by JOSIE GLAUSIUSZ
Racist assumptions are deeply embedded in the cultural fabric of the West. Lurking even in beloved texts where we may not expect to find them, they can easily translate into atrocities.
“Viewing such men, one can hardly make one’s self
believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants
of the same world.” Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
When I proposed to my science writers’ book club that we read Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, I recalled the sense of wonder that the young Darwin expressed as he traversed the world. Hired as the Beagle’s naturalist and just 22 years old when the ship left Plymouth in 1831, Darwin joyfully details his encounters with spiders and butterflies, and birds and mammals such as ostriches and armadillos, some of which he roasted and ate. His five-year-round-the-world voyage helped Darwin formulate some of the ideas that formed the basis of his theory of evolution, published more than twenty years later as On the Origin of Species.
I first read The Voyage of the Beagle back in 2003, in the midst of writing my book, “Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects,” co-authored with photographer Volker Steger. I was particularly struck by a passage in which the great naturalist described how he would clamber onto the backs of giant Galapagos tortoises, and, after “giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away; but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.” I quoted The Voyage of the Beagle in my own book, specifically, an anecdote about a night in Argentina in 1835, when Darwin described an attack by “the great black bug of the Pampas,” a blood-sucking bug which may have transmitted a protozoan parasite causing Chagas’ disease, possibly triggering a mysterious life-long malaise that Darwin endured upon his return home.
But as I read the book a second time this spring, eighteen years later, I felt my own creeping sense of malaise. For some reason I had forgotten Darwin’s encounters with indigenous peoples in South America, whom he describes, variously, as “wild,” “savage,” “cannibals” and “idle”; also “retard[ed] in their civilization,” thanks to their “perfect equality among individuals.” Even though the “civilized” Indians of the tribe of “the Cacique Lucanee” have a “lesser degree of ferocity,” he notes, “it is “almost counterbalanced by their entire immorality.”
To be sure, Darwin’s racist ideas about the savagery and immorality of the “Indians” is tempered with some compassion and discomfort. He describes a massacre of indigenous people, “men, women and children, about one hundred and ten in number,” murdered by “banditti-like soldiers.” “Nearly all [were] taken or killed, for the soldiers sabre every man,” Darwin writes. “This is a dark picture, but how much more shocking is the unquestionable fact, that all the women who appear above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood! When I exclaimed that this appeared rather inhuman [my informer] answered, “Why, what can be done? They breed so.”
But even as Darwin is aghast at this bloodshed, he also seems to equivocate. “Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?” He reassures himself, however: “the children of the Indians are saved, to be sold or given away as servants, or rather slaves for as long a time as the owners can make them believe themselves slaves; but I believe in their treatment there is little to complain of.” (My italics.)
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