Towards a methodology for analysing nineteenth-century collecting journeys of science and empire, with Charles Darwin's activities in Tierra del Fuego as a case study

Abstract

The interests of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in natural history and evolution took them to remote parts of the globe on hazardous, multi-sensory journeys that were ultimately about collecting. This paper introduces a methodology for exploring these complex experiences in more detail, informed by historical geography, anthropology, textual analysis and the geo-humanities. It involves looking for evidence of the richly stimulating and often challenging sensory dynamics within which they collected and connected data, observations, images, specimens, memories and ideas. Darwin's exploits in Tierra del Fuego are examined as a case study, with a particular focus on the collection of ‘Fuegian’ body paints in 1833. This type of analysis provides a fresh insight into the multi-sensory entanglement of encounter with people and place involved in the collecting process. It helps us to understand better the experiences that shaped what was collected and brought back to Britain, and the personal observations associated with these collections that sowed the seeds for Darwin's work on the origin of species.

Introduction

The journeys that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace undertook in the nineteenth century to remote parts of the globe were hazardous, multi-sensory journeys of heat and cold, tempest and calm. They were intense physical and mental encounters with alien environments, natural as well as cultural. They resulted in fear and disease that brought them close to death. Throughout these travails they wrote about how it was their zeal to collect natural history that helped them cope and gave them the will to live. For both men these journeys were uniquely memorable and life-changing; they were also about collecting. This paper introduces a methodology for exploring these complex experiences in more detail, which has been developed by focusing on two of the remotest locations on the European nineteenth-century world map: Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan, which Darwin visited in 1832–3 and 1834, and Dorey in New Guinea, which Wallace visited in 1858. They are places where both naturalists made rare acquisitions of human cultural artefacts as well as prolific collections of natural history specimens. Studying this collecting of specimens from the human and natural worlds provides a rare opportunity to gain a fresh perspective on the drive to collect during this period, which Darwin and Wallace embody. That these visits took place in two environments and cultures that could hardly be more different provides an opportunity to explore concepts of deep mapping and place this in an appropriate sensory framework.

Collections made in the field and associated manuscripts created at the time represent a pivotal integrated resource for understanding these journeys in more detail, yet frequently are researched in isolation from each other and from the context within which acts of collecting took place. This paper introduces a holistic analytical methodology informed by historical geography, anthropology, textual analysis and the geo-humanities. This analysis involves looking for evidence of the richly stimulating and often challenging sensory dynamics within which the two naturalists collected and connected data, observations, images, specimens, memories and ideas. Darwin's exploits in Tierra del Fuego are examined as a case study here, with a particular focus on the moment when he collected ‘Fuegian’ body paints. The detailed application of this methodology to Wallace's Dorey collecting journey is the subject of a separate paper.¹

My aim in this research is to raise the profile of the specimen collections of Darwin and Wallace as valuable research resources to be studied alongside their journals, letters, notebooks and sketchbooks, providing new insight into the collecting experience and scientific practice of these two great thinkers who both independently developed ideas about evolution and natural selection.

Collecting journeys, object biographies and deep maps

Darwin's and Wallace's collecting practices have been given consideration in a number of important recent works.² However, there has been minimal in-depth material culture analysis of the collections as complete entities, connected with a detailed treatment of the experiences of collecting in the field. During the course of previous research into the archaeological and ethnographic collection of Sir John Lubbock,³ I developed an interest in the concept of object biographies, and in one collecting event in particular: ‘277 Harpoon fr. Tierra del Fuego. Given me by Mr. Darwin’.⁴ This simple gift from Darwin to Lubbock's early collection in 1864 is an example of how two modes of collecting practice and experience interconnect in the biography of an artefact. In contrast to Lubbock, who collected via networks, Darwin and Wallace sourced their collections directly in the field laboratory. Both were travellers on great expeditions of encounter and sensory inspiration, as well as voyagers on adventures of intellectual and social discovery after their return to England. Individual acts of collecting, use and disposal can be viewed within the framework of a multi-sensory collecting journey that connects specific collecting events, experiences of place and moments of reflection. In these journeys, the dynamics of place, space (particularly travelling through space) and sensory experience are primary factors. Methodological approaches developed within the disciplines of historical geography, anthropology and the geo-humanities provide useful insight when combined with a perspective inspired by material culture and the biographies of objects.

Recent work around the concept of object biographies has developed a confident and multidisciplinary framework for exploring the life stories of objects, not least at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where excellent work has been undertaken to ‘re-visit’ objects in the founding collections.⁵ These biographies delve deep into the lives of a single object, or related groups of objects, as if they were animate. Object stories will play a central role in the research that is the subject of this paper. However, on its own, this framework does not do enough to capture the connectivity between collecting events nor the sense of trajectory in overall collecting journeys with their complex relationships to place, space and sensory experience.

Multidisciplinary researchers working in the fields of travel and exploration view the practices of collecting as a venture by the collector to capture as closely as possible the ‘on the spot’ context. This is achieved through collecting specimens, drawing images and recording observations in words.⁶ Bourguet in particular develops the idea of collecting data in notebooks as a form of observation and memory tool that allows data to be captured in a distant land and transported through time and space.⁷ Our focus, therefore, will centre not just on three-dimensional specimens acquired by Wallace and Darwin, but also on the images ‘collected’ in sketchbooks, and on the observations and experiences written as words in notebooks, letters and journals in the field. This ‘collecting’ at a particular moment in time is also an exercise in support of ‘recollecting’ at future dates, both during and after the collecting journey is complete. The various forms of ‘written collected’ (information and observations captured in text) are themselves constructs informed by recollection and presentation for differing intended audiences, and this must be considered in our handling of the evidence. The text of journals written in the field (and not their subsequent published format) is of particular relevance to a methodology interested in the sensory dynamics of exploration. These writings are about recording and sharing the immediacy of experience as close to the moment as possible, and the narrative approach used by the author was selected intentionally or otherwise to communicate an account for posterity. Words and expressions were used to capture and relay feelings, emotions, sights, smells, tastes and sounds. It is not possible to know for certain how people read (including the original author) and interpreted a particular text, but we can adopt techniques from textual analysis to look for clues that can be combined with findings from other evidence to make educated suggestions about meaning-making.⁸

An understanding of the time, place and context of a text being written as well as being read is of critical importance in such an analysis. Studying the content, language and words of texts created in the field enables a consideration of the narrative discourse influencing the author's worldview, and supports reflection on the immediate experiences of the collecting environment. Alexis Harley has explored the relationship between the early nineteenth-century literary sublime and Darwin's Beagle diary, and proffers a notion that diary is ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’, shortly after the event: ‘Diary … which involves writing in proximity, but not immediate proximity, to experience, allows for a double-experience: the experience itself (recent, and easily recalled), and the experience of interpreting and narrating it.’⁹ Other researchers have also provided commentary on the relationship between Darwin's writings and early nineteenth-century aesthetic and literary interest in the sublime, with its emphasis on grandness of thought and emotion, including in response to the natural world.¹⁰ The sublime may have shaped both Darwin's writings and also his ways of experiencing the world, which allowed room for strong personal feelings and sensations, as well as rationality of thought. Equally, the very experience of travelling and collecting in harsh, unfamiliar environments might resonate with and reinforce these feelings, with the sublime tradition making them acceptable to share with readers in his writings.

Geography, significantly, introduces the concept of ‘mapping’ to our collecting journey. In its simplest form, it enables the plotting of this journey and its trajectory onto graphic representations of significant physical and human features on the Earth's surface, both historical and modern. It enables collecting events and experiences to be connected with the concepts of distance, time, physical environment and cultural geography. The emergence of ‘deep mapping’ as a tool of study has the potential to add depth and richness to this geographical examination of collecting, and is helpfully defined in the following introductory text:

Deep maps are finely detailed, multimedia depictions of a place and the people, buildings, objects, flora and fauna that exist within it and which are inseparable from the activities of everyday life. [They]… may encompass the beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears of residents and help show what ties one place to another. A deep map is a way to engage evidence within its spatio-temporal context, and to provide a platform for a spatially-embedded argument.¹¹

The approach enables an exploration of the experiential dimensions of place, which are inherently instable, and had its origins in 1960s psychogeographical experiments.¹² It has come into its own in the era of multimedia technologies, which enable a multi-dimensional presentation of a range of animated sources that extends beyond the constraints of the two-dimensional sheet of paper. Within these constraints, however, this paper applies techniques of deep mapping to dive into individual moments of collecting connected across a wider geography, in order to explore the detailed sensory engagement involved for both collector and collected.

Our collecting agents were not just Darwin and Wallace but all who played their part, not least the indigenous communities and their intermediaries who were familiar with Western ways. Inspired by work in anthropology, as part of our deep dive we can view the collecting practices and experiences from the diverse perspectives of all participants: ‘the varied kinds of labour, from the humdrum to high science; and the varied social and cultural contexts that give collecting its meaning and value’.¹³ Moments of collecting were also moments of individual and community engagement across alien natural and human worlds. Approaches to material culture and anthropology promoted by Nick Thomas and others highlight the considerable insight to be gained from exploring the complex entanglement of encounter that took place within the context of every transaction.¹⁴ The human transactional experiences embedded in the collecting activities of Darwin and Wallace provide rich opportunities for such analysis.

These encounters were far from being sterile and mechanistic experiences, as we have already touched upon in relation to Darwin and the sublime. They were full of the excitement and mundane of multi-sensory interaction, where feelings, emotions and physical actions were inspired by sight, touch, smell, sound and taste. The work of those interested in the sensory dimension of material culture collections in museums and archives is of great relevance here,¹⁵ and in particular the work of Nadia Seremetakis, who in The senses still describes how ‘The object invested with sensory memory speaks … the artifact as the bearer of sensory multiplicity is a catchment zone of perceptions, a lens through which the senses can be explored from their other side’.¹⁶

This emphasis on ‘senses and place’ is a field of research populated by interdisciplinary practitioners interested in, for example, the geographies of sound, bringing artistic and geographic disciplines together as an example of geo-humanities in action.¹⁷ Much of this work takes place in the field, and is of course very much a product of the now in time, space and human psychology. However, both this work and the ideas of Seremetakis beg the question of whether we are missing something as cultural historians by only studying the artefacts and manuscripts in museums and libraries in isolation, without also re-connecting today with these original theatres of collecting. We can never recreate or reconstruct moments of history, but does a greater engagement with sense and senses of place in the now inspire new ways of interrogating historical data to explore evidence for sensory encounter in the past?

In September 2015, I visited Singapore and Indonesia, spending six days in Manokwari (Dorey) as well as travelling to Ternate, Macassar and North Bali. In February 2016, I travelled through the Straits of Magellan and the Beagle Channel, and to Cape Horn by sea. My interest in both locations centred on relationship with place and sensory experience, and a journal was kept, observations made, photographs taken and video/sound clips captured. These travels encouraged further reflection on researching the ‘collected’ left behind by Darwin and Wallace, particularly in terms of considering the physical and mental trajectories of their respective collecting journeys.¹⁸ Every collecting journey beat to a unique sensory rhythm in the field, which was in turn influenced by the different expeditionary modalities involved. Collecting was a primary objective for both Darwin and Wallace, albeit their modes of exploration were different. This was an intensive and unforgiving rhythm of collecting, which for both men was shaped by contingency as much as individual agency.

I have developed an approach to reviewing the historical evidence for insights into how the intensity of experience ebbed and flowed, identifying periods of immersion in the physical processes of collecting and travelling, and periods of intensive planning, processing and preparation, with opportunities to relax and reflect in places of relative safety and comfort. Evidence for intense sensory experiences is then mapped onto this rhythm by time and place. These sensory experiences might relate to physical and mental wellbeing, dealing with extremes of climate, meeting new people, moments of danger or great excitement, in-depth processing and analysis of collected specimens, and known moments of reflection and writing. Evidence might be found in field journal writings, observations made in collecting and field notebooks, letters home, the quantities and nature of specimens collected, the quality of their recording and preservation, and records created by travelling companions. This work can be complemented by analysis of evidence from the local people and places entangled in these collecting activities, which manifests itself in different forms, including oral tradition, historical texts written by others, and material culture from both anthropological and archaeological contexts. Local voices should be invited to engage in the exploration of sensory memories embedded in these collections, although this was not possible within this pilot study.

In summary, the methodological approach proposed analyses Darwin's and Wallace's collecting activities and collections from the perspective of multi-sensory collecting journeys, mapped onto a geographical landscape through which collectors traversed, and intersected by moments of deep mapping that explore the detail of specific object biographies with reference to specific sensory themes. This methodology enables a better understanding of each individual collecting journey, and in due course will facilitate a detailed comparative analysis between their differing experiences. In the rest of this paper, I apply this approach to Darwin in Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan, with a focus on the body paints he collected in 1833. In a separate paper, I develop a detailed object biography for the wood-carvings that Wallace collected in Dorey in 1858.¹⁹

Darwin's Tierra del Fuego collections

In the summers of 1832–3 and 1833–4, HMS Beagle navigated the waters of Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan, surveying the coastline, engaging with indigenous Yaghan, Kaweskar, Haush and Tehuelche communities, and collecting natural history. Darwin kept records of his specimen acquisitions in various catalogues written during the voyage and now preserved at the University Library, Cambridge, and Down House in Kent.²⁰ From these documents, it is possible to construct the collecting profiles for Darwin in Tierra del Fuego (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Number of entries in Darwin's zoological and geological catalogues from Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan. (Cambridge University Library, CUL-DAR236.1–4; English Heritage, Down House, 63.1–6.)

Darwin's primary research and collecting interests in Tierra del Fuego were twofold. He was intrigued by the geological make-up of this locale at the southernmost extremity of the Andean mountain range, and he wanted to test Charles Lyell's recently published ideas regarding geology and uniformitarianism.²¹ Darwin studied and retained his geological specimens during his lifetime, unlike the rest of his collection, suggesting that he felt confident in his own expertise as a geologist. They were donated in 1896 to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge, where they are stored in wooden drawers and on display, all identified by a green glued-on label inscribed with the title ‘Beagle Collection’ and the individual catalogue number assigned by Darwin in his geology field catalogue. The curator, Alfred Harker, has made a copy of Darwin's original four geological specimen notebooks in 1907 listing all the Darwin specimens in the Sedgwick Museum collection.²² It includes all of the geological specimens from Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan listed by Darwin in his notebooks, with the exception of 23 specimens originally collected and recorded by Darwin, 22 of which, intriguingly, are fossils and not rocks.²³

Darwin was also interested in the marine ecology of the region's kelp forests, possibly inspired by his early collecting apprenticeship on the shores of the Firth of Forth with the marine biologist Robert Grant.²⁴ His specimens are listed and observations about them described in his zoological catalogue,²⁵ and they were distributed across a number of research collections. To date, I have identified a few of these in the collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, including nine dry crustacean specimens, originally stored in spirits by Darwin, four still associated with the original metallic strips stamped with their catalogue number used by Darwin as labels.²⁶ The collection also includes a number of crustacean specimens that are still preserved in spirit after almost 200 years, kept now in modern glass test tubes and well looked after, albeit in poor condition.²⁷ A few of these also have their original, number-stamped metallic labels. All these specimens made their way to Oxford via the collection of Thomas Bell, who was particularly interested in amphibians, reptiles and crustaceans. He published a description of the reptiles and amphibians collected by Darwin during the HMS Beagle voyage, but failed to publish any work about the crustaceans. In 1862, the University of Oxford acquired 52 drawers of Bell's collection of Crustacea from the Hope Collection curator, John Westwood, who had purchased it from Bell when he retired that same year to Selborne.²⁸ Eight of Darwin's wet specimens are also to be found at the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology, most stored in modern glassware and demonstrating varying degrees of preservation.²⁹ A significant number of Darwin's zoological specimens are likely to be distributed anonymously across the entirety of the Natural History Museum in London, located according to modern scientific classifications.

Darwin had an interest in collecting bird skins from a scientific perspective, reflecting a wider early nineteenth-century trend whereby a growing number of travellers and explorers from Europe acquired birds to satisfy demand from museums and private collectors back home.³⁰ Darwin's bird specimens have been extracted and stored separately. They are relatively easy to find.³¹ An array of bird specimens collected by Darwin in Tierra del Fuego are now kept at the Natural History Museum outstation in Tring. Of the 46 specimens that Darwin collected in Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan, 19 (41%) have been located in this collection. They were probably sent to Henslow as part of Darwin's two consignments dispatched in the autumn of 1834 from Valparaiso, and eventually found their way to the British Museum (now Natural History Museum). Most were transferred in the 1850s from the Zoological Society collections where they had originally been deposited.³² Four specimens came via the Gould Collection, two donated in 1857 and two in 1881.³³ One, a fine specimen of a hawk, was transferred from Norwich Castle Museum in 1955, where it had formed part of a collection made by John Henry Gurney, a banker and ornithologist with a particular interest in birds of prey.³⁴ Two specimens were acquired via the Salvin & Godman Collection in 1888.³⁵ At least two specimens may still exhibit one of Darwin's original labels, with a catalogue number handwritten in black ink onto a simple piece of paper rolled up and tied to the leg. One specimen, collected by Darwin on Wollaston Island in January 1833 (CD ‘972’), is now at Liverpool Museum.³⁶

Darwin also collected at least 118 botanical plant specimens during his travels through Tierra del Fuego and the Straits of Magellan, which were shipped back to Henslow for analysis, and ultimately incorporated into the University of Cambridge Herbarium collections, where they are stored as dry pressed specimens.³⁷

Finally, the British Museum collections in London include two old, sealed glass test tubes containing red and grey–white ‘paint for bodies’ pigments collected by Darwin in Tierra del Fuego in 1833. They are rare examples of Darwin collecting ethnographic material, and are recorded in his zoological catalogue from the HMS Beagle voyage as entry ‘974’.³⁸ While overseas, he sent these samples to John Stevens Henslow and later bequeathed them to his museum.³⁹ They were later acquired by the British Museum as part of the Christy Collection bequeathed in 1865 on the death of its owner, Henry Christy.⁴⁰ One of the executors of this bequest was Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was also the son-in-law of Henslow and a close friend of Darwin.

The biographies of these objects provide a valuable gateway into understanding more about a pivotal, yet less well-known episode in Darwin's famous global collecting journey. There exists a rich seam of evidence about this journey, manifested in the specimens themselves and their associated documentation. We can also explore the theme of collecting in the journals, notebooks and correspondence written in the field, to complement this evidence. Darwin collected and journeyed in the company of others, and we can draw on evidence collected by his companions. Of particular note in this context are the sketchbooks of Conrad Martens (the artist on board HMS Beagle during the 1834 excursion to Tierra del Fuego), the journals of Captain Robert FitzRoy, the HMS Beagle logbooks, and the books that they took with them to read or that were collected on the way.⁴¹

Darwin's Tierra del Fuego collecting journey

Analysis of the Tierra del Fuego collections and associated manuscripts has defined the sensory rhythm of collecting during this segment of Darwin's journey. Figure 2 depicts this rhythm mapped in relation to time and place during relevant extracts from the period December 1832–July 1834. The map was constructed primarily from the original manuscript journal now at Down House, the zoological and geological collection catalogues which identify what was collected and when, and the HMS Beagle logbooks at The National Archives. It is presented as a ‘barcode’, with each two-millimetre-wide bar representing one day, reflecting moments of active collecting, travelling, planning, rest and recuperation. The diagram shows how the Tierra del Fuego episodes are part of an irregular pattern of collecting that reflects Darwin's journey to a great extent as being outside his individual control. Given his passage on board a British Admiralty vessel on a mission with wider purpose, his collecting expeditions and activities were, by necessity, primarily opportunistic, and encompassed the sea as well as the land. Figure 2 also illustrates the rhythm of collecting for Wallace in 1858, which includes his journey to Dorey, as a comparator.⁴²

Figure 2.

Sensory rhythms of collecting: Darwin in Tierra del Fuego and Wallace in Dorey, New Guinea.

These rhythms are unique to each individual collecting journey, and the different trajectories embedded within go beyond the physical into the multi-sensory. These trajectories are experiential, cultural, personal, emotional, mental and knowledge-generating (learning and connecting). Adopting an approach to interrogating the historical data inspired by concepts of deep mapping and sensory studies, we will dive now into the detail of people and place for one key collecting moment: the challenges of weather, environment and human encounter associated with Darwin's acquisition of body paints from Tierra del Fuego in January 1833.

Deep mapping a multi-sensory collecting moment: body paint pigments from Tierra del Fuego

Darwin was struck by the use of body paints from the very first moment he met four Haush men at Good Success Bay in late December 1832. He described their appearance in his journal:

Reaching from ear to ear & including the upper lip, there was a broad red coloured band of paint. & parallel to & above this, there was a white one; so that the eyebrows & eyelids were even thus coloured …⁴³

There is no exact date given in the relevant zoological catalogue entry for when Darwin acquired the samples of red and white paint. However, based on the position of the relevant entry and the wider collecting context in which the acquisition took place, it seems likely that they were obtained about a month later at Wulaia Bay in Ponsonby Sound, when he had opportunity to spend a few days interacting with members of the Yaghan community. It was at Wulaia that FitzRoy decided to repatriate the Yaghan and Kaweskar young people whom he had taken hostage on a previous voyage (o'run-del'lico, known as Jemmy Button; yok'cushly – Fuegia Basket; and el'leparu – York Minster). They were to be accompanied by the missionary Richard Matthews, who had travelled on HMS Beagle with the specific purpose of setting up a Christian mission.

Analysis of the narrative entries scribed by Darwin in his original journal during the days leading up to this acquisition identifies sensory and descriptive words frequently used by him, providing perhaps some insight into his influences, experiences and states of mind at this point in the collecting journey.⁴⁴ Two particular themes of sensory interaction can be identified: interaction with the weather and physical environment, and encounter and communication with local communities. For the Yaghan communities who encountered Darwin and his European companions, this land was familiar territory and their home, into which strangers had arrived; for these strangers, it was perceived as desolate, unknown and inhospitable. This perception, derived from Western adventurers who had travelled these waters previously, would have been reinforced by their own experience of a particularly dramatic weather encounter off Cape Horn little more than a week before Darwin collected the body paints at Wulaia. Figure 3 identifies those words used most frequently by Darwin when writing his diary entries in the field for the period, 1–15 January 1833. Tierra del Fuego is known for its changeable and extreme weather and sea conditions, shaped by its location at the intersection of the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern oceans and at the southernmost point of the mighty Andean mountain range. These were challenging and unpredictable waters to navigate, despite Captain FitzRoy and some of the crew having previous experience. In the first two weeks of January 1833, the Beagle party found themselves fighting for their lives in the wild seas of Drake Passage.

Figure 3.

Sensory and descriptive words used by Darwin in his original field journal entries about Tierra del Fuego. (Down House, English Heritage, reference no. 88202366.)

The HMS Beagle logbook sheds further light on the observations made by Darwin in his diary during this period.⁴⁵ On 31 December 1832, the ship ran out of the bay at Wigwam Cove near Cape Horn with the intent of travelling westwards along the coast to repatriate el'leparu with his own Kaweskar people. The weather was changeable with a mix of rain, clouds, blue sky, squally conditions and mist. Over the next few days, winds varied from 2 to 8 on the early version of Francis Beaufort's scale used by FitzRoy. On 3 and 4 January they found themselves blown towards the Diego Ramirez Islands in the dangerous Southern Ocean waters of Drake Passage. Throughout this early January period, they were battling squally conditions. A force 8 is gale force, with wind speed 34–40 knots and waves ranging from 5 m to 7 m in height.

Besides the serious & utter loss of time & the necessary discomforts of the ship heavily pitching & the miseries of constant wet & cold, I have scarcely for an hour been quite free from sea-sickness: How long the bad weather may last, I know not; but my spirits temper & stomach, I am well assured, will not hold out much longer.⁴⁶

The HMS Beagle log reveals how the wind whipped up violent and dangerous seas during the period of 11–15 January, with conditions recorded as very squally (represented by the word ‘squally’ being underlined in logbook entries) for much of the time. ‘Our horizon was limited to a small compass by the spray carried by the wind: the sea looked ominous, there was so much foam that it resembled a dreary plain covered by patches of drifted snow.’⁴⁷

On 13 January, the little ship and its community experienced hurricane-force (force 12) winds and periods of hail and constant rain. Waves were likely to have been at least 14 m in height and the whole sea would have appeared completely white with foam and spray.⁴⁸

At noon the storm was at its height; & we began to suffer; a great sea struck us & came on board; the after tackle of the quarter boat gave way & an axe being obtained they were instantly obliged to cut away one of the beautiful whale-boats. The same sea filled our decks so deep, that if another had followed it is not difficult to guess the result.⁴⁹

In these conditions, it was not just Darwin and his crewmates that suffered: Darwin's early Tierra del Fuego collections were also damaged.

I find I have suffered an irreparable loss from yesterdays disaster, in my drying paper & plants being wetted with salt-water. Nothing resists the force of an heavy sea; it forces open doors & sky lights, & spreads universal damage.

Fortunately, he had dispatched a consignment of collections to Henslow from Monte Video in late November, before embarking on the voyage south. However, those specimens that he had collected while at sea off the coast of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and during land excursions at Good Success Bay and Wigwam Cove during December 1832 were vulnerable to damage. His ‘catalogue for animals in spirits of wine’ lists 16 entries for marine animals for this period, including crustaceans, fish and shells.⁵⁰ It also lists approximately 33 specimens in the ‘specimens not in spirits’ catalogue, which include insects, shells, marine organisms and birds.⁵¹ It is likely that Darwin had processed the majority at least of these specimens prior to leaving Wigwam Cove on 31 December, and that the specimens in spirits (all of which were small) would have been stored with uniquely numbered metal label tags in bottles that were carefully stowed. However, Darwin himself had annotated the ‘specimens not in spirits’ catalogue at this juncture with the words ‘All specimens from 888 to 900 much injured by the gale of Jany 13^th . & Numbers 894 … 900 changed into 931 … 937.’⁵² There are a few crossings out and re-numberings in the catalogue involving coral samples which were all collected at 30 fathoms, 53 degrees south on 15 December.

Darwin's geological catalogue describes two specimens of slate and one rock composed of specular iron and silex in layers from Good Success Bay as catalogue numbers ‘878’, ‘927’ and ‘928’.⁵³ The specimens ‘927’ and ‘928’ are catalogued out of number sequence order, with their respective entries recording ‘instead of (876) and (877). (Original numbers lost).’ The catalogue also makes reference to the loss of specimens under the heading for ‘Good Success Bay’: ‘The numbers 876 and 877 were destroyed’. Seven geological specimens of hornblende, greenstone and limestone from Hermit Island are also listed in the catalogue as collected during December 1832, catalogue entries ‘916–922’. All of these geological specimens are now at the Sedgwick Museum, University of Cambridge. They are small and robust metamorphic or sedimentary rock samples that would have been likely to withstand the significant physical stresses of a heavily pitching ship. However, is the confusion regarding specimen numbers ‘876’ and ‘877’ something to do with the storm of 13 January 1833? Darwin brought pre-printed number labels from England with him for these specimens. Perhaps the labels were waterlogged or damaged beyond repair and required replacement? Or perhaps they were specimens of slate or similar that had not yet been recorded in the catalogue and did not survive.

Darwin and his fledgling Tierra del Fuego collections were fortunate to survive the storm of 13 January 1833, when, as luck would have it, HMS Beagle found itself blown back towards Hermit Island, from where it had departed 14 days before. The exhausted crew moored in the smooth waters of Goree Roads off the eastern point of Navarino Island on 15 January. It was only then that Darwin had the time and mental energy to review his collections and repair the damage done. In his letter to his sister Caroline, written from the Falkland Islands on 30 March 1833, Darwin recounted his experience for close family:

This final gale was worthy of the reputation which, this climate since Anson's times, has possessed. The Captain considers it the most severe one he was ever in. We have already heard of two vessels which were wrecked at the very same period. At Breakfast, I was remarking that a gale of wind, was nothing so very bad in a good sea-boat; the Captain told me to wait till we shipped a sea; it was prophetic; for at noon we shipped a great one; & it is a sight for a landsman to remember; one of our boats was knocked to pieces & was immediately cut away; the water being deep on the deck, it did me an infinity of harm, as it wetted a great deal of paper & dried plants. I suffered also much from sea-sickness: & yet with all this I am becoming quite hardened; it makes me however, think with greater ecstasy of the warm serene air & the beautiful forms of the Tropics. No disciple of Mahomet ever looked to his seventh heaven, with greater zeal, than I do to those regions …. I am quite astonished, to find I can endure this life; if it was not for the strong & increasing pleasure from Nat: History I never could.⁵⁴

His expressed concern was for his collections. However, it is also possible to reflect that, at least for a moment, he was also thankful and relieved to be alive and relatively safe: ‘None but those who have tried it, know the miseries of a really heavy gale of wind. May Providence keep the Beagle out of them.’⁵⁵

Only a few days after this experience, Darwin and fellow members of the Beagle party started out on their next adventure. Given the traumatic events of the previous fortnight, FitzRoy decided to settle o'run-del'lico, yok'cushly, el'leparu and Matthews all together in o'run-del'lico's home territory at Wulaia on the west coast of Isle de Navarino. He had also made the decision that a small convoy of three whale boats and a yawl would travel along the Beagle Channel to reach this location, rather than attempt another seaward journey along the coast. They entered the Beagle Channel in the afternoon of 19 January and arrived at Wulaia in the morning of 23 January. Figure 3 identifies the descriptive and sensory words written in Darwin's field journal for this part of the journey. His words and narrative style, inspired by the sublime, present a romantic sense of calmness, serenity and beauty. Indeed, on the first evening, Darwin describes the scene:

we found in the evening a corner snugly concealed by small islands. Here we pitched our tents & lighted our fires. Nothing could look more romantic than this scene. The glassy water of the cove & the boats at anchor; the tents supported by the oars & the smoke curling up the wooded valley formed a picture of quiet & retirement.⁵⁶

The next day the Yaghan kin groups on shore, who called this waterway their home, spotted this itinerant band of travellers in their long, deep, wooden ‘canoes’, and a series of brief human encounters unfolded as the Beagle contingent journeyed through. It is these encounters that engaged Darwin most when writing his diary, selecting words that reflected perhaps both his curiosity and his anxiety.

The Yaghan tribes were a grouping of people highly adapted to the specifics of their local environment. Their small canoes, made of three strips of evergreen beech bark stitched together, allowed them to navigate through the waves and traverse great distances.⁵⁷ ‘I am the last of the Wollaston race. There were five Yaghan tribes, each from a different place, but sharing the same tongue. Before I could walk, I travelled with my mother to Cape Horn, tied to her back.’⁵⁸

There is some sense from Darwin's account of his voyage down the Beagle Channel that he observed different groups and cultural dynamics in play, albeit he labelled all as ‘Fuegian’.⁵⁹ Darwin's original manuscript journal entry for 20 January 1833 noted that they entered ‘the parts of the country which is thickly inhabited’.⁶⁰ He thought, given that FitzRoy had first ‘discovered’ the Beagle Channel during the last voyage, that probably the ‘greater part of the Fuegians had never seen Europeans’. This is unlikely, given the interest of American whalers and sealers in the lucrative waters of Tierra del Fuego, who since the 1780s had diverted their attention to this part of the world.⁶¹ Yaghan communities on shore lit fires as the Beagle caravan passed through, perhaps, as Darwin suggested, to attract the visitors’ attention as well as spread news to others.⁶² It would not have taken long for each party on shore to ignite an available tinder of bird down, ground fungus, splinters, dry insect nests or grass, using the pyrite stone and flint they kept in a small leather bag hung from the neck, or in a basket woven from grasses.⁶³ As the Beagle party made its way past Gable Island, at the narrowest part of the eastern end of the Channel and about a mile wide, a group of Yaghan men used a low cliff on the island as a high vantage point from which to engage. These men are likely to have been associated with the Utamaala occupational area, and Darwin's written response to their actions was perhaps one of fearful curiosity mixed with revulsion:

I shall never forget how savage & wild one group was. Four or five men suddenly appeared on a cliff near to us. They were absolutely naked & with long streaming hair; springing from the ground & waving their arms around their heads, they sent forth most hideous yells. Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants.⁶⁴

It is not clear what the motivations were of the men that Darwin described. They were certainly running to and making the most of the only high ground immediately adjacent to the waters that Darwin and his companions were navigating through. It is easy to see how, sitting low in the water as they were, the Beagle party might have felt intimidated by the close proximity of these men and their considerable height advantage.

This mood of unease continued as they travelled along the Utamaala area of the central eastern Beagle Channel. Later that day, they landed for dinner and an overnight stop on the southern shore, probably somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Puerto Williams. They shared this landing place with a small mixed group of Yaghan men and women, the latter retreating to a secluded and presumably protected location. Despite presents of biscuits and red cloth, relations were strained. In the morning, when more local people arrived, the Beagle party quickly returned to the water, pursued for a while until they out-rowed the local craft in their faster boats. We will never be sure what these Yaghan people felt. However, it is possible to imagine that the sudden arrival of a group of almost 30 unusual people at their small campsite, with whom they could not communicate and who included a Yaghan person not of their ‘tribe’ (o'run-del'lico) and two Kaweskar people (yok'cushly and el'leparu), could be seen as threatening. They may have been more familiar with the gifts, however, if they had come across, or were aware of, other European and American travellers in these waters. This brief episode of barter might have whetted an appetite for such things that had consequences for the Beagle party and o'run-del'lico's own people at Wulaia only a few days later.

O'run-del'lico's people lived at the western end of the eastern Beagle Channel, in the Wakimaala occupational area. By the evening of 22 January, when the Beagle party drew into Lewaia Cove for the night near the present-day town of Puerto Navarino, they had finally arrived in the relative safe haven that was o'run-del'lico's home territory.⁶⁵ The language written at the time by Darwin changed in tone. Most significantly he used the word ‘family’ to describe the people who spent time with them around the campfire singing songs that evening, and listening to o'run-del'lico telling long stories, presumably in English, about the Ona peoples of Isla Grande to the north who occasionally attacked the Yaghan in the autumn: ‘At night we arrived at the junction with Ponsonby Sound; we took up our quarters with a family belonging to Jemmys or the Tekenika people. They were quiet & inoffensive & soon joined the seamen round a blazing fire’.⁶⁶ These people knew who o'run-del'lico was and had told him earlier in the day that his father had died. News had quickly spread to o'run-del'lico's wider kin of his return, and the Beagle party rowed the final few miles to Wulaia surrounded by a growing flotilla of canoes and people painted white, red and black.⁶⁷

Darwin's journal writings at Lewaia Cove suggest that for at least one day and night there was a brief sense of respite from danger. This impression of Lewaia Cove being a place of relative safety is reinforced by evidence from Darwin's collecting activity. Seven geological specimens (‘938–944’) were collected in the Beagle Channel at this time, all from the western end of Navarino Island. The catalogue entry for four specimens records their find spot as ‘6 miles east of the entrance into Ponsonby Sound’.⁶⁸ Darwin identified these as two specimens of hornblende, one of hornblendic greenstone and one of slate. The find location is likely to be Lewaia Cove where the Beagle party stayed overnight on 22 January 1833. A further three specimens were collected ‘at east entrance of Ponsonby Sound’, and were identified as slate (‘the general rock’), greenstone and felspathic rock. There is no definitive evidence of Darwin collecting any specimens during the trip along the Beagle Channel before they arrived at Lewaia Cove and its friendly welcome.

A review of content, language and words (Figure 3) used by Darwin in his field journal to describe the next five days (23–27 January 1833) paints a picture of intense human encounter. It began with the initial excitement of family reunion centred on o'run-del'lico, and gave way to increased tension as more unfamiliar Yaghan people arrived, and perhaps as the Beagle party's intentions for long-term settlement became clear. Wulaia Bay was an accessible natural larder for the local Yaghan people, yet o'run-del'lico had guided the Beagle party directly to this valuable spot where they now planned to set up a permanent missionary. Darwin and his companions interpreted a lack of physical infrastructure as virgin territory to be appropriated, albeit in a form of intended partnership with the local people who would be converted to Christianity: ‘When we arrived at Wooliah (Jemmys cove) we found it far better suited for our purposes, than any place we had hitherto seen. There was considerable space of cleared & rich ground, & doubtless Europæan vegetables, would flourish well.’⁶⁹

FitzRoy ordered his men to trace a no-trespass line on the ground with their spades between their tents on the shore and the grassland beyond. Local people were informed by gestures and present-giving not to pass the line, and sentries were placed to guard it, as the sketch drawn by Syms Covington illustrates (Figure 4).⁷⁰ The challenge of communication between parties speaking completely different languages, and with minimal cultural understanding of each other, influenced everything to do with the detail of this encounter.

Figure 4.

A sketch by Syms Covington depicting the Beagle party settlement at Wulaia Bay and the no-trespass line traced into the ground to deter local people from entering their encampment. (From the collections of the State Library of New South Wales (NSW). PXD41, ff3a.) (Online version in colour.)

Within a couple of days of the Beagle party's arrival, 300 local people had arrived at Wulaia. Some were from o'run-del'lico's family, and others from more hostile quarters that perhaps had seen the party travel along the Beagle Channel with its payload of red cloth and other items, and wanted to have their share of the takings from this floating treasure chest. O'run-del'lico, and to a lesser extent el'leparu, may have done their part in acting as translators, particularly for those willing to listen, such as o'run-del'lico's own kin. However, the Yaghan language is highly sophisticated and nuanced between different tribal groups. It existed as an oral language containing over 30,000 words, which were only written down by a later missionary, Thomas Bridges, in the late 1860s and 1870s. Despite FitzRoy's early and crude attempt to record and understand the language,⁷¹ it would have sounded completely alien to the Beagle travellers, as much as English would have sounded to their Yaghan hosts. It is perhaps unsurprising that it took o'run-del'lico a few days to remember. Communication via gesture and action predominated. These modes can only support bonding to a limited extent, and can soon become an unhelpful source of misunderstanding, particularly if cultural expectations regarding acceptable behaviour are also challenged.

Darwin made reference to only one Yaghan word, ‘yammer-schooner’, in his journals, which he described as meaning ‘give me’. He first mentioned it when describing their encounter with hostile people in the Beagle Channel.

the Fuegians were not at first inclined to be friendly, for till one boat pulled in before the others, they kept their slings in readiness: - We soon delighted them by trifling presents such as tying red tape round the forehead; it is very easy to please them but as difficult to make them content; the last & first word is sure to be ‘Yammer-schooner’ which means ‘give me’.⁷²

Through the later work of Bridges, we have formed a better understanding of this word, which is rooted in the Yaghan word yamask-û, meaning generous, liberal, kind and largely giving. The particular word was probably yamask-ûna, which means ‘do be liberal to me’ and might have meant something similar to our ‘please’.⁷³ Although the exchange was peacefully engaged in by o'run-del'lico's kin at the beginning, some may have felt this intrusion by strangers into one of their most important natural larders more keenly than others. As representatives from more, different Yaghan communities arrived (themselves labelled ‘strangers’ by Darwin and FitzRoy), this sense of tension increased, resulting in one of the Beagle sentries being threatened and FitzRoy finding it necessary to ‘scare’ all the local people through a shooting practice show of strength.

Despite all these distractions, there is evidence that Darwin collected a few zoological and geological specimens ‘from the settlement within Ponsonby Sound’. As the missionary wigwams were being constructed and the vegetable garden dug, he and several of the seamen went hunting unsuccessfully in the nearby hills for guanacos on 25 January 1833, while FitzRoy met members of o'run-del'lico's family.⁷⁴ It could have been during this hike through the lower slope forest up to the hills that Darwin collected stag beetles from rotten beech trees⁷⁵ and bugs (Hemiptera) in great numbers under rotten bark.⁷⁶ Perhaps he also collected some Hymenoptera insect specimens⁷⁷ and an Epeira spider with bright green abdomen and eggs in a bag enveloped by brown silk⁷⁸ during this excursion. Or perhaps these insect and spider specimens were collected as Darwin spent time in the camp or washing in the nearby freshwater stream. Darwin also collected four geological specimens at Wulaia – two pieces of felspathic rock (‘945–6’), one piece of white felspathic greenstone (‘947’) and one piece of slate (‘948’).⁷⁹ It is possible that these were collected in a walk up into the hills or alternatively from the stony beach or stream at Wulaia itself, which is suggested from Darwin's phrase ‘from the settlement’, as the tents were located on the beach.

There are a few other specimens recorded in his zoological catalogue at about this time that could have been collected during this period, 20–27 January 1833, or perhaps in the few remaining days of January after they left Wulaia for an excursion along the western arms of the Beagle Channel. These included marine shells adhering to the kelp and stones about the roots, fish from the Beagle Channel, and crustaceans from under stones, again in the Beagle Channel.⁸⁰ They also included a few plant specimens associated with a parasite plant that grows on beech (Myzodendron brachystachyum) and a small plant with thick leaves and of a bright green colour which is the great agent forming the peat (Astelia pumila).⁸¹

Most interesting of the ‘possibles’ is ‘974 the white and red paints of the Fuegians’, which are recorded in the zoological catalogue at this time. This entry is accompanied by the following note:

The Fuegians paint their faces, bodies & hair with white, red & black in various figures & quantities. The red is the oxide of Iron & is prepared by being collected near the streams, dried & burnt. The White is of a more curious nature – in the state fit for use it is of very little specific gravity. It is collected from under water, is made into balls (as J Button expressed it ‘all the same Ostrichs egg’) & burnt: did not effervesce with acids. & with bit of cobalt gave a permanent blue. I suppose therefore it [is] nearly pure alumina. It occurs in the Slate Mountain, I imagine from the decomposition of the beds of Feldspathic rock. The black I have not obtained: the black is I believe only charcoal & oil … I found some of the feldspathic greenstones decomposed into a white substance to the depth of 3/10 of inch.⁸²

The catalogue entry is dated January 1833 and its location is in proximity to others known to be from Ponsonby Sound. Darwin is likely to have come into frequent contact with the white, red and black paint of the Yaghan people at Wulaia and would have had time to engage with o'run-del'lico about the origin of these paints.

Many of them had run so fast that their noses were bleeding, & they talked with such rapidity that their mouths frothed, & as they were all painted white, red & black they looked like so many demoniacs who had been fighting.⁸³

The geological samples Darwin collected here included slate and felspathic rock, both connected with the origin of both the white and red pigments. It therefore seems possible that he acquired the samples of red and white paint from o'run-del'lico or a member of his family sometime during the period 23–27 January 1833. This is supported by the fact that these pigments appear to have been a precious personal commodity,⁸⁴ used as part of a complex visual communications language by individuals within known Yaghan social rules, and with their origins rooted in tribal belief systems.⁸⁵ Darwin was only likely to have collected them from people with whom he had time to develop a relationship. Their value as a coded messaging system was either not known or of no apparent interest to Darwin, who interestingly recorded them as zoological rather than geological specimens, yet subsequently recorded only their chemical composition on analysis undertaken later, presumably once back on board HMS Beagle.

Forty years later, Darwin made a general reference in Descent of Man to ‘savages in many parts of the world paint[ing] their faces with red, blue, white, or black bars’ as part of an argument about sexual selection.⁸⁶ He does not refer specifically to his observations in Tierra del Fuego in this particular reference,⁸⁷ and the way in which this text is written suggests that he is drawing on the knowledge received from others as well as later interpretation of his personal experiences. However, it seems probable that his interest in collecting these rare ethnographic specimens related to his curiosity in 1833 about physical and mental characteristics of human animal behaviour. A detailed study of how the ‘collected’ in Tierra del Fuego was recollected by Darwin in subsequent years as he developed his ideas about natural and sexual selection, particularly in Descent of Man, is not the focus of the present work and deserves to be the subject of a paper in its entirety.

On 28 January, relations seemed reasonably calm with the local Yaghan people, and FitzRoy took Darwin and others on an expedition to survey the northwest arm of the Beagle Channel, leaving Matthews and his local companions behind, for the time being at least.⁸⁸ Darwin's collection of specimens travelled with him, awaiting other acquisitions to join them from this next phase of the journey.

Concluding remarks

This deep dive into a moment in Darwin's famous five-year collecting journey provides an insight into the multi-sensory entanglement of encounter with people and place involved in the collecting process. It helps us understand better the experiences and field laboratory conditions that shaped what was collected and brought back to England, and the personal memories and observations associated with these collections that sowed the seeds for Darwin's later work on the origin of species. The ambition now is to further develop and apply the methodology outlined in this paper to map the complete multi-sensory collecting journeys of Darwin and Wallace, and to deep dive into further key moments of interest. Ideally, this would include the digital mapping of these collecting journeys and associated specimens onto a virtual earth platform, and inviting local communities today to share their voices.

The methodology may also shed new light on the activities of other imperial collectors of the nineteenth century, inspired by the Enlightenment collecting of Sir Joseph Banks and his companions, and made possible by the British naval empire. These explorers and visionaries helped build a world collections database in Victorian Britain that played a unique role in the rise of transformational thinking about nature, evolution and global world order by the late nineteenth century. This database now sits in our museums and deserves much greater research attention as a rich vein of evidence for the development of scientific thought.

Funding

This research was the subject of a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant-funded project entitled Collecting Natural Selection, which set out to develop a methodology of collecting analysis through delivery of a pilot study.