Galapagos, Ecuador - Darwin

Truth vs Myth
He was only 29 when he arrived in the Galapagos islands.  He was on a two year journey around the world that stretched to an unfathomable five years.  When he got back to England he never got on another boat for the rest of his life.  Contrary to what we were taught in school, there was no eureka moment while he was in the Galapagos.  Matter of fact, he only spent 35 days there in total and only 19 of them on land.  It was only after a discussion with ornithologist John Gould decades later that he put the puzzle pieces together.

The Darwin Center, on the outskirts of town, is less a museum than a scientific research center.  Their main focus is fighting off all the invasive species that have been introduced in the last fifty years.  They've had some successes but seem to be fighting an uphill battle.

Darwin was an avid and tireless collector of all kinds of plants and animals while in the Galapagos.  However, he was not without fault.  First, he assumed that all the tortoises had been transported there by pirates and didn't bother to collect a single one.  Next, he mis-classified most of the finches he collected and made the mistake of not noting the island he had taken each finch sample from.  A decade later he had John Gould review his finch samples.  Gould told him that each finch was a separate species, not a variety of a single species as Darwin had thought.  Darwin then scrambled to read through all the ships logs to figure out where each finch had been collected.

It was an accumulation of evidence, decades of thought and discussions with other experts that led him to his theory.  I can imagine that others were thinking what he was thinking - Gould for one - but just didn't have the courage to say it out loud.  It was in direct conflict with the scripture after all.  He didn't publish his seminal work until 24 years after having been in the Galapagos islands.