Books: How the Beagle Sank the Ark

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DARWIN AND THE BEAGLE by Alan Moorehead. Illustrated. 280 pages. Harper & Row. $15.

Any pleasant Sunday afternoon aboard H.M.S. Beagle, outward bound from Plymouth in 1831 on a scientific voyage around the world, Robert FitzRoy, her captain, would entertain his officers with readings from the Bible. A painting of such an event is one of the illustrations in Alan Moorehead's book. Depicted as a drab civilian among the scarlet naval persons present, the ship's naturalist, Charles Darwin, also clutches a Bible. The Beagle's Bibles contained an annotation dictated by the Anglican Archbishop Ussher, firmly stating that the Creation began promptly at 9 a.m., Oct. 23, 4004 B.C. After a five-year voyage, Darwin would show that the bishop could have been wrong by God alone knew how many million years. The Beagle (242 tons) would sink the Ark (of unknown displacement), and Darwin would write a new Book o[ Genesis called On the Origin of Species.

Half Child, Half Sage. At the outset, it seemed that only luck could have chosen Darwin for his job aboard the Beagle. The fox-hunting son of a prosperous Shrewsbury doctor, the young man proved a dud at school and at Cambridge. At 22, he seemed destined for what Victorians frankly called "a living" in the church. Only a chance friendship with the Rev. Professor J. S. Henslow of Cambridge, a botanist, led to Darwin's recommendation as the Beagle's naturalist. Chance, plus a certain amount of charm, determined that he hit it off immediately with the Beagle's hot-tempered Captain FitzRoy, a Tory traditionalist with a fundamentalist belief in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis.

Once aboard, Darwin proved immensely industrious. He climbed volcanoes and was shaken by earthquakes. He brooded upon such things as the social organization of army ants. He learned that the Fuegians ate their women in a hard winter (instead of their dogs, which could catch otter). Like a great artist, he was half child, half sage. Nothing, from tiny bugs to the giant fossilized Megatherium, was too small or great to stir his delight. He saw not only the kinship of beasts with man but the kinship of man with the beasts.

Splendor and Doubf. Doubt dawned slowly upon the incipient country parson. "At last gleams of light have come," he wrote, "and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable."