On the Brink of the Unfathomable

In late December 1835 the survey ship HMS Beagle spent nine days at the Bay of Islands during a (nearly) five-year circumnavigation of the earth. Expedition naturalist, 26-year-old Charles Darwin (1809–1882), was not impressed, confiding in his journal: ‘I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place.’¹ Ten months later and back in England, he began work on what has been acclaimed ‘the single best idea anyone has ever had’,² the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s big idea was revealed in On the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Presenting a stern challenge to prevailing beliefs, it introduced the concept of the ‘survival of the fittest’. Voted (in 2015) the most influential academic book ever written,³ On the Origin of Species made several references to New Zealand; the sixth edition of 1872 mentioned its extinct birds, glaciers and flowering plants, and noted that the endemic flora and fauna was ‘rapidly yielding’ to introductions from Europe.⁴

An early response to Darwin in New Zealand was that natural selection was hardly news to sheep breeders, who had been using the principle for years.⁵ On the Origin of Species soon came to the attention of Samuel Butler, who had arrived in Canterbury from England in January 1860. The son of a rector, he now rejected Christianity and took up Darwin ‘on the rebound’.⁶ His conversion resulted in a series of articles, the first appearing in the Canterbury in December 1862. But Butler would soon turn against Darwinism, unable to accept that the present state of life on earth had come about ‘without any specially creative effort of an overruling mind’. After four and a half years in Canterbury he returned to Britain, where he studied art and, in 1872, published his anti-utopian and anti-Darwin novel . The following year he produced a self-portrait in which he appeared to be brooding, perhaps over the direction of his paintingwhich he shortly abandoned for writingor the implications of Darwinism.