Jan 29– From The Voyage of The Beagle by Charles Darwin (1839)
Summary: The Beagle visits Terra de Fuego. Darwin tells us about how goofy he thinks the natives are, and describes the land.
Commentary: I just wrote about how I wonder if Eliot could've stuck a little closer with theming/organization. Origin of Species and The Voyage of The Beagle are both in T5FSOB. They're 18 volumes apart. I thought maybe they were grouped somehow, like OoS in science and TVoTB in travel or something, but no.
I was pretty excited when I drew this one for today. I have a few friends who would, if they were 19th century aristocrats, love to be "naturalists," so I'm hoping this gives us something interesting to talk about next time we grab a beer. Second, I don't I've read more than a paragraph of Darwin. I feel like he's sufficiently important that I should've. I've read Marx, Einstein, Rosseau, any number of other famous science and/or philosophy guys.
This exists, if you're looking for more daily reading fun.
Darwin's pretty euro-supremacist. For the sake of illustration, "Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world." I think I look on my cat with more humanity than Darwin looks at the Fuegians. That's probably the second worst part, next to the captain kidnapping people to try to civilize them.
He does have a certain eye for detail and knack for storytelling though. "Tierra del Fuego may be described as a mountainous land, partly submerged in the sea, so that deep inlets and bays occupy the place where valleys should exist." Awesome way to describe a mountainous island. He does a great job of peppering little anecdotes without getting sidetracked. The fact that he treats the environment as so totally alien, while gross in describing the people, does give us some cool fantasy-worldbuilding-type details about things like piles of mossy seashells that mark migration sites.
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