Charles Darwin: Voyages and Ideas that Shook the World

It seems like every museum in the world has been marking the Charles Darwin bicentenary with shows, books, and symposia. So when Dr Nigel Erskine, curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum, set out to assemble an exhibition, his main concern was the availability of material. 

"I went to England in August 2007," Erskine recalls. "I went to the Zoology Museum in Cambridge and had a wonderful moment of holding Darwin's Galapagos finches in my hands." He laughs. "Unfortunately, we didn't get them."

The show's coming together was itself a process of natural selection, limited by the competition for objects and by a nautical theme. Instead of those famous finches, whose slight variations in beak shape set Darwin's mind a-ticking all those years ago, Erskine obtained 11 of Darwin's crab specimens, three of which still have metallic tags attached to them in the system the great naturalist invented. Erskine secured them from an obscure collection at Oxford University. "We were very lucky to be granted permission to borrow those crabs before everybody else woke up to the fact that Oxford had them," he admits.

Another coup, courtesy of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, is the group of seven watercolour paintings of various ports of call by Conrad Martens, who sailed with Darwin to Patagonia and later became the leading landscape artist of colonial Australia. "They're just stunning," says Erskine. "There's an immediacy about looking at those images, and knowing Martens was actually on the Beagle when he painted them, that takes you on board the vessel."

There's a map of the Cocos Islands drawn by the Beagle's captain, Robert Fitzroy, in 1836. There are collections of Papua New Guinean and Torres Strait Islander weapons and carvings, collected by Darwin's disciple Thomas Huxley on board the HMS Rattlesnake. There's even a glasshouse of plants from the Botanic Gardens based on those studied by Darwin in his later years. "After the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 he immersed himself in the sex life of orchids," Erskine says.

He looked in vain for a suitable scale replica of the Beagle, but in the end commissioned one from Central Coast modelmaker Mike Bass. "I wanted a very authentic model from which people could visualise what the Beagle looked like and how small it was. The model will tell other stories in the permanent exhibition space after the Darwin show is over." A full-size recreation of Darwin's cabin, meanwhile, demonstrates how uncomfortable the conditions must have been for the 180cm-tall naturalist, who also suffered from chronic seasickness.

"His journal entries before the voyage are exuberant because he's mastered how to get into a hammock and thinks he's a real sailor," says Erskine. "And of course, the next entry he's been flat on his back for three weeks. So you have to hand it to the guy that he stuck with it."