Mouthwatering facts about revered Darwin’s dining habits

However, almost always the red earth between the trees shows here and there, as if blood had been spilt, dramatic and disconcerting in the ambient peace.

Elsewhere, every bit as vivid and more infinite in variety, are the legion wildflowers to be found in any five metres of dry mountain, some no more than specks of pigment amongst the yellow lichens colonising the bedrock, others eye-catching splashes of colour on aprons of powder-dry earth.

Outside the massive walls of the fortified Upper Town, Dalt Villa, of Ibiza –bastions started by the Phoenicians, continued by the Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Moors, Aragonese, Catalans and each of the many kings, potentates and lords who won and lost this priceless strategic gem in the western Mediterranean — is an area of un-farmable ground sloping down to the sea.

Looking across the azure water to the islands of Espalder, Espalmador and Formentera in the distance, it is a dry slope colonised by small, wiry pines dwarfed by lack of earth to root in and water to irrigate them, and 100 varieties of wild flora over which one could spend days of wonder, marvelling at how they grow out of the tiniest fissure in the solid rock.

Thank goodness there are no longer herds of goats.

Many years ago, I saw goats here but didn’t pay them much mind, never even considering the toll they were taking on plants that had arrived here aeons past, carried by the wind and the birds. I loved the place then, and I still do now, wandering about snapping the various testaments to vegetable beauty and tenacity to be found at almost every step.

Goats can be a plague. In the course of a brief visit, a son recently returned from the Galapagos and heading for La Gomera in the Canaries – working, I might say, as he goes – told me that only for the wholesale slaughter of goats herds on the Galapagos by New Zealand sharpshooters firing from helicopters, the remaining giant tortoises of the Galapagos would be gone.

Now that the goats aren’t around to snaffle all available fodder, the giant tortoises are making a comeback. One cannot but condone the timely eradication.

Goats are everywhere. Giant tortoises exist in the Galapagos and nowhere else.

Darwin, great biologist and visionary, ate the same tortoises with gusto, but so did everyone else at the time.

Turtles were, of course, harvested in their hundreds by sailors worldwide and kept alive as fresh meat for long voyages. However, giant tortoises for the pot is a shocking idea today and Darwin might well blush in his grave.

The tortoises weren’t the only rare and wonderful things on the famous biologist’s menu. While at Cambridge, he had joined the university’s Glutton Club, sworn to consume “birds and beasts, which were before unknown to the human palate.” During his round-the-world voyage in HMS Beagle, he kept his vow.

Besides classifying the rare creatures he discovered, he sampled in the flesh of each in the name of science. The Galapagos menu included marine iguanas, while in Central America dinners featured armadillo and puma, the latter being declared reminiscent of veal.

In Argentina, dining on an ostrich-like bird was almost the death of him, not because it was toxic but because after spending months attempting to capture the species without success, he discovered he was eating one.

It was a rare lesser rhea, distantly related to the ostrich and emu, rather than a more common greater rhea.

His companions, aware of his wish to sample rare creatures, had prepared the bird without telling him what it was.

Overwrought, he immediately ordered all the diners to lower their forks and assist him in salvaging the uneaten parts to be preserved, wrapped and immediately dispatched to England for study.

He noted somewhere that his favourite meal on his five-year journey was an eight-kilo rodent, probably an agouti, which he catalogued as the “very best meat I had ever tasted.”