George wore a beard was when he had disappeared temporarily into the land of the mad. Meanwhile, at the Darwins’ local workhouse in Shrewsbury, which went by the euphemistic name of ‘The House of Industry’, the poor were shaved once a week. This provision was designed less to bolster the inmates’ well-being than to return their faces to a state of order and legibility, in the hope that their minds and morals might follow suit.
All of which makes young Charles Darwin a highly unusual young man. For by the time he was twenty-seven he had grown and shaved off his beard multiple times. One of the few contexts in which it was acceptable for a late-Georgian gentleman to sport facial hair was while at sea. And Darwin, famously, had spent almost five years, from December 1831 to October 1836, on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun brig-sloop commissioned by the Admiralty to survey the coast of South America. Although his position as a self-funded ‘gentleman naturalist’ did not bind him formally to navy discipline, Darwin instinctively observed the service’s codes of conduct during his exposure to them. And those codes decreed that, while it was acceptable for officers to grow beards at sea, on shore they were obliged to shave. Mixing with the local elites, both native and European, the ten or so Beagle officers were expected to appear as smooth-skinned gentlemen when presenting their papers to the Consul, dining at the house of a British merchant, attending a concert, visiting a botanic garden, hunting with the local padre, and even on trips up-country to stay on a grandee’s coffee estate.
Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle – a stickler for a clean shave
In the case of HMS Beagle, the obligation to keep up appearances was doubly pressing, for the captain of the ship was Robert FitzRoy, nephew to the late Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, and well-known for being the most crashing snob. FitzRoy was also ‘an ardent disciple of Lavater’, and therefore keen on reading faces and skulls for signs of character. He had almost turned Darwin down for the post of ship’s naturalist simply because, as Darwin recalled in his autobiography, ‘he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage’. An out-of-place beard might mean the young man being left behind for good.
Darwin must have started growing a beard soon after the Beagle set sail from Plymouth on 27 December 1831, for by the time the ship reached the Equator seven weeks later he was sufficiently bristly for the crew to be able to perform the symbolic shaving ritual that always marked a seaman’s first ‘crossing of the line’. Under the watchful eye of a makeshift ‘Neptune’ the sailors ‘lathered my face & mouth with pitch and paint, & scraped some of it off with a piece of roughened iron hoop’, before dunking the neophyte in a tub of water. Darwin found the whole business ‘disagreeable’, although he knew he had got off lightly. The thirty-one equatorial debutants who followed him had ‘dirty mixtures’ pushed into their mouths and rubbed on their faces, the kind of toxic rough-housing that would have played havoc with the gentleman naturalist’s tender skin, not to mention his delicate stomach (he had been throwing up non-stop since they left Plymouth). All the same, you do sense a certain muffled pride in Darwin’s reaction to this bit of ritual bonding. The young man who just a few years earlier had scuttled home to his elder sisters whenever the crudities of public school proved too much had managed to survive this symbolic first shave without fainting or having to lie down.
After spending the spring and early summer of 1832 surveying the crumpled coast around Rio de Janeiro, the Beagle headed south towards Montevideo. As the little ship nosed towards Terra virtually Incognita the tone on board stilled and chilled. The barometer was falling, the seas were restless, and on coming ashore it was clear that something had changed. All the comfortable props of civic stability – sun-dappled white churches, busy market places, discreet whores, weather as pleasant as an English garden on a hot summer’s day – were beginning to fall away. In their place came armed soldiers, empty shops, sullen women, sheets of driving rain. Sailing into Montevideo at the end of July, the Beaglers had been corralled into putting down an insurrection of local black troops, while in Baha Bahia a month later Darwin had the feeling he was being watched, and his passport was checked and double-checked by henchmen of the local warlord. Safely back on board ship and headed south again, the older hands started to tell end-of-the-earth stories about shipwrecks, savage Indians and – a particular favourite – cannibal banquets. FitzRoy wrote home to his sister that ‘I am again quitting the demi-civilised world and am returning to the barbarous regions of the south …’ Darwin, in turn, wrote to his sister: ‘Every one has put on cloth cloathes & preparing for still greater extremes our beards are all sprouting. – my face at present looks of about the same tint as a half washed chimney sweeper.’
A few weeks later this ‘sprouting’ facial hair has become ‘a great grisly beard’ that, Darwin reports happily, has transformed him into ‘a wild beast’. By the time the Beagle reached Tierra del Fuego in the last weeks of 1832, the beard was so long that the young man could see the end of it when clasped in his fist. This wasn’t simply a gratifying novelty, it was practical too. During his week-long treks inland in search of mammalian fossils, stranded seashells and soil samples, Darwin often found himself obliged to bivouac at high altitude. On these occasions a beard acted as a muffler in the freezing dawns – ‘I never knew how painful cold could be.’ All the same, this didn’t stop the tyro naturalist complaining that he was feeling increasingly odd and itchy, like a bear forced into wearing an overcoat. And yet, such is the short memory of young men that by the time the Beagle eventually rounded Cape Horn and was heading north towards the elegant port of Valparaíso, where Darwin was due to lodge with an old Salopian classmate, he was grumbling once more about the chore of being ‘obliged to shave & dress decently’.
In its cyclical comings and goings, Darwin’s beard marked his criss-crossing from British gentleman to common tar to wild beast, and all the way back again. Clean-shaven, he was an emissary of British civilisation, an educated man with a family name that rang bells and with no reason to hide his pleasantly pudgy face from the world. But with a beard baffling his features, the man with a face like a chimneysweep, or even a bear, became indistinguishable from the common tars who heaved HMS Beagle around the globe. The ease with which mild, bashful young Charley Darwin could slip into this other identity – dirty, beastly and resolutely male – was thrilling. Armed with a beard, pistols and a geological hammer, he fancied that he might be confused with a ‘grand barbarian’. That, after all, is what had happened to Captain Robert FitzRoy RN, he of the impeccable lineage and finicky manners, who on the one occasion he had neglected to shave had been mistaken for a pirate.
Beard-wearing, though, did more than mark a simple boundary between civilisation and savagery, a line in the sand on which everyone could agree. The coastal ports of South America, where the Beagle officers regularly came ashore to mingle with the local elites, comprised an ethnographic free-for-all. In Bahia, Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Maldonado, Santiago and Valparaíso you would find African slaves, Jewish tailors, German blacksmiths, Arab traders, free blacks, American architects, Scottish engineers, English merchants, Argentinian gauchos, Fuegian Indians, not forgetting that large group of nondescripts and crossbreeds who belonged everywhere and nowhere. Amidst this polyglot jabber a beard became a conspicuous cultural marker, a handy feature to grab on to when trying to place a man you had only just met.
In letters home to his sisters Darwin makes jokes about how, if he were to turn up in Shropshire right this minute, he would be mistaken for a ‘Solomon’ who might start to ‘sell the trinkets’ – playing on a series of associations between Orthodox Jews, long beards and itinerant peddling. On another occasion he relates an encounter with a Uruguayan tradesman who suspects him of being a ‘Mohammedan’ simply by virtue of his long beard and his habit of washing his face.
As the tradesman’s mishit neatly demonstrates, in this mongrel world a beard could never do more than hint at a stranger’s identity. Throughout the Beagle’s voyage, Darwin was increasingly confronted with evidence
