On Christmas Day 1866, Bartholomew Sulivan sat down to write a typically long and chatty letter to his old friend, Charles Darwin, commiserating on shared ill-health, glorying in the achievements of their children, offering to collect plant specimens, and reminiscing about their time together on board HMS Beagle:
Mary Treat was a naturalist from New Jersey who made significant contributions to the fields of entomolgy and botany. Over the period 1871–1876, she exchanged fifteen letters with Darwin- more than any other woman naturalist.
Alexander Burns Usborne was born in Kendal, Westmorland, in 1808, the son of Alexander and Margaret Usborne; his father died in 1818 and in his will was described as the purser on HMS Hannibal. His son joined the navy in 1825 aged 16 as a second-class volunteer; by 1831 he was a master’s assistant. Later that year he was appointed to the Beagle, becoming assistant surveyor in 1833; Mount Usborne, the highest point in the Falkland Islands, was named after him. During the voyage he commanded a small schooner, the Constitucion, to survey the coast of Peru, 1835–6.
Wallace was a leading Victorian naturalist, with wide-ranging interests from biogeography and evolutionary theory to spiritualism and politics. He was born in 1823 in Usk, a small town in south-east Wales, and attended a grammar school in Hertford. At the age of 13, he was forced to leave school and enter a trade because of financial hardship. He joined an older brother in London as a builder’s apprentice, and the following year started work as a land surveyor with another brother, travelling to different parts of England and Wales and collecting plants.
George Waterhouse was born on 6 March 1810 in Somers Town, North London. His father was a solicitor’s clerk and an amateur lepidopterist. George was educated from 1821-24 at Koekelberg near Brussels. On his return he worked for a time as an apprentice to an architect, but his self-taught knowledge in natural history won out.
Hensleigh Wedgwood, Emma Darwin’s brother and Charles’s cousin, was a philologist, barrister and original member of the Philological Society, which had been created in 1842. In 1857, while Wedgwood was preparing a dictionary of English etymology, he wrote to Darwin suggesting that the common origin of the French “chef” and the English “head” and “bishop” illustrated the parallels between extinct and transitional forms in language and palaeontology.
Charles Darwin’s readership largely consisted of other well-educated Victorian men, nonetheless, some women did read, review, and respond to Darwin’s work. One of these women was Darwin’s own niece, Julia Wedgwood, known in the family as “Snow”. In July 1861 Wedgwood published a review of Origin entitled “The Boundaries of Science” in Macmillan’s Magazine. As a family member and one of the few female reviewers of Darwin’s work, Wedgwood’s review merits further exploration.
Born in Liverpool in 1808, Charles Thomas Whitley, like Darwin, attended Shrewsbury School and then Cambridge University where they were clearly very close, exchanging letters during the summer holidays. Whitley was a mathematician, a subject that held very little interest for the young Darwin; what they had in common was a taste for long country walks, which in later years Darwin often mentioned nostalgically. Whitley encouraged a taste for art in Darwin, sharing his own collection of engravings and encouraging visits to the Fitzwilliam Museum (Autobiography p. 61).
William Yarrell was a London businessman, a stationer and bookseller, who became an expert on British birds and fish, writing standard reference works on both. He was a member of several science and natural history societies, including the Linnean Society, and was a founder member of both the Zoological Society of London and the Entomological Society of London.
Fuegia Basket 1833 from 'Fuegians' in The narrative of the voyages of H.M. Ships Adventure and Beagle. Vol.2. FitzRoy, R. 1839. Proceedings of the second expedition, 1831-36. 'Fuegians' [plate] pp.324-325
Yokcushlu was one of the Alakaluf, or canoe people from the western part of Tierra del Fuego. She was one of the hostages seized by Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, after the small boat used for surveying the narrow inlets of the coast of Tierra del Fuego had been stolen in 1830. FitzRoy intended to release his captives on return of the boat, but all the hostages managed to escape except for three children. FitzRoy kept only nine-year-old Yokcushlu hostage because she seemed so happy and healthy, and he wished to teach her English.
