Charles Darwin is a giant in the history of biology. His idea that something called ‘factors’, the conceptual precursor to genes elaborated by the monk Gregor Mendel, were inherited from parent to child still stands incontroverted today. The intellectual architecture on all of modern life sciences knowledge today rests on Darwin’s idea.

Darwin visited the Cape between 31 May and 18 June 1836. This fact is not well known.

You will not find it in the history or life sciences secondary school curriculum. It is not part of the biology or medicine or history curriculum at universities, because history of science is not taught in an organised manner in our country. Here is my modest contribution to an introduction to an important theme in the history of science in Africa.

‘In the evening came to an anchor in Simon’s Bay’ Charles Darwin wrote in his notebook on the 31st of May 1836. The Beagle was on its way from Mauritius to Plymouth and stopped at the Cape for 19 days, the longest period of stay at any of the eleven ports other than the Galapagos Islands. ‘We lost a week near Cape Lagullas (sic) by contrary winds and a severe gale’ Darwin noted.

Simon’s Bay, Simonstown today, the natural harbour to use during the Cape winter, did not to Darwin provide much excitement. He wrote: ‘The little town of Simon’s Bay offers but a cheerless aspect to the stranger. About a hundred square whitewashed houses, with very few gardens and scarcely a single tree, are scattered aong the beach at the foot of a lofty, steep, bare wall of horizontally stratified sandstone.’ (Charles Darwin, Notebook entry 31 May 1836).

His passage on Simon’s Bay reveals Darwin’s primary interest in the Cape – geology. In fact, geological thinking was how he learnt to approach nature throughout the voyage of the Beagle. His mentor was the great Charles Lyell and his theories as elaborated in his Principles of Geology (1830-33) left a profound and lasting impression on Darwin.

Janet Browne in Charles Darwin Voyaging wrote: ‘Lyell’s book taught Darwin how to think about nature. Without Lyell there would have been no Darwin: no intellectual journey, no voyage of the Beagle as commonly understood.( Pimlico, 2003, London, p.186). Sitting on the beach nearby Quail Island, a moment he remembered till the day he died, Darwin wrote that ‘It then first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight.’

I tell you this because Charles Darwin spent his 3 weeks at the Cape intrigued by its geology and, perplexing to the visitor and beguiling to its proud residents today, unadmiring of its natural botanical aesthetic environment. About the fynbos and its glorious variety – countless species among which the flowering proteas and fragrant buchu – he expressed some joy without giving any observational description of the plants whatsoever. He wrote: ‘with the exception of the pleasure which the sight of an entirely new vegetation never fails to communicate, there was little of interest.’

Elsewhere in his notebook there are passages like ‘the unconcealed bleakness of a country like this’; ‘I saw so very little worth seeing, that I have scarcely anything to say’; ‘the country’ had a ‘bleak and desolate aspect’. Paarl, my home town, a valley of unparalleled green beauty, was to Darwin ‘far from picturesque’, a ‘pale brownish green.’

Well, that perhaps is what the Cape was like in the winter of 1836. I asked the UCT applied climatologist Peter Johnston, to reconstruct the weather for a number of us preparing a publication on Darwin’s visit to the Cape. Cape winters are known to be wet and miserable. It does not take much for polluting activities like wood-burning to create a haze by giving colour to the temperature inversions, obscuring views of the mountains.

It was colder then. Most of all, the Cape was nowhere as green as it is today because so little tree planting had taken place. When it was covered with plant life, it was with fynbos like restios, not terribly green during winter. In Franschoek which Darwin described as ‘one of the prettiest places I saw in the colony’ had ‘surrounding mountains destitute of trees and even of brushwood, the quantity but they supported a scattered vegetation of rather a brighter green than usual, the quantity however of white siliceous sandstone which everywhere protruded itself uncovered, gave to the country a bleak and desolate aspect.’