Charles Darwin’s legacy was a family tree. He theorised that humankind shared a primordial ancestor with “all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth”. He recognised a kinship with every creature that drew breath and every plant that grew. Darwin was among the first to regard the great apes as our distant cousins. Far less distant from Darwin himself are the TV presenters Anthea and Wendy Turner, who last year discovered they were his eighth cousins four times removed. A relative of theirs, searching on ancestry.com, revealed the blood link between the author of On the Origin of Species and the sisters.
“It is a bit surreal, a bit bonkers to think that we are related,” Wendy, 56, says. “We said we should go to the Galapagos. But we didn’t really think it would ever happen.”
The news came as the Turner family’s living arrangements were undergoing evolution — in particular for Anthea and Wendy’s 91-year-old father, Brian (Darwin’s eighth cousin three times removed). In 2023 he moved to London to be near his daughters, after losing his wife and their mum, Jean. The couple had met as teenagers on the school bus and had been married for 67 years. Having lived all his life in Stoke-on-Trent, the widower downsized for a new life in the capital. Brian — a likeable gent with a firm handshake and a gentle Staffordshire accent — explained that he had made adjustments. His gardening duties are now lighter. He is still getting used to the Tube. He is dogmatic about his daily ten-minute walk to Marks & Spencer to exercise and keep the fridge stocked. But his daughters were insistent he marked this new chapter with a longer journey.
“We said to ourselves that when Dad comes down, we need to go on holiday,” Anthea, 64, says. “The furthest the three of us had been together was Inverness in the early 1970s. We’re lucky that we’re all together — and that Dad is game.”
Their thoughts turned to cruises. They talked Norwegian fjords, but then their eyes wandered to those islands in the Pacific with the family connection.
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“There was a nervousness about going that far because of my great age,” Brian says. “I didn’t want to be the one who was holding everyone up. I must have asked Anthea and Wendy a few times if it was the right thing to do.”
Similar thoughts must have entered the mind of the 22-year-old Charles Darwin in December 1831 as he stood on the quay at Plymouth, about to board HMS Beagle. He had been offered a position as a naturalist on a survey expedition that, he was informed, would last two years (it actually took five). Months earlier he had visited Staffordshire — the county of his paternal roots — to seek his uncle’s endorsement to set sail.
A new world eventually arose before the Beagle’s bow: Darwin gazed upon Sugarloaf as they entered Rio harbour, rode with gauchos in Patagonia and found fossils in the high summits of the Andes. About four years later the Beagle reached the Galapagos. For the Turners it took a full day of flying, though perhaps Brian’s first long-haul experience felt like years. They too would explore the islands from the water.
The Beagle was a 28m-long brig. Darwin struggled to stay in his hammock, which was rigged over a chart table, and suffered seasickness. Above him a skylight framed the constellations. The Turners suffered no nausea on their 43m Ecoventura yacht — maybe it helped that the hammocks were strung on the sundeck, and luxurious cabins below had memory-foam mattresses and windows overlooking tropical straits. Instead of the roasted tortoises on which the crew of the Beagle dined, the Turners enjoyed amuse-bouches and gourmet meals including aubergine and almond stew with polenta, coconut panna cotta and Ecuadorian chocolates. Darwin overloaded the cabin with so many specimens, crew members tripped over them. Anthea and Wendy overpacked so much, they commandeered the wardrobe in their dad’s room too (he didn’t mind). The boat was a different one, but many of the views were the same.
“You can’t imagine the Galapagos was that different when Darwin saw it,” Anthea says. “We had that instant wonder. No one who goes there would fail to feel that.”
“There was a purity about it,” Wendy says. “It made me feel like I was pushing my nose up against a window, having this glimpse of paradise.”
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They spent a week cruising between islands, making landfall using Ribs. Initially worried, Brian nevertheless managed to keep his balance while wading ashore from these launches (though he did get the bottom of his trousers wet). On terra firma they saw those species whose subtle differences across the archipelago aroused their cousin’s questions: including the famous finches and giant tortoises. Anthea went snorkelling with penguins and sea lions, and at Sante Fe Island a Galapagos green turtle swam close enough for her to feel the rush of its wake. One night Wendy danced with the ship’s captain. The youngest passenger on board was an enthusiastic 11-year-old. The oldest was no less impressed.
“It was the best trip I’ve ever taken,” Brian says. “Such a variety of things I’ve never experienced before. It was the holiday of a lifetime.”
Just as arresting as the wildlife were the volcanic landscapes of the Galapagos, which first surged out of the sea five million years ago (a heartbeat in geological terms). Among them was the island of San Cristobal, where Darwin had camped the night on the shore and observed that its craters “vividly reminded me of those parts of Staffordshire, where the great iron-foundries are most numerous”.
The comparison made sense for Brian: when he lived in Stoke-on-Trent, he could see the sky glowing lava-red from the coke ovens. Like Darwin, Brian’s first love had been geology. He had spent many happy hours in a classroom full of fossils at grammar school, and pursued his passion working as a mining engineer for the National Coal Board until the pit closures. Family holidays were tours of Welsh slate mines or Cornish tin mines, or fossil-hunting in the White Peak in Derbyshire (Anthea’s seventh birthday present was a geological hammer). Brian still has his sixth-form palaeontology exercise book with meticulously sketched specimens. Seventy-five years on, his plan was to revive these chronicling habits. For the Galapagos he packed a little camcorder, a tripod and a khaki jacket with four pockets. He would overcome the emphysema he had developed many decades ago down the pit and stride the island trails.
“My main interest was trying to record everything I could on the Galapagos, and making a film. I was dying to see lava flowing into the sea,” he says.
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“Dad took himself out of his comfort zone and thrived,” Anthea says. “For Wendy and me, it was fabulous to see him becoming more confident. He was ten years younger. We were initially concerned that he was going to be at the back of the group. But the only reason he was at the back was because he was busy filming.”
Often the family were on the trail of their relative — they drank cocktails beside Leon Dormido, a volcanic monolith Darwin himself had sketched early in his voyage. They later visited Isabela — the island where Darwin had remarked on iguanas “clumsily running out of the way, and others shuffling into their burrows”.
The Galapagos are synonymous with revelation — and it was marine iguanas that provided Brian with his own. Returning to the ship in a launch one day, he spied two iguanas swimming out across the swells — bound for a little rock half a mile from shore that was “no bigger than a bedside chest”. Only when the lizards reached their goal did it become apparent that five or so other marine iguanas had had the same idea, and were already hogging the rock.
“There was only a tiny bit of room,” Brian remembers. “But they didn’t fight among themselves for who was going to occupy it. They made space. And I thought: when you think of all the trouble in the world — they’re all fighting over a bit of land. The lizards all lived happily together on that rock. All enjoying the sun. Wouldn’t it be nice if the human race were the same?”
It can take time to fully digest a great journey. It was decades after returning to England that Darwin wrote about the implications of his work, outlining a family tree with branches that stretched across innumerable species and across an unimaginable span of time. So too the Turner family reflected on the lessons of their voyage.
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“My wife’s only been gone two years,” Brian says. “It was a constant thought, wishing she was with me so she could enjoy it.”
“There’s no hint in any of our minds that Mum wouldn’t have wanted us to do that trip,” Wendy says. “Let’s embrace life even more so — and do things together.”
“The elixir of youth is not in a pot of cream,” Anthea says in agreement. “It’s in having a go, trying things out. It would be nice to think there’s no end to that.”
The Turner family were guests of Abercrombie & Kent, which has eight nights, including seven full board on an Ecoventura yacht in the Galapagos, from £9,999pp, including flights and transfers (abercrombiekent.co.uk)
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