness in public or private about Darwin’s preeminence.
In 1859, Darwin published his landmark treatise, The Origin of Species, unalterably shifting our understanding from one based on good old-fashioned religion to scientific reasoning. We had different races before Darwin, but not until after did we recognize the human race. It wasn’t a surprise that women were first given the right to vote (albeit in limited circumstances) in the United States, Australia, and Great Britain.
Coda
What Charles Darwin did with his life is nothing short of extraordinary. From the start, the goal was to create value. The day the young parson applied to be Captain FitzRoy‘s mate, our view of the future changed from a foreboding mystery to the inevitability of human progress. To achieve this step, he stood his ground with Captain FitzRoy which made him memorable. His endless quest to create opportunity led him to observe nature through a clear-eyed lens. Like others who achieve success, the powers that be objected, and he had to surmount challenges. In the end, The Origin of Species changed the world. The impact of Darwin’s thinking would not be understood for another century. The suicide of Pringle Stokes was a stumble for man, to paraphrase Astronaut Neil Armstrong, but it was a giant leap for mankind.
Luck is a perfect word for it.
Darwin’s Five Guiding Principles
Did Darwin follow the instruction manual? Let’s take a closer look
- Set Priorities: When he climbed aboard the HMS Beagle, he had set a priority and it would lead to more priorities.
- Be Memorable: We don’t have the particulars of his initial meeting with Captain FitzRoy, but he was undoubtedly memorable as he had very little in the practical useful skills to offer.
- Create Opportunities: This hardly needs an answer. Darwin found the ingredients of a great life and staged them in such a way he changed history.
- Overcome Challenges: Darwin fought the leading establishment figures who ostracized him from polite society. He was a revolutionary in every sense, and his good fortune was to be living in Victorian England in which blasphemy was tolerated.
- Measure Value: Later generations can attest to the fact that not only did Darwin change the world, but he changed it in scale over an indefinite amount of time.
