On 25 April 1832 the Royal Navy vessel HMS Beagle was anchored in the blue waters of Botafogo Bay, Brazil. The naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was leaving the Beagle in a small boat, en route to a temporary residence on the mainland, when a series of waves swamped the vessel and scattered his ‘most useful’ possessions into the sea. Likely among these floating items was a copy of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821) – an illustrated colour vocabulary authored by Patrick Syme (1774–1845).

Water-damaged and exhibiting pencil annotations in Darwin’s hand, the Beagle copy of Syme’s book is now held in Cambridge University Library. Its charts contain 110 painted samples of colour, each associated with examples from the ‘Animal’, ‘Vegetable’ and ‘Mineral’ kingdoms. ‘Gamboge Yellow’, for example, can be found on the wings of the goldfinch, the flowers of yellow jasmine and the mineral sulphur.

First published in 1814, Syme’s book was based on the mineralogical colour system developed by Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817). Expanded in number and scope, and published in compact octavo — a pocket-sized 10 x 20 centimetres — it served to extend the observatory skillset of the nineteenth-century naturalist. Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours was used widely among British naturalists in the first half of the century, its distinct terms appearing in handwritten field notes and in richly-illustrated publications on zoological and botanical subjects.

Darwin’s own use of Werner’s Nomenclature began a few weeks into the Beagle voyage of 1831–6. The young naturalist adopted Syme’s specific colour vocabulary as a standard for his scientific notetaking, routinely consulting its pages for the identification and articulation of natural hues. Darwin found Werner’s Nomenclature especially valuable for describing the colours of zoological specimens. His zoology notes (also in Cambridge University Library) contain hundreds of references to Syme’s terms: the ‘tile red’ body and ‘scarlet red’ prickles of a starfish, encountered beneath a sky of ‘pale ultramarine’ and ‘Berlin blue’; the markings of a snake, ‘primrose yellow’ and ‘scarlet red’.

My recent article in BJHS reveals for the first time the extent of Darwin’s reliance on Werner’s Nomenclature for collecting and communicating chromatic data, across distance and against the fugitive nature of natural hues. Its discussion of this captivating case study sheds light on the difficulties of accurate colour notation in exploratory natural history, investigating the various measures and mechanisms available to the nineteenth-century naturalist.

Image credit: Charles Darwin’s copy of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821) by Patrick Syme. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

‘Capturing colour on HMS Beagle: Charles Darwin and Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821)‘ by Joyce Dixon is out now in issue of The British Journal for the History of Science.