Earth Islands: Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos

In the fall of 1842, Charles and Emma Darwin plucked their family from the crowded environs of London and moved sixteen miles southwest to the village of Down, in Kent. "I shall become a Kentish hog," Darwin told his scientific friends, with great satisfaction. The new home was a rambling vic arage, a bit "oldish & ugly," Darwin noted, but it had a large well-treed yard and nearby fields that led to open walks on the Northern Downs. In Kent and Sussex, a down (from Old English dun, hill) is a dune composed of chalk, a fine-grained limestone that crushes easily. Once covered with old-growth forest, the Downs were later cleared for farming; Darwin's new landscape was lightly fringed with trees, but as smooth and rolUng as any summer sea. An American visitor today might recall the prairies, with greater elevation, or the "palouse" country of buried dunes along the Idaho-Oregon border. At sunrise and sunset the backUt Downs most resemble islands, each mounded slope a gray tumulus in the green English countryside. On the ground floor of Down House, Darwin set up a large study to hold his papers and collections, then began to write about his globe-circling voy age on the HMS Beagle in 1831-36. A man of routine habits and chronic indigestion, he soon estabUshed a daily ritual. After breakfast he walked through a back garden and across a pasture, planted in hay or clover. His journey followed a path, known as "the sand walk," that wound up and over the Downs, then descended through thick woods, before returning to Down House along a hedge-lined field. A single 40-minute circuit passed through varying scenes, from open and cultivated to tangled and wild, rising to a prospect of country before descending to the snug confines of garden and desk. The purpose of this rite was to obtain exercise, to settle his dyspepsia (a problem ever since the Beagle voyage), and to ponder the day's writing. Dar win called his route "my thinking path," and it clearly stimulated his mind.