Charles Darwin’s four-year naturalist expedition on the HMS Beagle took him to South America, the Galapagos, across the Pacific, Australia and back to South America. Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle is almost strictly a naturalist’s diary. Very little of the journal is devoted to telling stories unless they illustrate a natural phenomena; there is no overarching narrative and very little can be gathered of his fellow sailors.
Darwin was indeed interested in people however and the Voyage is as much an anthropological study as it is a geological or biological one. Descriptions and impressions of natives in different parts of the world are some of the richest parts of the Voyage, particularly his experiences with the “filthy”, aggressive New Zealanders.
But Darwin reserved his most passionate commentary on contemporary humanity for the last pages of his book. The Beagle briefly returned to Brazil “to complete the chronometrical measurement of the world” before sailing home to England. Darwin tells the story of his visit mostly through his “enjoyment in tropical scenery” then departs with some words on slavery.
On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have stayed in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. These latter cruelties were witnessed by me in a Spanish colony, in which it has always been said, that slaves are better treated than by the Portuguese, English, or other European nations. I have seen at Rio de Janeiro a powerful negro afraid to ward off a blow directed, as he thought, at his face. I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of;—nor would I have mentioned the above revolting details, had I not met with several people, so blinded by the constitutional gaiety of the negro as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil. Such people have generally visited at the houses of the upper classes, where the. domestic slaves are usually well treated; and they have not, like myself, lived amongst the lower classes. Such inquirers will ask slaves about their condition; they forget that the slave must indeed be dull, who does not calculate on the chance of his answer reaching his master’s ears.
It is argued that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters. It is an argument long since protested against with noble feeling, and strikingly exemplified, by the ever-illustrious Humboldt. It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.
It may seem at first to be a striking departure for a naturalist to exclaim on slavery but these are hardly separate issues for Darwin (as could be said for Henry David Thoreau, intimate with Darwin’s writings). In the Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin avoids broad conclusions on biological and geological forces but the holistic view of the world that will later contribute to his theory of evolution is already evident.
Darwin, as a geologist, was considerably interested in the forces of the Earth on the landscapes he visited: the mountains of Chile, inland deserts of Australia and Pacific atolls for example. When Darwin looked at a rock formation, he considered the powers that molded it. But he looked at a bird in the same way, considering the slower, more patient forces behind its shape and color… like a rock.
Similarly, through Darwin’s periscope, slavery serves to make a point about what he has observed in nature. Slavery, serving as a perfect example of human cruelty, is a unique phenomenon in nature. Nowhere in his voyage did Darwin witness cruelty except when encountering humans. Darwin understood better than anyone in his time how brutal nature was but it was not cruel. To abolish slavery, particularly in the Americas, was to bring humankind more in line with the laws of nature he observed in his trip around the world.
