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Volume 3: A blow of destiny, the king appears Chapter 68: Journey to the Beagle

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    After they stayed at Cape Verde and crossed the equator, Darwin received a shaving ceremony - his face was wiped with paint and tar, then shaved clean, and then pressed into a sail filled with seawater. This is a ceremony that new crew members must accept.  />

    A gust of trade winds carried the Beagle to Brazil, anchored in Bahia, and Darwin landed in El Salvador.  He walked among the forests and was intoxicated by the beauty here, confirming Humboldt's description.

    He wrote in his diary: No one can imagine a scene as beautiful as the ancient town of Bahia. It is completely embraced by a dense forest of beautiful trees. It is located on the cliff coast, overlooking the wide Bay of All Saints.  The quiet water in the middle It is one of the most beautiful scenery in Brazil.

    But no one but one who has experienced it can understand the utter joy one feels in walking among such flowers and such trees.

    When we got back to town the carnival was going on.  All the hard work was done by black people. Tory Fitzroy thought this was very reasonable. He said that he once asked a slave owner. The man asked his slaves whether they were dissatisfied with the status quo and whether they demanded freedom. The slaves replied  No.

    Darwin, who tended to be a Whig, couldn't stand it and believed that the slaves should be emancipated. What the slaves said in front of the slave owners was meaningless. The captain was angered and walked away.

    Fitzroy later apologized to Darwin and the two reconciled.  Darwin dined with Fitzroy in the captain's cabin, and gained the respect of his traveling companions. The young men began to call him sir, and the officers called him the dear old philosopher, our flycatcher.

    The Beagle sailed south along the coast again, and after surveying near the Abrolhos Islands, arrived in Rio de Janeiro.  He received letters from his family and learned that his sister Charlotte had married a parish priest and that his former girlfriend Fanny also married a wealthy man in March.

    Darwin felt sad for Fanny.  Into the outback journey.  One of the traveling companions was a slave owner. Although he was very friendly to Darwin, he was prepared to break up 30 slave families and auction them off. This behavior made Darwin once again filled with righteous indignation.

    He came to Botafugu and when he landed, he found that his books, instruments and firearms were all soaked in the water due to the waves, so he had to spend a day to deal with them.

    The Beagle went to Bahia to check its longitude, but there was no news for several weeks.  Darwin stayed there and was busy catching prey and making specimens. At night, he wrote letters to Henslow, Fox and others.

    When the Beagle returned home again, new cannons were installed on the ship. Three crew members, including Masters, fell ill and died, and McCormick also resigned and returned home.  Attended the service aboard the HMS Battleship.

    The Beagle left the tropics and continued south.  Sailing into the Gulf of La Plata, Darwin landed in Montevideo the next day.  He made specimens of some of the beetles he collected in the outer suburbs, and sent some back home, and the most important ones to Henslowe.

    The Beagle sailed away from La Plata to survey the coast, but encountered stormy weather and the anchor broke twice.  Their ship finally sailed into the port of Blanca.  There Fitzroy met Harrison, the unposterized sailing ship owner, who guided the Beagle to a safe anchorage.

    Darwin went upstream and met the Gaucho people for the first time.  While hunting, he tasted novel delicacies such as American ostriches, armadillos, and agouti.

    In search of Alta Plateau.  He found the fossils of some huge extinct mammals.  Another mandible was brought back, which he believed belonged to a pre-Diluvial ground otter.

    The Beagle returned to Montevideo again, and Fitzroy was preparing to send three Tierra del Fuego men and an Englishman to missionary work in Tierra del Fuego.

    The naval exploration ship Beagle (also translated as Beagle) conducted exploration activities for five years (1831-1836).  During this period Darwin spent two-thirds of his time on land.

    He carefully recorded a large number of geographical phenomena, fossils, and organisms, and systematically collected many specimens.  Many of them are species new to science.

    From time to time, he sent specimens collected during these voyages and letters recording these discoveries to Cambridge University, and he soon became a well-known naturalist.  Darwin's detailed exploration records showed the amazing talent of a theoretical pioneer and became the theoretical basis of his later works.

    The travel notes he originally wrote for his family were later published in the book "The Voyage of the Beagle", which described and summarized the customs and customs of the indigenous and colonial places he visited in detail from the perspectives of sociology, politics, and anthropology.  .

    During the voyage, Darwin suffered from severe illnesses.  Got a bad fever in Argentina.  On the way back to Valpara¨ªso from the Andes, he collapsed again and spent a month in bed.

    Before they set out, Robert Fitzroy gave Darwin a volume of Charles Ryle's Principles of Geology (in South Africa).??He gets Volume 2).  The book explains landforms as the result of gradual evolution over a long period of time.

    When he arrived at Cape Verde in Santiago on the first leg of his journey, Darwin noticed that there were many exposed coral and shell fragments in a white sedimentary layer high on the volcanic cliffs.

    This explained Lyell's theory well and gave Darwin a new perspective on the geological history of islands, leading him to decide to write a book about geology.

    Darwin made further discoveries on the rest of his journey, many of them dramatic.  In Patagonia, he saw boulders and seashell plains rising up from the sea, which were actually raised beaches.

    After experiencing an earthquake in Chile, he discovered that mussel beds were stranded high above the tide, indicating that the land had been lifted.

    High in the Andes, he found fossilized trees standing on a beach surrounded by seashell patches.  After the Beagle explored the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, he deduced that these coral rings were formed on sinking volcanoes.

    In South America, Darwin discovered and excavated the fossils of some extinct giant mammals, quite a few of which were not in geological layers showing signs of dramatic weather changes and disasters.

    And the skull of an animal looked to him like that of an African rhinoceros.  In addition, he judged that some of the animal carapace came from a prehistoric giant armadillo that was two to three times the size of a common armadillo in the area, but he was misled into believing that it was part of the remains of the genus Geosloth found nearby.

    In Ryle's second volume, the creation of all things is reduced to this, which puzzled Darwin, who was already ahead of his time.

    The three Indians (Native Americans) brought by the Beagle when it came to Tierra del Fuego were sent back to their hometown and then became missionaries.

    During their two years in the UK, they received traditional British education and entered a familiar civilized society. However, their relatives had no hope for Darwin and were an insult to mankind.

    A year later, the missionary mission was forgotten by them. Only Jamie Barton told them that he would rather live the difficult life before than return to England.

    Because of this incident, Darwin reconsidered humans. He concluded that although humans are higher animals, the nature of animals has never been lost as his friends said, and he understood that the evolution of every civilization is  Different, not determined by race.

    When he saw the atrocities committed by European settlers on indigenous people in South America, New Zealand and Australia, he strongly opposed slavery and felt sad for these barbaric acts.

    Captain Fitzroy had been writing the official diary of the Beagle's journey, and at the end of the trip he read Darwin's diary and asked him to rewrite it for the third volume of Natural History.

    Darwin¡¯s family tended not to follow the Church of England at that time. His grandfather, father and brothers were all free thinkers.  Against this background, Darwin still believed in the Bible as a child, and even later studied theology at Cambridge University and became a priest.

    At this time, he believed in a set of "Teleological Proofs" that used the mysteries of nature to prove the existence of God.  Later, during his voyage on the Beagle, Darwin realized that there are many different species in the world, and the characteristics and habits of these species cannot be explained by the Bible.

    For example, there is a wasp that paralyzes caterpillars and lays eggs in their bodies. The eggs turn into parasites and kill the host. This behavior is believed to contradict the teaching of "Teleological Demonstration" that nature is a manifestation of God's goodwill.

    Even so, Darwin still cited the Bible as moral authority, but criticized some historical statements in the Old Testament.

    When Darwin studied the evolution of species, the social implications of the ruthless behavior of species were often viewed by nonconformists and atheists as a means of attacking the theories of the Church of England.

    Darwin even believed that religious belief was actually a survival strategy for biological groups, although at this time he still believed that God was the ultimate maker of natural laws.

    After the death of his daughter Anne in 1851, Darwin's faith waned and he became more skeptical.  At this time, although he continued to assist in some church affairs, he no longer attended church on Sundays.

    He tends to believe that pain is a law of nature rather than a test of God.  When he was asked about his religious orientation, he noted that he had never been an atheist, but that agnosticism was a more accurate description of his mind.

    Darwin also stated in his autobiography that the authenticity of the Gospels was doubtful and that he did not have sufficient evidence to believe that Christianity was the doctrine of God.
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