Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  Since all seemed well, FitzRoy decided to leave the group in Woollya for another week or so while he explored the western arms of the Beagle Channel, and then return to see how they were doing. He sent the yawl and one whaleboat back to the Beagle in Goree Road and set out with Darwin and a smaller group in the other two boats.

  For a week, Darwin and FitzRoy had exciting but relatively trouble-free cruising. The weather began hot and sunny, and they were surprised to find themselves sunburned. They saw many whales breaching and spouting in the channel, which ran deep right up to the shore.

  Both young men loved this sort of boat-camping. It was very like the trips FitzRoy had made with the whaleboats through Otway and Skyring Waters in the first year of his command aboard the Beagle, when he had slept on beaches beneath his sea cloak, finding it frozen hard over him in the mornings, and himself exhilarated by the experience.

  For Darwin, the rough and truly dangerous conditions greatly appealed to the physically rugged side of his nature that had found its outlet at home in riding and shooting; it was a magnificent enlargement on the geologizing ramble he had made across Wales with Professor Sedgwick. Here, in addition to the cornucopia of natural phenomena to explore, there were wild savages to contend with, a sailing ship to call home, and weather severe enough to prompt him to grow a long beard whose tip he could see below his hand when he made a fist around it. It was the grandest adventure a boy ever had.

  On successive nights they landed to make camp at deserted spots, the first at Shingle Point just west of the Murray Narrows, only to be quickly discovered and bothered by canoes full of aggressive Fuegians. These appeared unfamiliar with firearms, so the Englishmen’s weapons were no deterrent. Rather than spend the night holding them at bay or in conflict, each time they packed up and moved on, trusting that the Fuegians would not follow them after dark. Nevertheless, even when they found campsites free of any sign of natives, they kept watch in turn through the night.

  On his watch, sitting close to a fire in the dead dark of night, Darwin’s imagination flamed. Fed by stories of the scuffles of the Beagle’s previous voyage, by tales of Cook and others, he was ever ready for an attack from wild savages.

  It was my watch till one o’clock; there is something very solemn in such scenes; the consciousness rushes on the mind in how remote a corner of the globe you are then in…the quiet of the night is only interrupted by the heavy breathing of the men & the cry of the night birds.—the occasional distant bark of a dog reminds one that the Fuegians may be prowling, close to the tents, ready for a fatal rush…their courage is like that of a wild beast, they would not think of their inferiority in number, but each individual would endeavour to dash your brains out with a stone, as a tiger would be certain under similar circumstances to tear you.

  The day after recording such febrile imaginings, nature made a rush for Darwin. His courageous and instant response got his name stamped into geography for the first time.

  That day, the two boats entered the northern arm of the Beagle Channel and the scenery changed dramatically. The land along the north shore of the channel now rose steeply to the high, permanently snow-covered, jagged southern cordillera of the Andes. Cottagey Kincaid country gave way to waterlogged Himalayan vistas. Waterfalls poured from the heights, glaciers tumbled into the Beagle Channel only a few hundred yards from the men’s oars, surrounding the boats with small icebergs, or “growlers.” The land turned tundra-like, scraped clean of all but the most stunted, wind-bent vegetation. The water in the channel, right up to the deep edge of the land and in the dense shadows of the glaciers, was a dark blue-black. Both FitzRoy and Darwin remarked on the “beryl blue” sepulchral glow of light refracting through the glacial ice.

  At midday they stopped to cook a meal on a sandy point of land “immediately in front of a noble precipice of solid ice,” wrote FitzRoy, “the cliffy face of a huge glacier, which seemed to cover the side of a mountain, and completely filled a valley several leagues in extent.” It was not a good spot for lunch. As they gathered around their fire, the edge of the glacier right in front of them suddenly calved.

  Down came the whole front of the icy cliff, and the sea surged up in a vast heap of foam. Reverberating echoes sounded in every direction, from the lofty mountains which hemmed us in; but our whole attention was immediately called to great rolling waves which came so rapidly that there was scarcely time for the most active of our party to run and seize the boats before they were tossed along the beach like empty calabashes. By the exertions of those who grappled them or seized their ropes, they were hauled up again out of reach of a second and third roller; and indeed we had good reason to rejoice that they were just saved in time.

  Darwin was among the first to jump up and grab the boats from the sudden waves that would undoubtedly have carried them off, stranding the men ashore. His instant grasp of the situation, quicker than most of the seamen in the group, and his action in helping save the boats, prompted a special consideration from FitzRoy.

  The following day, the 30th, we passed into a large expanse of water, which I named Darwin Sound—after my messmate, who so willingly encountered the discomfort and risk of a long cruise in a small loaded boat.

  FitzRoy later named the high mountain above the Beagle Channel Mount Darwin. Many bestowals upon geography by early explorers have been lost or changed over time (for instance, a number of Captain Cook’s names for the headlands and harbors of the New Zealand coastline have, in recent, more politically correct times, been replaced by their original Maori names). But Cerro Darwin still rises 7,975 feet high in the Cordillera Darwin above Seno Darwin on modern maps of Chilean Tierra del Fuego.

  Several days later, the boats reached the open Pacific. In “miserable weather” they turned around, traveling back along the southwest arm of the Beagle Channel. From a whaleboat, FitzRoy’s observations and surveying of this western end of the Beagle Channel were quick and relatively rough, but accurate enough to provide the basis of charts still in use today.

  On February 5, at Shingle Point, close to the Murray Narrows—where they had earlier been disturbed by a group of Fuegians and decided to move camp—they met some of this same group again. Now they appeared to be “in full dress,” as FitzRoy put it: covered with red and white paint, goose down and feathers. They also wore ribbons and scraps of red cloth—gifts from the Beagle’s seamen handed out at Woollya if they hadn’t been stolen since—but one of their women, “noticed by several among us as being far from ill-looking,” was wearing one of Fuegia’s dresses. “There was also an air of almost defiance among these people, which looked as if they knew that harm had been done.” FitzRoy immediately grew anxious about settlers at Woollya.

  They hurried on, rowing until it was too dark to see. They were in the boats again at daybreak. Sluicing through the Murray Narrows they saw more natives “ornamented with strips of tartan cloth or white linen, which we well knew were obtained from our poor friends. No questions were asked; we thought our progress slow, though wind and tide favoured us: but hurrying on, at noon we reached Woollya.”

  The beach was thick with canoes; a hundred Fuegians were gathered along the shore and wandering around the new settlement. “All were much painted, and ornamented with rags of English clothing, which we concluded to be the last remnants of our friends’ stock.”

  FitzRoy’s darkest visions seemed about to be realized when the two whaleboats touched the shore and the Fuegians ran down to the water and surrounded their crews, leaping and shouting at them.

  But then Matthews appeared, his clothes and person intact, followed by York and Jemmy, still dressed in their English duds and looking as well as usual.

  Fuegia Basket did not appear. She was in York’s wigwam, they said. FitzRoy gave no further explanation, but the reason for her indisposition is obvious: her first nights inside the wigwam with York Minster had also been her first alone with him. He had almost certainly had sex with his twelve-year-old bride. He had probably raped
her, repeatedly.

  FitzRoy pulled Matthews into a whaleboat and instructed the crew to row them a little distance offshore. There, away from the noise and interruption, he heard his story, while the natives squatted on their haunches along the beach watching them, “reminding me,” wrote FitzRoy, “of a pack of hounds waiting for a fox to be unearthed.”

  The young missionary’s zeal and stoicism had collapsed in the face of the rude attention directed at him.

  Matthews gave a bad account of the prospect which he saw before him, and told me, that he did not think himself safe among such a set of utter savages as he found them to be.

  At first there had been only “a few quiet natives.” But three days after the English boats had left, canoes full of rowdier Fuegians had turned up to bedevil him night and day. They stole anything he left lying around his wigwam; others crowded inside it all day, chattering and imploring him to give them everything they saw. Some of them became belligerent when he refused. More than one, he told FitzRoy, “went out in a rage, and returned immediately with a large stone” implying that he would kill Matthews if he didn’t hand over what had been demanded. Others amused themselves by teasing him, “making mouths at him,” and holding him down and pulling the hair out of his face. For a few days Matthews had been able to leave Jemmy guarding his wigwam while he visited the women in theirs, where they fed him and asked nothing in return, but soon the besieging, importuning, thieving mob made it impossible for him to leave his wigwam. Despite Jemmy’s constant assurances to the contrary, Matthews told FitzRoy that he believed he would soon be killed.

  York Minster, a superior physical specimen among the Fuegians, had not been bothered and had lost nothing. Fuegia had his protection against everything outside their wigwam. But Jemmy had been “sadly plundered, even by his own family.” “My people very bad,” he told FitzRoy mournfully, “great fool, know nothing at all, very great fool.”

  The seamen’s prize garden had been wantonly trampled, despite Jemmy’s attempt to explain its purpose, and—or perhaps because of—his best efforts to keep people off it.

  FitzRoy decided to take Matthews away with him, and the formerly zealous missionary gave no argument. The seamen quickly retrieved his chest and cache of personal possessions from the cellar in his wigwam and got it all into the whaleboats. FitzRoy himself distributed some of Matthews’ stores—axes, saws, knives, and nails—among the surrounding natives, as a measure of goodwill, hoping some of this might reflect on his three protégés who were to remain: Jemmy, York, and Fuegia.

  FitzRoy promised Jemmy and York he would return in a few days to see how they were getting on. Then the Englishmen pushed off in the whaleboats.

  When fairly out of sight of Woollya, sailing with a fair wind towards the Beagle, Matthews must have felt almost like a man reprieved, excepting that he enjoyed the feelings always sure to reward those who try to do their duty, in addition to those excited by a sudden certainty of his life being out of jeopardy.

  Matthews had spent more than a year and come a long, hard way, with the blessing and endowments of many patrons, to establish the mission settlement in Tierra del Fuego. He may indeed have felt a manic surge of relief at being rescued from his worst imaginings. But if he felt as happy as FitzRoy suggests, he was fulfilling all Darwin’s doubts about him. “He is of an eccentric character & does not appear…to possess much energy,” Darwin had confided to his diary days earlier, before they had left Matthews in his wigwam. “I think it very doubtful how far he is qualified for so arduous an undertaking.”

  FitzRoy does not record his own feelings at seeing Matthews so readily abandon his post and this crucial element of his noble design, so long hoped-for, fail so quickly and completely. His remarks about Matthews are charitable. Behind them his own bitter disappointment shouts in mute, raging relief.

  A week later, after briefly surveying sections of the Wollaston and Navarin Islands and Ponsonby Sound, FitzRoy returned with a single whaleboat crew to Woollya.

  The scene that met him allayed his “considerable anxiety.” The whaleboat passed women fishing peacefully from canoes. On the beach at Woollya, FitzRoy met Jemmy, York, and Fuegia, dressed as usual, Fuegia even “clean and tidily dressed.” There were only a few other natives present, and they seemed “quiet and well disposed.” FitzRoy inspected the three wigwams and found them unchanged and in good repair. The formerly trampled garden had recovered, and was now even sprouting a few vegetables. Beside York and Fuegia’s wigwam lay a partly completed canoe that York was building from planks left behind by the crew. The place looked peaceful and productive.

  Jemmy complained (he did a lot of this) that many of his things had been stolen. But apart from a few lapses by his own brothers, the thieves had mostly been strangers, now gone, and he and his family were on good terms. Jemmy’s mother came down to the boat to greet her son’s benefactor—and her own, for she was wearing a dress Jemmy had brought for her.

  When FitzRoy and his boat crew shoved off, he was hopeful. “I left the place, with rather sanguine hopes of their effecting among their countrymen some change for the better.”

  FitzRoy had done his best—his considerable utmost, with the full backing of the Royal Navy, his king, queen, and the blessings of many like-minded Christians of England. Surely, his faith in all he held to be true assured him, God would now take this seed and make it grow.

  Darwin was not so easily persuaded.

  It was quite melancholy leaving our Fuegians amongst their barbarous countrymen: there was one comfort; they appeared to have no personal fears.—But in contradiction to what has often been stated, 3 years has been sufficient to change savages, into, as far as habits go, complete & voluntary Europæans.—[but] I am afraid whatever other ends their excursion to England produces, it will not be conducive to their happiness.—They have far too much sense not to see the vast superiority of civilized over uncivilized habits; & yet I am afraid to the latter they must return.

  Distracted as he had been from his survey work (one gets the feeling, reading FitzRoy’s narrative, that he was never again able to bring to it the singlemindedness that had characterized his efforts before the whaleboat had been stolen, just over three years earlier), FitzRoy felt he had covered enough of eastern Tierra del Fuego. On February 26, 1833, the Beagle sailed out into a gale in the Strait of Le Maire and ran in heavy seas toward the Falkland Islands.

  17

  A year and more into this second voyage aboard the Beagle, FitzRoy brooded.

  He had spent months distracted from his primary, ostensible purpose—surveying and mapping the southern South American coastline, east and west—with the settling of the Fuegians. That now done, unsatisfactorily, the work still to be accomplished loomed before him.

  In addition to surveying the Falkland Islands, there were still gaps in his surveys of the Atlantic coast, uncertainties of longitude to be resolved—work he had put aside to take the Fuegians south during the summer season. He would have to sail north again and spend another year crawling along the pampero coast of Argentine Patagonia: thousands of miles that included vast river estuaries, gateways to the continent’s developing interior, all of it potentially important for future trade and safe navigation, yet it was impossible to sail every mile of it. There was still the whole world to circumnavigate: all those chronometers bought and daily tended to mark off an unbroken chain of longitudes around the globe. The entire voyage was supposed to last just three years and with almost half that time gone, he was still mired on the Atlantic coast. The job seemed endless. He had brought it on himself, it was what he had wanted, an important peacetime commission. Now it seemed impossible.

  He was unfairly overburdened, FitzRoy felt. On the first voyage, the survey area—just Tierra del Fuego—was far smaller, and the Beagle had been one of three vessels, with the Adventure and the Adelaide, carrying out the work. Now, with a single ship, he began to despair of being able to complete the work and justifying the time and expenditure o
f this voyage as more than simply a repatriation effort on behalf of his three Fuegians.

  The young aristocrat’s attenuated sensibility stretched and tightened. The captain’s cabin aboard the Beagle became once again the fraught isolation chamber inside which Pringle Stokes had succumbed to despair.

  Within days of arriving at the Falklands, an accident occurred that further isolated him. There was a standing order aboard the Beagle that no one venture far ashore alone. FitzRoy’s clerk, Edward Hellyer, went off to shoot in the company of a Frenchman from a wrecked French whaler, Le Magellan, whose crew were living in tents ashore, awaiting a ride to the South American mainland. After the two men had walked a mile alongshore together, the Frenchman returned to his camp and Hellyer went on alone. An hour later, clothes, a gun, and a watch were found near the shore. Seamen from the Beagle and some of the French crew ran along the beach looking for Hellyer, others pulled alongshore and through the kelp beds in whaleboats. After a long search, his body was found, naked, entangled in kelp. Bynoe, the Beagle’s surgeon, and his French counterpart, tried everything to revive the boy. A duck was found dead in the kelp near Hellyer’s body; his gun lying on the beach had been discharged.

  FitzRoy expressed his sorrow in the most conventional terms when he came to write up his narrative years later: “Mr Hellyer had been much with me, both as my clerk and because I liked his company, being a gentlemanly, sensible young man.” But Hellyer’s death was a significant loss to him. The complex job of captain’s clerk was a plum one, not unlike the position of personal assistant to a CEO. It generally went to young men who could combine an impressive array of secretarial talents with an unusually personable, sensitive nature. Finding such help among a ship’s company was difficult, and FitzRoy lost Hellyer at a time when his task threatened to overwhelm him. A deeply emotional man, he was made unhappier by the belief that the boy had shot the duck, of a species they had not seen before, for his captain, and, when it had fallen into the water, stripped and swum after it.