03.10.2009 - The voyage also coincides with the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and has been on the draw­ing board for over 20 years.  However the technology, in the form for example of satel­lite phones and internet, was not available then to carry out the project in the way it was desired.  Now as part of the bicentennial Darwin cel­ebrations, all the necessary high technology has been employed for the voyage aboard the beautiful Clipper Stad Amsterdam.  They even have a fully equipped editing room aboard.

When the Dutch televi­sion company VPRO first contacted Sarah about eight months ago, she had no hesi­tation in agreeing to be part of the team, “I immediately said yes”.  With two others she is to be co-presenter of a 35 part series, Beagle, on the Future of Species, which retraces Darwin’s original route, revisiting and com­paring the 1830s sites with today.  During a few pre-filming visits it has already become obvious that some areas such as the coast of Brazil are changed beyond recognition, whilst others like a beach in Argentina are much the same today as in her forefather’s times.

The voyage is to take eight months and along the route they will be joined by international scientists, phi­losophers, historians and art­ists, like Christopher Lloyd, James Moore, Redmond O’ Hanlon and Daniel Dennett.  In Tenerife they were joined by University of La Laguna professor of geology, Ramón Casilla, who escorted them on a walk up Mount Teide explaining the origin and formations of the volcanoes.  They stayed overnight at the Altavista refuge, “and what a vista,” exclaimed Sarah.  With no previous experience of this type of work, it is a challenge for her, “but I’m learning fast”. The interna­tional specialists will escort Sarah and the Beagle crew members in an attempt to answer important contem­porary questions, such as: What can we say about the true state of the environ­ment?  What will the Earth’s future, and mankind’s, look like?  This exciting expedi­tion will cross the oceans of the world, take viewers from Brazil to Patagonia, and from the Andes mountain range to the Galapagos Islands. They will sail the Pacific Ocean to Australia and pass through the Cape of Good Hope.

“We’re looking at Darwin’s time around the world and the places he visited, what changes have taken place and then we’re looking at the future of the species, how we are treating our world and how we might be changing it,” explained Sarah.

Important scientific dis­coveries have already been made as a team from the ship made a unique find, before the first episode has aired.  At the inhabited Portuguese island Salvagens Grande, which is situated in between Madeira and Tenerife, sci­entists, professor Dr. Bert Boekschoten of the Vrije University in Amsterdam and Dr. Hanneke Meijer of Naturalis in Leiden, discov­ered a rare and particularly well-preserved fossil egg, dating from 15 million years ago.  “It looked as if a hen had laid it yesterday,” Sarah told us excitedly.

A botanist, who has just completed her PhD (three days before they set sail), Sarah works at the Natural History Museum in London.  She is accompanied by her two young sons, four and six years old, who are having a great adventure, although somewhat amazed at their mum’s sudden media popu­larity, and her husband is due to join her at some point for part of the journey.  “This isn’t at all what the Beagle’s crew had to live like,” she smiled, “this is five star luxury.  We have air conditioning and en suite bathrooms.”  The ship has a professional crew but many of the specialists have also taken part in the various watches and Sarah herself hopes to climb the main mast at least once.

They will be visiting, “pret­ty much” all the places visited by the Beagle, although Tenerife is a plus as Charles Darwin never set foot here.  He was fascinated by the work of scientists of the era such as Alexander von Humboldt, who wrote, “I got back last night from a trip to the peak.  What a fantastic place.  What a time we had.  We climbed down some way into the crater much further than any other previous scientific traveller.”  When Darwin ar­rived in Santa Cruz he wrote in his personal papers, “Oh, misery, misery.  We were just preparing to drop our anchor at Santa Cruz, when a boat ar­rived and told us that we had to have a 12 day quarantine.  You can see what gloom sur­rounded everybody.  Matters were soon decided by the Captain and he ordered the sails to be put up and we set sail for the Cape Verde.”  Sarah confirmed, “he was terribly sad not to have been able to visit Tenerife”.

Inevitably many of the questions from the local press were based around whether or not if Darwin had been able to land here, he would have come to the same conclusions.  Although not an anthropologist, Sarah tried to answer.  She be­lieves that it is possible but it would have been, “much more complicated here”.  The Tenerife flora and fauna has two main sources, Mediterranean and African of which he had little knowledge, but he did have knowledge of the South American spe­cies and the majority of the Galapagos Islands’ plants and birds came originally from the coast of Equador and Peru.

They are going to carry out some anthropological investigations in Australia.  “One of the things that was a trigger for Darwin’s thoughts on evolution was slavery in South America,” he appar­ently came from a family which was very anti-slavery and didn’t buy the justification for the cruel treatment of the slaves that they were of a dif­ferent species.  He looked at the Negroes in South America (as they were then called) and decided that we all came from the same species and that, “if there could be variations in the human species, why not in other species” and so he started his search.

As a scientist Sarah doesn’t believe that evolution is going to keep pace with the level of contamination and the speed of global change.  Previously animals and plants had time and space to migrate north or south depending on the climate change but now, “we have fragmented the world so much, there are cities, roads and runways blocking the routes” making migration very difficult.

The series will be shown on Dutch and Belgian television but it can also be followed on internet via the website onthefutureofspecies.nl, or on Sarah’s Twitter site, Bea­gle_Sarah, or the Natural History museum’s blog.

Throughout the year in the UK there have been exhibi­tions, talks to celebrate the Darwin bicentenary and in November there is a special event to celebrate 150 years since the publication of On The Origin of Species.  In December the Darwin year closes, to give way to the in­ternational year of biodiversi­ty.  However the celebrations of this internationally famous and important figure have been worldwide with events in Argentina, the Galapagos Islands and Brazil.  Private celebrations in the family included a get-together with 180 of the family members, all descendents or spouses of descendents of Charles, but not everybody was able to come, “there’s quite a few more”.

It is not to be the last visit for Sarah.  She was given a book on the local flora by Ramón and is determined to return in May to see the white broom and towering jewels of the pink tajinastes in the Teide national park, as well as a possible visit to Masca.  We hope to be able to speak to her then to get a full personal report on this incredible adventure.
By Sheila Collis


Charles Darwin
Did you know?

• Apparently Darwin was prone to sea-sickness, which, it is said, was one of the main reasons he spent as much time as possible on land and not on the ship, something which probably helped him collect more data than he might have.
• Darwin delayed the publication of On the Origin of  Species as he was reportedly worried as to how it would be received, finally deciding to publish after news of the imminent publication of similar theories by Alfred Russel Wallace.
• Charles Darwin shared a birth date with Abraham Lincoln, both born on February 12, 1809.  Both men also lost their mothers during their early child­hood.
• When he was a child, Darwin’s father said ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family’.
• As a student at Cambridge, Darwin presided over the Glutton Club, which met weekly to seek out and eat unusual meats.
• Charles Darwin beat Charles Dickens to become the face of the new Sterling £10 note in 2000.
• Survival of the fittest was not a phrase coined by Darwin. He borrowed it from the economist Herbert Spencer, on Wallace’s advice. It does not appear in On the Origin of Species until the fifth edition.




This article appears in the print edition 600 of Island Connections

Gallery: The future of the species

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