Mar 16– Crabs, Cacao, and Coral from: The Voyage of The Beagle by Charles Darwin (1839)
Summary: Darwin talks about giant freaky crabs, unexplainable coral, and rubbing toxins on his face!
Commentary: Darwin continues to be one of the highlights of this project. 50 percent travel writer, 25 percent thriller (kind of a low tech Michael Crichton), and 25 percent old school fantasy, but better than 90% of the writers in any of those genres.
We start out with a lovely description of sitting on the beach under a coconut tree:
During another day I visited West Islet, on which the vegetation was perhaps more luxuriant than on any other. The cocoa-nut trees generally grow separate, but here the young ones flourished beneath their tall parents, and formed with their long and curved fronds the most shady arbours. Those alone who have tried it, know how delicious it is to be seated in such shade, and drink the cool pleasant fluid of the cocoa-nut.
Sounds very relaxing. I had a professor in my MFA who did travel writing professionally. That's better than anything she ever showed us.
Then we go to crabs.
The crab begins by tearing the husk, fibre by fibre, and always from that end under which the three eyeholes are situated
Did you know crabs this big exist, that they're "only" the third biggest crab (depending on how exactly you measure) and that they can safely ingest toxins, which then makes their own flesh toxic?
One day, however, by merely touching my face with one of the branches, pain was instantaneously caused; it increased as usual after a few seconds, and remaining sharp for some minutes, was perceptible for half an hour afterwards. The sensation was as bad as that from a nettle, but more like that caused by the Physalia or Portuguese man-of-war.
I guess "rub my face on it" was his equivalent of "poke it with a stick." Did Steve Irwin actually poke everything with sticks? I didn't watch much of his show, but it seems like one of those things he did once or twice and then got memed for.
Most of the rest is him going, "Wow, the ocean is big and mysterious! What's up with coral?" in a way that lends itself to some kind of horror fantasy.
Captain Fitz Roy found no bottom with a line 7200 feet in length, at the distance of only 2200 yards from the shore.
bears the stamp of having been subjected to organic arrangement. [...] This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.
The theory that has been most generally received is, that atolls are based on submarine craters
He is trying to disprove that last one, it still lends itself to an overall feel of, "aliens did the coral to xenoform Earth" or something.
on what have the reef-building corals, which cannot live at a great depth, based their massive structures?
A sentence right out of Lovecraft.
If the sea had formerly eaten deeply into the islands, before they were protected by the reefs
Makes coral sound like it's some sort of fae creature fighting the ocean titan.
I would play Darwin: The RPG. I wonder how much of his actual writing you could cram into the campaign setting, bestiary, etc. It'd be pretty cool. You'd play as part of an exploratory voyage (classes: naturalist, captain, sailor...) and they'd only make the horrific monsters maybe 10% weirder than he actually makes them sound.
Surprisingly, I hadn't added him to the reading list yet, but I put him in today. I'll have to see if I can find an annotated version or something. It's one thing to go find pictures of the animals and stuff once every couple weeks when he comes up in this blog, but I don't think I'd want to have to do it manually while reading the whole book. The Digital Voyage of The Beagle would be a cool project. Even if you just dropped a hyperlink to the Wikipedia pages for all the species names it'd be a big help.
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