One chilly afternoon ten years ago, as I paid for cream tea at Fitzbillies in Cambridge, I noticed the back of the old ten pound sterling banknote, out of circulation since 2018, for the first time. I was starting to research how knowledge about hummingbirds (Trochilidae family) crossed the Atlantic in the early modern period, and I was immediately drawn to the pink-and-green hummingbird portrayed next to Charles Darwin in the banknote art. In the weeks that followed, every time a tenner passed through my hands I glanced at Darwin’s hummingbird for a few seconds, feeling somehow comforted to find my subject of study in such good company.

Months later, in the midst of the 2009 celebrations of Darwin’s bicentennial, the hummingbird on the banknote attracted my attention again. This time it was in the news, at the centre of an unlikely controversy. During the inauguration of the exhibition Darwin’s Big Idea at the Natural History Museum in London, Professor Steve Jones, then head of the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London and author of Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England, qualified the image of the ten pound banknote as ‘little better than fiction’. ‘There were no hummingbirds in the Galápagos’ – the Ecuadorian archipelago where Darwin carried out valuable observations – affirmed Jones. ‘Mockingbirds and finches were important in getting Darwin thinking about evolution, but hummingbirds played no role at all.’ Furthermore, he concluded, ‘hummingbirds are not even mentioned in On the Origin of Species’, so ‘why depict them?’

Professor Jones posed an excellent question. The website of the Bank of England announces briefly that the banknote illustrates the flora and fauna that Darwin ‘could have found in his journey’. Lacking a more clarifying official response, let us speculate: why immortalise the most celebrated naturalist next to a New World species that ‘had nothing to do with evolution’? Using the tools of the historian of science – Darwin’s own writings, Victorian specimen collections and contemporary sources to place them in their historical context – I venture to suggest three possible answers.

The first possibility is that portraying a hummingbird next to Darwin – mediated by the image in the background of the HMS Beagle, in which the young naturalist travelled around the world from 1831 to 1836 – evokes his South American journey in general and not only his famous passage through the Galápagos Islands. In his journal, later published as the Beagle Diary, Darwin, then 23, wrote impatiently from the Brazilian archipelago Fernando de Noronha on 20 February 1832: ‘I am sure all the grandeur of the Tropics has not yet been seen by me. – We had no gaudy birds, No humming birds. No large flowers – I am glad that I have seen these islands, I shall enjoy the greater wonders all the more from having a guess what to look for.’ A few months later, there was success. On 9 June 1832, Darwin wrote from Rio de Janeiro: ‘As we passed along, we were amused by watching the humming birds. – I counted four species – the smallest at but a short distance precisely resembles in its habits & appearance a Sphinx. – The wings moved so rapidly, that they were scarcely visible, & so remaining stationary the little bird darted its beak into the wildflowers, – making an extraordinary buzzing noise at the same time, with its wings.’ The following year, on his way from Santa Fe to Buenos Aires, Darwin described his hikes along the Paraná cliffs and evoked with nostalgia: ‘Amongst the fallen masses of rock, vegetation was very luxuriant; there were many beautiful flowers, around which humming birds were hovering. – I could almost fancy that I was transported to that earthly paradise, Brazil.’¹ Darwin’s young pen confirms that, indeed, hummingbirds were among the species that he observed in South America, but also among the ones he expected to see even before coming across them: hummingbirds epitomised tropical nature to him.

A second possibility is that hummingbirds tell us more about evolution than can be apparently discerned from On the Origin of Species.² Let us take, for example, Darwin’s observation about the similitude between hummingbirds and sphinx moths (Macroglossum stellatarum). Nowadays, this close resemblance is recognised as one of the clearest examples of convergent evolution, the process through which unrelated creatures, like bird and insect, which have the same function in nature – as pollinators, for instance – develop similar traits and end up having a similar appearance. Hummingbirds also illustrate another kind of adaptation, reciprocal evolution. This can be observed in the direct relation between the shapes of the beaks of certain hummingbirds and the corollas of the flowers from which they feed and therefore pollinate. As Darwin explained in his The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom: ‘It appears, indeed, that the beaks of humming-birds are specially adapted to the various kinds of flowers which they visit.’³ In the ten pound banknote, the close-up to the stamen of the yellow flowers with Darwin’s magnifying glass seems to remind us of these two examples of evolutionary theory. But Darwin paid the most attention to hummingbirds in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.⁴ Here he tackled the question of beauty and its place in evolutionary theory. ‘It is very remarkable in how many different ways these birds are ornamented. Almost every part of the plumage has been taken advantage of and modified’. He explained these variations in hummingbirds’ plumage as determinant devices in the process of sexual selection, or as he put it, ‘the selection by the females of the more beautiful males’. Hummingbirds are present in Darwin’s writings throughout his career, including his most famous work. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin presented alpine hummingbirds and their relation to those found in nearby lowlands as examples of modification to adapt to new environments, much like the variations between the famous finches of the different Galápagos Islands.

Finally, a third possibility: perhaps choosing the hummingbird as an icon of the South American fauna explored by Darwin has more to do with the English taste for this creature than with Darwin himself. Indeed, the hummingbird is an animal with a long history in the English cabinets of naturalia. The Natural History Museum keeps, for example, a hummingbird nest collected by Captain James Cook in Rio de Janeiro in 1768 during his first voyage of exploration. In 1801 the collector and antiquarian William Bullock published the first edition of the catalogue of his Museum of Natural Curiosities, which included numerous hummingbird specimens. By 1823, the year Bullock travelled to Mexico and saw live hummingbirds for the first time, his collection amounted to 170 specimens and was the largest in Europe up to that point. But the epitome of English hummingbird collecting was the Hummingbird House of John Gould. The naturalist exhibited his immense collection of 1,500 stuffed trochilids in 1851, to coincide with London’s Great Exhibition. The birds were mounted on little branches inside hexagonal display cases so that visitors could walk around them and appreciate the feathers’ iridescence with the changes in light. The Hummingbird House was so successful that it attracted 75,000 visitors during that year. In 2009 Gould’s hummingbirds were available again to the British public. One of the original 1851 displays was restored and exhibited in Endless Forms: Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Nothing compares, however, to the experience of observing live hummingbirds, a desire that remains very much alive in Europe and the United Kingdom. In the spring of 2008 the London Zoo reopened its exotic bird exhibit, the Blackburn Pavilion, where the main attraction were three Amazilia hummingbirds from Peru and Ecuador. Anyone who was living in London back then can remember the spectacular advertising campaign featuring hummingbird photographs in the Underground and many public spaces. This story did not end well, though. South American hummingbirds have long disappeared from the Blackburn Pavilion, as has any trace of them on the London Zoo’s webpage. Some species, even in the 21st century, cannot be globalised or, at any rate, anglicised.

Also preparing for the Darwin celebrations in 2009, the World Land Trust launched an initiative to observe hummingbirds in situ through a webcam installed in the middle of the South American rainforest. The launch of the project, celebrated in the impressive seat of the Linnean Society of London in Piccadilly, allowed guests to observe in real time hundreds of hummingbirds sipping from the enormous feeders installed in the Buenaventura ecological reserve in Ecuador. As Gould’s hummingbird specimen cases were revisited in Cambridge, real hummingbirds were finally visible in London, via webcam, and admired not only in their inimitable iridescence but also their swiftness, appetite and bellicosity. These are the traits that observers in the Americas have been remarking on and recording since pre-Columbian times.

It was in these same rooms of the Linnean Society of London that, in July 1858, the main points of Darwin’s evolutionary theory were read out loud for the first time. On the Origin of Species was published in November of the following year, mentioning alpine hummingbirds on page 403.

Few commemorations are as effective as those occurring in currency. They render past episodes and characters current through the repackaging of lives and ideas, and they imprint these in the collective memory as they circulate from hand to hand in the most mundane of registers. In this sense, what was the banknote commemorating? Darwin’s claim to evolutionary theory? Or the sustained English imagination about the tropics? The distilled version of Englishness that paired Darwin and the hummingbird in the banknote connects the making of the tropics from Cook to Bullock and Gould, and to us. It also accounts for the desire to keep transplanting the endemic American hummingbird through exhibitions, both of specimens and of live birds, in Cambridge and London.

FURTHER READING

Browne, J. (2003) Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Donald, D., and J. Munro (eds.) (2009) Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press).

Jones, S. (2009) Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England (London: Little, Brown Book Group).

McKie, R. (2008) ‘Darwin art strikes wrong note’, The Guardian/The Observer, http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/nov/16/darwinbicentenary-currencies?INTCMP=SRCH.

Montero Sobrevilla, I. (2018) ‘Indigenous naturalists’, in Worlds of Natural History, edited by H. Curry, E. Spary, J. Secord, and N. Jardine, 112–30 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Steinheimer, F.D. (2004) ‘Charles Darwin’s bird collection and ornithological knowledge during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, 1831–1836’, Journal of Ornithology, vol. 145, 300–20.

Voss, J. (2010) Darwin’s Pictures: Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837–1874, translated by L. Lantz (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press).

¹ C. Darwin, Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle’s circumnavigation of the globe. Journal and remarks, 1832–1836 (London: Henry Colburn, 1839).

² C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859).

³ C. Darwin, The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (London: John Murray, 1876).

⁴ C. Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871).