The Evolution of the Beagle

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A Dear Darwin Memo

Reading the birth or racism abetted by science made keeps me thinking about a class (Todd Butler’s TransAtlantic Lit. ) looking at early English voyages to the New World. We read a Thomas Harriot’s quasi-scientific book written about 1590 about a trip to an area they were calling “Virginia,” which is raising some issues when confronted with the themes and historical patterns we have read about in this class. What I’m talking about is how the scientific (curious and serious) and economic purposes (plantations, transplanting exotic species in Europe) gets fused with the cultural milieu, and ultimately forces those same headlong pursuits to a showdown over Christian genesis and teleology. Thomas Harriot and many others portrayed the Indians of Roanoke Virginia as the children before the Fall, and the book that resulted does attempt an admirable scientific bent, with descriptions of villages, plants, the social and other practices of the Roanoke Indians as well. Overall, it is a poorly funded venture and a naturalist/economic expose. It is practically an advertisement. The book with engravings (modeled by fairly accurate naturalistic drawings by a guy named John White?) softened the features of nearly everything. The villages were pristine and orderly, the Indians were transformed into Greeks, with unnatural poses and long curling locks about their Europeanized faces. It is remarkable, and it appears to be both the need to show the English that it was safe to venture to the Northern portions of the Americas (above the cannibals the Spanish encountered), and it spoke to the belief in the one-time creation of the Bible. At what point did the Biblical, or Golden Age, Inhabitant of the New World become a racialized being?
Somehow it would be fun to connect the early views of the new world peoples with the formation we start to see crystallizing in Darwin. I’m not sure how much Darwin draws upon Blumenbach, but it does seem that his “truth” of evolutionary processes did help spread that scientific glaze over racial identity. The idea of progress is a strong feature of linear European ways and calendars. Who can deny that things have progressed in so much that Cook, Humboldt, or Darwin could easily see the technological and cultural differences (better!) that clearly showed the new world peoples (new to Europeans that is) to be in the early stages of becoming more European. Darwin, unlike so many others came to see and record (he was not seller of wares and travel brochures) but he did manage to somehow build a scientific fiefdom to scrape the cream off the luscious lands he encountered with his brutally eloquent theory. The persistence of Social Darwinism might be the touchstone to how the economic, scientific, and teleological join forces to make something as forcefully true as Darwin’s theory something equally false, and forcefully so.