When the Beagle went to sea
Fitzroy fixed the route by GMT
With John Harrison’s marvellous clock
In a box which stemmed the roll
The pitch and rock of the sea,
And allowed a fix upon a chart
In exact accord to the point of start.
It overcame the ancient hurdle
Of a chronometric girdle
Mastered longitude and motion
Of Atlantic and Pacific Ocean
To record the Beagle’s tiny loss
From voyaging to the Galapagos
Of merely seconds thirty three
After five long years at sea.
Darwin went back home to find
The ancestry of human kind
Make a monkey of the human race
So archaeologists then could trace
The way that mountain ranges shifted
From ocean bed until they lifted
Whale fossils high on Everest,
And cause theologians to protest
That he cast doubt on God’s great glory
Undermined the ancient story
Of Genesis and Noah’s flood
As Darwin greatly feared it would.
In Armagh Archbishop Ussher
Calculated six millenia
No more could he believe
Since God made Adam and Eve
He calculated light descended
With other Bible dates compounded
One October evening of twenty three
Four thousand years and four BC
A date that Darwin had contended
Was a date should be amended
Two million years the human story
Which augured less for God’s great glory.
Was Adam born in the flat savannah?
A deep rift valley in Tanganyika
Where Leakey later found old bones
And human tools among old stones
For stripping bark or slicing meat
Product of brains which would defeat
The lesser beasts of lesser sense
And produce their art and science
In clouded visions in the years
When timepieces counted hours
But yet did never compass Darwin
Or the skill extreme of Harrison.
His subtle new chronometer
Outdid the sundial and clepsydra
Their new time would eclipse by far
Archbishop Ussher of Armagh
©Terry Hodgson2020
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