‘AN INSTINCT FOR TRUTH’: DARWIN ON GALAPAGOS RICHARD LANSDOWN I just read Darwin’s Beagle again — he dried himself — and tant de bruit pour des insectes! — But I like the book. D. H. Lawrence to Aldous Huxley , November 1927 Every island in the Pacific is different; every one has its claim on our attent- ion. But as far as the Western world is concerned four islands or island groups beat the others into relative obscurity. Easter Island is one, with its enigmatic statues and mysterious indigenous population, long since mas- sacred or dragged off to slavery in Peru. Hawai’i is another, with its Elvis Presley associations, its shirts, surfboards, hula-hula girls, and other such attractions. But those mighty opposites in terms of physical attraction, Tahiti and the Galapagos, have made a deeper intellectual impact than either Easter Island or Hawai’i. After its discovery by Samuel Wallis in 1767, Tahiti appeared to illustrate Rousseau’s principle of the noble savage and thus to redefine that which is natural in man. Galapagos, in providing a key set of spurs to Darwin’s thinking between 1835 and 1845, helped the great Victorian redefine that same question once more, though from a biological point of view rather than a cultural one. Even before arriving in the Galapagos Darwin was aware of the promise they held out to him — though typically he misplaced it to some degree. ‘I am very anxious for the Galapagos Islands,’ he wrote to his sister Caroline from Lima: ‘I think both the Geology & Zoology cannot fail to be very interesting’. ‘I look forward to the Galapagos,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘with more interest than any other part of the voyage. — They abound with active Volcanoes & I should hope contain Tertiary strata.’ As it happened Galapagos presented little of volcanic or Tertiary interest, and the zoology stole the show. 1 There are four general questions surrounding Darwin and the Galapagos that I should advert to before I offer what is essentially a literary-critical account of the Galapagos chapter of the book we now know as The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’. First, there is the whole question of the paradoxical centrality of islands to nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. Quite soon after the Beagle trip began Darwin was bowled over by St Jago, for example: one of the Cape Verde islands in the equatorial Atlantic off West Africa. This was his first experience of tropical biological luxuriance (‘a perfect hurricane of delight & astonishment’ was the expression he used). 2 He was also very struck by the Cocos Islands of the Indian ocean, which confirmed his thinking (essentially correct as it has turned out) about the origins of coral atolls, which had been a mystery to Victorian science. Then again, he was specially inspired by the great contrast between the biologies of two archipelagos (the Galapagos and the Cape Verde groups) which were similar in terms of their climate and geology. This contrast helped lead him to the belief that animal species