Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  Darwin had hoped for respite from his seasickness at Tenerife, where the Beagle was supposed to make its first stop. After closely reading about von Humboldt’s travels around the island, he had dreamed of visiting Tenerife with his mentor Henslow. But “Oh misery, misery,” he wrote in his diary: the local fear of cholera and overzealous quarantine regulations forbade anyone to go ashore for twelve days. FitzRoy wouldn’t wait that long; he raised anchor immediately and sailed on. Darwin could only “gaze at this long-wished-for object of my ambition” from the deck. “Everything has a beautiful appearance: the colours are so rich and soft. The peak or sugar loaf has just shown itself above the clouds. It towers in the sky twice as high as I should have dreamed of looking for it”—and watch it fall below the horizon. On January 16th, three weeks out of England, the Beagle anchored in Porto Praya, on Saint Jago, one of the Cape Verde Islands. Darwin went ashore immediately and “strolled about the town, & feasted upon oranges.”

  Before returning to the ship, he walked beyond the small shantytown into a deep, unspoiled valley.

  Here I first saw the glory of tropical vegetation. Tamarinds, Bananas & Palms were flourishing at my feet.—I expected a good deal, for I had read Humboldts descriptions & I was afraid of disappointments: how utterly vain such fear is, none can tell but those who have experienced what I to day have.—It is not only the gracefulness of their forms or the novel richness of their colours, it is the numberless & confusing associations that rush together on the mind, & produce the effect.—I returned to the shore, treading on Volcanic rocks, hearing the notes of unknown birds, & seeing new insects fluttering about still newer flowers.—It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.—he is overwhelmed with what he sees & cannot justly comprehend it.—Such are my feelings, & such may they remain.

  So Darwin wrote in his diary aboard the Beagle that evening. That day he found his voice. The next day, accompanying FitzRoy in one of the ship’s boats to Quail Island, “a miserable, desolate” rock near Porto Praya, he found himself.

  He had been reading Charles Lyell’s first volume of Principles of Geology and looking at the rocks and sea pools around Quail Island when it occurred to Darwin that he might someday write his own book, one worth reading. Fifty years later he remembered the impact of this thought at that moment.

  It then first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight. This was a memorable hour to me, and how distinctly I can call to mind the low cliff of lava beneath which I rested, with the sun glaring hot, a few strange desert plants growing near, and with living corals in the tidal pools at my feet.

  While FitzRoy busied himself ashore with surveying and problems of magnetic variation, Darwin tramped around Saint Jago for almost three weeks, alone or with friends from the ship’s company, collecting everything that captured his fancy. He littered the Beagle’s deck and chart room with his specimens, causing First Lieutenant Wickham to complain, uselessly, about his mess. He examined, catalogued, and boxed everything for eventual shipment back to England, where Professor Henslow would oversee his growing collection.

  The Beagle sailed from the Cape Verde Islands on February 8, heading for Bahia on the coast of Brazil, the first stop on FitzRoy’s mission to enlarge the earlier surveys of South American waters. The ship bowled along before the trade winds on seas of a deep vivid blue unknown in colder, darker Europe. The water was warm, the air warmer and moist, the sky dotted with puffy cumulonimbus clouds. Rain squalls overtook the ship periodically, the sudden winds heeling her under a press of too much sail for ten or fifteen minutes, too short a time for the men to reduce canvas, so that the Beagle suddenly accelerated and rolled and made noisy, frothing waves that coursed past her hull until the cloudburst moved away leaving the deck dark and cool underfoot from the rain.

  In the calmer tropical seas, Darwin felt better. He constructed a net and towed it astern on a long line, trawling for plankton and tiny sea creatures. He was able to work on his collection—dissecting plants and animals, writing up his notes—and settle into a shipboard routine.

  He and FitzRoy met at eight every morning for breakfast in the captain’s cabin, again at 1 P.M. for dinner, and at 5 P.M. for supper. The first two meals were spartan, though Darwin found them ample and satisfying: rice, peas, bread, antiscorbutics like pickles and dried apples, water and coffee. For supper there was meat—from the cans while those supplies lasted, or fresh meat or fowl—bread and cheese. They drank no alcohol, by FitzRoy’s preference. During these meals, the two men talked of their work when FitzRoy felt communicative, though often he did not, and ate in cogitative silence. They made a practice of leaving the table as soon as they were finished, without waiting for the other.

  Twenty days from the Cape Verdes, the Beagle anchored in Bahia de Todos Santos (present-day Salvador). The town, “embosomed in a luxuriant wood,” sent Darwin into raptures: “It would be difficult [to] imagine, before seeing the view, anything so magnificent…if faithfully represented in a picture, a feeling of distrust would be raised in the mind.” He was soon spending his days wandering through the Brazilian forest, seeking each evening back aboard the Beagle adequate expression for what he had seen and felt.

  29th (Feb) The day has passed delightfully: delight is however a weak term for such transports of pleasure…amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking…a most paradoxical mixture of sound & silence pervades the shady parts of the wood.—the noise from the insects is so loud in the evening it can be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore.—Yet within the recesses of the forest when in the midst of it a universal stillness appears to reign.—To a person fond of Natural history such a day as this brings with it pleasure more acute than he ever may again experience.—After wandering about for some hours, I returned to the landing place.—Before reaching it I was overtaken by a Tropical storm.—I tried to find shelter under a tree so thick that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain, yet here in a couple of minutes, a little torrent flowed down the trunk….

  March 1st I can only add raptures to the former raptures…. Brazilian scenery is nothing more nor less than a view in the Arabian Nights….

  But there was more than loveliness to contend with. At this time the slave trade was still legal in Brazil, and Darwin, whose ancestors had been strident abolitionists, was repelled by the stories told by Captain Paget of the Samarang, who came aboard the Beagle to dine with FitzRoy.

  Facts about slavery so revolting, that if I had read them in England, I should have placed them to the credulous zeal of well-meaning people: The extent to which the trade is carried on; the ferocity with which it is defended; the respectable (!) people who are concerned in it are far from being exaggerated at home…. It is utterly false (as Cap Paget satisfactorily proved) that any, even the very best treated, do not wish to return to their countries.—“If I could but see my father & my two sisters once again, I should be happy. I can never forget them.” Such was the expression of one of these people.

  But FitzRoy had different ideas. While he felt slavery was “an evil long forseen and now severely felt,” he believed the majority of Brazilians treated their slaves humanely. He felt the institution was not unlike the mutually useful master-servant, landowner-tenant relations in existence in England since feudal times, long enjoyed by his own family. He cited his own recent visit to a Brazilian plantation where the owner had brought a number of his slaves to meet the captain and asked them, in front of FitzRoy, if they would rather be free. All had answered no.

  Darwin, unable to restrain himself, grew uncharacteristically angry and asked FitzRoy if he really thought the answers given by slaves in the presence of their master were believable.

  To FitzRoy, such a questioning of his opinion was almost unknown; it was practically mutinous. He erupted furiously at Darwin, saying that as he doubted his word, they cou
ld no longer “live together.” The meal broke up instantly, and FitzRoy sent for Wickham to tell him that Darwin was no longer welcome at his table.

  Darwin was convinced that his voyage was over, that he would have to leave the ship. But Wickham, perhaps more used to his captain’s blacker moods, invited Darwin to take his meals with the officers in the gun room. It wasn’t necessary: a few hours later FitzRoy sent an officer to him with an apology and a request that he “continue to live with” the captain. Darwin agreed, and they settled, without reference to the episode, back into their old routine. But the younger man was now aware of the terms of their friendship.

  The Beagle weighed anchor and sailed from Bahia on March 15, her course southward.

  The three Fuegians, who had sailed north along this same coast two years earlier, knew where they were headed.

  14

  They had come a remarkably long way. There was no more certain sign of the Fuegians’ anglicization than their clothing. The first thing FitzRoy had done after kidnapping them, even before feeding them, was to dress them in English clothing. This, he assured the Admiralty in his first communication concerning his protégés, made them “very happy.”

  Now, two years on, they walked about the ship in their fancy duds and gazed shoreward from the decks, the oddest of tourists. There was no cruising or yachting gear for passengers, no white ducks or striped blazers. Though they may have been given oiled canvas seacoats to permit them to get some air on deck during inclement weather, the Fuegians would not have dressed as seamen. York Minster and Jemmy Button, in earnest collusion with their captors over their transformation, dressed in the de rigueur fashion of early-nineteenth-century gentlemen: aboard ship and ashore, they wore topcoats with tails, double-breasted waistcoats with lapels, high-collared shirts with cravats, long trousers, and leather boots. They had probably been given cheap watches with fobs to complete the proper “weskit” effect. The full regalia, pounds of English wool, must have been sweltering in the tropics, but it was the clear badge of their elevation from savagery and they wore every layer of it devoutly.

  Jemmy Button in particular was observed by everyone to be fastidious about his dress. He had grown fat and vain during his stay in England, he was rarely seen without his white kid gloves, and was scrupulous, even neurotic, about the polish of his boots. While his speech never went far beyond the basic “Me go you” plateau of essential communication, he had an ear for the delicate and foppish in expression. When he visited Darwin in his seasick berth, Jemmy gazed at him with pity and said, “Poor, poor fellow!” This virtual satire of excessive Englishness—closely resembling someone from the lower classes putting on airs—amused captain, crew, and Darwin alike, and endeared Jemmy Button to all of them. He instinctually, if incompletely, understood this and played to his gallery.

  Fuegia Basket’s dresses and bonnets were probably more comfortable at sea and in the heat, but no less proper. And all three dressed up in their formal best for FitzRoy’s regular Sunday shipboard services of hymn singing and prayers.

  Although thrown into intimate contact with them for more than a year, Darwin’s impressions of the Fuegians were less savvy than his observations of the natural landscapes he glimpsed at the Beagle’s ports of call. He agreed largely with FitzRoy’s opinions of their innate personalities and characteristics, which the captain had derived from his ideas about facial features and the mumbo jumbo of phrenology. Soon after their arrival in England, FitzRoy had taken them to a phrenologist to have the bumps on their heads read. The specialist’s finding was that all three were “disposed to cunning” and possessed “animal inclinations and passions” that would pose problems in making them “usefeul members of society.” Nobody in Christian England would have been surprised by such a diagnosis. Darwin saw a gentler side to Jemmy Button, but his own conclusion that the boy must possess a “nice disposition” was based less on his day-to-day contact with him than his reading of the physiognomy of Jemmy’s face.

  Darwin thought the twelve-year-old Fuegia Basket “a nice, modest, reserved young girl, with a rather pleasing but sometimes sullen expression.” He noticed too that she possessed an innate cleverness: “[She was] very quick in learning anything, especially languages. This was showed by picking up some Portuguese and Spanish, when left on shore for only a short time at Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, and in her knowledge of English.” Fuegia was the best English speaker of the three, and she picked up manners with her languages. She was the charmer, the pet of the lower deck on the voyage back to England from Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy’s showpiece specimen who had won Queen Adelaide’s heart. Fuegia Basket had a natural charm that needed no translation, that bridged any cultural gap, an endearing quality as potent in its way as sex appeal. She understood this and used it.

  Darwin’s impressions of York Minster were close to FitzRoy’s, for the little he wrote of the elder, most intractable Fuegian echoes the phrenologist’s report, which Darwin undoubtedly read: “His disposition was reserved, taciturn, morose, and when excited violently passionate; his affections were very strong towards a few friends on board; his intellect good.”

  Darwin was most struck by the two Fuegian men’s eyesight. His own had proved extremely sharp in shooting, and he had excellent distance vision, better than most of the crew’s. But York and Jemmy sighted ships at sea and land beyond the horizon long before anyone else on board the ship. They were well aware of their superiority and enjoyed it: “Me see ship, me no tell,” Jemmy liked to tease the officers on watch. Their sense of taste seemed keener too; they appeared to Darwin to have natural powers far beyond the capabilities of Europeans, an impression he was to amplify years later when he came to write his Descent of Man.

  The clearest object of York Minster’s affections was Fuegia Basket. It was understood by all on board that once landed in Tierra del Fuego, York and Fuegia would become, as the sailors put it, “man and wife.” Until then, while in his care, FitzRoy kept them apart as far as possible. Fuegia’s hammock was swung aft, near the officers’ quarters, while Jemmy and York bunked forward with the crew.

  It was a long slow cruise south. The Beagle made lengthy stops in Rio de Janeiro (FitzRoy left Fuegia Basket ashore here in the company of an English family for three months, where she helped the young children of the family with their English, while picking up Portuguese herself), Montevideo, and Bahia Blanca on the Argentine coast. Between these ports the ship cruised painstakingly back and forth surveying the coast.

  Darwin took advantage of this tedious cruising to explore ashore for weeks at a time, renting houses and staying with ranchers, wandering through Brazilian rain forests, galloping across the Argentine pampas with bands of gauchos, thrilling and exhausting himself. He also spent more time in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. For reading material ashore, surrounded by paradisaical natural glories, he carried Milton’s Paradise Lost everywhere. He stayed in touch with the ship and its wanderings by a fairly regular correspondence with FitzRoy. The tone of these letters shows the essential warmth of their friendship. The captain clearly missed Darwin while he was off the ship; his letters reveal an antic, schoolboy banter—a tone he could never have enjoyed with his subordinates—underscoring both FitzRoy’s tender age and the lonely isolation of his rank and often fearsome responsibility:

  My dear Philos,

  Trusting that you are not entirely expended—though half-starved, occasionally frozen and at times half drowned—I wish you joy from your campaign with General Rosas [an Argentine general whose troops were slaughtering Indians all over the pampas], and I do assure you that whenever the ship pitches (which is very often as you well know), I am extremely vexed to think how much sea practice you are losing;—and how unhappy you must feel on firm ground.

  Your home (upon the waters) will remain at anchor near the Monte Megatherii until you return to assist in parturition of a Megalonyx measuring seventy-two feet from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail, and an Ichthyosaurus somewhat larger t
han the Beagle!…[While still with the ship in Bahia Blanca, Darwin and FitzRoy had discovered on a nearby beach the fossilized bones of several large animals, which they believed could have belonged to a Megatherium or Megalonyx, both extinct.]

  My dear Darwin,

  Two hours since I received your epistle…. and most punctually and immediately am I about to answer your queries. (Mirabilo!!) But firstly of the first—My good Philos, why have you told me nothing of your hairbreadth escapes and moving accidents? How many times did you flee from the Indians? How many precipices did you fall over? How many bogs did you fall into? How often were you carried away by the floods?…I hear you are saying, “You have got to the end of a sheet of paper without telling me one thing that I want to know.”

  Philos, do not be irate, have patience and I will tell thee all.

  Tomorrow we shall sail for Maldonado—there we shall remain until the middle of this month—thence we shall return to Monte Video…

  Adios Philos—Ever faithfully yours,

  Robt. FitzRoy

  FitzRoy was anxious to get south to Tierra del Fuego to land the Fuegians and Matthews, the missionary, and help them establish their mission during the brief southern summer, December to January. In September 1832, daunted by the enormity and difficulty of making a thorough survey of the Argentine coast with the Beagle alone, he hired two small local sealing schooners to share some of the work. The seventeen-ton Paz was, FitzRoy wrote, “as ugly and ill-built a craft as I ever saw, covered with dirt, and soaked with rancid oil.” The eleven-ton Liebre was just as filthy, but they appeared seaworthy and suitable. FitzRoy outfitted them from the Beagle’s stores, manned them with his own men, and sent them off to survey the shoal waters and river estuaries between Bahia Blanca and Rio Negro.