How Darwin Made Amazing Discoveries Climbing Mount Wellington Tasmania

Darwin’s discoveries in Tasmania, while climbing Mount Wellington/Kunanyi, changed the world – and the way we understand it. 

In 1836, Charles Darwin made amazing discoveries in Tasmania while circumnavigating the world on the Beagle. The famous naturalist stopped over in Hobart Town and climbed Kunanyi/Mount Wellington. It took him two tries to get to the top, foiled the first time by the dense vegetation. As he wrote in the diary of his voyage: ‘I failed in a first attempt, from the thickness of the wood.’

Darwin was not impressed with Mount Wellington on first glance, judging it to be of ‘of no picturesque beauty’. Nonetheless, he decided to tackle it. The second time, he took a guide. A ‘stupid fellow’ who took the wrong route. ‘… and conducted us to the southern and damp side of the mountain, where the vegetation was very luxuriant … In many parts the Eucalypti grew to a great size, and composed a noble forest.’

Darwin found it almost as taxing as the climbs he’d done the previous year in the Andes.

‘… the labour of the ascent, from the number of rotten trunks, was almost as great as on a mountain in Tierra del Fuego or in Chile. It cost us five and a half hours of hard climbing before we reached the summit.’

Darwin’s discoveries on Mount Wellington, Tasmania

Seeing ‘huge angular masses of naked greenstone’ on the top, like a plain of fired cannon balls, helped clarify Darwin’s discoveries from his travels in South America the previous year. Witnessing the devastating effects of an earthquake on the town of Concepción in February 1835, he set out to cross the Andes. Passing from Chile to Argentina, he saw similar piles of fragmented stones crowning the summits. Fearing they owed to the frequent earthquakes, he was tempted to run for cover.

‘I felt inclined to hurry from below each loose pile,’ he wrote in his journal.

On Mount Wellington – where there were no earthquakes –  the blocks ‘appeared as if they had been hurled into their present position thousands of years ago,’ he noted. This confirmed for Darwin that mountain ranges were not ‘produced at one blow’ – the result of violent geological upheaval – but over time, through trillions of successive earthquakes.

The hunch first came while witnessing the astonishing uplift of coast and marine life in the Andes immediately after the quake. Seeing fossilised marine shells at over 4,000 metres above sea level proved to him that the phenomenon had been repeating itself for aeons.

Darwin’s 10- hour return trek from his Battery Point digs to the pinnacle was impressive, given the lack of an established path. Even more so, considering he wasn’t in great shape. Perhaps that helps explain his comments about the mountain … As though he projected his mood a bit on the nature he encountered … And saw the ‘gloomy shade’ under the mountain’s ‘tree-ferns’.

Darwin in Tasmania: Gloomy mountain mood but marvellous manferns

His dropping into Hobart was towards the end of a five-year voyage on the Beagle. He was homesick and seasick. Even within days of leaving Plymouth Harbour in December 1831, he was ‘wretchedly out of spirits and very sick’. As he approached the Cape Finisterre in Spain, he wrote in his diary:

‘I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking, little did I think with what fervour I should do so.’

Despite that, he marvelled at Tasmania’s nature and especially the flourishing ferns he encountered … No doubt around Fern Tree, on the mountain’s upper slopes.

The flowing fronds of the ‘manferns’ (Dicksonia antarctica) had him spouting poetically despite his evident grumpiness.

‘In some of the dampest ravines, tree-ferns flourished in an extraordinary manner; I saw one which must have been at least twenty feet high to the base of the fronds, and was in girth exactly six feet. The fronds forming the most elegant parasols, produced a gloomy shade, like that of the first hour of the night.’

Darwin loved Hobart, thinking of it as an imaginary haven to escape to in troubled years to come.

Read more about Darwin’s adventure and mountain climb in my upcoming (and long-awaited, to put it mildly) book on my island home.

Useful links: Visit kunanyi/Mount Wellington information on Discover Tasmania and on the Wellington Park website.