The cabin Darwin had occupied on the clumsy “Beagle,” was his home from Plymouth to the Cape.  Instead of sleeping in a bunk he swung a hammock, which he regarded as the better sea-going bed.  Though no yacht in heels, the “Beagle” had her own qualities for rough weather, and she behaved loyally towards her passengers.  All the water supply had to be carried in casks, with the effect, under a blazing sun, that it soon grew bad.  The ship called at South America, where Sir George had his first revelation of nature, as she blooms in the gorgeous tropics.  The colour, richness, luxuriance, dazzled him; the more so that he had not read any description of the tropics, which adequately conveyed the sentiments they inspired.

He walked on shore of an evening, and the feelings engendered in him by the scene were wild, of a truth indescribable.  He turned from the luxuriant foliage, to the stars aflame above, and he followed the fireflies as they danced.  The woods were vocal with the hum of insect life, and balm loaded the breezes as they blew softly.  These things at first oppressed his senses as so novel, so strange, that his mind almost hovered between the realms of fact and fancy.

‘And you ask me of the sea,’ he chatted; ’to which I answer that it has always made an impression on me, best described as a mixture of awe and gladness.  I was very conscious, during that long voyage by sail, of the presence and majesty of the Maker.  I felt, standing on the deck of the “Beagle,” as if I were surrounded by some awful but beneficent power.  The grandeur of the sea must make a reflective man religious, as its weirdness might breed superstition in the youthful, or the credulous.’

What wonder, he reasoned as he sailed, that a sailor should be superstitious?  He was separated in boyhood from his home, before he had forgotten the ghost stories of childhood.  While the simple heart still loved to dwell upon the marvellous, he was placed amid all the marvels of the sea.  In the dark, out of the howl of wind and din of waves, he would hear strange shrieks piercing the air.  By him would float huge forms, dim and mysterious, from which fancy was prone to build strange phantoms.  Ships might come and ships might go; the sea must ever hold sway over the sailor man, a mistress to be loved and feared.

‘Sailors,’ he added, ’are not a religious class, so called, but I believe they are sincerely religious in their own manner.  Poor Jack has faith that he is being guarded by some supreme power suited to the protection of the sailor.  He does not seek to analyse that power; he simply believes that it will attend him in the hour of peril.  And that is how all nature’s giant works affect you, when once you are clear of the help of man.  You have a perfect reliance upon the unseen, and there follows a calm, sweet solace, which you cannot express.  No doubts enter, when you are confronted with the great spirit, which seems to preside over virgin nature.