Marco Giancotti , January 1, 2026 Cover image: The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, painted by Spiridione Roma for the boardroom of the British East India Company (CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
This is the third installment in a series of curated quote collections I've gathered while reading Darwin's famous travel book. You can also read episode 1 and episode 2.
If you've read the previous two posts, you might have formed the impression that Charles Darwin's voyage aboard the HMS Beagle was all adventure and levity. In this episode, I want to temper that impression a little. After all, if you want a three-dimensional picture of someone, you need some dark spots to create contrast.
TL;DR: Darwin in many ways represented the best English society of the 1830's had to offer—smart, good-hearted, well-educated, and a fervent science-lover—but he was very much not free of the worse features of that same culture.
The period of the late 18th and early 19th century was a time of deep contradictions—that is, only a little more so than most other times. The Enlightenment had brought forth the birth of modern science and some new moral values that are still foundational today. Political upheavals were paving the way for the spread of democracy. Technology was accelerating fast and transforming society. All of these things were good at a high level, but terribly messy if you look only a little bit closer. I'm not going to write a history lesson here. Let's just say that, in that period, people had begun to see and tackle the deepest systemic problems of their times, but they were not yet ready yet to fully grasp the reach of those problems, nor to commit to complete solutions.
Two prominent examples were the American Declaration of Independence (1776) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789): fantastic intellectual advancements implemented rather poorly and contradictorily. Both proclaimed the equality of all people, but the former was written by slaveholders, the latter denied poor people citizenship, and both failed to give women equal rights.
Darwin's voyage happened half a century after that, but the situation wasn't much better then. From today's perspective, he had a strange mixture of novel insights and antiquated thinking, and this showed up in almost everything he said. For example, he was ahead of his time when it came to (what would later be called) the field of ecology. Inspired by his idol and precursor Alexander von Humboldt, he was able to see Nature as a dynamic, deeply interconnected web of delicate relations—something you can't say of most of his conteporaries.
He understood the risks of invasive species, and saw natural resources as finite and endangered by human interference.
A few years since this country [Australia] abounded with wild animals; but now the emu is banished to a long distance, and the kangaroo is become scarce; to both the English greyhound has been highly destructive. It may be long before these animals are altogether exterminated, but their doom is fixed. — Voyage of the Beagle (all quotes below from the same book unless otherwise stated)
(Fortunately he was wrong on both accounts, but many other Australian species weren't so lucky.)
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