by ELIZABETH PRESTON
It’s always a good idea to bring reading material on your trips, whether you plan to have some airport downtime or you’re spending five years floating on the ocean. When Charles Darwin departed in 1831 for his trip around the world on the HMS Beagle, he had a well-stocked library. But the collection wasn’t saved, and neither was the catalogue listing the titles.
The team behind Darwin Online, led by John van Wyhe, has been working to recreate that library. They painstakingly worked backward from comments and citations in Darwin’s notebooks, which were sometimes brief and cryptic (“Ellis horse story,” read one). Now they’ve reconstructed the Beagle library as completely as possible. It’s an online collection of 404 volumes, which all of us in the 21st century can peruse from the comfort of solid ground.
The library is heavy on atlases and travel narratives and light on fiction (I hope you like Paradise Lost). Here are a few critical pieces of 19th-century knowledge I uncovered there:
Where to hunt whales
“On penetrating a body of open ice encompassing the Headland, we saw a whale, and pursued it with all our boats, but without success. From hence we steered to the westward, and found the ice, which was very compact when we passed it on the 21st of the month, now loose and navigable. … On the 28th of May, in latitude 80° 8?, longitude 0° 40? E., we met with whales so numerous, that, in the course of a month, we succeeded in capturing twenty-four of the species. These, with two seals, two sea-horses, two bears, and one narwhale, afforded an excellent cargo*.
* The whole produced upwards of 216 tons of oil.”
That comes from An account of the Arctic regions, with a history and description of the northern whale-fishery, written by William Scoresby in 1820.
Because William Scoresby was not the only person pulling in excellent cargos of marine mammals, they are not quite “so numerous” today. And it’s not legal to commercially hunt any of them. Commercial hunting of walruses—which Scoresbey called “sea-horses”—isn’t allowed either, so I won’t be able to put my new knowledge to use.
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