In the beginning

Charles Darwin Brown's character was informed by his ancestry. He speculated that he inherited his ferocious passion for social justice from his paternal grandfather, the abolitionist John Brown, and his abiding wonder and curiosity about nature from his maternal grandfather, the naturalist Charles Darwin. He attributed his sense of the Divine to his maternal grandmother, Emma Wedgwood, and his ability to patiently care for others and stoically accept loss to his paternal grandmother, Mary Ann Day.

He was roused from his reverie by the sight of a young woman in a broad-brimmed straw hat down the beach struggling with a chalk boulder. He went over to offer his help. Splitting the boulder exposed a beautiful spiral shell which she tucked into her bag. Then standing up, they had a first chance to appraise each other. She was a pretty woman in her mid to late twenties with a bold, proud, almost defiant demeanor.  He was in his early thirties, tall, trim, and handsome, his voice deep and sonorous. And then there were his eyes, his haunting blue eyes. The resonance of attraction was mutual. 

They introduced themselves; he was Charles but called Day and she was Henrietta but called Etty. 

As they began walking together along the base of the cliff, Etty told him what to look for. She would point out where the fossils might be hiding and he would split the boulders to find them. He carried her steadily growing bag of fossils and her hammer. 

And they began to talk. Their differences in education, wealth, and social standing were apparent from the start. Still, theirs was an attraction of opposites; both of them had never met anyone like the other before.  But their similarities also soon became evident. She could see that he was a quick study, rapidly learning where the fossils might be concealed.  And their shared values also soon came to light. His accent told her that he was an American; she asked where he was from and whether he had fought in the War of the American Rebellion that had ended a few years before. When it emerged that his father was John Brown, she was intrigued. She had read newspaper accounts of John Brown's failed insurrection at Harper's Ferry and, as the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of abolitionists, wanted to hear more.

At that point, a little past midday, both were hungry and thirsty and the bag of fossils had become heavy, even for him. They climbed the path back up the cliffs and returned to her inn. And he began to tell his life story.

In 1843, just short of his sixth birthday, three of his siblings, Sarah, Peter, and Austin, died of dysentery. His parents claimed that he had also died, under the superstition that they could thereby protect him from the evil that had robbed them of the other children. He became the hidden one, concealed from view. Even visitors to the household would not have noticed him among the welter of ten other children. His older half-brother Owen took Day under his wing; he had always regarded Day as an early birthday present, born the morning before he turned thirteen. Owen had gravely injured his right arm and was too crippled to do any heavy labor; as Day grew up, Owen increasingly depended on him for help. Day genuinely acted as his right arm. 

He was 17 when his brothers John Jr,  Jason, Owen, Frederick, and Salmon left to join the fight against pro-slavery forces in the Kansas territory. His father left a few months later with his younger brother Oliver and a wagonload of guns and ammunition. He stayed home with his brother Watson to help their mother and watch over their three younger sisters. All came home but Frederick who was shot, killed, and buried in Osawatomie. 

In Ashtabula, Day left his brothers behind and made his way north across Lake Erie to Port Burwell, and east to Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and finally Halifax, Nova Scotia. There he took a paddle steamer to Liverpool and then, by train, on to London. He was repulsed by the stench and poverty of London and traveled further east, eventually finding work as a mechanic's apprentice at the Ashford Railway Works serving the London-Dover line of the South Eastern Railway.  

A more alarming warning of their misalignment came when it was Etty's turn to speak. She had been a rapt audience for his stories, but he was baffled by hers. When she tried to explain her search for ammonites under the chalk cliffs and how she would compare them to some her father had collected in Cretaceous-era strata at the top of Mount Tarn in Tierra del Fuego, all Day could do was stare at her blankly. When she told him that the Cretaceous period was millions of years ago, he protested that they could not have existed before Noah's flood only a few thousand years before.  Needless to say, the discussion did not end well and Etty was dismayed by the ignorance of her now-former lover. They soon parted, he returning to work at the Railway Works, she remained in Dover searching for ammonites. They would never see each other again.

Afterward, for her, there were only two lasting consequences of their meeting. The first was Charles Darwin Brown. The other was that she learned what she wanted in a husband. Opposites may briefly attract but mating is assortative; she discovered that she would only be happy in a long-term partnership with a man much more like herself in education and social class.

Nevertheless, when she discovered that she was pregnant, she was surprised that both she and her parents were delighted by the news. Horace, the youngest of Charles and Emma's seven surviving children, was 19 and going off to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. For thirty years there had been children growing up in Down House and now the nest was about to become empty. Charles and Emma had always been doting parents and were impatient for the arrival of grandchildren. They still felt enormous pain at the death of their beloved daughter Annie when she was 10. They were disappointed that their eldest, Erasmus, was thirty and still unmarried. Etty was also unmarried and, at age 27, past her peak child-bearing age. 

After years of immersion in her father's research, Etty knew the vital importance of offspring for all species including humans. She had learned that the meaning of life is to have babies and make sure your babies have babies. So the three of them agreed that she would remain secluded at Down House for the duration of her pregnancy and the first few months of her newborn's life to conceal both her pregnancy and her newborn from the world.  Finishing the editing of The Descent of Man provided a simple explanation of her absence from social events.  A few months after she gave birth, she left her son in the care of her parents in Down House without any outward sign that the child was hers. If anyone asked, it was enough to say that Charlie was brought by the stork. This left her free to find a suitable husband unencumbered.  

And virtually as soon as she ventured out again into the world, she met him. He was a scholar, a barrister, and the principal of the Working Men's College in London, a progressive bastion of utopian aspirations for the self-improvement of the working class. She liked the fact that he was a friend of other members of her circle, a gifted musician, and a man of high moral principles and liberal sensibilities. In short, she met her intellectual and social equal, someone everything her child's father was not.  She married Richard Buckley Litchfield at the end of August 1871, a couple of months after meeting him. Charles Darwin Brown was to be her only child. 

However, she did miss the romance and passion of her brief fling. While she had shown herself capable of impulsive abandon when far away from the eyes of those who knew her, within her social world she felt constrained to obey its conventions. It would have been unseemly for her to defy them and spontaneously display her affection to Litchfield. She was disappointed that he did not sweep her up in his arms. Perhaps he was only interested in her for her money. Perhaps his moral principles were a bit too high. Perhaps her dalliance with Day had not been such a bad idea after all.

Down House

Etty was a tortured soul. She was able to act with astonishing independence, as when she went to the White Cliffs alone to hunt for ammonites. But she was also desperate for her father's respect and affection. Her work as a diligent editor of his work was a strenuous effort to win him over, but in the end, it only won her short-lived praise. Her focus on being his editor also kept her from writing anything of her own. Whenever she tried to write, her mind would go blank and the emptiness filled with all of the resentments and anxieties that had been building up in her. 

Uncle Frank also brought Bernard into the household who became like Charlie's younger brother. This was a vast improvement for him because he was no longer the only small person in a world of towering adults.

Tutors taught Charlie how to read and write, and gave him a basic education in literature, history, Greek, Latin, German, mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, geology, music, and the arts. 

His grandmother took charge of his religious education, sharing her beliefs as a devout Christian. In this, he was fortunate that she was a Unitarian instead of an Anglican. The fact that she disparaged belief in biblical inerrancy, the Trinity, original sin, and predestination prepared him to attempt to synthesize his grandfather's growing religious skepticism and her religious fervor. The conflict between his grandparents on this score was a source of pain and sadness for them both and charged the atmosphere in Down House like an electric field.  His growing mind became the arena for their efforts to contest and reconcile their conflicting beliefs. It resulted in the development of Charlie's reverence for science and his awe of the Divine.

Uncle Frank showed Charlie how to perform experiments in the garden and trained him as a collector of biological specimens. Although Charlie tried to help his grandfather and Uncle Frank in their research on phototropism in plants, he made a more substantial contribution to the research on earthworms. He enlisted the help of his young cousin Bernard to dig for earthworms with him when his grandfather was too infirm to kneel and tend to his own experiments. It was they who discovered that the worms' favorite food was chopped carrots and that the worms had a prodigious sex drive. Bernard also helped him in the care and feeding of their pet Venus flytraps; they enjoyed exploring the range of things their green wards would eat. And Aunt Bessy taught him how to play the piano and closely observe the social world. 

But before his uncle and grandfather recruited him to help in their research, nature began to teach him about herself. He started by exploring the forty acres of the Down House grounds. As he became bolder, he wandered further and further along the footpaths in the surrounding chalk hills. His grandfather's horse kept him company on his adventures; usually they walked side-by-side. Eventually, he would spend the whole day walking the round trip through the grasslands to Farthing Downs, eight miles away but usually his walks were closer to home.

He was fascinated by the wildflowers in the chalk grasslands. At first, they were just a blur — he could distinguish them only by their color. But he borrowed a hand-lens and the volume "British Wild Flowers" by C. P. Johnson. It had beautiful illustrations by John Sowerby and included a key that allowed him to identify the family of each flower he encountered. He felt like a myope with his first pair of glasses — suddenly the green blur resolved into a myriad of distinct species. There were bird's foot trefoil, horseshoe vetch, lady's bedstraw, chalk milkwort, ox-eye daisy, knapweed, Queen Anne's lace, and many others.

As he learned to distinguish the plants, he began to recognize that they formed natural communities — the array of species found in the chalk hills were often different from those found in the forests in the clay soils of the low weald or in the sandy soils of the high weald to the south. And the Romney Marsh had its own endemic species. Sometimes related species had very different ranges. For example, one encountered the horseshoe vetch only in the chalk grasslands while another member of the pea family, the bird foot trefoil, could be found practically anywhere.

The observation that different plants were part of different plant communities growing on different soils aroused his curiosity and he asked his grandfather to explain why it was so. His grandfather pulled out his copy of William Smith's geological map and showed him that Down House is on top of a ribbon of chalk hills in the North Downs that run between Dover and the Surrey Hills.

Aunt Bessy then took him by train down to Dover where the cliff shows a profile of the chalk strata that underlay the ribbon. Charlie was awestruck by the brilliant white wall.

The death of his grandfather a month or so after his eleventh birthday caused a shift in his relationships with the entire family, especially with his Uncle Frank. At eleven, he was no longer a child but not an adult either. Francis began to treat him more seriously as his mentee and research assistant.  Uncle Frank also continued with Charlie the lively discussions about science that he had previously enjoyed with his late father. After a year and a half, Uncle Frank married Ellen Crofts. Still, it did not make much of a difference in his relationship with Charlie since they built their house, Wychfield, on the grounds of the Grove, where Charlie continued to live in winter with his grandmother and his Aunt Bessie; Charlie's daily contact with Uncle Frank continued.  Bernard also remained close. 

This is when Etty began to pay attention to him. He was not a target for her maternal instincts; she didn't have any to deploy. Instead she began to recognize his family resemblances — he looked like kin, acted like kin, and had the keen intelligence and voracious curiosity of kin. She listened to his lively scientific conversations with her brother Frank and reasoned that if he could take him seriously, she could too —if he regarded him worth talking to, so would she. At first they mainly talked about her father's theories and adventures. She described her editing of "The Descent of Man" and his autobiography and her role of removing material that might be offensive or embarrassing. She enlisted his commitment to defend his intellectual legacy after she was gone. 

After a while, she told him her story of searching for ammonites at the Cliffs of Dover and meeting his father. She relayed his father's tale of his escape from capture after the failed insurrection at Harper's Ferry and explained the significance of who his father's father was. She remembered that his father had worked at the Ashford Railway Works. Charlie had never been curious about who his father was; after all, he didn't see his mother all that often and felt very well-loved by others in her absence. He was more intrigued to learn he was descended from the abolitionist John Brown and began to read about his bloody history. But most interesting of all was learning that his existence was due to the ammonites of the White Cliffs of Dover; if she has not been searching for them there then, he would never have been born. 

He owed it all to ammonites.

This revelation inspired him to delve deeper into the works of William Smith, especially the principle of faunal succession as elaborated in his work "Strata Identified by Organized Fossils." This is a guide to identifying English strata based on the first occurrence of certain fossils — essential to the determination that a rock formation in one part of Britain was the same age as that in another. Ammonites were especially useful for this purpose because they were abundant, diverse, easily identifiable, and they popped in and out of existence, new species rapidly emerging to replace extinct ones.  

Etty invited Charlie to visit her in London. She no longer felt any need to hide him from her husband both because he was familiar as a ward of her parents of unspecified origin, not as her son, and because her husband's opinion on anything did not matter much to her. She had discovered that he really had married her for her money and was spending her wealth wandering Europe on his own. Yes, she doted on him when he was home but he was rarely in London. 

So in the summers, Charlie would ride the South Eastern Railway from Orpington Station to Charing Cross and then walk down the Piccadilly along Green Park to Wellington Arch, and then through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to Kensington Square. It was a very pleasant three mile walk, almost all of it through city parks. He would occasionally visit the Museum of Practical Geology on the way but more frequently he would stroll the mile from Kensington Square to the recently opened Natural History Museum which housed the more than 2000 fossils that Smith had used to date strata. Throughout his visits, he studied how to identify all of the index fossils. In the evenings, which memorized which strata the fossils indexed. He then discussed it all with his mother. 

It gave them something else to talk about.

During the winters in Cambridge, Charlie tried auditing lectures at Trinity College in botany, ornithology, geology, and paleontology. But he didn't have much patience with them — they taught him little that he had not learned from his grandfather and uncle or on his own. His time was better spent reading. 

And walking. 

In Cambridge, he found himself again on chalk, Cretaceous strata deposited earlier than those found further south. The chalk under his feet was part of the same formation as the chalk hills of the North and South Downs, folded under the Thames estuary in the valley between them. Ammonites were plentiful in the earlier strata but became increasingly scarce as one went south through later ones.

At eighteen, Charlie considered himself as well-trained in natural history as his grandfather had been at about the same age when he set sail on the Beagle. He also believed that he had received as broad an education as his mother had from her tutors. It wasn't necessary to seek a Bachelor's degree; he had observed that the accomplished scientists in the household had all learned their craft by doing instead of studying. He felt ready to go out and explore the wider world starting by retracing his grandfather's travels in South America armed with his grandfather's books, most importantly The Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species.

But before he left Britain, he decided to seek out his father.

Father and Son

Day had been crushed by Etty's rejection of him. Hours before he had not believed his luck to be in bed with such a well-born woman. Now, back at the railworks, he grieved losing her. He realized there was no reasonable chance for their connection to last, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and hope can intrude on life like an uninvited guest. It stung that Etty spurned him because of his ignorance and was wounded that she didn't bother to explain to him what he didn't know. She never gave him a chance. 

His lack of schooling shamed him even though it was a result of his parents keeping him hidden from the dark forces that had taken his three siblings. This wasn't the first time that he had confronted this disadvantage. It had taken considerable effort and Owen's help to learn to read and write. There were few occasions to read anything except the bible and the newspaper, and no need to write anything much beyond signing his name. He had learned his trade as a mechanic by doing it and became a very good one. He was especially good at diagnosing what was wrong with engines and capable of coming up with clever solutions. So he knew that his problem was not that he was stupid but only that he had never had an opportunity to learn anything in school. 

Ironically, Day had drawn virtually the same inference from their brief encounter that Etty had: Opposites may attract but long-term relationships are usually possible only in couples from similar backgrounds. In other words, like Etty, he discovered that he would only be happy in a long-term partnership with a woman much more like himself in education and social class, someone who would see him for who he was. There were plenty of such women among the sisters and daughters of the men he worked with at the Railway works. In that setting, he was regarded as something of a catch, both because he was a very handsome man and also because he had demonstrated to his co-workers that he was a very intelligent one as well. His ancestry was Welsh on his mother's side so he favored bright pretty Welsh girls. 

Shortly after his fling with Etty, he met and married Anwen Davies. Their firstborn, a boy, took his wife's last name as his middle name — Cadfael Davies Brown. And a year or two later,  their second born, a girl, took his own mother's last name as her middle name — Carys Day Brown. The four of them were happy together for a time; they were never rich but as a skilled laborer, he earned enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. He was inordinately pleased that his children both had the same initials as he did. But tragedy struck; when Carys was eleven, she came down with a fever and a sore throat. At first, Anwen and he thought she just had a cold, but she soon developed a red rash all over her body — she had come down with scarlet fever. She was dead within a week. 

This came as a terrible blow, one that tore Anwen and Charles apart. After fifteen years of marriage, they divorced and Anwen and Cadfael went to live with her parents. Day was devastated at the loss of his wife and daughter and his alienation from his son.  He began to drink heavily, do poorly at work, and was at the end of his rope. And then, out of the blue, Charles Darwin Brown, the son he never knew he had, found him still working at the railworks. 

Although it seemed they had little in common, they struck up a relationship. It was awkward at first, neither knew what to expect from the other. They soon discovered that they were alike in many ways both physical and temperamental. Day began by telling Charlie essentially the same tale he had told his mother eighteen years before, of his birth in the Connecticut Western Reserve, of the death of his siblings, of his adventures with his father and brother, of their escape from danger, and of his journey to England.

It was enough to provoke Charlie's curiosity about his paternal grandfather and the family he had never known. At the same time, after 30 years, his father was weary of working at the Ashford Railway Works, was despondent over losing his family, and had been feeling the tug of his kin in California. It was clear that, with the War of the American Rebellion long over, no one would still be seeking to arrest him for his role in the Harper's Ferry insurrection. So they decided to travel together to the US to explore places that were important in their family history and then go on together from there. 

They departed Liverpool on the RMS Umbria in May 1889, landing in New York City ten days later. Then on to Concord, Massachusetts to meet with Franklin Sanborn, organizer and member of the "Secret Six" who had funded John Brown's failed insurrection. Only two of the six survived, Sanborn and Thomas Higginson who lived nearby in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Howe, Stearns, Smith, and Parker were all dead. (It was Stearns and Smith who were the money-bags, the rest were just in on the secret.) Day had met the Six when he accompanied his father's travels to solicit funding for the revolt. 

Franklin was impressive. He had been the youngest of the six, born 34 years after the oldest member, Gerrit Smith, but was the organizer and leader of it, nonetheless. Educated at Harvard, he was a teacher, author, journalist, social scientist, reformer, politician, and above all else, had been a fervent abolitionist. Day was struck by the fact that he was only six years older than himself, but had accomplished much more with his life. Yes, Franklin was lucky enough to be born into a prosperous and well-connected family. Still, Day suspected that Franklin's success was mostly a result of his loftier ambitions and hard work. 

Franklin was a gracious host; he told Day of his fond memories of Day's father, defense of him before and after his death, support of his widow and his sisters, attendance at his brother Watson's burial, and regular visits to his father's grave. He was able to fill in many of the details of what had happened during and after the insurrection: the trial and execution of his father, the remarkable courage he had shown at the end, and the critical importance he had in bringing about the end of slavery.  Franklin stressed the point that even though Day's father lost the battle — the Harper's Ferry insurrection failed — he won the war; his declaration that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood" proved true. He closed his praise by singing "John Brown's Body" followed by the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," the same melody with different words. 

The losses among the insurrectionists were staggering: Anderson, Newby, and Leeman were killed outright, his brothers Watson and Oliver mortally wounded along with Leary, Kagi, Taylor, and the two Thompsons. Others including Green, Stevens, Copeland, and Edwin Coppoc were captured and hanged while Hazlett and Cook had initially escaped but were later also captured and hanged. Only he and his brother Owen along with Meriam, Tidd, and Barclay Coppoc had escaped. There for but the grace of God. 

Independently, Mary Ann Day (John Brown's second wife) and her children Salmon, Annie, Sarah, and Ellen went together to Red Bluff, in the central valley of northern California. They later split up; Annie and Salmon continued west to Humboldt County while their mother, Sarah, and Ellen headed south to Santa Clara County.

Franklin caught them up with what had happened in the country since Day had gone: the conduct of the Great War, Lincoln's assassination, the despicable presidency of Johnson, and the cowardly one of Hayes. Hayes effectively reversed the outcome of the Great War and allowed the southerners to deprive blacks of the vote and reinstitute slavery in the form of sharecropping and the exploitation of prison labor. Harrison had just been elected and like Hayes, lost the popular vote but won in the Electoral College. Unlike Hayes, Harrison turned his narrow win into a huge victory; by admitting several lightly populated western states to the Union, he was now able to engineer a Republican stranglehold on the Senate for the foreseeable future. The country continued to become industrialized, immigration continued to swell, and wealth continued to be concentrated in the hands of the few. 

Franklin and Day marveled at how similar their experiences had been, both were hunted for their involvements in the failed insurrection, both had fled temporarily to Canada, and both were saved from the law by fellow abolitionists. In Franklin's case, when federal marshals came to Concord to arrest and take him to Washington to answer questions before the Democrat majority Senate, he was rescued by ringing church bells, 150 fellow Concord residents rushing to his defense, and a writ of habeas corpus from the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice. In Day's case, the governor of Virginia had offered a large reward for his and Owen's apprehension and delivery to Virginia, but the Republican Attorney General of Ohio refused to honor the extradition request.  

Day asked about Thoreau and Emerson whom he had met while traveling with his father and learned that both were dead. Transcendentalism almost died out with them but its spirit lived on in Franklin, Thomas Higginson, and a handful of others.  When Franklin discovered that Charlie was Charles Darwin's grandson, he brightened and told the story of receiving a copy of Origin of Species the year after it was published, sharing and discussing it with Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Charles Loring Brace. All immediately saw how powerfully Darwin's theory of evolution supported their call for the abolition of slavery; if all life descended from a common ancestor, so did Europeans and Africans — their differences were only skin deep. None of them was more excited by the book than Thoreau who read it carefully and voraciously, taking copious notes, and integrating the theory into his own vision of nature. Charlie could see how Thoreau's ideas might help him in his efforts to integrate his grandfather Charles' theories with his grandmother's unitarian faith. Thoreau's book Walden would become one of Charlie's most faithful traveling companions; he took it with him to the ends of the earth. 

Their conversation with Franklin also taught Charlie that transcendentalism grew out of Unitarianism; it implied that God could be found through immersion in nature. Day and Charlie pursued this topic the next day with the transcendentalist Unitarian minister Higginson. He was also impressive, not just a minister, but an author, politician, soldier, and the other surviving member of the Secret Six abolitionist funders of John Brown's insurrection. 

Next, to North Elba, New York to visit John Brown's grave, to Ashtabula, Ohio to visit Charlie's uncle, John Jr., to Hudson, Ohio where Day had been born, to Richmond, Ohio where three of Day's siblings had died, and to Harper's Ferry, where two of Day's brothers were mortally wounded and his father wounded and captured, before being tried and executed in Charles Town. They then returned to Boston to sail with the clipper ship Florence on its way to California.

At this point, in a few short months, Charlie had spent orders of magnitude more time with his father than he had with his mother over eighteen years. He marveled at how accidental his own existence was. If his father had not been spared the dysentery that took his siblings, or not survived his harrowing escape from Harper's Ferry, or not chosen to go to England and have a chance encounter with his mother eighteen years ago, he would not be here. His birth would not have been more fortuitous even as the descendant of the infant sole survivor of a shipwreck. 

Throughout his time with his father, he had been struck by how different their lives had been and how similar their characters were. Both were gentle, generous, and kind to others and both were animated by omnivorous curiosities, even though Charlie had deployed his to understand Nature and God while his father's had been directed toward developing an intimate knowledge of engines. He learned in detail how his paternal grandfather had been both a hero and a monster, capable of courageously sacrificing himself to free the slaves and also massacre pro-slavery settlers in Pottawatomie, Kansas. He learned what a poor husband and father he had been. He had abandoned his wife to fend for herself and their children for long periods while he organized rebellions, waged war in Kansas, and wandered all over the country seeking funding for his causes. He also had led three of his sons to slaughter starting in Kansas and culminating at Harper's Ferry. Abraham was only prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac, his grandfather had followed through. 

Tierra del Fuego

The Florence stopped at the ports of call in eastern South America that the Beagle had visited — Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo/Buenos Aires, and the Falklands. Charlie disembarked in Punta Arenas, Tierra del Fuego to retrace some of his maternal grandfather's most important discoveries. His father sailed on to California. Charlie's first outing was to climb Mount Tarn to look for ammonites just as his grandfather had fifty years before. In October, he went about a hundred miles to the southeast of Punta Arenas on the Beagle Channel to visit the Yahgan community of Ushuaia. 

His grandfather thought that Yahgan dwellings were particularly primitive; ákars were cone-shaped constructions of branches, bark, grass, and sea lion hides. He described them as follows:

When Charlie arrived sixty years later, the Yahgan had changed a great deal from his grandfather's encounter with them as a result of extensive contact with Europeans; he regarded them as still quite primitive but they had begun to wear European clothing and use some European artifacts. This was not an improvement. Before contact, the Yahgan had gone nearly naked, dressed most of the time in small aprons concealing their privates, sometimes with a sealskin cape to cover their backs, and slathered in thick layers of whale and sea lion oil to insulate them from the cold. Western clothes trapped the moisture and made them colder. Jemmy had the right idea in shedding them.

But the most important change was the radical decline in their population and condition. They had been devastated by Old World diseases and starved by the theft of much of their food resources by passing whalers and sealers. 

Charlie stayed in Ushuaia until the approach of Austral winter, occupying the site of an abandoned Anglican mission with enough provisions to last him for the duration. During his stay, he traveled 35 miles east along the Beagle Channel to visit the Estancia Haberton, the ranch of Thomas Bridges, the recently retired Anglican missionary to the Yahgan who had established the village of Ushuaia. He was the author of a Yamana grammar and English-Yamana, Yamana-English dictionaries. Unfortunately, these manuscripts had been "borrowed" by Frederick Cook who refused to return them and later tried to publish them as his own work. (This was just one of many frauds perpetrated by Cook which included false claims to have reached the North Pole and climbed to the summit of Mount Denali. He was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to almost 15 years in prison for his swindling of investors in start-up Texas oil companies.) 

Nevertheless, even without the dictionaries, Bridges and his son Lucas were invaluable to Charlie for sharing their knowledge of the culture and customs of the Yahgan that they acquired over almost 30 years. The horror stories they shared about the abuse of the Yahgan by European passing sealers and whalers prompted the beginnings of Charlie's activism for indigenous rights, consistent with his mother's and father's families' long histories of abolitionism. For example, the Bridges told him of the sealers who had the practice of abducting Yahgan women, taking them aboard, and raping them for weeks, before dumping them onshore after the sailors were done using them. Sailors shot Yahgan at random out of fear or for sport. And, most recently, there had been the wholesale slaughter by sheep ranchers as though the Yahgan were an infestation of vermin on their own territory. Over time, he would witness similar abuses of other native groups.  This enraged him because it seemed that his fellow Europeans were blind to their common humanity with the Yahgan. Like his grandfather before him, he was struck with how similar the "savage" Yahgan were to the "civilized" British despite outward appearances. They seemed just as intelligent as the deckhands on the Florence even though that intelligence had been directed to solving a radically different set of problems. 

He learned enough Yamana from Jemmy Button's grandchildren to engage in simple conversation but never advanced very far. It was no wonder; the Yamana lexicon was huge despite the simplicity of their society.  Bridges' dictionary had over 30,000 words and that was not close to a complete inventory.   On a lark, he asked them for the Yamana word that was closest in pronunciation to his name. Lucas answered, "chālūmaii," meaning 'a swelling, rolling sea.' That seemed appropriate enough given the long voyage Charlie had taken to get there. 

Most of what he learned about the Yahgan was through observation. He watched from shore as the Yahgan hunted seals; he didn't dare go along with them because the canoes seemed too flimsy and unstable to support anyone his size. Similarly, he was content to look on as others gathered shellfish, such as mussels and limpets from the rocks. He was especially impressed when women dove naked into the frigid Beagle Channel to emerge holding a large crab. The Yahgan did not make pottery or weave cloth, but Charlie was fascinated by their basketry. He once spent an entire afternoon mesmerized as a woman wound a long fiber cord into a coil and sewed half-hitch knots between adjacent turns of the growing basket. 

The nuclear family seemed the basic social unit, there were no clans or chiefs or other trappings of politics. The division of labor in the society was simple. Unlike England, which had priests, soldiers, merchants, farmers, and many other specialized roles, among the Yahgan there were only two: the roles of man and woman. Charlie reasoned that, because mastery of so many different kinds of tasks was required to adequately fulfill duties of one's sex role, the Yahgan had to learn more than a narrowly specialized professional such as a barrister or engine mechanic in English society. 

Quarrels sometimes escalated to the point that one of the combatants was killed by the other.  Revenge killings often followed — usually, these were eye-for-an-eye retaliations between individuals although sometimes a whole family would join in seeking retribution. But cold-blooded murder was exceedingly rare — rare enough that the story of the one example that anyone knew about was endlessly repeated. Sassan, the murderer, desired another man's wife and so invited the husband, his intended victim, to go hunting with him for bird nests. They fastened a rope at the top of a cliff to allow the husband to scale down and collect eggs from the nests. The murderer then cut the rope sending the victim to his death on the rocks below. 

But there was no warfare such that entire local groups violently united against each other. Like the English, the Yahgan considered kin from both the mother's and father's sides of the family as equally close. But unlike the English, they regarded cousins as siblings and marriage with them incestuous. He had as little luck as his grandfather in eliciting any description of their religious beliefs or their cosmology. Even after six months among them, they remained opaque to him — he could see the shimmering surfaces of their lives but not deeper within their minds or souls.  He never sensed he understood them or they him. He never felt at home. 

In March 1890, he returned to Punta Arenas, used it as a base to explore the archipelago, and awaited the return of the Florence. 

His grandfather had told him to look out for the Parasitic Jaeger (Stercorarius parasiticus) which spends the summer breeding season in the Arctic and the winter (Austral summer) in high southern latitudes.  His grandfather had encountered the species several times as he made his way westward across the Pacific, first in Tierra del Fuego and then in New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania, and South Africa. 

Pasadena

At first, Day moved into Jason's cabin about six miles north of town on what was called John Brown's Peak. Jason kept cows and goats for their milk, chickens for their eggs, and two burros, Fred and Amelia. Much of his income came from selling photographs of himself and Owen to the tourists who came to pay homage to the sons of the abolitionist John Brown. (Pasadena was full of Republican immigrants from Indiana and the Browns were prominent local celebrities.) 

Although Jason had accompanied his brothers and father to bleeding Kansas, he had gone to settle there with his wife Ellen, not to engage in armed conflict. He refused to participate in his father's and brother's massacre of pro-slavery settlers in Pottawatomie.  Nevertheless, he was arrested, beaten, his house burned, and was taken prisoner by a proslavery militia who were hunting for his father and brothers. He was released only after they took the proslavery militia hostage in the Battle of Black Jack and exchanged the militia for Jason. The violence continued a couple of months later in the Battle of Osawatomie where his younger brother Frederick was shot through the heart. Shaken, Ellen and Jason gave up on homesteading in the Kansas Territory and returned to Ohio. Jason was revulsed by his father's violence in Kansas and traumatized by his beating and the burning of his home and all of his possessions. He not only refused to join his father in the insurrection at Harpers Ferry but resolved from then on to be a pacifist. 

Both Jason and Owen were described by their neighbors in Pasadena as noble, brave, kind, gentle, and generous to a fault. He and Owen had lived according to Matthew 19:21, following Jesus in shedding their property and giving to the poor. Owen could have been speaking for both of them when he said shortly before his death "The only true religion is to be true to every human being, and to all animals so far as it is possible, and be just." Owen and Jason, true to their abolitionist heritage, believed that no animal should be deprived of its freedom. They had no corral; the goats and chickens took shelter under the house and all stayed for their mutual protection and companionship. They all foraged for themselves. A pond created by a dam they made on the Arroyo Seco provided water.

Jason's dedication to the liberty and independence of his companions extended to his wife Ellen. They were still devoted to each other but they lived in opposite ends of the country — he in Pasadena, she in Akron, Ohio. In his most recent letter to Sanborn, he said of Ellen: 

"She was always opposed to my coming here and said she could never leave Akron again, to live in the west after trying “that Kansas move”. I cannot blame her as I have always believed that a wife has the same right to decide where her home shall be as a husband."

Fred, like the other members of the household, was not confined and was able to come and go as he chose. 

He remained a free burro. 

Fred was a lot like Owen and Jason: calm, intelligent, independent, friendly, gentle, and helpful. Like the Browns, he reciprocated the respect he was shown; failing that, if someone tried to coerce him, he would peacefully but firmly resist. He loved to roam and explore the surrounding hills and valleys, always welcoming companions on his hikes, whether they be humans or goats.

Jason grieved Owen's death and felt too feeble to continue life in the hills and weighed down by an accumulation of debt. He decided he would sell the land and cabin, entrust the animals to his sister and brother-in-law, and take a job as a zoo keeper at the Echo Mountain resort about four miles to the southeast as the crow flies. Jason felt closer to animals than to most humans and enjoyed taking care of the ringtail cats, lynxes, raccoons, badgers, foxes, goats, fawns, great horned owls, and eagles. He especially enjoyed the company of Ursa, the black bear, Jocko, the monkey, and Lenore, the talking raven. He left his cabin for the zoo just after Thanksgiving dinner at Ruth and Henry's. Day moved at the same time into a boarding house in Pasadena not far from his sister's house and began to look for work.

He met and married Sarah within a month. She was a few years younger than himself who had been widowed three years earlier. He married her in haste but did not repent at leisure. She had a couple of daughters, ages 4 and 6, from her first marriage, but he loved them as his own. After all, his first-born son had been raised by others, he had lost his daughter to scarlet fever, and was alienated from his first wife and his second son. Like the unfairly afflicted Job, he was grateful for a second family to replace the one he lost. Day joined the three of them in their house and formed a happy home with them not far from her parents.

When Charlie arrived a few months later, he moved into the boarding house his father had recently vacated. He found himself surrounded by kin: his father Day, his Aunt Ruth, his Uncles Jason and Henry, and his cousins Ella, Grace, and Mary ('Mamie'). Ella and Grace lived close by with their families but Mamie lived with her parents and took care of them. Ella and Grace were both more than 10 years older than he was, but Mamie was his exact age mate. 

Mamie was smart, attractive, and kind, with a playful sense of humor. She and Charlie shared interests in the natural world, in other languages and societies, and in social justice. Both were teachers. As his father's sister's daughter, if he followed his mother's family's mating patterns, she would have made an ideal mate just as he, as her mother's brother's son, would have been ideal for her. When they first met, there was a mild erotic buzz between them that manifested as flirtatious teasing.

And yet. His maternal grandfather had worried that although Emma Wedgwood had been a superb helpmate and partner, they had married too close for the health of their offspring. After all, he and his children had more Wedgwood ancestry than Darwin. Charlie learned from him that inbreeding could be deleterious and should be avoided. But beyond that, it just didn't feel right especially since her mother had effectively adopted him. So, after their initial flirtations, they settled into a platonic friendship. Their fondness for each other was like that between brother and sister, not that between lovers. Charlie filled a gap in her life. She had two much older sisters nearby to boss her around, but her only brother lived in Humboldt County far away. Charlie became the brother she never had. He also filled a gap in Ruth's life for the same reason; her only son lived far to the north and Charlie could serve as his proxy. And just as he became a proxy for Ruth's son and Mamie's brother, Aunt Ruth became his surrogate Aunt Bessy and Cousin Mamie his surrogate sister. He took on the roles of son and brother, doing all the chores requiring physical strength beyond what Mamie could do and tending the animals Jason had entrusted to Ruth. He also frequently joined them for meals. Soon, Ruth invited him to build a cottage on a corner of their 15-acre plot; he chose to erect one on a site along the Arroyo Seco.

And this is how he met Fred. 

Fred took Charlie along when he ascended the arroyo to the site of Jason and Owen's cabin, followed the crest line to Lowe Mountain to visit Jason, and returned to Ruth and Henry's home, a round trip of around 10 miles. Sometimes they would hike further into the wilderness — to Mount Wilson and beyond — camping overnight. In these wider expeditions, Charlie would choose the destination with a map and compass while Fred would pick the path. Fred had better vision than Charlie and surer footing so sometimes Charlie would hold onto Fred as they walked side-by-side. 

Charlie had ridden horses in England, but this was his first exposure to burros. All in all, he considered them a superior species. Yes, horses could run faster, but burros were calmer, more intelligent, braver, had better eyesight and greater endurance, were stronger pound for pound, better adapted to a hot dry climate, and could get by on far less water. But there was something more. He felt a bond with Fred that he had never felt with a horse, a sense that they trusted, understood, and liked each other. They worked together as a team. Fred had a soul.

Fred was not just more intelligent than horses, he also seemed more intelligent than other donkeys he met, like Amelia. His grandfather had observed in his book "The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication" that domesticated species often differ in a suite of characters from their wild ancestors; they tend to have floppier ears, more mottled coats, shortened muzzles, and smaller brains. But he also showed that these changes could be reversed, that feral populations descended from ancestors that had escaped human control of their reproduction reverted closer to their wild state. Charlie reasoned this might explain why feral Fred was more intelligent than his domesticated kin. He was also surer-footed, more agile, and more capable of a genuine social relationship with humans. The resumption of natural selection undid some of the harmful effects of artificial selection showing that nature is wiser in crafting organisms than humans and that human error is reversible.

In the fall, Charlie found a job teaching natural history at Pasadena High School. This meant that his explorations with Fred were limited to the weekends, although Fred continued to venture out on his own. Charlie didn't need the salary; a bequest from his grandfather's estate would have allowed him to live in comfortable idleness. But he felt he needed something to do to keep himself grounded; teaching natural history was a good use of his talents. His courses emphasized the careful observation of nature; he encouraged his students to learn natural history the way that he, his Uncle Frank, and his grandfather had learned it, through direct experience instead of textbooks. 

One of his students, Joseph Grinnell, emerged as a prodigy naturalist and Charlie began to tutor him in botany, zoology, and geology. Joseph learned rapidly and soon they and Fred were roaming Mount Wilson and the San Gabriel Forest Reserve to the east of Pasadena collecting specimens of plants, insects, and birds. Charlie carried topographic maps and a compass, Joseph a hand lens and a field notebook, and Fred a plant press, a butterfly net, and any specimens they collected. Both Charlie and Joseph carried binoculars for any birds or other animals they saw. 

Under Charlie's tutelage, Joseph became an astute observer of nature; his field notes documented the environments they traversed and the identity, behavior, and habitat of any species they encountered. Joseph was especially adept at sketching birds, highlighting their distinctive features and depicting landforms, indicating their life zones. He felt drawing them allowed him to remember them better. Charlie traced their route on his maps and marked where specimens had been collected or animals sighted. 

Over time, their relationship morphed from that between a teacher and student to a mutually respectful one between colleagues. Joseph joined Ruth, Mamie, and Fred as the reasons Charlie stayed in Pasadena. His father was so absorbed in caring for his new family that he did not have much time to spend with Charlie. It was just as well — Charlie had already had much more contact with him than with his mother. His strongest attachments to family remained with his late Grandfather Charles, Grandmother Emma, Uncle Frank, and Aunt Bessy.

Fred and Amelia carried minimal loads of water, food, camping gear, and plant and animal specimens, Charlie and Joseph their usual maps, compass, notebooks, and binoculars. They made good progress, averaging twenty miles a day.

Crossing Tuolomne Meadows near Yosemite, Fred showed his worth as a defender of his herd when they encountered a black bear intent on stealing their food. Fred backed up, studied the situation, advanced, reared, and struck the bear in the head. The bear was persuaded to seek food elsewhere. (If Fred had not been able to drive off the bear with his front hooves, kicking him with his back legs would have been more than enough to kill him outright.)

Aunt Annie tolerated visitors, but her poverty and her alcoholic husband's abuse of both her and her children had embittered her. She was aggrieved that her role in the Harper's Ferry insurrection was ignored while her brother Salmon, who had not even participated, received great attention and celebrity as John Brown's son.  Aside from Owen and Day, she was the only surviving participant in the attempted insurrection and she was the only one in the family who had seen their father hanged. Even thirty years later, she had not recovered from the shocks and losses of that time. She was offended by the many false things written about her father and family and by the fact that none of the authors asked her about the planning and preparation for the insurrection she had witnessed at Kennedy's farm.  She also resented that formerly enslaved people had not expressed more gratitude to her father, their liberator,  and his family. Her grievances filled her small house like the acrid smoke. Charlie and Joseph were relieved when they could retreat to the relative peace and harmony of Charlie's cousin John Henry's nearby house.

After visiting Charlie's family, they sailed via clipper ship from the deep water port of Arcata to San Francisco and on to Long Beach, completing their circuit to Pasadena.  

The next summer they went inland to what had been the floor of the Western Interior Seaway. Charlie went looking for ammonites in chalk formed at the same time as the deposits at the White Cliffs of Dover and the marine strata at the summit of Mt. Tarn, Tierra del Fuego. Joseph went for the migratory birds they would see along the way. 

The strata they traversed were from the eve of two mass extinctions: the Cretaceous period at the end of the Mesozoic and the Permian period at the end of the Paleozoic. 

They took rail via the Southern Pacific north to San Francisco, the Central Pacific to Salt Lake City, and the Union Pacific to Ogallala, Nebraska.  Fred and Amelia traveled in the stock car. 

From Ogallala, they walked due south until they came to Sharon Springs, a stop on the Butterfield Overland Despatch Route running along the Smoky Hill River. They walked east along the river, searching the exposed Smoky Hill Chalk for ammonites. The Smoky Hill Chalk member of the Niobrara formation was laid down in the Coniacian stage of the Late Cretaceous, contemporary with the deposition of the White Cliffs of Dover. 

They first encountered the Little Jerusalem Badlands about four miles west of Elkader, Kansas in Logan County, then the Monument Rocks and nearby Castle Rock in Gove County, and next Wildcat Canyon and Cedar Bluff in Trego County. 

Their route along the river took them through earlier and earlier strata until they reached  Lehigh, Kansas, south of Salina. There, Jurassic and Triassic strata had been eroded to expose Permian period limestones. They followed the limestone due south past Wichita and into Oklahoma. In the south-east corner of Oklahoma they returned to Cretaceous period chalk.

Charlie was struck by how the Oglala's experiences at the Carlisle school paralleled that of the Yahgan at the Usuaia mission station. Fortunately, Thomas  Bridge's efforts to Christianize the Yahgan were not nearly as successful as Pratt's to Americanize the Carlisle School students.

[give route, talk about trip through Choctaw territory, following overland trail

Wilson Nathaniel Jones Durant

Captain Pratt reentered Joseph's life in 1896, taking him along on an Indian school inspection trip up the Pacific coast to Sitka, in southeast Alaska. When Pratt returned south, Joseph stayed in Sitka among the Lingít, collecting bird specimens until the fall of 1897.  Back in Pasadena, Joseph's collection of bird specimens amazed Charlie and his recollections of his adventures among the Lingít enchanted him.

Shortly afterward, the country was seized by gold fever. Most of the rush was toward the Klondike, but Captain Bernard "Barney" Cogan conned the gullible into believing that vast amounts of gold could be found on Kotzebue Sound. The scam inspired Joseph to join the Long Beach and Alaska Mining and Trading Company and head for the Kotzebue to mine for gold. Joseph was motivated not so much by a lust for gold as by a desire to collect bird specimens someplace he had never been. It was easy to convince Charlie to accompany him;  Charlie had wanted to visit that part of the world ever since his time in Tierra de Fuego — his stay at the southern tip of the Americas made him yearn to see the other end. 

Alaska

Charlie and Joseph used this spare time to hike around the San Francisco Bay, surveying the tidal flats for its flocks of shorebirds — plovers, willets, curlews, godwits, sandpipers, and dunlins.  They averaged around eight miles a day, stopping on the way at Stanford University and Berkeley, where Joseph thought he might continue his education and Charlie might find a future intellectual community. 

The Penelope sailed from San Francisco in mid-May and reached Unamak Pass through the Aleutians on June 12.  Eight hundred miles north and a little after the summer solstice, they had a chance to watch the midnight sun arc high in the sky then swoop down, just grazing the southern horizon, before climbing again. A few days later, in Kotzebue Sound, Charlie transferred to the Northern Light that would soon return to San Francisco. 

The Yukon Delta was an ideal place to watch birds; there were more in one spot than he dreamed possible: geese, ducks, grouse and ptarmigans, loons and grebes, petrels, cormorants, eagles and hawks, cranes, plovers, sandpipers, gulls and terns, auks and puffins. But best of all, the parasitic jaeger had its summer breeding grounds there and allowed him to closely observe its behavior. It was a naturalist's paradise.  Given his evident fascination with birds, they gave him the name "Yaqulpak" 'eagle.' 

He was invited to stay in the qasgiq or men's house along with the community's boys and young men and began his apprenticeship in Yup'ik hunting and fishing. [The traditional subsistence economy was based on the hunting of whales, sea otters, and seals and fishing for salmon in streams and saltwater fish in the bays. These activities were supplemented by the hunting of land animals and the collecting of berries, roots, and bulbs. 

Living there gave him a chance to learn a few words of Yup'ik, especially the names of different species of birds and mammals. It was a nice role reversal from teacher to student of natural history. 

The material culture included the two-hatch kayak, harpoon arrows, darts, twined baskets, and stone, bone, and wooden utensils.] 

The coming of spring was his signal to leave. An umiak took him out to a steamer that was making its way back from Nome to Seattle and San Francisco. He stopped in Anchorage and went up the Matanuska Valley to Glacier View, north of the Chugach mountains, to search for ammonites in the Cretaceous period Matanuska Formation. His guides spoke both English and Chugash, a language related to Yupi'k; he could see that their names for the many common animals were either the same as Yup'ik or were cognates.

English Yup'ik Chugash

black bear tan’gerliq` tan'erliq

wolf kaganaq kaganaq

silver salmon qakiiyaq qakiiyaq

And he found his ammonites.

Geology of the Matanuska Formation , AK

Lingít ('Tlingkit')

His first task was to search for an interpreter and tutor, a native Lingít speaker who could translate for him, teach him the local natural history, educate him about Lingít culture and society, and in general act as his research assistant. It was a tall order but he soon found Xíxchʼ ('frog') who had been working at Clark and Martin's general store as a way of learning English and earning money. He was sixteen years old and a member of the Gaanax.ádi ('People of Sheltered Harbor') matrilineal clan living in the community of Katdukgun on Tongass Island in the Yéil Hít or 'Raven Longhouse.' There were a number of variants of the name of the island — Tongass, Tomgas, Tungass,  Tont-a-quans, Tungass-kon, and Tʼang̱aash — all loosely based on the name of their people, the Taant'á Kwáan. They took their name from Taan ('Sea Lion') Island known to Europeans as Prince of Wales Island. The name of the tribe, Taant'á Kwáan, derives from the Lingít name of the Island.)

Xíxchʼ saw that he could both learn English and earn money by taking Charlie in tow. So they canoed 50 miles to the southeast where Xíxchʼ introduced Charlie to the other members of his longhouse. His mother, Láx̱ʼ ('heron,') recognized that Charlie was different from any other dleit ḵáa ('white man') she had met; she saw that Charlie was respectful of the Lingít and sincerely wanted to learn their language and their ways. She figured he could be useful — someone who could help defend them against further encroachment by other dleit ḵáax'w. She told him that he was a neechkateiyí,  a 'rock on the beach' — someone without Lingít parents who she could make into a Lingít through adoption. Many Lingít would have perceived being called neechkateiyí as a grave insult, tantamount to being called a bastard. But it didn't bother Charlie; after all, he was a bastard and felt no shame in it. His entire life experience was that the accident of whether or not his parents had a marriage license had no bearing on his worth as a human being. 

Thus Charlie became a member of the Gaanax.ádi clan in the Yéil naa ('Raven Moiety'), a resident of the Yéil Hít ('Raven House') on Tʼang̱aash Island, and was given the name Kóoshdaa ('river otter'). Now, instead of just Xíxchʼ to teach him, he had a whole longhouse of tutors. Láx̱ʼ was the hít tláa ('house mother') and her brother, Jánwu ('mountain goat'), was the hít s'aatí ('house master'), both positions that demanded respect. Jánwu, in his role as Charlie's káak ('mother's brother'), exercised authority over Charlie in a way that Xóots ('brown bear'), in his role as Charlie's éesh ('father') did not. He also taught Charlie the skills he would need as a Lingít man: hunting, fishing, and fighting.

Yéil naa   Gaanax.ádi naa   Yéil Hít

'Raven moiety'   'Sheltered Harbor clan'   'Raven House' 

Charlie soon discovered that it was almost impossible for him to learn Lingít; its sounds and grammar were completely alien. Some consonants were particularly hard, especially those produced at the back of the mouth; they sounded to him like popcorn popping. He eventually discovered that they could be produced by choking at the same time as one said the sound. (Much later he learned from his linguist son Raven that these sounds are called ejectives.) He decided Lingít had been designed by sadists intent on punishing anyone who dared learn it as a second language. However, he persevered and his Lingít hosts were patient and eventually, he made some progress. They negotiated a way of communicating with each other — creating a pidgin just for him. This meant he could have simple one-on-one conversations with fellow Gaanax.ádi ḵáax'w but not understand rapid conversation among them. He never became fluent in Lingít and depended on Xíxchʼ, his interpreter, for detailed discussions about anything that could not be directly seen. It appeared that Xíxchʼ had learned more English from him than he had learned Lingít from Xíxchʼ. So it goes, it was the best he could hope for. 

In addition to instructors, Charlie had acquired a wide web of other fictive kin relationships. Xíxchʼ became his fictive younger brother; Charlie addressed him as ax̱ kéekʼ 'my younger sibling.' In return, Xíxchʼ called him ax húnx̱w 'my older brother.' He addressed his sisters, Digitgiyáa 'hummingbird,' and Tlax̱aneisʼ 'kingfisher' as ax̱ dlaakʼ 'my sister.' In return, his sisters called him ax éekʼ 'my brother.' Tlax̱aneisʼ called Digitgiyáa ax̱ shátx̱ 'older sister' and was called ax̱ kéekʼ 'younger sibling' in return. It was confusing — where English males and females both used the same two terms for their siblings, Lingít used five, males and females using different terms from each other except that they both referred to their younger same-sex siblings as kéekʼ which effectively meant 'brat.'

Chʼáakʼ naa   Daḵlʼaweidí naa   Kéet Hít

'Eagle moiety'  'Inland Sandbar clan'  'Killer Whale House'

But the confusion of their kinship system didn't end there. The same-sex siblings of his fictive mother and father were treated as though they were also his parents and their children as though they were also his brothers and sisters. His father's sister's daughters were his preferred marriage partners; failing that he would only be allowed to marry a woman in the Chʼáakʼ naa ('Eagle moiety'). But because his father's sister was married to his mother's brother, his father's sister's daughters were also his mother's brother's daughters. In other words, their daughters were his double cross-cousins. You could say that his father and his mother's brother had traded their sisters for wives or, alternatively, that his mother and his father's sister had traded their brothers for husbands. This part, however, was familiar; he decided that the Darwin-Wedgwood families must have been closet Lingíts: Josiah Wedgwood III and Charles Darwin had also exchanged their sisters in marriage; Emma is Josiah's brother, and Josiah's wife, Caroline, is Darwin's sister. The converse is also true, Emma traded her brother Josiah III to Caroline Darwin and received Caroline's brother in return. 

(Charlie was disappointed that the pattern didn't continue among the Darwin-Wedgwoods. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriages would also have been possible in the next generation; Josiah III and Caroline had three daughters and Emma and Charles had more than three sons. The sons could have married their mother's brother's daughters in birth order:  Erasmus Darwin with Sophy Wedgwood, George Darwin with Margaret Wedgwood, and Francis Darwin with Lucy Wedgwood. The three couples would have been reasonably closely matched in age, with Sophy three years younger than Erasmus, Margaret three seven years younger than George, and Lucy two years older than Francis. Alas, it was not to be.)

Just as with the Yup'ik, he had the impression that Lingít material culture was better adapted to their environment than the Yahgan's to theirs. However, the difference was not as extreme as that between the Yup'ik and the Yahgan, presumably because the Yup'ik environment was much more hostile in winter than that of the Lingít and Yahgan. After all, it wasn't necessary to for them live in underground bunkers and dress head to toe in fur, just to survive winter's onslaught. 

Other differences, such as in their dwellings, were driven by the fact that the Yahgan were nomadic canoe-faring hunter-gatherers while the Lingít were much more sedentary. Lingít longhouses were long-lasting cedar plank houses with bark roofs up to 100 feet long. Lingít longhouses took much longer to construct and were much more comfortable than Yahgan dwellings. In contrast, Yahhan ákars were easy to construct, occupied briefly, and did not last long after they were abandoned. 

Láx̱ʼ, Charlie's fictive mother, was a young girl approaching puberty when a great smallpox epidemic swept the Pacific Northwest in 1862 killing half of the people in Katdukgun. Five years later, the Waashdan Ḵwáan ('Americans') white men came with gunboats to claim lingitʼaaní ('Lingít Land') as their own. A year later, they set up a noow 'fortress' on the other side of the island that they called Fort Tongass. It was abandoned two years after that. 

Shortly, after the smallpox epidemic, her parents promised her to Xóots, her double cross-cousin and Charlie's fictive father. They were married a few years after that.  Dagatgiyáa followed a year later, then Taan, Tlax̱aneisʼ, and Xíxchʼ at lengthening intervals.

[consolidate discussion of history, names, raven cycle, shamanism to what Charlie learns from Yaay.

control of trade routes from coast to interior and Athabaskans (G̱una naa)  beyond

totem poles, crests, idea of clan property -- names, blankets, art forms

[Yáay 'whale' 'father's father', 'mother's mother's brother'  shaman (taught Charlie shamanism)

Taanta Kwan library of congress -- knew all of the Raven cycle, the stories of conflict and warfare (the battle of sitka, feuds within the G..adi, and the history of the migrations of the Taanta kwaan and of the G...adi,

died [of what] funeral potlatch and erection of totem pole kootéeyaa  in last year

memorial ceremony for a shaman íx̱tʼi daa yoo kooneik

totem pole with Lincoln at the top -- considered by the white men as honoring him, by the Lingit as shaming him for ending slavery

Reflection that the three societies that he had gotten to know -- the Yahgan, Yupik and Lingit all had essentially the same subsistence economy -- all were hunter-gatherers of mostly marine resources. 

They should all have been equally civilized. But the Lingít were the most sedentary and the Yahgan the least, and social and cultural complexity seemed to track the richness of the natural resources degree to which the society was sedentary. The thing that allowed the Lingit to be sedentary and socially complex and kept the Yahgan more nomadic with less social complexity (political system) with the Yupi'k somewhere in the middle was the richness of the resource base -- the Lingit had the most amble resource base, especially in the form of massive salmon runs while the Yahgan the skimpiest.

The Raven was central to Charlie's new identity as a Lingkit; he was a member of the Raven moiety, his clan crest was the Raven, and he lived in Raven House. Raven is also central to the Lingít cosmos; he is the trickster hero who created all life, populated heaven with lights, and intervened to help humanity. In this respect, he is like the Greek titan and trickster figure Prometheus who stole fire from the Gods to give it to humans and was tortured for eons until freed by Heracles. This core myth in the Raven cycle illustrates his roles as creator, trickster, and hero. Instead of stealing fire, he steals the sun, moon, and stars. 

Raven flew until he heard people in the dark and asked them "Would you like to have light?” They didn't believe him so Raven opened the box and let out the sun. Frightened, the people all ran far away. 

Now there are stars, the moon, and the sun and the sky is not always dark. 

He believed that the Lingít experienced nature much the way he did, as the infinite and eternal saturated with the divine. In short, after his three years there, he felt truly at home. 

[Far from being inferior to other forms of religious beliefs, animism comes closest to what he actually believes. He would be an animist, genuine unitarian, Buddhist, Hindu, Greek polytheist/Muslim, Jew, Anglican/Episcopalian, Evangelical Born-again in that order. explain

This was especially important in learning about Lingít animism and cosmology. ]

He felt much more a part of the community than he ever had in Ushuaia or Alakanuk and stayed long enough to gain a deep understanding of Lingít culture and cosmology. 

Arcata

But he did not return to Pasadena. He had grown restless by the end of his seven years there, he wasn't inclined to return to teaching, and his father was absorbed in the life he had created with his new family and had little spare attention for him. In any event, Charlie never developed the attachment to his father that he had to his caregivers in Down House.

He had already discovered the ideal place to settle temporarily while on his way to north Alaska three years before — the town of Arcata, California. Arcata Bay and Humboldt Bay had a species diversity of birds to rival Alakanuk, the town had all the amenities of civilization that he had missed, as the only deep water port between San Francisco and Portland it was well connected to other cities on the California coast, and he was able to find a cottage near the Ma-le'l dunes on the outskirts of town where he could read, and write, and think.

After six months in Tierra del Fuego, nine months at the mouth of the Yukon, and three years in the Alexander Archipelago, plus a summer exploring the margin of the Western Interior Seaway, he felt prepared to write three scientific journal articles and a monograph. The first journal article would compare the adaptation of the Ushuaia Yahgan and the Kichx̱áan Lingít to similar environments at opposite ends of the Americas. The second would build on the work of his mother and grandfather by comparing the ammonites found in Cretaceous-era chalk deposits from the summit of Mt. Tarn, the White Cliffs of Dover, the Austin Chalk, Monument Rocks, and the Matanuska Formation. The third would compare the behavior of the Parasitic Jaeger at the southern and northern ends of its range. And the monograph would be an ethnography of the Yup'ik, covering their material culture, subsistence practices, marriage, child rearing and education, the kinship system, social organization and politics, community rituals, mythology and cosmology.

However, when he submitted them for publication, all were rejected. He was handicapped by the fact that he did not have any degrees from or affiliation with a University. He had been prepared for scientific work by the greatest naturalist of the time but it did not matter. He published the ethnography on his own because he regarded it as an obligation to the Yup'ik but the rest he abandoned.

This was enormously discouraging and caused him to reevaluate his career plans. He knew that his rejected articles were superior to much of what he saw published in the journals — it was only his lack of degrees and a university affiliation that excluded him. But he did not want to go to a university for the necessary degrees, partly out of pique, partly out of believing it would be a waste of time and that he had more to teach his professors than they to teach him. 

But he also realized that his best contribution to science might not be as a practicing scientist but instead as a defender of science, scientists, and students of science.

He was equally appalled by the term "Social Darwinism" as though the dog's breakfast that Spencer had made of his grandfather's theories could be applied to human beings and justify imperialism and racism. It rankled to hear it claimed that evolution produced better human beings, that the strong invariably prevailed over the weak, the intelligent over the stupid, and the superior over the inferior. He could think of a long list of human beings he greatly admired who never had children: Her Majesty Elizabeth I, composers Beethoven and Handel, scientists Da Vinci and Newton, and poets Keats and Blake. Surely these exemplary humans could not be regarded as inferior to the many undistinguished parents of large families. Furthermore, this perversion of his grandfather's ideas was being used to justify the most cruel forms of domination and subjection of the weak by the powerful.

Charlie believed that Spencer had missed the whole point of his grandfather's theory. Natural selection does not favor mere survival; what is important is getting your offspring into the next generation and the ones after that. Mice have very short lifespans but, because females can bear many litters per year with many pups in a litter, they manage to produce about sixty offspring in their brief lives. Mere survival is often irrelevant to evolutionary outcomes. Thus "survival of the fittest" is a non-sequitor.  

Another important way that Spencer missed the point is that his focus on the notion that "nature is red in tooth and claw" blinded him to the best of his grandfather's theories — the idea of sexual selection. Often, in evolution, it's lovers not fighters who prevail. Males in many species often sport extravagant ornaments that impede their survival but help them attract mates — the plumage of a peacock, the overlarge antlers of red deer, and so on.  What matters in many cases is not which male can win a competition with another male, but which one can manage to get chosen by a receptive female.  Charlie speculated that this might have something to do with the evolution of the human capacity for music; for humans, like for many birds such as the mockingbird and the lyrebird, elaborate music and song is a way of attracting mates. It can't be said that a talent for music increases the likelihood that one would survive, but clearly, it is an ability that can be favored by selection. This might be called "selection of the sexiest;" those who are best at the competition for mates will be the most successful in leaving their offspring. 

However, Charlie's main objection was that nature is much more competent at selection than humans are. Humans are hindered by their tunnel vision; they too often select for an excessively narrow set of traits. For example, selecting horses for speed alone might help win derbies but produces horses with light, fragile leg bones that often break and the horses then must be euthanized. 

In general, many domesticated animals would not survive long on their own in the wild (horses and boars are exceptions). Compared to nature, humans are inept at selection. They would be especially incompetent if they were to artificially select each other.

One of the strengths of Origin of Species was its freedom from Lamarck's idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited — the notion that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors had strained to reach the leaves on upper branches. But then, almost ten years after the first edition of Origin, his grandfather backtracked to reintroduce Lamarck in the form of pangenesis. This was the hypothesis, with a pedigree going back to Hippocrates, that an organism's cells emit small particles called gemmules that can circulate throughout the body and collect in the gonads. The gemmules are then passed on to the next generation, transferring acquired traits from parent to offspring. 

Charlie could see that the pangenesis would work to conserve some of the variation in the population necessary for natural selection, but not all of it. Again, if inheritance blended at each generation, the children of one blue-eyed parent and one brown-eyed parent would have muddy brown eyes, but in fact, their eyes are usually brown and sometimes blue but not a mix of the two. It was hard to see how any pattern of use or disuse could preserve the difference. Charlie didn't mind theoretical speculation if it did work as an explanation but objected if it did not and merely got in the way — pangenesis and its companion Lamarckism were at odds with his grandfather's original conception of natural selection. As Proverbs 17:28 states "Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is considered prudent." It wasn't until the turn of the century that the mystery of the mechanism was solved with the discovery of Mendel's findings.

Pangenesis

Later, in the first decades of the 20th century,  came the attacks on evolution by biblical literalists or creationists. As explained in the mission statement of the Solid Rock Church of God in Nature, he excoriates "Christian" fundamentalists for their misunderstanding the poetry of the Judeo-Christian scriptures as the literal word of God, reserving special condemnation of so-called "Creation Scientists." As Max Simon would say, they are not even wrong. They cannot be described as bad scientists because they are not scientists at all.

Science is like cricket, it is played according to a certain set of rules. If you do not follow the rules of cricket, whatever else you might be doing, you are not playing cricket. Similarly, science also proceeds according to a certain set of principles. Scientific theories must be empirically testable and falsifiable. Experimental results must be replicated before they are trusted and should generate new empirically testable theories. If you do not follow these principles of the scientific method, whatever else you might be doing, you are not conducting scientific research. 

Instead of being bad science, creationism is bad theology. Its advocates do not appear to have read past the first chapter of Genesis; if they had read any further they would have noticed that the second chapter contradicts the first. They certainly show no evidence of having read the Gospels; they are more Mesopotamian cultists than Christians. 

Worse still was when creationism became fused with so-called "Christian" nationalism. Not only did this movement try to impose their beliefs on others, like the teaching of "creation science" in classrooms, but they embraced a whole host of authoritarian, racist, and misogynist policies. They seek to deny science, control women's bodies, encourage the proliferation of firearms, allow the wealthy to destroy the environment for profit, destroy public education, deny food to the hungry and housing to the homeless, and in many other ways act contrary to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus Charles Darwin Brown found himself having to defend the theory of evolution from its misuse by Social "Darwinists" and eugenicists on one side and ignorant distortions by creationists and "Christian" nationalists on the other. Seeing that he was unlikely to make a significant contribution as a practicing naturalist, he resolved to defend science, scientists, and students of science from all sides. By contesting the misconceptions of the sacred by fundamentalists and atheists alike, he defends faith in an infinite and eternal Divine Nature through his founding of the Solid Rock Church of God in Nature. 

His understanding of the sacred is described here.

Berkeley

Ever since arriving in California, he missed the intellectual stimulation that he had had growing up and listening to the spirited conversations between his grandfather and Uncle Frank.  But the conversations diminished when his grandfather died and ended altogether when he left England. For a time, he had a semblance of that kind of exchange with Joseph Grinnell, but in 1901, Joseph had gone north to study at Stanford University and there were no naturalist prodigies following in Joseph's footsteps at Pasadena High School. 

Even though he had decided not to attend a university, he resolved that if he lived close to a good one he might find among the faculty and students the kinds of intellectual companions he wanted. But where should he go? Throop Polytechnic Institute (later to become CalTech) was close by and developing into a fine college, but its focus was engineering; it was not an intellectual home for a naturalist like himself.  The University of California, Los Angeles was a possibility; it was only a little further away but the city was growing rapidly like a spreading melanoma; the idea of living there was repellent. Cambridge and Oxford were out of the question for a host of reasons. Harvard and Yale were potential candidates but the weather was too cold and the landscapes lacked the grandeur of the West. He was also just beginning to get a feel for the ecology of the California coast and to be able to identify all of the birds and many of the plant species he encountered. He cast his attention northward.

He had traveled the length of the Pacific Coast during his 1892 summer field season and returned to the California Bay Area in 1898 on his way to Alaska. He was already gravitating toward living near the University of California, Berkeley when he received word that Joseph Grinnell had been named the director of the newly established Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. 

That decided the matter. Soon Joseph had recruited him to work at the museum as curator of the growing collection of bird specimens. (Sadly, Charlie's collection of invertebrate fossils did not find a home there.) Although the reversal of their roles was strange at first, their respect was mutual. 

So, by the fall of 1909, he was happily settled in a redwood bungalow on Panoramic Hill, perched above the university with a wonderful view of the Golden Gate and the entire San Francisco Bay area. It also had ready access to trails into the foothills and their chaparral and oak woodlands.  Once there, he arranged to bring Fred to live with him. His Aunt Ruth had died five years before and his Uncle Henry, at 87, was too infirm to allow Fred the freedom to continue to walk up the Arroyo Seco to explore the hills on his own.

The Solid Rock Church of God in Nature

It was down in the Berkeley Flats near the Bay on San Pablo Avenue that he established the first Solid Rock Church of God in Nature as a small storefront. It was a humble beginning but he gradually assembled a small congregation drawn in by his sermons — in equal parts discourses about Nature and the Divine. He drew a large portion of his parishioners from the Unitarian Church who were predisposed to his celebration of the Divinity of Nature. He gave his sermons on Saturday mornings so as not to conflict with the services given at First Unitarian Church on the corner of Dana and Bancroft in Berkeley.

Unitarians were especially receptive to his message in part because he had been greatly influenced by the religious fervor of his Unitarian grandmother. She, he, and his Unitarian congregants all rejected belief in biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, the Trinity, original sin, and predestination and shared doubts about the resurrection. But all also had an abiding faith in the Divine. Unitarians at least started as genuine monotheists, believing, along with Muslims, that there is no god but God. From there, it was not a great leap to go from saying that God is One to affirming that God and Nature are One; it just takes Unitarianism one step further. He convinced his congregants that the idea that God exists in the image of man is a form of idolatry as is the attribution to the Divine of human characteristics like a distinct personality with emotions, a will, and intentions. He argued that, like worshiping an idol, this anthropomorphism coerces the infinite and eternal into the material and temporal limitations of a human being.

Along with the Unitarians, he also drew in members of Berkeley's scientific community who sought a way of reconciling their senses of the divine with their commitments as scientists. He met many of them in the course of his work at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and his ubiquitous attendance at colloquia in the botany, zoology, geology, and physics departments. He attracted scientists who were averse to the sterile atheism embraced by many of their colleagues; it struck them as arrogant to confidently deny the existence of the sacred. It was enough to be an agnostic. Better still to be a devout agnostic, to emphatically recognize the limits of human understanding and be passionately aware of Divine Nature's transcendent mystery. These scientists would answer the voice from the whirlwind with a resounding declaration of their ignorance. 

He found colloquia in the physics department the most stimulating. It exposed him to a novel way of seeing reality. In the quantum realm, all of his presuppositions were upended — effects could precede causes, entities could be both particles and waves and in two places at once, and unseen cats could be living and dead simultaneously. The entire way of doing science was upended. Physicists started with mathematics and used experiments on the invisible to test their predictions. In contrast, as a British empiricist, he inferred generalizations from observations that relied on his senses. Unlike the boring lectures on natural history he had endured as a youth in Cambridge, these colloquia actually taught him something he did not already know. 

Paradoxically, this new science deepened his understanding of the Divine.

After establishing the The Solid Rock Church of God in Nature, he attended services at the First Unitarian Church in Berkeley to fish for humans as congregants at his own church. Among the fish, he met Lucy Ward_Stebbins, daughter of Horatio Stebbins, the now-deceased pastor of the First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. She was a well-educated former social worker who had recently been named Dean of Women at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the only woman on the faculty or staff of the university. In many respects, she reminded him of his mother — strong willed, independent, and very intelligent. 

They soon became fast friends.

Her resemblance to his mother did not end with her personality. Like Etty, she wanted to have a baby but not care for it — a child but not a spouse.  The desire to remain single was not just a result of her independent spirit but was also a reaction to the prevailing patriarchy. In her role as Dean of Women at UCB, she did not want to be seen as under the domination of a husband. Her motivations were a little like those of Queen Elizabeth in remaining single — as a woman in authority she wanted it clear she was independent of men. And like Elizabeth, the desire for independence did not include an absence of desire. 

One New Year's Eve she acted on that desire with a good friend, under the influence of a little too much champagne. Lucy and Charlie almost exactly reenacted the fling between Etty and Day. She was young, pretty, and bold. He was a little older, tall, and handsome, his taut body honed by years of exercise. And he had his father's haunting blue eyes. All of a sudden, they ceased for the moment to look at each other as friends but instead as lovers. And almost as quickly as Etty after her dalliance with Day, when she woke with a hangover, she regretted acting her erotic impulse, not because he was beneath her but instead because she feared losing a friend.

She did not have to worry.

When Lucy learned she was pregnant, she and Charlie talked about what to do. Both wanted a child, neither wanted to be married. But who would care for the baby? Their discussion revealed that Charlie had more of a maternal instinct than she did — that he was willing to play the roles of father and grandfather as his maternal grandfather and uncle had played for him. It was unusual for a man to be a single parent but not unique. And Lucy would be much more engaged as a caregiver in their child's life than Etty had played in his.

Raven Stebbins Brown, conceived January 1, 1915, was born September 14, 1915 at the recently opened Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley.

During Lucy's pregnancy, the Great War unfolded in Europe and Britain entered on the side of France and Russia. Charlie, at age 45 was too old to think of joining the fight himself but beyond that, despite his ties to the nation of his birth, he was against the war. He opposed Britain's entry in August, 1914; its ties to France and Russia were weak and its interests in conflicts on the continent limited. 

He thought of it as mainly a squabble among Queen Victoria's cousins, all of them fighting over the spoils of Empire. But he was even more horrified to watch the United States become gradually but inexorably involved in the conflict itself. 

To his mind, the idea of the US entering the war was spherically stupid — idiotic from any perspective. He worried that involvement in the war could disrupt recent progressive reforms under Roosevelt, he failed to see why it was in the nation's interest to join the fight on one side or another in a struggle amongst empires, but most importantly, he fervently opposed entry into a war that did not meet the qualifications for a moral war. For Charlie, only those wars that were equivalent to protecting one's self, home, and family from murderous intruders could be considered just. This war was not morally just either for Britain or the US. (That it was also immoral for the Germans, Austrians, Russians, and French was not his concern.)

[The United Nations Conference on International Organization (UNCIO), also known as the San Francisco Conference, took place begining April 25, 1945 to establish a framework for the United Nations. The conference's goal was to create a charter for the new organization that would be acceptable to all 50 attending countries, representing over 80% of the world's population. The conference concluded on June 26, 1945, with the unanimous approval of the UN Charter, the Statute of the International Court of Justice, and the Preparatory Commission's "Interim Arrangements". The United Nations officially came into existence on October 24, 1945. 

conference took place from 25 April to 26 June 1945. The process of writing the UN Charter took two months. Every part of it had to be voted on and accepted by a two-thirds majority.

Death of CDB I  May 5, 1950

Charles Darwin Brown II

December 8, 1950 - present

Named after recently deceased grandfather, following Lingit tradition

social world of Darwin-Wedgwood

Charterhouse Trinity College Cambridge (where mother's grandfather,  George Darwin FRS went)

Goes to US, as a professor teaches Ecology and Evolutionary Biology 

in the Dept of Integrative Biology

affiliated with the MVZ

reopens the Solid Rock Church of God in Nature