Abstract
To say something new about Charles Darwin is no mean feat. The ‘Darwin Industry’ is sufficiently expansive that, at time of writing, a Google Scholar search for ‘Charles Darwin’ will return 448,000 results. Moreover, any new addition to that vast literature must contend with magisterial works like Janet Browne’s two-volume opus, Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002). And yet, Alistair Sponsel has managed to say something new. In the process, he has also said something about how theories were made, careers were managed, books were written, and – perhaps most importantly for the readership of this journal – how shipboard natural history research was done.
Many biographies of Darwin take the Galapagos and Down House as the poles of an extraordinary journey across the globe and a scientific life, tracing a path from the observation of insular biodiversity in 1835 to the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. In so doing, they corroborate Darwin’s own autobiographical vision, in which the scientific hero understood his early projects as a series of helpful waystations on the course towards his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Sponsel, however, has avoided those well-travelled waters to chart more neglected shores. In Darwin’s Evolving Identity, we again have the figure of a young, ambitious geologist, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt and mentored by Charles Lyell, who joins Robert Fitzroy on HMS Beagle’s surveying expedition. Sponsel, however, reminds us that Darwin aimed to produce grand, speculative geological theories centred on the uplift and subsidence of whole continents. The origin and distribution of species was only one component of a would-be systemic theory, evidence of massive but gradual Lyellian changes to the world’s topography. Darwin’s fieldwork is still a crucial component of that story, but in Sponsel’s revisionist telling it is not the collection of natural historical specimens, but rather the hydrographical work of a surveying vessel that emerges as its most salient feature.
Sponsel reorients our vision to the practical work of a naval survey, refusing to follow Darwin’s autobiographical lead to trace his sounding lead instead, as it were. Perhaps I need not explain to the readers of this journal how a sounding lead works, but as a historian of science, I found Sponsel’s attention to the practice of maritime hydrography revelatory. To measure the ocean’s depth, sailors dropped a heavy lead weight attached to a line. A depression on the bottom of that metal weight filled with wax or tallow allowed them to gauge the composition of the sea floor. In Darwin’s hands, the lead became a zoological instrument; he identified coral species from pieces it pulled up, or from the ghostly shapes they formed in the tallow. As a tool to collect natural historical data, the sounding lead presaged the usefully indiscriminate collection methods of early-twentieth-century ecology. Unlike other natural historians, who set out into the field to collect particular, representative varieties of flora or fauna, Darwin came away with a survey of sea life in which the appearance of coral species, sampled at regular intervals, was noted alongside their depth, location, and the composition of the sea floor.
The merger of natural historical and maritime practice made Darwin into what Sponsel usefully terms ‘an amphibious being’. The phrase is borrowed from Darwin’s mentor, Charles Lyell, who in his Principles of Geology had longed for a hybrid scientific creature who could transcend land and sea to ‘mark, on one hand, the growth of a forest, and on the other that of a coral reef’ (p. 16). By learning the methods of hydrography from Fitzroy’s crew, Darwin became that double-worlded being. Sponsel persuasively traces Darwin’s amphibious vision across the Beagle voyage. Reading Darwin’s notes on the Andes and Pampas, we see the topography of South America as the mounts and flats of a raised seabed. Following Darwin to sea in a launch, we witness him taking soundings for himself in the shallows and depths around Mauritius. The history of science has followed science studies in turning toward histories of practical and tacit knowledge of the sort Darwin learned from Fitzroy’s crew, and Sponsel’s book shows us how productive that approach is. If anything, one wishes to learn even more about the imbrications that wove together Darwin’s scientific practices with maritime cultures the world over. Sponsel tells us that Darwin first learned to gather aquatic specimens as a student in Edinburgh by joining zoologist Robert Grant on trips into the Firth of Forth on fishing trawlers and, even more tantalising, that he learned which species of coral grew on which portions of the reef from Tahitians in an outrigger canoe. The archive, however, only reveals so much.
Sponsel’s attention to hybrid forms of scientific and maritime practice, which occupies the first five chapters, is likely the contribution of most interest to readers of this journal. Yet it lays the groundwork for a successful series of arguments about patronage, writing, and theorising in nineteenth-century science that occupy the book’s later sections. Tying these concerns together is Sponsel’s focus on Darwin’s theory of coral reef formation as the book’s central case. Much of the young naturalist’s work on the Beagle touched on the mystery of how such small animals as coral polyps could form such large and, to nineteenth-century sailors, dangerous formations as reefs. Why, moreover, did they form distinctive ring-shaped atolls? Prevailing theories held that they grew on existing stone craters lurking beneath the surface. Darwin’s amphibious, hydrological gaze, however, revealed steep undersea mountains of coral, evidence that polyps accreted atop one another on subsiding volcanoes over the span of millions of years. It was a theory that supported Darwin’s vision of a world in which whole continents sank and surfaced, American uplift balanced by Oceanic subsidence.
Sponsel draws successfully from the literature of science studies to frame and answer the question of how Darwin sought to make his theories credible. To do so meant transcending the status of mere explorer/collector to become a respected geological theorist. Once returned from the Beagle voyage, we follow Darwin into meetings of the Geological Society, where his mentor Lyell, perhaps too carefully, orchestrated the reception of his ideas. We also follow those theories into print – and into Darwin’s study, where they lingered as notes and unpublished manuscripts. Ultimately, Sponsel most helpfully shows us both where theories were and where they weren’t. He revises our understanding of nineteenth-century natural history to tell us that theories were made with sounding leads in the Indo-Pacific and not just while pouring over specimens in the metropole. By the same token, he tells us that the pressures of promoting and publishing could bury scientific ideas in southeast England. Darwin was shepherded too well and too meteorically into the world of British geology, Sponsel suggests, exploding promising but speculative theories onto its landscape. Science awaited a full-length monograph that Darwin felt unready to supply. It never came. His ‘fingers burned’ by the ‘sin of speculation’, Darwin instead set aside his primary project, distracting himself with work on species – and even that remained unpublished until Wallace famously threatened his priority. Indeed, far from reproducing the teleological narrative that so often proceeds from the Galapagos to the Origin, Sponsel recasts the theory of evolution by means of natural selection as the result of a kind of wilful, anxious procrastination. It is an appealing notion to wilful procrastinators everywhere, who would do well to spend a few hours productively sounding the depths of Darwin’s amphibious worlds before turning back to their own neglected manuscripts.