Hey, it’s Charles.
The two-year voyage has turned into four years and counting. I am not going to talk about the seasickness except to say it has not gotten better and I have accepted that my body simply hates the ocean on a fundamental level.
But I need to tell you what I have been seeing because it is keeping me up at night.
We have spent years stopping at ports along South America, collecting specimens, exploring jungles and coastlines. I have seen things I could never have imagined in Cambridge. Fossils of enormous creatures embedded in cliff faces — animals that clearly do not exist anymore. I found the bones of a giant sloth the size of an elephant. It looked almost exactly like the tiny sloths still living in the same area, just impossibly bigger. Why would a giant version die out and a tiny version of almost the same thing survive in the same place?
I wrote it down and kept moving. But questions like that have been piling up in my notebooks for years.
A few weeks ago we reached a small group of islands in the Pacific called the Galápagos. Volcanic. Harsh, dry, ugly little places covered in black rock and strange creatures that do not seem afraid of people at all. I walked up to a bird yesterday and it just looked at me. These animals have never learned to fear humans because humans have never been here.
And this is where it gets strange.
There are finches on these islands. Small birds, nothing remarkable at first glance. But I have been collecting them from different islands and their beaks are all different. On one island, thick heavy beaks for cracking hard seeds. On another, thin pointed beaks for insects. On another, shaped for pulling grubs out of cactus.
Same bird. Different islands. Different beaks. Perfectly suited to whatever food is available on that specific island.
The tortoises are the same. The governor told me he can look at a shell and tell you exactly which island it came from because they are all slightly different shapes. Islands only a few miles apart and the animals on them have diverged into distinct forms.
I keep staring at my specimens and asking myself a question I am not sure I am allowed to ask. What if these are not different species each individually created for their specific island? What if they were all the same species once, and they changed? What if the environment slowly shaped them over a very long time into exactly what they needed to be to survive?
Because if that is true — if animals change and adapt based on their surroundings over generations — then everything I was taught about how life works is wrong. Everything.
The Church says every species was created perfectly by God and has remained the same since creation. That is not just a religious idea — it is the foundation of how every naturalist in England understands the world.
And I am sitting on a volcanic rock in the middle of the Pacific holding a handful of finches that suggest otherwise.
I have not said any of this out loud to anyone on the ship. The captain is a very religious man and if I told him what I am thinking he would probably throw me overboard, which given my seasickness might actually be a relief.
I am going to collect everything I possibly can from these islands. Every bird, every shell, every plant. I am going to bring it all home and study it properly. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe there is a perfectly simple explanation that does not involve questioning the fundamental nature of life on earth.
But I do not think I am wrong. And that is what scares me.
I will write again once we are back at sea. It has been five years. I left England as a beetle collector with no career. I am not sure what I am coming back as, but I do not think I am the same person.
— Charles
