Second paragraph of third chapter of Charles Darwin and the Silurian Survival:
‘Is – is something the matter, Doctor?’ Darwin asked, his enthusiastic expression creasing into one of concern.
This is one of a recent series of books where the Doctor encounters a famous person from history and has an adventure with them, the first one that I have read (the others involve Frida Kahlo, Shirley Jackson and Fela Kuti). I have to say that I was not tremendously satisfied. It probably doesn’t help that my PhD supervisor was an expert on Charles Darwin, so I cut the author a lot less slack than most readers perhaps would.
But this story is the fruit of minimal research; the islands are jungle-covered, uninhabited volcanoes, rather the contested and partly colonised territory of history, and Darwin’s actual identity makes little impact on the plot; it might as well have been Captain Fitzroy who has the adventure with the Tenth Doctor. And the cover features Darwin in the famous photograph taken of him in 1868, a third of a century after he visited the Galapagos Islands in 1835.
I do have one of the other books in the series, but this wasn’t a brilliant start. You can get Charles Darwin and the Silurian Survival here.
Really, the Doctor and Charles Darwin meeting the Silurians on the Galapagos Islands is such an obvious idea that it had already been done much better twenty-five years ago by Big Finish, in the 2001 Sixth Doctor audio Bloodtide by Jonathan Morris. I listened to it in 2007, and wrote then:
Glorious, glorious: Sixth Doctor and Evelyn meet up with Charles Darwin and Captain Fitzroy on the Galapagos Islands, and – how utterly appropriate – meet up with the Silurians. No doubt the play’s account of Darwin’s inner dialogue with himself, as brilliantly portrayed by Miles Richardson, would fail to pass muster with real experts (such as my PhD supervisor) but you don’t expect utter historical accuracy in something like this. Evelyn and Six continue to be a great pairing, and the Silurians with their inner conflicts and betrayals make a great story. Loved it.
I listened to it again in order to write this. A two hour full-cast drama is a very different format from a 100-page novella, but I stand by my assessment that this is much the better work. As well as the points I made first time round, I note that there is a direct connection drawn between Darwin’s experience with the Silurians and the theories that he later developed; and the colonialism of the humans towards the island is reflected in the colonialism of the Silurians to the humans.
Though I was amused that “Governor Lawson” is depicted in the play by Julian Harries with a strong Suffolk accent – in real life, he was the Vice-Governor rather than the Governor (though Darwin might not have realised the distinction) and more importantly he was born in Norway and a naturalised American citizen, who probably never set foot in Suffolk in his life. The Latino accents put on by the all-English cast are also regrettable – Big Finish is doing better than that these days.
For those of us who were around at the time, the unforgettable fictional depiction of Darwin in the Galapagos Islands was the 1978 BBC series, The Voyage of Charles Darwin, with the superb tension between Malcolm Stoddard as the title character and Andrew Burt as Fitzroy. The Galapagos story is told in the second last of the seven episodes, which at present you can watch here: