IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 300

HMS Beagle was never intended for science. She was built at Woolwich dockyard on the Thames and launched in 1820 as a ten-gun brig of the Cherokee class, one of many small warships built cheaply for patrol work. Just 27 metres long, she carried an armament that left little room below decks for anything else. After a few years in reserve, however, the Navy found a different use for her. She was stripped of most of her guns, given extra storage and rebuilt as a survey vessel: a slow, stable craft from which sailors could measure a coastline with lead and line.

Her first surveying commission took her to South America. Between 1826 and 1830, under Commander Pringle Stokes, the Beagle worked along the coasts of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, accompanied by a second ship, HMS Adventure. The work was dangerous and the weather almost continuously bad. Stokes, worn down by isolation and by the weight of command, took his own life in 1828, and command eventually passed to a young officer, Robert FitzRoy, who completed the survey. FitzRoy returned to England convinced that the work was unfinished, and determined to go back.

He had a second reason for wanting company on the next voyage. FitzRoy was acutely aware of the mental strain that a long and solitary command could impose, and he dreaded the prospect of spending years alone with his thoughts; an uncle had died by his own hand. A captain's authority was such that he could not eat with his officers as an equal, so FitzRoy asked the Admiralty for permission to take a gentleman aboard who would share his cabin and his table. The man he found was Charles Darwin, a young Cambridge graduate recommended by his former teacher, the botanist John Stevens Henslow.

Darwin was not the ship's naturalist in any official sense, and he was not paid. The post of surgeon belonged to Robert McCormick, who regarded the collection of specimens as part of his own duties and who left the ship early in the voyage. Darwin, who had private means, met his own expenses and paid for his share of the cabin. He came aboard chiefly as a companion for the captain, with a serious interest in natural history. Before sailing he was given the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, a book that shaped the questions he would ask of the rocks and islands he visited.

The Beagle sailed from Devonport on 27 December 1831, but only after two false starts: twice gales drove her back into port, and on the second occasion she was lucky to return at all. The voyage that followed lasted nearly five years and carried her around the world. Its aims were strictly practical. The Admiralty wanted reliable charts of the South American coast, and FitzRoy, a meticulous and ambitious surveyor, intended to provide them.

The first year took the ship to the Cape Verde Islands, to Brazil and to the estuary of the River Plate. Then came Patagonia, where Darwin, by now working seriously as a geologist, found fossils of extinct mammals in the coastal cliffs, among them the bones of giant ground sloths. In Tierra del Fuego the three Fuegians who had been carried to England on the earlier voyage were returned to their homeland, together with a young missionary, Richard Matthews, in an attempt to found a settlement; the attempt soon collapsed.

FitzRoy's surveying was obsessive in its accuracy. He carried more than twenty chronometers, so that an error in one could be checked against the others, and he recorded his observations with a discipline unusual even by the standards of the Navy. Darwin, meanwhile, spent as much time ashore as the captain's permission allowed, riding inland, climbing in the Andes and collecting. In Chile he experienced a severe earthquake and afterwards saw how the coast had been lifted.

In September 1835 the Beagle reached the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin collected giant tortoises and many birds and plants that appeared peculiar to individual islands. He did not yet grasp their significance; the ornithologist who later examined the birds would explain it to him. He was, however, already thinking about the origin of coral reefs, a problem that would occupy him for years.

The homeward route took in Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia, where Darwin found the society of New South Wales disagreeable, and then the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, where his account of how coral atolls form was strikingly confirmed. Mauritius and Cape Town followed. The Beagle anchored in England on 2 October 1836. Darwin went home to Shrewsbury, sorted his specimens and eventually handed the birds to the ornithologist John Gould, who identified the Galápagos finches as a group of closely related species found nowhere else.

FitzRoy's later career was distinguished and unhappy. He was appointed to lead a new department of meteorology, where he gathered weather observations from ships and issued the first gale warnings, but his methods were criticised by scientists, and he died in 1865. His ship had meanwhile sailed on a third voyage, to survey the coasts of Australia, and was afterwards kept at a mooring on the River Roach in Essex, in the service of the coastguard, until she was sold in 1870.

Rome never developed anything resembling a public prosecutor for private disputes. If a man believed that a neighbour had taken his land, failed to repay a loan or damaged his property, it was for him to bring the matter before a magistrate and to persuade the court of his case. In the earliest period the rules that governed such actions were not published at all. They were kept by the pontiffs, the priestly college that advised the magistrates, who alone knew the calendar of days on which a court could sit and the form of words that each kind of claim required. Since the priests also advised anyone who consulted them, they controlled access to the law.

Pressure to publish the law came from politics. For much of the early Republic, disputes between the patrician families who monopolised public office and the plebeians who did not were fought over law as much as over land or debt. According to Roman tradition, a board of ten men was appointed around 450 BC to set the rules down, and the result was the Twelve Tables, which were displayed in the Forum for anyone to read. They dealt with family authority, inheritance, injury and the conduct of cases, and although later generations added a great deal, Roman writers continued to treat the Tables as the foundation of their law.

The oldest procedure for enforcing a claim was the legis actio, a contest of spoken words. Both parties appeared before the magistrate, and each had to state a claim or a defence in a fixed form of words, sometimes accompanied by prescribed gestures. There was no room for argument about the wording and no discretion for the magistrate, who merely presided. A litigant who made the smallest mistake lost the case, whatever the merits. Gaius, writing in the second century AD, records a man who lost a claim about his vines because he spoke of vines when the law mentioned only trees.

By the second century BC the old procedure had been largely replaced by one conducted in writing. The hearing was now divided into two distinct stages, each with its own official. In the first, the parties came before the praetor, an elected magistrate who held office for a single year and who was not usually a trained lawyer; he listened to both sides, decided whether the claim should go to trial and defined the issue in a short document. In the second stage the case went to a judge, a private citizen of standing named in that document, who heard the evidence, applied the law as it had been set out for him and gave judgment. The praetor did not himself hear the evidence or weigh the witnesses.

The praetor's power lay in his edict. At the beginning of his year of office he published a statement of the kinds of action he would allow, and litigants could bring a case only if it fell within one of them. A second praetor was appointed in 242 BC to handle cases involving foreigners. Neither magistrate could pass legislation, but each could promise a remedy, and the promise was enough. Successive praetors kept the clauses that had worked and added new ones, so that the edict grew into a body of rules, until in the second century AD the emperor Hadrian had it consolidated and fixed, after which it could no longer develop.

The document that framed the trial was itself called a formula. It was short, sometimes no more than a few lines, and it contained the appointment of the judge, a statement of the claimant's case, any defence the defendant wished to raise and the basis on which the judge should condemn or acquit. It mattered because it fixed the boundaries of the dispute. No argument about the law took place in front of the judge; the legal question had already been settled by the praetor and written into the document. A defence that had been omitted from the formula could not be raised later, and a claim that had been left out could not be added.

Under the emperors the arrangement changed again. From the second century AD, and increasingly in the later empire, cases were heard by a single imperial official who conducted the whole proceeding himself, questioned the parties, weighed the evidence and gave judgment in writing. Appeals lay upwards through the hierarchy of officials to the emperor. This procedure, known to historians as the cognitio extraordinaria, or extraordinary inquiry, gradually displaced the two-stage system, and with it the division between the magistrate who defined the law and the citizen who decided the facts.

What historians know of all this comes from sources that are remarkable but uneven. No transcript of a Republican trial survives, and the writings of the jurists reach us largely because they were collected and edited in the sixth century, when the emperor Justinian ordered the compilation of what is now called the Digest. The Digest preserves thousands of extracts from classical authors, but they were chosen for use in a later legal system and cut down to fit it. The textbook of Gaius, the clearest account of the old procedure, survives in a single manuscript that was later scraped clean and written over with other text. Scholars still argue about how much of what they read reflects the practice of the classical courts.

In courtrooms on several continents a familiar contest is played out. On one side lies a map, perhaps a century and a half old, drawn by a surveyor employed by a colonial government, on which a tract of forest or desert appears as empty space. On the other side stands a community whose grandparents hunted, fished or buried their dead in that same place, and whose claim rests on stories rather than documents. The question such cases raise is not whether the map is genuine; it usually is. It is what a map can properly be asked to prove. Historical maps are indispensable evidence and dangerous proof: indispensable because they record intentions and measurements that nothing else preserves, dangerous because they are too often read as photographs of the world rather than as arguments about it.

It is worth beginning with what maps do well. A map drawn to record ownership, to levy a tax or to settle a boundary is a document with a legal purpose, and its conventions are usually stated. Where such a map was made by officials with no interest in the eventual dispute, and where the boundaries it shows were then respected for decades, it can be the best evidence a court possesses. Cadastral records, title deeds and the great national surveys have settled countless arguments, and the aerial photographs taken from the 1920s onwards have done the same for disputes about hedges, ditches and river banks.

The difficulty is that every map answers a question that its maker chose to ask. A survey designed to raise revenue records fields and buildings because fields and buildings can be taxed; a map prepared for a military campaign records roads and bridges. What is not needed is not shown. Nineteenth-century colonial maps frequently marked land as waste or unoccupied, not because nobody was there, but because the legal categories available to the surveyor had no place for shifting cultivation, seasonal grazing or land held collectively. The blank space on the sheet is evidence of a category, not of an absence. Something similar happened in North America, where land was laid out in square townships under an ordinance of 1785, and no space was left in the grid for ground that a people held in common.

Even where no such purpose is at work, maps contain errors. Instruments were imperfect, terrain was impassable, and lines were copied from earlier drawings by clerks who had never visited the place. A boundary drawn as a straight line across a mountain may have been a rough approximation that everyone at the time understood. Rivers move. A map that correctly recorded a stream in 1860 may describe a boundary that the stream itself abandoned a generation later, and the map will then mislead precisely because it was once accurate. Many maps of the interior of continents were compiled in the nineteenth century from the routes of travellers rather than from surveys, so that a line on the paper may rest on no firmer foundation than one explorer's estimate of a day's march.

None of this is an argument for preferring memory to documents without further thought. Oral testimony is fallible: it changes with each telling, it is shaped by the dispute itself, and it can be coached. Courts are right to test it. But testimony about land is often transmitted with unusual care, tied to names, songs, genealogies and the physical features of the landscape, and it carries information that no surveyor thought to record. A witness may fix a boundary by naming a tree that has since fallen or a spring that has since moved, and a detail of that kind, of no use to a surveyor, may be exactly what a court needs. To dismiss it because it is spoken rather than written is to confuse the medium with the message.

A further difficulty concerns fairness. Where a state never mapped a community's land, or mapped it as empty, that community may have nothing written to produce. If a court demands documentary proof of occupation, it rewards the party whose ancestors did the recording, which is frequently the party that took the land in the first place. The rules of evidence then appear neutral while producing a result that is anything but.

Some courts have begun to adjust. In a landmark judgment in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada held that the oral histories of indigenous peoples must be treated seriously as evidence of their occupation of land, and that a trial judge had erred in dismissing them. Elsewhere, judges have started to read old maps for what they reveal about official assumptions rather than for what they show on the ground, and to ask why a particular area was left unmarked.

That, it seems to me, is the right approach. A historical map should be admitted, examined and used, but it should be used as a statement made by someone for a purpose, alongside the testimony of the people who lived on the land and the evidence of archaeology and place names. Where a map is silent, the silence should be treated as a question rather than an answer. A map showing a track, a deed naming it and an elder's memory of walking it make a stronger case together than any one of them alone. Maps are valuable witnesses. They should not be allowed to deliver the verdict.