For a sensitive young man, fresh from Christ’s College, that was disturbing. At Bahía Blanca, Argentina, gauchos told him of their extermination of the Pampas “Indians.” Beneath the veneer of human civility, genocide seemed the rule on the frontier, a conclusion reinforced by Darwin’s meeting with General Juan Manuel de Rosas and his “villainous Banditti-like army,” in charge of eradicating the natives. On the River Plate ( Río de la Plata) in July 1832, he found Montevideo, Uruguay, in a state of rebellion and joined armed sailors to retake the rebel-held fort. He would later consider that evidence against the beneficent design of nature.
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For Darwin, so often alone, the tropical forests seemed to compensate for human evils: months were spent in Rio de Janeiro amid that shimmering tropical splendour, full of “gaily-coloured” flatworms, and the collector himself became “red-hot with Spiders.” But nature had its own evils, and Darwin always remembered with a shudder the parasitic ichneumon wasp, which stored caterpillars to be eaten alive by its grubs. At Salvador de Bahia (now Salvador), Brazil, the luxuriance of the rainforest left Darwin’s mind in “a chaos of delight.” But that mind, with its Wedgwood-abolitionist characteristics, was revolted by the local slavery.
On the Cape Verde Islands (January 1832), the sailor saw bands of oyster shells running through local rocks, suggesting that Lyell was right in his geologic speculations and that the land was rising in places, falling in others. And so was his questioning: on calm days Darwin’s plankton-filled townet left him wondering why beautiful creatures teemed in the ocean’s vastness, where no human could appreciate them. The hardship was immediate: a tormenting seasickness. As a result, he spent only 18 months of the voyage aboard the ship. As a gentleman naturalist, he could leave the ship for extended periods, pursuing his own interests. Five years of physical hardship and mental rigour, imprisoned within a ship’s walls, offset by wide-open opportunities in the Brazilian jungles and the Andes Mountains, were to give Darwin a new seriousness. The circumnavigation of the globe would be the making of the 22-year-old Darwin.
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