DARWIN’S HUMMINGBIRD

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 pink-and-green hummingbird portrayed next to Charles Darwin in 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?’ 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.