When they returned for a second season of surveying, Stokes was instructed to proceed again to the western part of the strait, and from there continue surveying north as far as Chiloé Island. He sailed once more from Port Famine in March 1828, eager, as far as his commanding officer Captain King knew, to add to his work of the year before. But this second plunge turned his mind. Into his plainly written journal, a normally staid, even dull accounting of daily navigation and notable features passed on the coast, there crept a maggot of dissonance, the first tremors of a sickness that would ineluctably waste and finally destroy:
Near Cape Notch the mountains spire up into peaks of great height, singularly serrated, and connected by barren ridges. About their bases there are generally some green patches of jungle; but, upon the whole, nothing can be more sterile and repulsive than the view.
The scenery in the Strait of Magellan should not have looked repulsive or otherworldly to Stokes. In places it resembles the European Alps, or the magnificence of the Scottish Highlands, which had been widely appreciated in the romantic fiction of Sir Walter Scott. (Stokes’s use of the word “jungle” to describe vegetation is misleading: what he saw was a dense scrim of tundra mosses and thigh-high forests of storm-bent trees; average temperatures ashore hovered year-round at just above freezing; snow frequently settled over this “jungle.”) In the more protected fjords, the landscapes resemble those described by Vancouver and Cook in their accounts of travels along the west coast of North America and Australia and New Zealand, or the early nineteenth-century paintings of the Hudson River Valley and the untrammeled spaces of the new United States, all of which had set people in England to talking about the sublimity of such natural edens.
But Stokes would not see it. He did not agree with Pigafetta that “there is not in the world a more beautiful country.” To him it became a malignant vision. He began to hate it with a poison that worked its way through him, through his journal, and it appeared inescapable:
The coast between Capes Isabel and Santa Lucia is dangerous to approach nearer than ten miles, for there are within that distance many sunken rocks…the general aspect of this portion of the coast is similar to the most dreary parts of the Magalhaenic regions.
The conditions through which he attempted to push the Beagle did nothing to lighten his view.
By 8 pm we were reduced to the close-reefed main-topsail and reefed foresail. The gale continued with unabated violence during the 6th, 7th, and 8th (April), from the north, N.W. and S.W., with a confused mountainous sea. Our decks were constantly flooded…the little boat which we carried astern was washed away by a heavy sea that broke over us…the marine barometer was broken by the violent motion of the vessel….
The effect of this wet and miserable weather, of which we had had so much since leaving Port Famine, was too manifest by the state of the sick list, on which were now many patients with catarrhal, pulmonary, and rheumatic complaints…
The ship was frequently stormbound, frustrating Stokes’s attempts at progress and the success of his mission.
Nothing could be worse than the weather we had during nine days’ stay here [Port Santa Barbara]; the wind, in whatever quarter it stood, brought thick heavy clouds, which preciptated themselves in torrents, or in drizzling rain…
Ship management was always difficult. At times boats had to be lowered to drag the Beagle from possible shipwreck.
After running two miles through a labyrinth of rocks and kelp, we were compelled to haul out, and in doing so scarcely weathered, by a ship’s length, the outer islet. Deeming it useless to expend further time in the examination of this dangerous portion of the gulf, we proceeded towards Cape Tres Montes…
Stokes pushed on up the western shores of Patagonia for another two months. His journal revealed a mounting catalog of torment and failure, and a pathological estrangement from his work.
Exceedingly bad weather detained us at this anchorage. From the time of our arrival on the evening of the 21st, until midnight of the 22d, it rained in torrents, without the intermission of a single minute, the wind being strong and squally at W., W.N.W., and N.W….
Another day and night of incessant rain. In the morning of the 25th we had some showers of hail, and at daylight found that a crust of ice, about the thickness of a dollar, had been formed in all parts of the harbour….
Here we were detained until the 10th of June by the worst weather I ever experienced…. Nothing could be more dreary than the scene around us. The lofty, bleak, and barren heights that surround the inhospitable shores of this inlet, were covered, even low down their sides, with dense clouds, upon which the fierce squalls that assailed us beat, without causing any change…. Around us, and some of them distant no more than two-thirds of a cable’s length, were rocky islets, lashed by a tremendous surf; and, as if to complete the dreariness and utter desolation of the scene, even the birds seemed to shun its neighbourhood. The weather was that in which…“the soul of a man dies in him.”
It got worse. The ship’s 28-foot-long yawl, “a beautiful boat,” and vital to their surveying methods, was smashed to pieces while being hoisted aboard in a gale: “We were obliged to cut her adrift…. her loss was second only to that of the ship.”
Stokes’s crew, despite being outfitted with foul weather “clothing”—lengths of painted canvas to wrap around themselves (this only ensured a clammy discomfort)—began to fall apart dramatically. They were generally hardy young men, in their teens through their thirties, but without being able to get ashore and supplement the ship’s salt beef and pork and rock-hard biscuit with fresh meat, they soon began to suffer from scurvy. Their gums bled and their teeth loosened, old scars opened, they grew listless and weak, and the cold accelerated this frighteningly, until it seemed that Stokes’s crew might not be able to control the ship. After consulting with his surgeon, Mr. Bynoe, Stokes made for a landlocked anchorage where the Beagle was temporarily decommissioned for a period of convalescence. The yards and topmasts were struck, the ship was covered with sails for protection, the crew were put on light duty, the sick were tended. Even safe from storms, their harbor of refuge…
being destitute of inhabitants, is without that source of recreation, which intercourse with any people, however uncivilized, would afford a ship’s company after a laborious and disagreeable cruise in these dreary solitudes.
And here Stokes’s journal stops. Even he must have tired of the repetition of his lamentations.
After a two-week rest, the crew somewhat revived, the Beagle sailed south and east heading back to the Strait of Magellan and Port Famine, where the Adventure was waiting for her. The passage took almost four weeks and Captain Stokes remained in his cabin the entire time. The ship was effectively commanded by his assistant surveyor, Lieutenant William Skyring, and the ship’s sailing master, Samuel Flinn.
Fighting strong winds to the last, even tacking into sheltered water, the Beagle reached Port Famine after dark on the wintry evening of July 27. Skyring immediately had the bosun’s gig row him across to the Adventure where he climbed aboard and reported Stokes’s condition to Captain King. King went to see for himself.
“I went on board the Beagle in the evening and found Captain Stokes, after the first two or three minutes, perfectly collected and communicative of all the events of his cruize,” he later wrote in a long letter to the Admiralty. “For three days afterwards I saw him daily during which he resumed all his duties with increased energy.”
However, King told his ship’s surgeon to confer with Benjamin Bynoe, the Beagle’s doctor, so both men could give him an opinion of Stokes’s health. They told him that although Stokes had at times in the last few months “expressed himself weary of life and wished to meet his death,” he now seemed so recovered that they thought he might be able to carry on his duties. Those duties meant continuing the surveying mission for several more years at least. While the two surgeons were aboard the Adventure actually reporting this to King, word came from the Beagle that
Stokes had shot himself.
They found him in his cabin, his head streaming blood, his linen shirt and clothes drenched, blood slippery on the cabin sole, but Stokes was quite conscious and even apologetic for making himself a nuisance. The two doctors immediately did what they could for him, which wasn’t much: a head wound, no exit wound, the pistol’s ball lodged somewhere inside. They cleaned him up and laid him in his bunk.
For the next three days, King spent hours aboard the Beagle with Stokes, who remained “perfectly collected.” As they talked, King went through Stokes’s papers, his journal and surveying observations, the ship’s daily memoranda, accounts, and orders. These “were in so confused and scattered a condition,” wrote King, “that I despaired of putting them into any order.”
Stokes was overwhelmed with remorse. He told King that the main reason for his “unhappy malady” was his fear that he wasn’t up to the job, that his defects as a surveyor were bound to come to light. And they did, as King began to see that most of what had been accomplished on the Beagle’s cruise—the charts, the harbor plans, the laborious azimuths and bearings and calculations made in the course of surveying—was the work of Lieutenant Skyring and the junior officers. The calculations written in Stokes’s hand were actually copies of what had been done by the others. This was never admitted in King’s subsequently published account of the cruises of the Beagle and the Adventure, in which he praised Captain Stokes for his work and stoicism. In his letter to the Admiralty, however, King shifted his praise to the ship’s master, Flinn, for extricating the Beagle from “situations of impending danger into which her Commander had unwarily and rashly rushed without any regard to the lives of so many people under his protection…. The state of Captain Stokes’s mind drove him at times to such desperate acts, as regarded the conduct of the ship, in which he would be controlled by no one, but (when the case arrived at a pitch of extreme danger) by the Master Flinn.” Before returning to Port Famine, Stokes had extracted a pledge from his officers that they would never tell what had happened. But now, lying on his bunk, his deception revealed, he told King everything and praised Flinn with almost exactly the same self-recriminatory words.
At moments, as he lay in his bloody berth, Stokes even talked of resuming command once he recovered, as he began to feel he would. But after three days of excited chatter and confession he worsened. Gangrene slowly made its way through his brain. It took him twelve days to die. The first entry in the Beagle’s log for August 12, 1828, made just after midnight, reads: “Light breezes and cloudy. Departed this life Pringle Stokes, Esq., Commander.”
After death, his body was examined. Despite his tremorous hand, the gunshot had done its job. The surgeons, duty bound to provide postmortem evidence, opened Stokes’s head and found the pistol’s small-bore ball lodged in the corrupted mess of his brain.
They also found seven nearly healed knife wounds in Stokes’s chest: the inept captain had been trying to kill himself for weeks.
The two ships then sailed north for the winter. The crews of both vessels were weak from months of exposure and hard service on insufficient rations. They had caught fish and shot what game they could find, but it was never enough, and they were plagued by scurvy. At Montevideo they took aboard a supply of bitter Seville oranges and these alone had every man better in less than a week.
The Beagle spent six weeks in Montevideo undergoing repairs to its hull, while King sailed north in the Adventure to Rio de Janeiro, where he was to report to Sir Robert Otway, the commander-in-chief of the South American fleet, aboard the fleet’s flagship, HMS Ganges. After two seasons in the remote south, much of the surveying work commissioned by the lords of the Admiralty was still unaccomplished. Despite the hardship that had driven one captain to suicide, killed several officers, and left men on both ships weakened from scurvy, Adventure and Beagle were to go south again.
On Stokes’s death, King had appointed Lieutenant Skyring as the Beagle’s acting commander. The promotion, when Skyring assumed it on August 12, 1828, was still unofficial; not until confirmed by Sir Robert Otway would he be formally recognized as the Beagle’s new captain. However, with his accomplishments aboard the ship under conditions harrowing inboard and out, the captaincy appeared to be his.
But Otway had his own ideas. He superseded Skyring with a favorite of his own, the Ganges’ lieutenant, twenty-three-year-old Robert FitzRoy. No doubt King remonstrated to the extent he felt able with his commanding officer in the privacy of Otway’s cabin aboard the Ganges. Skyring was the obvious choice: he knew the Beagle intimately, he had handled both the ship (along with Master Flinn) and her former captain with delicacy and skill, and although nominally the assistant surveyor, he had done the main part of that work while Stokes was going to pieces in his cabin. Otway was not swayed. Stokes had also been King’s choice, and now Otway wanted his man aboard the Beagle.
King could only submit to his superior’s wish. Years later, in the published account of his South American voyage, he still politely objected:
Although this arrangement was undoubtedly the prerogative of the Commander-in-chief…it seemed hard that Lieutenant Skyring, who had in every way so well earned his promotion, should be deprived of an appointment to which he very naturally considered himself entitled…. (Lieutenant) FitzRoy was considered qualified to command the Beagle, and although I could not but feel much for the bitterness of Lieutenant Skyring’s disappointment, I had no other cause for dissatisfaction.
When the Beagle arrived in Rio from Montevideo, Skyring was relieved of command. Robert FitzRoy went aboard at 6 A.M. on December 15, 1828, and assumed his captaincy. Lieutenant Skyring took up his former position as assistant surveyor and served his new captain with loyalty, goodwill, and without bitterness.
In the same way that a commander slain on the battlefield is replaced by an unknown who will profoundly change the outcome of a war, Robert FitzRoy now stepped into the light of his peculiar destiny. He hoped for advancement and distinction, and these he duly achieved. But he would find them in the shadow of a fame that obliterated these accomplishments. He is remembered only for his pivotal role in what he came to consider an abomination.
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In 1934, Nora Barlow, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, visited Robert FitzRoy’s elderly spinster daughter, Laura FitzRoy, at her home in London. The dark, cluttered Victorian drawing room, resisting any influence of the twentieth century, was dominated by a large white marble bust of Miss FitzRoy’s father. “A remarkable face,” Nora Barlow later wrote, “sensitive, severe, fanatical; combining a strength of purpose with some weakness or uncertainty.”
He was also handsome. Drawings of FitzRoy as a young man show a long, thin, aquiline nose; the smudged impression of a wispy moustache; limpid, long-lashed, feminine eyes; and a high forehead, suggesting that the dark hair combed forward at the top and along the temples covered a receding hairline. It is indeed a sensitive, narrow, introspective, finely featured face, and in the line of the thin lips, in a certain lift in the brow, there is more than a hint of a volatile mix of intellectual brilliance, intolerance, and arrogance. It could be the face of a supercilious young classics scholar at Oxford too sure of his own capacity, or of a young Sherlock Holmes—picture his first Hollywood incarnation, the chilly, long-nosed actor Basil Rathbone, as a twenty-three-year-old. Undoubtedly FitzRoy liked the way he looked and paid attention to his appearance.
Robert FitzRoy as Darwin first knew him, at about the time of his second voyage aboard the Beagle. (Drawing of Robert FitzRoy by Phillip Parker King, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)
He was a great believer in phrenology, the bogus science in such vogue during the nineteenth century, that supposed that the shape and size of the human cranium, together with its telling bumps, determined character and mental faculties. FitzRoy drew instant conclusions about people based on such evidence. He had a distrust of people with coarse features or wide spatulate noses. He believed
them untrustworthy and inferior.
In one sense, Robert FitzRoy himself was exactly what he appeared to be: a highly strung aristocrat. The FitzRoys had descended as the dukes of Grafton, a favored though illegitimate branch of royalty, from a liaison between Barbara Villiers and King Charles II. For generations, the Graftons were at the highest level of British society. They were members of the royal court, they were high-ranking Tories in government, they owned great estates in England and Ireland. They legislated and they controlled. At least three dukes of Grafton were admirals, men used to getting their way in every respect. One of them, Lord Augustus FitzRoy, third duke of Grafton, commanded a small fleet of four vessels to fire on four passing French ships in the Caribbean one day in 1737 when they wouldn’t stop at his hail, this precipitated a full-scale naval action between all eight ships. Britain and France were not at war at the time; the battle finally ended with gracious apologies on both sides, and the ships sailing on.
Another duke of Grafton was briefly acting prime minister in 1767, between the governments of the ailing William Pitt the Elder and Lord North. FitzRoy’s father, Lord Charles FitzRoy, became a general in the British Army, an aide-de-camp to George III, and a member of Parliament. His mother, Lady Frances Anne Stewart, came from an equally dominant strain; she was the eldest daughter of the first Marquis of Londonderry.
FitzRoy’s connections were impeccable, except in one respect: from his mother he inherited a kinship with mental instability. In 1820, when Robert FitzRoy was fifteen, his uncle, the third Marquis of Londonderry, who had teetered for years on the edge of madness, finally committed suicide, with terrible efficiency, by slashing his own throat with a razor. His uncle’s death and its manner made an impression on the boy that he never forgot. He spoke about it and feared it all his life. It loomed forever just beyond the foreground in his mind as a specter of his own predisposition.
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