by A. N. Wilson
Every soul on board was as sorry to shake hands with poor Jemmy for the last time, as we were glad to have seen him. I hope and have little doubt he will be as happy as if he had never left his country; which is much more than I formerly thought. He lighted a farewell signal fire as the ship stood out of Ponsonby Sound, on her course to East Falkland Island.27
Jemmy perhaps did not retain quite such happy memories of the British as they did of him. When, in November 1859, the Patagonian Missionary Society sent a ship, the Allen Gardiner, to establish a mission at Wulaia, their reception was unfriendly. Jemmy and his brother, assisted by fellow Fuegians, massacred the missionaries and the entire crew of the Allen Gardiner, excepting the cook.
Fuegia Basket married York Minster, in 1833. He was subsequently killed in retaliation for a murder, and she married a much younger man. E. L. Bridges, author of Uttermost Part of the Earth, met her as late as 1883, aged sixty-two and near her death, at London Island, to the extreme west of Tierra del Fuego.
The violence of the Fuegians might have provided a good example of the ‘struggle for existence’ which Darwinists would come to believe was the underlying secret of how sustainable life moves on from one generation to the next. If so, it would question rather than confirm the belief that struggle was conducive to evolutionary progress. By the end of the nineteenth century, the three Fuegian tribes were almost extinct. The Alacalufes, the canoe people of the western channels, numbered 10,000 at the time of Darwin’s visit. By 1960 there were hardly a hundred.28
As soon as Button appeared to them semi-naked, Darwin saw the folly of the attempt to westernize the Fuegian people. For Captain FitzRoy, the failure of the Fuegian experiment was a personal tragedy. As they sailed away from Jemmy, who stood beside his fire on the shore, the Captain could hardly restrain his feelings, and was on the verge of tears.
After they had left Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy hardened. For the Captain, it had been a difficult year. While his young naturalist-companion Darwin had been free to go ashore, to idle away a week or two if the mood took him in Buenos Aires or to make exciting expeditions into the rainforests, FitzRoy had responsibility for everyone on board the Beagle and, moreover, he had been entrusted by the Admiralty with a task which had, in part at least, defeated one of the greatest cartographers in history: namely to make accurate maps of the entire coast of South America.
Cook had sailed, on each of his great voyages, with another ship to chaperone him. A year into the voyage of the Beagle, FitzRoy had come to see that this had been not a luxury but a necessity. Not only had the weather been consistently against them, but there had been much ill health on board, and life would clearly be safer for everyone were a second vessel to be acquired, which could be surveying other stretches of coast, or allowing half the crew to rest up. At Maldonado in the summer of 1833 FitzRoy had chartered two small boats and purchased an American 170-ton sealing vessel without getting clearance for the purchase from the Admiralty. He spent £1,300 buying the vessel and a considerable sum in reconditioning her. To make clear her function and his purpose he renamed her the Adventure, the name of the consort-ship (commanded by Captain Furneaux) in Cook’s epic second voyage in which he had made three valiant efforts to discover the Southern Continent, in which he had charted nearly all the islands of the South Pacific and in which he had discovered South Georgia, Norfolk Island and others. The Admiralty refused to reimburse FitzRoy for his purpose, but he knew his business: ‘I had often anxiously longed for a consort, adapted for carrying cargoes, rigged up so as to be easily worked with few hands, and able to keep company with the Beagle.’29 Since the Adventure had come into service, with Lieutenant John Wickham as its highly competent commander, life had been busy. FitzRoy had run the Beagle constantly back and forth between Montevideo and Patagonia, usually in terrible weather, completing his cartographical work as assiduously as any man could. He worked long hours. On many days he dined alone in his cabin, bent over his charts.
When the time approached for them to round Cape Horn and head up the western coast of Chile, they dropped anchor in the mouth of the river of Santa Cruz. The Beagle was found to have lost some of her false (protective) keel. She had to be beached. All but her mainmast had to be taken down. Guns, anchors and heavy gear had to be brought ashore while the carpenters got to work. It was a minor repair, but it needed doing, and while the Beagle lay ashore like a beached whale, the Captain took three whaleboats to explore up the Santa Cruz river. They moved at about ten miles per day. While the crews slept, two men and an officer kept watch, maintaining the campfires and keeping a look-out for Indians.
It was a strenuous trip. After two days, oars and sails were abandoned, with every man, FitzRoy included, taking turns to tow the heavy boats upstream. It was also bitterly cold and Darwin at first had to record that ‘the country remains the same, & terribly uninteresting’.30 But there was wildlife to observe – ostriches, huge herds of guanaco (one with as many as 500 of these camelids), pumas, lions and, hovering over their heads, the huge-winged condor. Little by little, Chile began to work its magic on Darwin. His attentive eye made out fields of lava which must have flowed down from the Andes. Then there was sport – he shot a condor, whose wingspan was over eight feet. At the end of a long hike, ‘we hailed with joy the snowy summits of the Cordilleras as they were seen occasionally peeping through their dusky envelope of clouds’.31 Within a week they reckoned they were 140 miles from the Atlantic and 60 from the nearest inlet of the Pacific.
Throughout the next year, Darwin frequently complained, in his journal, of tiredness, and there were occasional illnesses: this was to be expected. Given the man he would become, relatively soon after his return to England, however, we cannot but note his strength and vigour. As homesickness grew sweet, rather than acute, and as the letters from his sisters grew ever more parochial and inane, the space and the scope of South America were especially intoxicating. To Fox, back in November 1832, he had written from Rio Plata, ‘Poor dear old England. I hope my wanderings will not unfit me for a quiet life, & that in some future day I may be fortunate enough to be qualified to become like you a country clergyman.’32 It became a less inviting prospect with every month which passed. The letters from his sisters and female cousins read like the outpourings of a Jane Austen heroine. It is a comparison made by Charlotte Wedgwood, when a Maer neighbour entreated the girls to entertain a party of officers. No one would do so but Emma Wedgwood, who when she could not persuade her sister Fanny ‘to go & keep her in countenance had great scruples lest she should appear too Lydiaish’:33 that is, like Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice whose flirtations with soldiers had almost disastrous consequences. Fanny Wedgwood was one of the partners whom his unstoppably matchmaking sisters had in mind for Darwin. When news reached him that she had died aged twenty-six, after a few days’ illness from some inflammatory attack, he does not appear to have responded in any way. Fox, writing from the Isle of Wight, mentioned that he had heard from the Darwin family: ‘Poor Fanny Wedgwood’s death had just been a great shock to them, as it will be to you I am sure,’34 again, as far as we can see, eliciting no response at all from Darwin.
It would be preposterous to suggest that Darwin was other than devoted to his family. He lived his whole life in their bosom and when he chose to marry, inevitably, he married a cousin – Fanny’s sister Emma Wedgwood. We can but note that when he was thousands of miles away from them, he was usually fit, strong and frequently bursting with joy – particularly during the first few months in Chile. The years of voyaging with the Beagle were laying the seeds of a long life of intellectual inquiry. They were also years of liberation, the only five years in which he was an individual rather than a member of a family. ‘I use the term Struggle for Existence’, he wrote in his most famous work, ‘in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.’35
Darwin was
always affectionate in his letters home, and no doubt sincere when he wrote to his sister Catherine, ‘continue in your good custom of writing plenty of gossip’. Yet, to have all his family life encased by paper envelopes and red sealing wax, to be free, for five years, from their actual company, was a palpable liberation. ‘Tell Charlotte . . . I should like to have written to her; and to have told her how well everything is going on – But it would only have been a transcript of this letter, & I have a host of animals, at this minute, surrounding me, which all require embalming & Numbering.’ And besides, ‘I long to be at work in the Cordilleras, the geology of this side, which I understand pretty well is so intimately connected with periods of violence in that great chain of mountains.’36
It was that sublime double mountain chain the Andes which now, gleaming and snow-capped, was their alluring goal. It was desperately hard making their way up the Pacific coast in unstoppable northerly gales in June 1834. The purser on the Beagle, George Rowlett, the oldest officer aboard at the age of thirty-eight, died of exhaustion and illness. On 28 June, Captain FitzRoy read the funeral service and Darwin noted, ‘it is an aweful & solemn sound, that splash of the waters over the body of an old ship-mate’.37
Not long afterwards, they landed, though thick mists made the longed-for Cordilleras invisible. Then they took to the sea again and sailed on to Valparaiso, and the two ships, the Beagle and the Adventure, anchored together in the beautiful harbour. The sky was bright blue. A range of hills, 1,600 feet in height, surrounded the straggling but pretty little town. ‘When in T. del Fuego I began to think the superiority of Welsh mountain scenery only existed in my imagination. Now that I have again seen in the Andes a grand edition of such beauties, I feel sure of their existence.’38 He threw himself at once into strenuous mountain walks, from the luxuriant valleys up into the rough mass of greenstone from which he could turn and watch the glories of the setting sun. The sublimity of the mountain scenery brought forth from Darwin an excitement, and awe, which recall the Romantic poets Goethe and Wordsworth in Alpine or Lakeland settings. ‘Who can avoid admiring the wonderful force which has upheaved these mountains, & even more so the countless ages which it must have required to have broken through, removed & levelled whole masses of them?’39
Moreover, in Valparaiso, there were intelligent English-speakers with whom he could share his enthusiasms. ‘We all, on board, have been much struck by the great superiority in the English residents over other towns in S. America.’40
Lyell’s first volume of Principles of Geology had been Darwin’s companion during the earlier part of his voyage, and even in St Jago, when he had read only a few chapters, it had begun to change him – in its exposition of the age of the planet, in its puzzlement (even though Lyell at this stage rejected Lamarckian or any other notions of transmutation) about the origin of species, and about the fossil evidence for creatures which had ceased to be. In the course of the voyage, he had Lyell’s subsequent volumes sent out to South America. By April 1833 he had read volume two.41 By November, his sister Catherine was writing to him of volume three, and asking if it had reached him.42 It had certainly done so by July 1834.43 (The inscribed copy, with no date, is in the University Library at Cambridge.) He told Fox, ‘I am become a zealous disciple of Mr Lyell’s views,’ and by 1836 he was offering to Lyell his paper ‘Observations of proofs of recent elevation on the coast of Chili’.44 Darwin’s notion was that ‘the Andes, at the period the Ammonites lived (which corresponds to the secondary rocks), must have been [a] chain of Volcanic Islands, from which copious stream[s of] lava were poured forth & subsequently covered with Conglomerates. Such beds form the Cordilleras of Chili.’45
As Darwin observed in Valparaiso, Lyell’s Geology was not read by the scientific academy alone. ‘Already I have met several [English] people who have read works on geology and other branches of science . . . It was as surprising as pleasant to be asked, what I thought of Lyells [sic] Geology.’46 The generality were immediately able to grasp the significance of what Lyell was making clear. Tennyson’s In Memoriam, as well as being a record of bereavement, is a poetic diary of an intelligent man, brought up in a parsonage to conventional Christian belief, and coming to terms with the implications of Lyell’s book. No longer living on a planet which was a few thousand years old, that generation of men and women now looked back into a past which was unimaginably distant. Their childhood faith in a heavenly Father who did not allow a single sparrow to fall to the ground without his notice was confronted by fossil evidence of whole species ‘cast as rubbish to the void’.47 Lyell’s harsh refusal to believe in the transmutation of species made the extinction of the fossilized fish, birds, reptiles and mammals appear to be the work of a relentlessly indifferent and impersonal force. Evidence, however, was evidence: and though Lyell’s rigidity about the transmutation or development of species would soften, and though scientific opinion would eventually embrace the idea of species modifying, rather than being destroyed outright and replaced by new ‘creations’, the basic premises of Lyell’s Geology had laid the foundations of the modern scientific study of the subject. The human race was beginning to realize that the planet on which it lived was almost unimaginably old – thousands of millions years old, as we now know.48 Just as James Cook in the 1770s had established the existence of unknown parts of the world, and thereby made everyone’s world a larger place, so Charles Lyell in the 1830s made the world not only older but more palpable. The fathers of modern science had been the chemists who, while Cook sailed the seas, had begun to demonstrate the properties of matter itself and, after the groundbreaking work of Priestley and Lavoisier, to see the very nature of elements and particles. It led, almost at once, to prodigious technological change, especially the discovery that water was H2O which allowed James Watt and others to pioneer the use of steam in industrial technology.
In the post-Napoleonic times, Lyell was one of the great pioneers not only of geology but of the wider ramifications of geological discovery. It began to seem tantalizingly possible that, by investigating rocks and fossils, volcanoes and ancient lava, that generation could see into the heart of things, comprehend the origins of life on earth. Historians of ideas sometimes represent this as a conflict between a ‘scientific’ outlook and an older ‘religious’ outlook, and this is how it sometimes seemed at the time. The reality is, however, that it was a new beginning. Not since the Arab mathematicians and astronomers of the middle ages imported their discoveries to Spain, and in some cases not since the ancient Greeks, had human beings in the West asked, or answered, many of the scientific assumptions which in the twenty-first century we take for granted. It is easy to blame ‘religion’ for this, but such a simple view overlooks the fact that most ‘modern’ scientists, from Galileo to Boyle, from Newton to Lyell himself, had some religion: many were pious, as Newton had been. The lazy mindset which assumed all scientific truth, together with moral and spiritual truth, was contained in Scripture, belonged largely to those who had no interest in science. If one had to find an underlying cause it is more attributable to the Latinization of the West than to its Christianization. The Romans were technological wizards when it came to building roads or under-floor heating, but they had no interest in mathematics, and from their conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean until the Islamization of Spain there was not a single scientific development. Modern science coincided with the revival of Greek learning. Lyell’s generation was more or less coeval with the arrival of the Parthenon marbles in London.
Even Captain FitzRoy, who in later life backtracked and became what might be termed a biblical fundamentalist, read Lyell and discussed him eagerly with Darwin. Devout Protestant though he was, FitzRoy could see that Lyell drew a very different picture of the origin of the earth from that in Genesis, or, more accurately, Genesis as interpreted by the Protestant seventeenth century. Lyell wrote, as was customary, of Moses as the author of the first five books of the Bible: and, looking back to the time of the voyage when he was convinced
by Lyell, the penitent FitzRoy could not imagine how he could have overlooked the fact that ‘the knowledge of Moses was super-human’.49 He regretted that while Captain of the Beagle he had ‘suffered much anxiety . . . from a disposition to doubt, if not disbelieve, the inspired History written by Moses’.50 This essay, which FitzRoy attached to his own account of the voyage, was published in 1839. If, to a callous modern eye, it verges upon the ludicrous, it is also a good illustration of the mentality which was not untypical. Loyalty to scientific truth was challenged by a higher loyalty, or what seemed a higher loyalty: faithfulness to the inspired word of God.
In Valparaiso, Darwin had met a school contemporary, now a merchant, and taken up residence in his house. It was doubtless in R. H. Corfield’s company that Darwin met the intelligent English who had kept up with the publication of Lyell’s Geology – in particular another person by the name of Robert Edward Alison. Corfield would return to England where he worked as a sugar merchant in Liverpool, retiring at the age of seventy-six, and dying aged ninety-three in 1897. Alison, who wrote about South American affairs, shared Darwin’s interest in geology. He became the director of a Chilean mining company and died a year after Darwin in 1883.
Geology was Darwin’s uttermost passion in these months, and he made expeditions into the mountains. The ‘chaos of mountains’ inspired inevitable wonder – it was ‘like hearing a chorus of the Messiah in full orchestra. I felt glad I was alone.’51 Yet the solitary Darwin was not only the awestruck wanderer: he was also the geologist – ‘I had some more hammering at the Andes,’52 he told his sister – and, as the fascinated grandson of a great industrialist, he could not fail to notice the mines. ‘Almost every part of this mountain has been drilled by attempts to open gold mines . . . The rage for mining has left scarcely a spot in Chili unexamined, even to the regions of eternal snow.’53 In the copper mines beyond Quillota he met the manager, ‘a shrewd but ignorant Cornishman’, married to a Spaniard. The copper ore was shipped to Swansea to be smelted. The Cornishman’s skill as a mining engineer was matched by lack of other sophistications. Now that George Rex was dead, he asked Darwin, ‘how many of the family of Rex’s’ were yet alive?54 (George Rex was, of course, George IV in 1830.) Darwin speculated that ‘This Rex certainly is a relation of Finis who wrote all the books.’ The loftiness behind this joke is very ‘Darwin’, just as the flintheartedness with which he observed the working conditions of the miners is very ‘Wedgwood’. Old Josiah had been a good-natured paternalist, but as he accumulated his tens of thousands he had begrudged his workforce every shilling. It is almost with approval that his grandson noted, ‘Poverty is very common with all the labouring classes. One of the rules of this mine sounds very harsh, but answers pretty well – the method of stealing gold is to secrete pieces of the metal & take them out as occasion may offer. Whenever the major-domo finds a lump of ore thus hidden, its full value is stopped out of the wages of all the men, who are thus obliged to keep watch on each other.’55 Nothing about this arrangement appears to have shocked Darwin, still less touched his heart.