Almost immediately, life became unbearable for Matthews, who had ‘no peace by day and very little rest at night’, according to what Darwin heard later. The Fuegians swarmed into his wigwam, and requested everything they saw – ‘Yamershooner’: ‘Give me’ – and when he said no, they took it anyway. One group stayed outside, making a racket to stop Matthews sleeping, while others picked up rocks and threatened to kill him. The three Anglicised Fuegians from the Beagle made no attempt to help when yet another group held the missionary down and ‘teased him by pulling the hair of his face’. There was obviously something about the young man’s whiskers that the Fuegians found comical, even slightly obscene. When, as FitzRoy had promised, a party from the Beagle made its return on 6 February, Matthews was spotted running towards the boats, screaming. As he was pulled on board he gaspingly explained that just five minutes earlier his flock had been plucking out the hairs of his beard one by one, using mussel shells as pincers. ‘I think,’ wrote Darwin that night, ‘we returned just in time to save his life.’
Darwin’s observations on beards – his own and other people’s – were to take root in his thinking and writing over the next forty years. In the books and articles that issued from his study at Down House he would repeatedly test the line that ran between nature and culture, the given and the made. What did it mean, exactly, that the ‘savage’, ‘miserable’, ‘abject’ Fuegians, who seemed at times to be barely human, turned out to have all the prejudices of Home Counties aunts when it came to wispy chins? And why had the returning Fuegians, whom Darwin had been convinced would continue to live as civilised Britons, reverted to their ‘grievous’ ways within months of being repatriated? Thinking more generally, why was it the case that only men had the ability to grow facial hair – at least if you discounted the Fuegians’ assumption that white women routinely sported bushy beards? And to what extent was human hairiness evidence that, far from being crafted in the image of God (another enthusiastic beard-wearer, if you could believe the paintings), man was simply an animal that had found a way of walking on its hind legs?
II
Arriving back in Britain at the beginning of October 1836, Darwin lost no time in sifting through his harvest of plant and fossil specimens before forwarding them to specialists for identification. Especially important here was the material he had gathered from the Galápagos Islands, nineteen tiny volcanic specks of land straddling the Equator, stocked with species that were not found anywhere else in the world. Self-taught ornithologist John Gould got the bird samples, clergyman Leonard Jenyns the fish, while anatomist Richard Owen of the Royal College of Surgeons received the fossil mammals, amongst which were some extraordinary finds. Most spectacular were a rodent the size of a rhinoceros and an armadillo as big as an ox.
By the following March Darwin had moved into rooms at 36 Great Marlborough Street, just off Regent Street, where there was space for himself, his servant and the crates of self-addressed material from the voyage that continued to arrive at Woolwich docks. He spent his days preparing a series of descriptive accounts of his five-year expedition, including The Voyage of the Beagle and the multi-decker Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, to which Jenyns, Owen and Gould would contribute volumes. Although he had received a grant of £1,000 to defray publication costs, thanks to the generosity of the Chancellor of the Exchequer Thomas Spring Rice, this was the last time the twenty-eight-year-old would have to look for financial support from beyond his own family. As an academically disappointing teenager, he had been educated first for medicine (half-heartedly at Edinburgh University) and then for the Church (even more sluggishly at Cambridge), before his father finally acknowledged that Charles’s real talent lay elsewhere, in the natural sciences. Dr Darwin, who had grown wealthy from his secondary career as a genteel moneylender to Shropshire’s first families, now settled on his younger son sufficient capital to produce an annual income of £400. This was enough for a bachelor to get by on, as long as he didn’t develop a sudden mania for women or horses. By this single stroke of luck, Charles Darwin became that most enviable and slightly old-fashioned of creatures, a gentleman of independent means, free to follow his intellectual interests wherever they led.
Just as Darwin was clattering his crates into Great Marlborough Street, workmen digging in nearby Trafalgar Square stumbled across a cache of elephant and tiger fossils. In that jolting moment modern Britain felt both ancient and very strange. This sense that the world was out of joint was magnified a few weeks later when a young girl ascended the throne after 120 years of middle-aged male rule. A propitious moment, then, for Charles Darwin to embark on a programme of enquiry that would end by dislocating the foundations of existence.
It started in a humdrum enough way, with a series of cheap notebooks into which Darwin dashed down his thoughts on the topic of ‘transmutation’. This was the word he used to describe the snail-paced process by which plants and animals developed variations to suit their particular environment, eventually branching off to form entirely new species. Page after page of Philos’s notebook was filled with breathless jottings on pigs, lions, volcanoes, rhododendrons, mountains, pelicans, coral and greyhounds, as he worried away at the question of how animal and plant life had evolved over millennia to fit what he knew from both observation and reading was the earth’s continually shifting crust. Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus had made a start on the topic forty years earlier in his path-finding Zoonomia. The Frenchmen Lamarck and Cuvier had continued to work on the subject from different perspectives during the difficult years of the French Revolution. Now young Charles Darwin of Great Marlborough Street took up the baton, trying to design a model that would make sense of his Beagle samples, as well as account for the data he continued to harvest from the hedgerows and farmyards of Great Britain.
Over the next eighteen months Darwin spent what little free time he had from his cataloguing work letting his mind roam over the big questions. Within weeks of disembarking from the Beagle he had reached the conclusion that species operate without divine agency. In his own mind God was dead, even if it would take decades before he hinted as much to anyone outside his immediate circle. But in that case, what was the mechanism that drove transmutation? And where did that leave Man, who according to Christian teaching was God’s special creation, quite separate from the beasts of the field? From the spring of 1838 Darwin became a frequent visitor to the heated giraffe house at Regent’s Park Zoo, where he spent hours staring at its temporary resident, an orangutan called Jenny. Dressed in human clothes, sulking and skittish by turns, Jenny resembled nothing so much as a hairy, copper-coloured baby. Opening his new maroon notebook Darwin wrote: ‘Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble & I believe true to consider him created from animals.’
Although he liked to describe himself as a hermit, Darwin did allow himself to be tempted out during these months, especially to any social event that was likely to prove professionally useful. It was for this reason that he eventually agreed to serve as Secretary to the Geological Society, which brought him into frequent contact with Charles Lyell, Richard Owen and pretty much every scientific man who mattered. All the same, he was careful to muffle the direction in which his thoughts were tending. Over the previous two hundred years scientists and theologians had attempted to reconcile Christianity with the emerging evidence of the earth’s ancient history. According to this hybrid model of ‘natural theology’, God was a kind of celestial watchmaker: He made the universe and its laws, although not necessarily in the seven days described by Genesis, and then retired to view His work from a great distance.
Darwin’s growing conviction that even this theory gave God too much agency was likely to be