Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  By early December, the survey work was done. The Beagle returned to Montevideo for supplies, and then sailed south again.

  On December 16, 1832, the Beagle closed with the bleak eastern shore of Tierra del Fuego. Through the long afternoon and twilight the ship sailed southeast, paralleling the shore at a distance of a few miles, and in the evening anchored in an exposed bight off Cape Santa Inez, some 130 miles south of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan. The land ran in a long unbroken line northwest to southeast, offering no safe harbor, ending in sheer cliffs over which seabirds wheeled and cried.

  “The sky was gloomy,” wrote Darwin in his diary. “At a great distance to the south was a chain of lofty mountains, the summits of which glittered with snow.”

  The Beagle had never visited this part of the Fuegian coast. The crew wondered if it was inhabited. Shortly they knew: smoke rose from the shore. Through his telescope, Darwin saw Indians scattered about the sheer edge of the land “watching the ship with interest.” This southeastern shore of Tierra del Fuego was the territory of the Ona tribes.

  With their keen eyesight, the Fuegians aboard the Beagle did not need telescopes. “Oens-men—very bad!” Jemmy and York told FitzRoy, and asked him to fire at them, which he declined to do.

  Despite his refusal to kill their enemies, FitzRoy observed that the three Fuegians appeared elated. They stared shoreward from the deck and knew they were home.

  The captain’s own feelings at seeing “his” Fuegians so close to their repatriation went unrecorded.

  15

  Nowhere are the designs of men more subject to the cooperation of the natural world than among the dangers of the Cape Horn region. All of FitzRoy’s hopes and plans, his schemes for the Fuegians, his surveying mission, the lives of all aboard his ship, depended on his carrying them all through a war zone of wind and waves. Above and beneath every other piece of business now came the daily struggle to survive conditions that had long made of this place a graveyard.

  Almost immediately, this meant flight. A heavy swell, harbinger of an Atlantic storm far to the north, came in the night and set the Beagle rolling violently. There was little breeze, but as the swell deepened, FitzRoy, who had hoped to spend a day or two in the vicinity to make observations, grew anxious that the waves and the wind that might follow them could drive the ship into the cliffs. At 3 A.M., when first light came, he gave the order to weigh anchor, but with her tethers to the seafloor raised, the ship drifted uncertainly, pushed shoreward by the swell as the crew scrambled in the rigging to work her seaward in light airs. Then the breeze FitzRoy had anticipated sprang up, filled the sails, and carried the Beagle out of immediate danger. But weather was coming and there was no protection from it on this long inhospitable shore, so FitzRoy turned his ship south again and ran for the Strait of Le Maire.

  At noon, the masthead lookout reported very high breakers ahead off Cape San Diego: the Southern Ocean’s flood tide was pouring east from Cape Horn like a millrace through the strait, piling up against the rising north wind and swell, creating seas that could overwhelm a modern tanker. “The motion from such a sea is very disagreeable,” wrote Darwin with considerable understatement; “it is called ‘pot-boiling,’ & as water boiling breaks irregularly over the ship’s side.” The Beagle escaped a pot-boiling that day for when she reached Cape San Diego an hour later at 1 P.M., the tide had turned, running now in the same direction as the wind and waves; the breakers disappeared, and the Beagle sluiced through the strait on the new, and now favorable, ebb tide.

  A few hours later, close under the lee of the Fuegian shore, the ship sailed into Good Success Bay (any anchorage in the Strait of Le Maire is a success story), and Darwin got his first look at Fuegians not in English clothing, but in their natural element.

  In doubling the Northern entrance [to Good Success Bay], a party of Fuegians were watching us, they were perched on a wild peak overhanging the sea & surrounded by wood.—As we passed by they all sprang up & waving their cloaks of skins sent forth a loud and sonorous shout.—this they continued for a long time.—These people followed the ship up the harbor & just before dark we again heard their cry & soon saw their fire at the entrance of the Wigwam which they built for the night.

  As soon as the Beagle’s anchors were down, the wind shifted from the north to the southwest and began to blow hard. Heavy squalls and hurricane-force williwaws swept down upon the ship from the high surrounding hills, but the water in the anchorage remained flat, undisturbed by waves or swell, and the fine white sand on the floor of Good Success Bay proved to be firm holding ground.

  This was Darwin’s first experience of Cape Horn conditions, but he was confident of the ship and her men.

  Those who know the comfortable feeling of hearing rain & wind beating against the windows whilst seated around a fire, will understand our feelings: it would have been a very bad night out at sea, & we as well as others may call this Good Success Bay.

  The next morning Darwin met a group of Fuegians ashore. He was amazed: “I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage and civilized man is,” he wrote in his diary.

  With just the skin of a guanaco (a South American animal similar to a llama) thrown over their shoulders, daubed with red and white “paint” and charcoal, they reminded Darwin strongly of the Wolf’s Glen devils in Carl Maria von Weber’s gothic Der Freischutz, which he had seen on the stage in Edinburgh eight years earlier.

  The elder “devil” slapped him simultaneously on the chest and back three times while making “the same noise which people do when feeding chickens,” and then asked Darwin to slap him back in the same fashion. He obliged, making the Fuegian happy. Darwin concurred with Captain Cook’s description of the sound of the Fuegian language.

  It is like a man trying to clear his throat; to which may be added another very hoarse man trying to shout and a third encouraging a horse with that peculiar noise which is made in one side of the mouth. Imagine these sounds and a few gutturals mingled with them, and there will be as near an approximation to their language as any European may expect to obtain.

  He was equally struck by the primitiveness of their lifestyle.

  If their dress and appearance is miserable, their manner of living is still more so.—Their food chiefly consists in limpets & mussels, together with seals & a few birds; they must also catch occasionally a Guanaco. They seem to have no property excepting bows & arrows & spears: their present residence is under a few bushes by a ledge or rock: it is no ways sufficient to keep out rain or wind.—& now in the middle of summer it daily rains & as yet each day there has been some sleet.—The almost impenetrable wood reaches down to the high water mark.—so that the habitable land is literally reduced to the large stones on the beach.—& here at low water, whether it be day or night, these wretched looking beings pick up a livelihood.—I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.—The Southsea Islanders are civilized compared to them, & the Esquimaux, in subterranean huts may enjoy some of the comforts of life.

  He also observed, as others had before him, that the Fuegians were excellent mimics, able to mime the Englishmen’s physical mannerisms precisely and parrot back whole sentences in the English they couldn’t understand. What European could possibly do that, or follow an American Indian through a sentence of more than three words? Darwin wondered. He believed this skill was a complement of the superior natural powers of taste, smell, and sight that he had observed in the Fuegians aboard the Beagle.

  He returned to the ship for lunch and was rowed ashore again that afternoon with a party that included FitzRoy, Jemmy Button, and York Minster.

  This was FitzRoy’s first encounter with Fuegians in their natural state since leaving Tierra del Fuego two years earlier. He was impressed all over again by their savagery, but now he saw that condition, with a kind of brotherly affection, as improvable.

  Disagreeable, indeed painful, as is even the mental contemplation of a savage, and u
nwilling as we may be to consider ourselves even remotely descended from human beings in such a state, the reflection that Caesar found the Britons painted and clothed in skins, like these Fuegians, cannot fail to augment an interest excited by their childish ignorance of matters familiar to civilized man, and by their healthy, independent state of existence.

  In attempting to describe their color, FitzRoy sought a palette of comparisons.

  A rich reddish-brown, between that of rusty iron and clean copper, rather darker than copper, yet not so dark as good, old mahogany…. The colour of these aborigines is extremely like that of the Devonshire breed of cattle. From the window of a room in which I am sitting, I see some oxen of that breed passing through the outskirts of a wood, and the partial glimpses caught of them remind me strongly of the South American red men.

  The two “civilized” Fuegian men, Jemmy and York, became instant snobs. They alternately laughed at the squalor of their countrymen and appeared ashamed by them. They even pretended not to understand the Fuegians’ speech (for Jemmy this might have been true), but York Minster could not help laughing hysterically when one of the older Fuegians, recognizing him as a fellow native despite his fine clothes, chided him and told him he was dirty for not shaving the few hairs on his face.

  Richard Matthews, the missionary who was to establish a new Jerusalem on these wild shores, was also getting a first look at his future parishioners in the raw. His true impressions were not recorded, but according to FitzRoy he remained stoically unfazed: “[he] did not appear to be at all discouraged by a close inspection of these natives. He remarked to me, that ‘they were no worse than he had supposed them to be.’”

  After three days of survey work, while Darwin and others climbed the nearby hills and attempted unsuccessfully to shoot one of the giant guanacos they had spotted, the Beagle sailed from Good Success Bay. FitzRoy was eager to settle Matthews and the Fuegians ashore at last and tried to make for Christmas Sound and March Harbour, west of Cape Horn—the neighborhood where his fine whaleboat had been stolen two and a half years earlier, and where he had abducted York Minster and Fuegia Basket.

  The ship passed south of the Horn on December 21, but then the wind shifted and began to blow at gale force, as it so often does here, driving them out to sea. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the Beagle’s crew worked her through driving hail into a small cove on Hermite Island, just west of Cape Horn. There they remained for Christmas and until the end of the month, in a secure anchorage, while storms and williwaws blew around them.

  On December 31, though conditions were little improved, the Beagle weighed anchor, as FitzRoy was impatient to reach March Harbour, now only 100 miles away. But the weather remained relentlessly against him. For the first two weeks of January he pushed the Beagle westward through a succession of gales, battling the entire time to make that short distance. For days the ship made no headway at all: the tiny offshore Diego Ramirez Islands were sighted through the murk close off the ship’s port beam on January 2 and again in exactly the same place on January 5. Life aboard the ship beating with no letup into gale force winds and icy breaking seas was reduced to the grimmest continuum of food, water, rest, and struggle. Seawater made its way everywhere below, through hatches and streaming from the men’s soaked clothing. This is what the Bounty—much the same size and shape as the Beagle—faced in this same spot in 1788, before Bligh gave up, turned at last downwind, and sailed around the world the other way to reach the Pacific.

  The Beagle’s captain and crew were not as unhappy as the Bounty’s, but her natural philosopher was as miserable as he had ever been. Swinging wildly in his hammock, he complained to his diary: “[Since December 21] I have scarcely for an hour been quite free from seasickness. How long the bad weather may last, I know not; but my spirits, temper, and stomach, I am well assured, will not hold out much longer.”

  On January 11, the towering rock formation that had given York Minster his name was sighted ahead, “looming among driving clouds.” FitzRoy believed they would soon be at anchor in March Harbour, then only a mile ahead, when the gale suddenly increased to storm force and darkness, violent squalls, rain and hail drove the Beagle out to sea again.

  All the following day the ship lay hove-to south and just west of Cape Horn, drifting slowly back over the sea miles she had won with so much effort. It was twenty-four days since they had passed the Horn and they were now barely twenty miles west of it. The storm steadily worsened until it reached a pitch of screaming intensity around noon on the 13th. It was the worst weather FitzRoy had ever encountered. The waves had grown to such heights that he remained on deck in the driving wind and rain, able to do nothing but watch them anxiously, feeling a sense of imminent catastrophe. At 1 P.M., three great rollers bore down on the ship.

  [Their] size and steepness at once told me that our sea-boat, good as she was, would be sorely tried. Having steerage way, the vessel met and rose over the first unharmed, but, of course, her way was checked; the second deadened her way completely, throwing her off the wind; and the third great sea, taking her right a-beam, turned her so far over, that all the lee bulwark, from the cat-head to the stern davit, was two or three feet under water.

  In other words, the ship was knocked right over on her side, capsized.

  Water burst open doors and hatches, cataracts tumbled below into the chart room where Darwin lay in his misery and spread through the cabins. The Beagle tried to rise but wallowed on her side, listing with the weight of the water now trapped against her bulwarks. “Had another sea then struck her,” wrote FitzRoy, “the little ship might have been numbered among the many of her class which have disappeared.”

  Lieutenant Sulivan struggled up onto the deck from below (as he later described the event to his son) and found the Beagle on her side. Carpenter Jonathan May was already sliding along the nearly vertical wall of the deck, struggling with a hand spike to open the hinging wooden ports at the edge—now the bottom—of the deck to allow the water to drain off. Sulivan helped him and when a few of these had been knocked open, the water drained off the deck and the ship came up. One of the new whaleboats had been torn off its davits astern and was hanging smashed alongside the hull; crewmen had to take an ax to its tackle to chop it adrift. But the ship was otherwise unscathed. None of its rigging had carried away, no one had been swept overboard. Apart from the whaleboat, the only recorded damage was to one chronometer and Darwin’s “irreparable loss” of some of his specimens.

  The knockdown marked the height of the storm. The wind soon abated sufficiently for the crew to set some sail and the ship turned north, off the wind, to find shelter. It was after dark when the Beagle let go her anchors in quiet water behind False Cape Horn at the edge of Hardy Peninsula, only twelve miles from her last anchorage on Hermite Island, which she had left two weeks earlier.

  FitzRoy abandoned the attempt to reach March Harbour in the Beagle. Days of continued bad weather forced them north and east through Nassau Bay, still farther away, until he finally decided to leave the ship in Goree Road, a secure and accessible anchorage atop Nassau Bay, and proceed in the smaller boats through the inside passages among the islands to the area around Christmas Sound.

  But York Minster stopped him. He told the captain he didn’t want to return to his own country. He and Fuegia, his wife to be, preferred to settle with Jemmy Button and Matthews in Jemmy’s “country,” York told the captain. FitzRoy was surprised but glad. He thought it much better that the three of them and Matthews all settle together.

  “I little thought,” he later wrote, “how deep a scheme Master York had in contemplation.”

  16

  Darwin was among the large group that set out on January 19, headed for the place near Murray Narrows that Jemmy Button called his “conetree,” from where he had first been taken. This was where FitzRoy now decided the new settlement and mission should be established.

  For about a day, he had considered the land on Lennox and Navarin Islands around
the Beagle’s anchorage in Goree Road. More towns and cities have come into being because of their proximity to a safe harbor than for any other reason. The coast hereabouts was unusually flat for this drowned-mountain region, and FitzRoy thought it might prove suitable to agriculture. But after tramping across it for a few miles with Darwin, they found the whole area to be a swamp, “a dreary morass…quite unfit for our purposes.” Jemmy’s country, where he was keen to return, seemed more promising.

  FitzRoy, Darwin, Matthews and the three Fuegians, Bynoe, the Beagle’s surgeon, and about twenty-seven seamen, marines, and officers, filled three whaleboats and the ship’s 26-foot yawl. Temporarily decked over, the yawl was also crammed with the cargo largely donated by the Church Missionary Society and others to start the Fuegians and Matthews on their new life.

  The choice of articles [wrote Darwin] showed the most culpable folly & negligence. Wine glasses, butter-bolts, tea-trays, soup turins, [a] mahogany dressing case, fine white linen, beavor hats & an endless variety of similar things shows how little was thought about the country where they were going to. The means absolutely wasted on such things would have purchased an immense stock of really useful articles.

  The folly and the culpability were mainly FitzRoy’s, as Darwin surely knew. The captain, better than any of the well-meaning donors, knew the conditions of the wild, uttermost shores upon which the pioneers would be deposited. He had apparently not instructed the generous suppliers on what might have been more useful, nor sold or traded the linens, tea trays, and beaver hats for tools. He had been the prop master organizing the shipping and handling of all these silly items. He had watched them being carried into the Beagle’s hold at Devonport, where they had taken up valuable cargo space. It was one thing to have the queen of England presenting Fuegia Basket with a ring as a keepsake from a famous patron, but something else altogether to transport a boatload of genteel and mainly useless bric-a-brac to Tierra del Fuego. What could he have been thinking?