Nostalgia and the Voyage of the Beagle

Abstract

On 27 December 1832, when the H.M.S. Beagle set sail from Devonport, Darwin embarked upon a voyage that took him away from England for nearly five years. As those familiar with the voyage’s particulars know, the ocean passage was not always smooth. Darwin suffered from seasickness. No matter how frequently he willed himself to endure the rougher weather, to center his thoughts on the future and honor his ‘ambition to take a fair place among scientific men’, and no matter how his poetic sensibility esteemed the sea’s grandeur, he could not gain his sea legs.¹ Despairing, he occasionally kept to his hammock and complained to his mentor John Henslow that he was ‘sea-sick & miserablé .² Worst of all, his discomfort exacerbated his longing for home; it intensified a nostalgia that, although not continuous, was more tenacious than his physical distress.³ He yearned for his family, his friends, Shrewsbury, Cambridge, and ‘long-past happy days’ not only when the waves advanced but also when they receded and the sea lay calm and luminous beneath tropical skies.⁴ Moreover, he longed for them on land when he rode through the plains and into the primeval forest. There his ‘former home’ seemed far away.

Forgetfulness, by rolling my memories along in its tide, has done more that merely wear them down or consign them to oblivion. The profound structure it has created out of the fragments allows me to achieve a more stable equilibrium, and to see a clearer pattern.

C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

(New York: Atheneum, 1974) pp. 43–4