12.04.09
How Darwin pulled it off: but mail shipping dates give him away
Darwin must have thought his scheme could never be discovered. It is amazing that shipping schedules for the British mails for the nineteenth century still exist. Crime doesn’t pay!
For the whole text online of Davies book, The Darwin Conspiracy, check the sidebar page, and follow the link.
From The Darwin Conspiracy
CHAPTER 28
The third letter
WALLACE’S advocate H. L. McKinney completed his research, gave his lectures and wrote his book, but he was never going to win prizes for generosity in sharing his sources. In the late 1970s, Arnold C. Brackman, a US writer and journalist who specialised in historical narrative, was researching a book on Wallace. He contacted McKinney congratulating him on his own book, and asking for some help.1
Brackman wanted to know how he could get in contact with Wallace’s descendents (who had helped McKinney some years earlier) so that he could check for himself an incredible piece of evidence McKinney had been shown. McKinney did not reply. Brackman wrote again. Again McKinney failed to reply. Brackman was furious, and used the story in his book in an attempt to embarrass McKinney within the academic frater¬nity and with the government agencies that had funded his research. McKinney still did not get in touch. It was obvious that as far as he was concerned, the Wallace story was his personal preserve. If Brackman so badly wanted to check his evidence, he would have to find the Wallace family himself.2
Brackman spent hours with the London telephone directory and failed with every ‘Wallace’ he contacted. Then he stumbled upon a reference to the Wallace family’s connection with Bournemouth, a coastal resort in the south of England, and switched his point of attack. In a very short space of time, he was sitting with the family in their home. The object that he had come to see was old and fragile, but he immediately saw why McKinney had made it central to the writing of his book.
The discovery was a letter from Wallace addressed to Frederick Bates, the brother of Henry Bates, at his home in the English town of Leicester.3 The letter, dated 2 March 1858, had originally enclosed Wallace’s January letter to Henry Bates in the Amazon (in which he had informed his friend that he had received a letter from Darwin), which had been forwarded to Bates as Wallace had requested. The envelope was marked
‘via Southampton’ in Wallace’s handwriting, and bore a cancellation mark from Singapore dated 21 April. It also bore a London postmark with the date 3 June 1858 (as well as one for the same date at Leicester).
McKinney had immediately recognised the significance of these dates when he had first seen the envelope years before. Darwin had written to Hooker on 8 June 1858, saying that the principle of divergence, along with natural selection, was now the keystone of his theory. Four days after that, Darwin had written in his journal that he had finished amending the ‘Natural selection’ chapter.
Darwin had claimed that Wallace’s letter had arrived at his home on 18 June, but the amazing piece of evidence Brackman was holding suggested otherwise. If this letter to Frederick Bates had arrived in London by 3 June, then so, too, had Wallace’s letter to Charles Darwin. They had travelled on the same ship from Singapore, under a Royal Navy guard.
For Brackman, this piece of evidence (along with Beddall’s suspicions about the missing letters to and from Darwin in that crucial three-year period) indicated a conspiracy he had never dreamed of when he had begun his biography of Wallace. When Brackman published his book, which gave details of evidence that pointed to Darwin having lied about when he had received Wallace’s Ternate paper, the Yale environmental biologist John Brooks was still in the middle of his research, and could tell Brackman only that he, too, had a strong suspicion that Wallace’s letter had been in Darwin’s hands weeks earlier than the declared arrival date.
The question could not be avoided then and it cannot be avoided now: what evidence is there that Darwin stole Wallace’s ideas from his Ternate paper and claimed them as his own by incorporating them in his ‘Natural Selection’ manuscript between 3 June and 18 June 1858?
By piecing together nineteenth century shipping reports from the Dutch East Indies and re-examining Post Office archives in London, as well as following leads from shipping experts for the period, it is now possible to claim beyond any reasonable doubt the following course of events:4
Timeline of the third letter to Darwin
• Wallace posted letters to both Charles Darwin and Frederick Bates on 9 March 1858 from Ternate.
• Both letters were carried aboard the Ambon and arrived in Macassar on 20 March.
The third letter 147
• The Ambon carried the letters from the Celebes to the Javan port of Surabaya and arrived on 25 March.
• The letters were transferred to the Koningin der Nederlanden, which arrived in Batavia on 31 March.
• The Koningin der Nederlanden sailed from Batavia on 12 April and arrived in Singapore on 16 April.
• On 21 April, both letters were date-stamped in Singapore and put on board the Bombay en route to Ceylon. The Bombay arrived in Galle on 29 April.
• At Galle, the letters were transferred to the Nubia, which set sail for Suez on 2 May.
• The Nubia arrived in Suez on 16 May.
• In Suez, the letters were transferred by the overland route and arrived in Alexandria on 18 May.
• The Pera picked up the mail at Alexandria and sailed on 19 May for Malta. The ship docked for three hours in Malta on 23 May and set sail for Southampton.
• The Pera arrived in Southampton, on schedule, shortly after noon on 2 June.
• Mail from the Pera was despatched from Southampton to London by 3pm on 2 June.
• The Pera mail arrived in the General Post Office in London at 6.30pm on 2 June.
• Wallace’s letters were date-stamped and delivered to Charles Darwin and Frederick Bates on 3 June.
The arrival of Wallace’s letter on 3 June (see Appendix 2) would have given Darwin more than enough time to digest its contents and make the two lengthy changes to the ‘natural selection’ chapter of his manuscript. It would also have allowed him to claim that Wallace’s ideas were replicas of his own.
This explains why Darwin had suddenly been able to expound on his ideas about divergence (increasing the relevant section of the manuscript from fewer than two pages to more than sixty pages in the first two weeks of June 1858), and how he had got hold of the essence of Wallace’s ideas about ‘intermediate types and links of species’, which Wallace had been thinking and writing about just before he sent off his letter to Darwin.
It was all extremely neat, and though John Brooks’s date differed from McKinney’s, he believed he had enough evidence to accuse Charles Darwin of stealing Wallace’s ideas in a way that McKinney had not, because McKinney had missed the implications of the changes Darwin had made to his manuscript in June 1858.
Only now, when the entire journey of those letters can be verified beyond doubt, can the case be made that ideas contained in Wallace’s Ternate Law paper were plagiarised by Charles Darwin to convince both Lyell and Hooker, should such evidence ever have been needed, that he had already described those ideas in his own ‘Natural Selection’ manu¬script some time before Wallace’s letter arrived at his home.