Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  He reveled in the rigors of the small-boat adventure. As the season advanced and the weather grew colder, he found that his navy cloak, which covered him at night, was stiff with frost in the mornings. “Yet I never slept more soundly nor was in better health.” Late one afternoon, FitzRoy and his crew in the whaleboat were caught in a sudden gale and spent five hours of darkness rowing into the rising wind and waves, bailing frantically to keep the boat from swamping, until the gale died down just as quickly and they made shore. This incident, and the hardship shared and even enjoyed by FitzRoy and his men (with whom he also shared his cutthroat razor), made a strong bond between the new captain and his crew.

  In July, with gales bringing snow and winter coming on, the Beagle and the Adelaide sailed west out of the strait, into the Pacific, and north to Chiloé Island to rendezvous with Captain King and the Adventure. On the way, scudding before a southeasterly gale, a moment’s inattention by the helmsman allowed the Beagle to slew sideways off course and a breaking sea smashed aboard and swept away one of the whaleboats hanging in davits off the ship’s stern quarter.

  The three ships and their crews spent the southern winter anchored off a small settlement on Chiloé Island, working on the ships, readying them for the next season’s work. Jonathan May, the Beagle’s carpenter, built a new whaleboat to replace the one that had been carried away. May was a shipwright of considerable skill who had served a long apprenticeship in boatbuilding, and the new boat was built of seasoned planks that had been carried aboard the Beagle from England expressly for such a need. FitzRoy was pleased with the new whaleboat. He did not know it was destined to act as the lynchpin of his fate.

  In November, with the approach of spring, Captain King gave FitzRoy his orders for the coming season: alone with the Beagle (the Adelaide would be otherwise occupied), he was to explore and survey whatever he could of the ragged, broken southern shores of Tierra del Fuego, from the western to the eastern entrances of the Strait of Magellan. Neither captain knew the magnitude of these orders. Neither had any idea of the extent of this nebulous region’s vast galaxy of razor-sharp rocks and islands scattered across more than 25,000 square miles, bordered by the strait to the north and Cape Horn to the south. FitzRoy had a few inadequate charts, and these were so full of small starlike crosses marking rocks that they appeared (as they still do on modern charts) more like maps of heavenly constellations. They were inaccurate, but they were good indicators of the nature of what lay ahead.

  King told FitzRoy to accomplish what he could and rendezvous with the Adventure either in Port Famine by April 1 or in Rio de Janeiro by June 20.

  The Beagle sailed south on November 19, 1829.

  4

  Small wonder the job had driven Pringle Stokes mad.

  Sailing a bulky, square-rigged vessel through a place that invited shipwreck at any moment from uncharted rocks, hurricane-force williwaws, racing tides, obscuring blizzards (in any month of the year)—a place ship captains then as now considered the ultimate test of their seamanship and ability to manage a vessel, an ordeal to be got through and left behind—that was just the beginning.

  The surveyor-captain, FitzRoy’s inherited job, had to stop and deliberate in such a place. To find a tenable, secure anchorage, moor his ship, take readings—compass azimuths and angles shot from on deck with a sextant of landmarks and heights around the anchorage; then attempt a landing ashore through swell and surf in a small boat loaded with precious and delicate surveying equipment, scale a rocky hill or cliff with these instruments—a heavy theodolite, its tripod, sextant, and compass—take multiple readings; and do this many times in the immediate area to produce a single result of any useful accuracy.

  From FitzRoy’s journal, November 1829:

  27th. A promising morning tempted me to try to obtain observations and a round of angles on or near Cape Pillar. I therefore left the ship with the master…[in the hands of the ship’s sailing master, Mr. Murray, to tack back and forth off Cape Pillar] and went in a boat to the Cape. To land near it in much swell was not easy upon such steep and slippery rocks; at last we got inshore in a cove, and hauled the instruments up the rocks by lines, but could get no further, on account of precipices; I, therefore, gave up that attempt and went outside the Cape, to look for a better place; but every part seemed similar, and, as the weather was getting foggy, it was useless to persevere….

  28th and 29th. Gloomy days, with much wind and rain; and the gusts coming so violently over the mountains, that we were unable to do any work, out of the ship.

  Whole weeks might pass like this: strenuous, dangerous efforts made for no result. The mission stalls and loses shape, goals are abandoned and redefined out of what is decreasingly possible. One’s career—not to mention the lives and safety of the ship’s complement—hangs in the diminishing balance.

  Often, the problem was not being wrecked ashore but simply getting close enough to it.

  Shortly after, the weather became so thick, that I could not see any part of the coast; and therefore stood offshore, under low sail, expecting a bad night…. The thick weather, and a heavy swell, induced me to stand farther out than I had at first intended…. After noon it was clearer, and we again stood inshore; but found that the current was setting us so fast to the southward…that we could not hold our own…. A good idea may be formed of the current which had taken us to the S.E., when I say that, even with a fresh and fair wind, it occupied us the whole of the [day] to regain the place we had left the previous evening….

  Dec 5th. To our mortification, we found ourselves a great way off shore; and Landfall Island, which was eight miles to leeward the last evening, was now in the wind’s eye, at a distance of about six leagues [18 miles].

  Sailors may know something of what FitzRoy felt that day at seeing such distance lost, and a course dead to windward over a foul current to make it back, in a ship that would point at best at an angle of 75 degrees toward its destination.

  But unlike Stokes, FitzRoy was made for this. He was obdurate, determined, and resourceful. He quickly realized that sailing the Beagle alongshore, anchoring frequently, landing by ship’s boat with instruments and then sailing on again was not going to work here. Too much time was being spent simply handling the weather and negotiating the ship’s progress along the coast. It would be far better, he concluded, to anchor the Beagle in a safe harbor, leave her there, and move up and down sections of the coast by small boat, taking supplies enough to be independent of the ship for a week or more at a time—as he had done the previous season, north of the strait in Otway Water—then sail on to another base well along the coast. A minimum of time spent sailing the Beagle, more surveying in the small boats.

  Through November and most of December, the Beagle cruised southeast along the southern shore of Desolation Island. This remote outlying bulwark edge of the world lay fully exposed to the storm seas and great swells of the Southern Ocean where they crashed at the end of their long run across the bottom of the Pacific. Yet even here, all along the coast, the Englishmen saw wigwams ashore and met with Fuegians.

  Just before Christmas, they discovered a rare protected anchorage off Landfall Island, only forty miles from Cape Pillar, at the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan. Smoke indicated Fuegians on the shore. Soon after the Beagle anchored, a canoe full of men, women, and children, sixteen in all, approached the ship. The natives in it “were in every respect similar to those we had so frequently met before,” wrote FitzRoy.

  But they were not. They were members of the Yamana (or Yaghan, an English corruption) tribe, as they called themselves, which meant simply “the people” in their own dialect. The Yamana may have resembled the Fuegians FitzRoy had seen farther north in the Strait of Magellan, but they were a tougher bunch, hardened and calloused from living along the wild stormwrack edge of the Southern Ocean. They were unimpressed by the beads and trinkets offered by the Beagle’s crew. They wanted knives, tools, metal, items the Englishmen wouldn’t part with. �
�Yammerschooner” was the English transliteration of a word they heard constantly uttered by the Fuegians, here and throughout Tierra del Fuego, accompanied by the natives pointing to a coveted article. “Give me,” they took it to mean.

  “Yammerschooner”—the endlessly importuning Fuegians near Button Island, Murray Narrows. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy)

  But despite the nuisance of yammerschoonering Indians, FitzRoy liked his new anchorage: it offered good shelter yet was easy to sail into and out of, rare along this stretch of coast, and the bottom shoaled gradually and offered good holding for the Beagle’s anchors. Ashore, he obtained good sextant observations for latitude, and he named the place Latitude Bay.

  On December 21, FitzRoy sent Mr. Murray, the ship’s sailing master, off in a whaleboat with six other men and surveying instruments to the east side—the other side—of Landfall Island. The next day a gale began to blow from the northwest. On the twenty-second and twenty-third the storm intensified and rain drew a dense, obscuring curtain around the Beagle. Murray and his crew in the whaleboat had gone to the lee side of Landfall Island, which would be relatively sheltered from the storm, but they would clearly not be able to row or sail back against such weather to the ship.

  Christmas Day and the twenty-sixth passed and the weather continued blowing and raining hard. FitzRoy grew anxious about the whaleboat crew. There was no possibility of sending a boat to look for them in such weather, and he knew they couldn’t get back against it. He could only hope they were well and sheltered. They had set out with four days’ provisions, not expecting to be gone that long, but they carried a good tent with them, and guns and ammunition enough to shoot plenty of the local “steamer” ducks, a flightless fishy-tasting waterfowl that propelled itself by paddling its short wings like a paddle steamer.

  On the twenty-seventh, the wind finally moderated, and FitzRoy ordered all hands aboard the Beagle to keep a lookout for the whaleboat. At noon, two of the boat’s crew were spotted waving to the ship from Landfall Island. A boat was lowered and they were soon brought back aboard. They had spent the previous afternoon and night walking across the island. The rest of the whaleboat’s crew were still in a cove on the east side. Food finished, ammunition soaked, they had not been able to make a fire or shoot any game, and had eaten nothing for the past two days. On almost every day they had tried to row back around the island to the ship, but the weather had either forced them back ashore or threatened to blow them out to sea. Not knowing when the weather might let up, Murray had sent the two men across the island to try to get word to the ship. And as they came down to the shore of the Beagle’s anchorage that morning of the twenty-seventh, before they were seen by the ship, a group of Yamana Fuegians had attacked the two seamen, beaten them, and taken some of their clothing.

  FitzRoy was astonished at such boldness by the natives and was determined to discourage it.

  By this time, the weather was fine and before a rescue party reached them, the whaleboat appeared and Murray and the rest of the boat’s crew made their way back to the ship.

  FitzRoy and some of his officers went ashore to look for the offending Fuegians—and found them: an encampment of about twenty, of whom eight were men. They met the Englishmen armed with clubs, spears, and “swords,” wrote FitzRoy, “which seemed to have been made out of iron hoops, or else were old cutlasses worn very thin…. They must have obtained these, and many trifles we noticed, from sealing vessels. By the visits of those vessels, I suppose, they have been taught to hide their furs and other skins, and have learned the effects of fire-arms.”

  FitzRoy does not say in his journal what happened at this confrontation. He slides abruptly away from the vivid and tantalizing picture of the natives waiting confidently for the Brits with clubs and cutlasses, into a bland, pedagogic description of their food: “the chief part of their subsistence on this island appeared to be penguins, seal, young birds.” These Fuegians were not a pliant, submissive group. The situation had all the makings of a bloody skirmish, and the Englishmen wisely turned tail and walked away. But a corner had been turned.

  A month later, on January 29, 1830, the Beagle anchored in a cove (today called Puerto Townshend) on London Island, which FitzRoy wanted to survey. Again he sent Murray and a crew off in a whaleboat to make instrument observations, this time of the area around a high craggy cliff about fifteen miles away, named Cape Desolation by Captain Cook fifty years earlier. Very soon after Murray and his men sailed off, the wind began to increase rapidly. By evening it was blowing what FitzRoy described in his journal (after almost a year in these storm-swept waters) as a “hard” gale. A note of worry about the men in the whaleboat again crept into his journal, but he took comfort from the fact that Murray knew what he was doing, and that “he could not have been in a finer boat.”

  It was the whaleboat newly made only months earlier by the ship’s carpenter, Jonathan May, at Chiloé Island.

  This gale continued to harden. The high peaks immediately above the anchorage made it worse. They funneled the wind into the furious katabatic blasts for which the Cape Horn region is so famous. Hurricane-force squalls tore down the slopes into the cove: “the williwaws were so violent, that our small cutter, lying astern of the ship, was fairly capsized…. the ship herself careened, as if under a press of sail, sending all loose things to leeward with a general crash.”

  The weather dismayed FitzRoy.

  Considering that this month corresponds to August in our climate [the latitude of London Island, at 54 degrees, 40 minutes South, corresponds to Yorkshire in the northern hemisphere], it is natural to compare them, and to think how hay and corn would prosper in a Fuegian summer. As yet I have found no difference in Tierra Del Fuego between summer and winter, excepting in the former the days are longer, and the average temperature is perhaps ten degrees higher, but then there is also more wind and rain.

  This was no England: Winter (July) temperatures averaged 31 degrees Fahrenheit; in midsummer’s February they rose to the forties.

  Five days passed.

  The gale still continued, and prevented anything being done out of the ship. However safe a cove Mr Murray might have found, his time, I knew must be passing most irksomely, as he could not have moved about since the day he left us.

  More than irksomely. On their first day Murray and his men had pulled into a cove in the lee of Cape Desolation, moored the whaleboat off the beach, and bivouacked ashore. At two o’clock the next morning, Murray sent one of his men to check on the boat; he reported back that it was riding happily at its mooring. At four o’clock another man got up to look at the boat and found it was gone.

  At first they thought it must have blown away so they spread out alongshore hoping to find it drifting nearby. Then they discovered a Fuegian campsite of deserted wigwams and a still-burning fire. The boat had been stolen, they concluded, the thieves gone with it.

  Murray set his men to building a makeshift boat to get word back to the Beagle. With considerable ingenuity, they fashioned something resembling an Irish coracle, a wicker-like intertwining of branches, covered with pieces of canvas cut from their tent, the inside packed with dense, clayey dirt. But they had to wait five days before the weather moderated enough to put to sea. The men had taken their clothes, the surveying instruments, and some of their provisions out of the boat the night before it was stolen, and they ate what food there was while they waited out the weather.

  Early on February 4, two of the men set out with a ship’s biscuit each for the fifteen-mile paddle to windward. Twenty hours later, at three in the morning of the fifth, exhausted, hungry, their wicker boat nearly sinking, they heard the barking of one of the dogs aboard the Beagle and found their way into the cove and to the ship. The men on the Beagle were amazed they had come so far in what appeared to them all to be nothing more than a large basket.

  FitzRoy lost not a moment in going after the stolen boat. Into another five-oared whaleboat—also newly made by carpe
nter May at Chiloé—he piled two tents and two weeks’ provisions for eleven men. While it was still dark he set off with six others to Cape Desolation. They reached Murray and his three companions just before midday. FitzRoy immediately asked to be shown where and how the lost boat had been moored—he still couldn’t believe the natives had the nerve to take it; far more likely, he thought, it had broken away from its mooring in the gale and been blown out to sea. But when he saw the protected mooring place, and heard from his sailing master, in whom he had a nearly unwavering trust, how the boat had been secured, he was convinced of Murray’s story.

  The eleven men climbed into the whaleboat and set off on what would prove to be one of the most fateful pursuits in history.

  5

  FitzRoy has been characterized as going after the Fuegians who stole the whaleboat out of anger, pique, even imperial arrogance, to punish the natives for their theft, to teach them a lesson. He may have been angry, even furious, but the enormity and difficulty of his task, the length of the coastline assigned to him to survey, the constantly delaying weather, precluded the possibility of any side trip other than one facilitating the absolute need to continue his work.