Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  The boy was buried, after a melancholy procession, on a lonely and dreary headland. FitzRoy’s burden only felt heavier.

  Days later, an opportunity that seemed tailor-made to improve his predicament presented itself. An American sealing schooner, the 170-ton Unicorn, had put into the Falklands after a six-month cruise in Cape Horn waters with her hold empty, her master and part owner ruined. An unusually stormy summer season (the great gale of January 13 that had knocked the Beagle down had driven Le Magellan ashore in the Falklands) had kept the Unicorn bottled up in harbors riding out gales for sixty-seven days, preventing the taking of any seals, and her master was ready to sell. The hire of the two schooners, the Liebre and the Paz, to cover some of the coast to be surveyed had worked so well the year before that FitzRoy’s desire to purchase the Unicorn was “unconquerable.” The Beagle’s carpenter, Jonathan May, looked over the ship and reported back that she was sound, her construction first-class: fastened with copper spikes, planked of good oak. She was roomy, easily handled by a small crew, and a good sea boat. She was more: pretty as a yacht, she was a seductress as ships go. FitzRoy seems to have fallen in love with her, in the way that seamen can find their hearts stolen by two or three ships that they will remember for a lifetime, vessels that somehow contrive to be more than their wood and metal and canvas. She was beautiful, and he needed her.

  He bought the Unicorn for £1300 out of his own pocket. He hoped that his purpose in doing so—to aid the Beagle in covering the territory to be surveyed, to speed up the work, enabling the cruise to continue on around the world without years of delay—would meet with Admiralty approval and see him reimbursed. He renamed her Adventure in honor of the Beagle’s former consort.

  It seemed the right thing to do at the time.

  While FitzRoy and his crew rowed around the islands surveying from the whaleboats, Darwin explored ashore, often in the company of Syms Covington. He found the Falkland Islands dull and uninteresting: “We have never before stayed so long at a place & with so little for the Journal.”

  He spent six days riding across East Falkland with gauchos who had come to the islands to catch some of the wild cattle (descendents of shipborne livestock) that roamed there. “The inhabitants are a curious mixed race,” Darwin wrote of the motley population of shipwrecked sailors, whalers, and sealers of many nations, gauchos, Argentine and Spanish colonists, three women, “two of them negresses,” and the single resident Englishman, Mr. Dixon, under whose flag the islands were in temporary possession. “Their habitations are in a miserable condition & deficient in almost every accomodation. The place bespeaks what it has been, viz a bone of contention between different nations.”

  Although Darwin’s early focus was geology, the jottings in his notebook while in the Falkland Islands show that he was beginning to be irresistibly drawn into the mystery of the differences between species and their geographic distribution.

  March 2: To what animals did the dung beetles in South America belong—Is not the closer connection of insects and plants as well as this fact point out closer connection than Migration.

  Tuesday 12th: Horses fond of catching cattle—aberration of instinct.

  21st: Saw a cormorant catch a fish & let it go 8 times successively like a cat does a mouse or otter a fish.

  22nd: Migration of (Upland) Geese in Falkland Islands as connected with Rio Negro?

  And in his published Journal of Researches (later renamed The Voyage of the Beagle), Darwin wrote:

  The only quadruped native to the island is a large wolf-like fox which is common to both East and West Falkland. I have no doubt it is a peculiar species, and confined to this archipelago; because many sealers, gauchos, and Indians, who have visited these islands, all maintain that no such animal is found in any part of South America…. As far as I am aware, there is no other instance in any part of the world of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large an aboriginal quadruped peculiar to itself. Their numbers have rapidly decreased…. Within a very few years after these islands shall have become regularly settled in all probability this fox will be classed with the dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth.*

  FitzRoy and Darwin disagreed about the foxes. “Naturalists,” wrote FitzRoy, referring to the only naturalist whose opinion he had sounded on the subject, “say that these foxes are peculiar to this archipelago, and they find difficulty accounting for their presence in that quarter only.” FitzRoy thought them very similar, different only in the shading of their coats, to the Patagonian foxes he had seen. He believed foxes from the mainland had been carried to the islands aboard large chunks of ice riding the current that sets between southern Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands. The Falkland foxes were simply variants of the same species, he reasoned.

  The animals they saw in the Falkland Islands (and everywhere else, notably the Galapagos Islands), and their variation from the genus species they were familiar with, made for frequent discussions between the two scientist messmates at the captain’s table aboard the Beagle.

  FitzRoy generally disagreed with Darwin’s early musings about the way animals might change from one place to another:

  Rats and mice were probably taken to the Falklands by the earlier navigators who landed there, whose ships were often plagued with their numbers. That they have varied from the original stock in sharpness of nose, length of tail, colour, or size, is to be expected…but to fancy that every kind of mouse which differs externally from the mouse of another country is a distinct species, is to me as difficult to believe as that every variety of dog and every variety of the human race constitute a distinct species. I think that naturalists who assert the contrary are bound to examine the comparative anatomy of all these varieties more fully, and to tell us how far they differ. My own opinion is, judging from what I have gathered on the subject from various sources, that their anatomical arrangement is as uniformly similar as that of the dogs and the varieties of man.

  However much he and Darwin disagreed in their thinking, this sort of engaging debate is what FitzRoy had longed for on the Beagle’s first voyage, what he had appealed to Beaufort to supply him with on this one. It brought him out of himself and kept him connected to the world.

  But for Darwin, these constant discussions, turning over the findings and observations of a voyage around the world with a keen scientific mind that often sparked and challenged him with an opposing view, were of incalculable benefit.

  Early in April, the Beagle and the Adventure sailed for Rio Negro on the Argentine mainland.

  Ten months later, the Beagle was back in Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy had further chronometric readings to make at Port Famine inside the Strait of Magellan, and he still needed to survey the Fuegian coast below the eastern entrance to the strait—the area around the rolly open anchorage off Cape Santa Iñez that the Beagle had fled in foul weather in December 1832.

  For many of those intervening ten months, Darwin traveled widely inland. One of these excursions, overland from Rio Negro to Buenos Aires, was an exciting and dangerous adventure. The Argentine General Rosas was engaged in “a bloody war of extermination against the Indians,” but “so fine an opportunity for geology was not to be neglected,” Darwin wrote his sisters. In company with an English trader, James Harris, a peon guide, and a band of gauchos, he traveled between postas, Spanish army camps; Darwin and Harris roamed deeper into the country than any previous European travelers. The gauchos, a species unto themselves, made a vivid impression on the young Englishman.

  They are generally tall and handsome, but with a proud and dissolute expression of countenance. They frequently wear their moustaches, and long black hair curling down their backs. With their brightly coloured garments, great spurs clanking about their heels, and knives stuck as daggers (and often so used) at their waists, they look a very different race of men from what might be expected from their name of Gauchos, or simple countrymen. Their politeness is excessive: they never drin
k their spirits without expecting you to taste it; but whilst making their exceedingly graceful bow, they seem quite as ready, if occasion offered, to cut your throat.

  Darwin rejoined the Beagle in Montevideo, where, on December 5, 1833, he “took a farewell of the shore & went on board.”

  On February 2, 1834, the ship anchored in Port Famine. The harbor of Pringle Stokes’s suicide (now 5 ½ years past) was still an unrelievedly depressing place. “I never saw a more cheer-less prospect,” Darwin later wrote of this place, where it seemed to rain continuously, and ashore he found a “death-like scene of desolation [that] exceeds all description…everything was dripping with water; even the very Fungi could not flourish.”

  For the next three weeks, FitzRoy worked the ship down the eastern Fuegian coast, through the Strait of Le Maire and back into very familiar waters: up Nassau Bay, through Goree Road, and into the Beagle Channel. Only the Beagle’s whaleboats, not the ship herself, had floated upon her namesake waters before now.

  On February 25, headed shoreward in a whaleboat with a group of seamen, Darwin passed a canoe holding six “Yapoo Tekeenicas.” More than ever, he was struck by the existence of unreconstructed Fuegians in their natural environment. His experiences, his thinking and discussions with FitzRoy over the past year, led him now to a deeper reflection on the extreme lowliness of their condition. They seemed to exhibit a disregard for the meagerest of niceties that might lift a human one notch above the animal state. That day he wrote in his diary:

  I never saw more miserable creatures; stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint & quite naked.—One full aged woman absolutely so, the rain & spray were dripping from her body; their red skins filthy & greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gesticulation violent & without any dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world…. Although essentially the same creature, how little must the mind of one of these beings resemble that of an educated man. What a scale of improvement is comprehended between the faculties of a Fuegian savage & a Sir Isaac Newton—Whence have these people come? Have they remained in the same state since the creation of the world? What could have tempted a tribe of men leaving the fine regions of the North to travel down the Cordilleras the backbone of America, to invent & build canoes, & then to enter upon one of the most inhospitable countries in the world…. Nature, by making habit omnipotent, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate & productions of his country.

  Just as they exchanged views about Falkland foxes, Darwin and FitzRoy surely had countless dinner table discussions along exactly these lines. Both men found the Fuegians equally instructive grist for later conclusions.

  The only thing more fascinating than seeing these time-capsule humans in their natural habitat—like cave dwellers from a diorama come to life before one’s eyes—was to dress them up as English gentlefolk, drop them off in the wild, and see how long the patina of civilization could last. The ship was now back in Jemmy Button’s country, and FitzRoy—along with everyone else aboard—was eager to know what had become of the three Fuegians they had left ashore almost a year earlier. On March 5, after days of beating to windward through the Beagle Channel, the Beagle rode the tide through Murray Narrows and came to anchor at Woollya.

  “Not a living soul was visible any where,” wrote FitzRoy, noting only what he was looking for on land; the ship had been followed through the narrows by seven canoes full of Fuegians waving bows and arrows. Going ashore with some men he found the Beagle-built wigwams were still standing, undisturbed but empty, and showing no signs of recent habitation. The garden appeared trampled and neglected, but the seamen dug up some turnips and potatoes “of moderate size” which the captain later ate for dinner.

  Back aboard the ship, FitzRoy feared the worst, particularly in view of the aggressive behavior of the natives in the canoes. But an hour or two later, three more canoes were sighted, paddling strongly for the ship from a nearby island. FitzRoy raised a telescope in their direction.

  I saw that two of the natives in them were washing their faces, while the rest were paddling with might and main: I was then sure that some of our acquaintances were there, and in a few minutes recognized Tommy Button, Jemmy’s brother. In the other canoe was a face which I knew yet could not name. “It must be some one I have seen before,” said I, when his sharp eye detected me, and a sudden movement of the hand to his head (as a sailor touches his hat) at once told me it was indeed Jemmy Button—but how altered!

  In shame, Jemmy kept his back to the ship until the canoe came alongside. Up he scrambled onto the deck. The fat, vain dandy was no more. In his place, observed Darwin, was a thin, haggard savage, with long matted hair, and naked, except for a skin around his waist. “I could hardly restrain my feelings,” wrote FitzRoy, “and I was not, by any means, the only one so touched by his squalid, miserable appearance.”

  With an unfailing sense of what was most important, the Englishmen hurried Jemmy below to be clothed. In half an hour he was sitting at the captain’s table. He ate lunch with his manners unimpaired, using his knife and fork as correctly as ever. FitzRoy thought he looked ill, but Jemmy assured him that he was “hearty, sir, never better.” He hadn’t been sick a day since he had last seen them, and ate “plenty fruits, plenty birdies, ten guanacos in snow time,” and “too much fish.”

  What had happened to York and Fuegia? FitzRoy asked.

  After the Beagle had left, the year before, Jemmy told them, other Fuegians—Jemmy’s enemies the Oens-men, not of his country—hearing of the settlement, had raided the camp at Woollya. They looted whatever Jemmy and his family had not been able to escape with in their canoes. York had managed to save most of his belongings, including the large canoe FitzRoy had seen him building beside his wigwam. He and Fuegia then urged Jemmy and his family to move with them, with all their remaining belongings, to York’s country, farther west, where he had first been taken from. They traveled as far as Devil Island at the western end of the Beagle Channel where they came upon York’s brother and other members of his tribe, the Alacalufes (or the Alikhoolips, as FitzRoy called them). There, while Jemmy and his family slept on Devil Island, York made off with all his worldly goods, leaving him in his naked, original state. An act of consummate villainy, Darwin thought. FitzRoy, when he heard this, saw in it considerable cunning.

  York’s fine canoe was evidently not built for transporting himself alone; neither was the meeting with his brother accidental. I am now quite sure that from the time of his changing his mind [the year before, in January 1833, when the Beagle had spent weeks trying to fight its way west below Cape Horn toward York’s country around March Harbour], and desiring to be placed at Woollya, with Matthews and Jemmy, he meditated taking a good opportunity of possessing himself of every thing; and that he thought, if he were left in his own country without Matthews, he would not have many things given to him, neither would he know where he might afterwards look for and plunder poor Jemmy.

  They must have asked Jemmy if he wanted to come away with them again, because both FitzRoy and Darwin wrote that he was happy and contented with his life and had no wish to change it or to return to England.

  After lunch Jemmy visited with members of the crew. He had brought two otter skins, one for FitzRoy, and the other for the captain’s steady coxswain, James Bennet, who had overseen all the Fuegians’ arrangements in England and spent so much time with them there.

  While Jemmy’s English appeared as good as ever, he told FitzRoy that his Fuegian was still poor, but that he spoke with his family now in both languages, and they appeared to understand him. They were speaking a little English. This seemed like the thin end of the wedge that FitzRoy had always hoped for.

  In the evening, another canoe came alongside the ship with an attractive young woman in it. She was crying fearfully, unstoppably, for Jemmy Button. It was his wife, Jemmy told the crew. Immediately she was showered with gifts—shawls
, handkerchiefs, and a gold-laced cap—but would not stop crying until Jemmy appeared on deck close by. His brother, Tommy, also felt the visit had gone on long enough, for he began to bellow in his stentorian Fuenglais: “Jemmy Button, canoe, come!”

  Jemmy paddled away with his family for the night. They did not head for Woollya. The wigwams there had been too good: they were too high and cold in the winter. And the terrain around the settlement—a parklike setting that appealed to English tastes, sketched and painted by the Beagle’s artists—made them too vulnerable to attack. They steered instead for nearby “Button Island,” as all now called it, where Jemmy felt better off.

  After farewells and more present giving the next day, the Beagle sailed away. Jemmy sailed with it for a short distance, until his wife’s violent crying got him back into her canoe. He had developed a fondness for ships and the shipboard life. He would not forget it.

  Darwin was glad to see the last of the Fuegians. Scientifically they fascinated him, but he had grown sick of their incessant, importuning “yammerschoonering.” “Saying their favorite word in as many intonations as possible, they would then use it in a neuter sense, and vacantly repeat, ‘yammerschooner.’ On leaving some place we have said to each other, ‘Thank Heaven, we have at last fairly left these wretches!’ when one more faint halloo from an all-powerful voice, heard at prodigious distance, would reach our ears, and clearly could we distinguish—‘Yammerschooner.’”

  To Darwin, FitzRoy’s great experiment seemed to have failed utterly. Prefiguring his long cogitation on adaptation and the pecking order of evolving species, the young naturalist intuited a crucial impediment to the improvement of the aborigines of Tierra del Fuego: