Ten years later, another Englishman, the naturalist Charles Darwin, spent five weeks in the archipelago as part of his five-year journey of exploration and scientific discovery aboard HMS Beagle. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote. “A broken field of black, basaltic lava… crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sunburned brushwood… the many craters vividly remind me of parts of Staffordshire, where the great iron foundries are most numerous.”

Notwithstanding those bleak first impressions Darwin found the islands “infinitely strange, unlike any other islands in the world.” And he recorded that the natural history of the archipelago was “very remarkable: it seems to be a little word within itself; the greater number of its inhabitants, both vegetable and animal being found nowhere else.”

Despite intense heat and a shortage of drinking water, Darwin worked hard at collecting his specimens. Only later, during the years he spent examining his collection on his return to England, did he recognize the full significance of his work. He noted important differences between similar species collected on different islands, particularly in the shapes of the beaks of finches. He concluded that over the millennia, the finches had adapted to the varying conditions of the islands. One type of finch would have thick beaks for cracking nuts, for example, while another would be adapted for pecking at fruit or, and yet another finch used twigs to dig insects from the bark of flowers trees.

These and other observations eventually led Darwin to his theory that man had evolved from apes, in direct contradiction to the accepted ideas of divine creation. Darwin set forth his views in his controversial book, On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection, which he published in 1859, nearly 25 years after his visit to the Galapagos Islands. The first edition of 1,250 copies sold out on the day of issue. Darwin’s theory that our human ancestors had emerged from primordial slime stimulated the most vigorous intellectual debate of the 19th century.

|Article contributed by Dominic Hamilton|||

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