Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  The perfect equality of all the inhabitants will for many years prevent their civilization: even a shirt or other article of clothing [given to one as a gift] is immediately torn into pieces [to be shared].—Until some chief rises, who by his power might be able to keep to himself such presents as animals &c &c, there must be an end to all hopes of bettering their condition.

  FitzRoy would not admit it. He persisted, even now, in seeing a hopeful outcome.

  I cannot help still hoping that some benefit, however slight, may result from the intercourse of these people, Jemmy, York, and Fuegia, with other natives of Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps a shipwrecked seaman may hereafter receive help and kind treatment from Jemmy Button’s children; prompted, as they can hardly fail to be, by the traditions they will have heard of men of other lands; and by an idea, however faint, of their duty to God as well as their neighbour.

  Jemmy Button would prove how terribly wrong FitzRoy was.

  18

  FitzRoy never counted on Admiralty support for his extracurricular hiring and buying of additional vessels to aid his surveying efforts, but he had certainly hoped for it. Financially he needed it.

  “I believe that their Lordships will approve of what I have done,” FitzRoy had written to Captain Beaufort, “but if I am wrong, no inconvenience will result to the public service, since I alone am responsible for the agreement…and am able and willing to pay the stipulated sum.”

  The dispatch secretary at the Admiralty underlined the phrase “am able and willing” and asked Beaufort for a report on this irregularity at the next Board Day meeting of the Lords. Beaufort’s response was as supportive of his man out mapping the edge of the world as he could make it.

  There is no expression in the Sailing Orders, or surveying instructions, given to Commander FitzRoy which convey to him any authority for hiring and employing any vessels whatever.

  On the other hand, there can be no doubt that by the aid of small craft he will be sooner and better able to accomplish the great length of coast which he has to examine—and which seems to contain so many unknown and valuable harbours;—especially if he finds it necessary to trace the course of a great river, which had been reported to him as being navigable almost to the other side of America.

  It may also be stated to their Lordships that the Beagle is the only surveying ship to which a smaller vessel or Tender has not been attached.

  In the last paragraph, Beaufort invokes the ideal and more usual practice of all exploring voyages since Man first set out on logs across a lagoon: sailing in company with another vessel as insurance. Columbus did it, as did Magellan and Cook. It was unusual and risky to send a ship alone to explore a remote corner of the world. If she struck a reef, her crew could easily perish unless a companion ship stood nearby. Of Magellan’s five-vessel squadron that set out from Spain to circumnavigate the world in 1519, only one ship, battered and manned by 31 of the 270 men who had started the voyage, returned to Seville. On her first voyage to Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle had sailed with HMS Adventure commanded by Captain King, and this, as Beaufort points out, was standard practice with surveying missions.

  In another letter, FitzRoy reminded Beaufort of the time slipping by, and the opportunity made possible by a sister vessel.

  I cannot help feeling rather strongly that the Adventure and Beagle have been several years about this survey, and that Foreigners as well as Englishmen are anxiously expecting the results of the “English Survey.” Officers acquainted with these countries are now employed who may be elsewhere in a short time. Chronometers will not continue to go well for many years, without cleaning—The Beagle has many measurements to make and much work to do in the Pacific. And a certain troubled spirit and conscience is always goading me to do all I can, for the sake of doing what is right; without seeking for credit, or being cast down because everyone does not see things in the same light. These are some of the reasons which occasion my outgoings.

  What is now left undone, will long be neglected. Not only the character of those actually engaged in the survey will suffer, but the credit of the English as surveyors will be injured.

  Despite his avowed willingness to bear the expense, FitzRoy was banking on Admiralty approval. After purchasing the Unicorn and rechristening her Adventure, he bought stores and gear to refit her from the wrecked French whaler Le Magellan, had her careened (hauled over on her side at the water’s edge, exposing the bottom of the hull) and her bottom coppered, and fitted her out with no expense spared to sail in convoy with the Beagle around the world. He was hugely excited by the opportunities made possible with a second ship. She would virtually double his charting and exploring of the Pacific islands; she would offer his crew safety; and she might help to make him famous. FitzRoy knew his history, and he saw the Beagle and her consort Adventure taking their place in the pantheon of landmark voyages. The supplies aboard both vessels, and the mandate of his mission, gave FitzRoy the chance to make an exceptional mark on the world. He believed that no one on Earth at that moment had the chance and the wherewithal to open up the globe, to delve into its natural and scientific mysteries, as he now hoped to do. All these hopes lay gathered in his purchase of the schooner.

  He was inordinately proud and protective of his new little ship. As the Beagle and the Adventure neared the western shores of Tierra del Fuego, ready to sail out into the Pacific, poor weather and visibility kept them pinned inside the Furies, a rock-studded constellation of small islets that posed a death trap for ships. Night came on with heavy, view-obliterating rain squalls. There was one safe anchorage in the area, a tiny cove with room in it for a single vessel. FitzRoy sent the Adventure in to shelter in safety while he kept the Beagle underway all night, tacking and wearing back and forth through the black foul weather and racing tides in a space of four square miles. It was a purely emotional, and strikingly unsound and unseaman-like decision to keep the mother ship—the bluffer, unhandier, less efficient sailer, with the greater amount of stores and number of men aboard—turning and turning about between the rocks through the long black hours. But he carried it off with his usual consummate, relished seamanship:

  It was necessary to keep under a reasonable press of sail part of the time, to hold our ground against the lee tide; but with the ebb we had often to bear up and run to leeward, when we got too near the islets westward of us. In a case of this kind a ship is so much more manageable while going through the water than she is while hove-to, and those on board are in general so much more on the alert than when the vessel herself seems half asleep, that I have always been an advocate for short tacks under manageable sail, so as to keep as much as possible near the same place, in preference to heaving-to and drifting.

  When the day at last broke…we saw the Adventure coming out to us from the cove where she had passed the night, and then both vessels sailed out of the Channel, past Mount Skyring and all the Furies, as fast as sails could urge them. At sunset we were near the Tower Rocks, and with a fresh north-west wind stood out into the Pacific, with every inch of canvas set which we could carry.

  The Furies have always made strong men quail. Sixty-two years later, in March 1896, Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world, found himself trapped among them in his 37-foot sloop, at night in a roaring gale.

  Night closed in before the sloop reached land, leaving her feeling the way in pitchy darkness. I saw breakers ahead before long. At this I wore ship and stood offshore, but was immediately startled by the tremendous roaring of breakers again ahead and on the lee bow. This puzzled me, for there should have been no broken water where I supposed myself to be. I kept off a good bit, then wore round, but finding broken water also there, threw her head again offshore. In this way, among dangers, I spent the rest of the night. Hail and sleet in the fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face; but what of that? It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is northwest of Cape Horn, and it was the white breakers of
a huge sea over sunken rocks which had threatened to engulf her through the night. It was Fury Island I had sighted and steered for, and what a panorama was before me now and all around! It was not the time to complain of a broken skin. What could I do but fill away among the breakers and find a channel between them, now that it was day? Since she had escaped the rocks through the night, surely she would find her way by daylight. This was the greatest sea adventure of my life. God knows how my vessel escaped…. The great naturalist Darwin looked over this seascape from the deck of the Beagle, and wrote in his journal “Any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week.” He might have added, “or seaman” as well.

  Darwin did indeed find the Furies and their environs nightmarish; this is what he actually wrote.

  Outside the main islands, there are numberless rocks & breakers on which the long swell of the open Pacific incessantly rages.—We passed out between the “East & West Furies”; a little further to the North, the Captain from the number of breakers called the sea the “Milky Way”.—The sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, & shipwreck.

  So it was FitzRoy who, that night, coined the name by which seamen ever afterward called this deadly scattering of rocks.

  The frightening view astern was Darwin’s, FitzRoy’s, and the rest of both ships’ crews’ last sight of Tierra del Fuego.

  The Adventure proved a fast sailer, and even Darwin caught some of FitzRoy’s pride and enjoyment in their consort: “The Adventure kept ahead of us, which rejoiced us all, as there were strong fears about her sailing. It is a great amusement having a companion to gaze at.”

  But he was aware of the price being paid, and it worried him. “He [FitzRoy] is eating an enormous hole into his capital for the sake of advancing all the objects of the voyage,” Darwin wrote home. “The schooner which will so very mainly be conducive to our safety he entirely pays for.”

  So FitzRoy was emotionally unprepared for the Admiralty’s response, which finally reached him on the west coast of Chile.

  Their Lordships do not approve of hiring [and buying] vessels for the service and therefore desire that they may be discharged as soon as possible.

  There would be no reimbursement.

  By the time he let go the other two schooners, the Pax and the Liebre, which he had hired the year before to help him survey the South American Atlantic coast, FitzRoy had spent a total of £1680 to charter them, and more to refit them for the work. At a time when the average per capita income in Britain was about £20 per year, this was a fortune, lost in the zealous service of his commission. Now he had spent almost as much for the Adventure alone, and more to outfit her. He was so reluctant to give her up, and “all my cherished hopes,” that he held onto her a little longer, hoping for an official change of heart. It did not come.

  Darwin believed the “cold manner” of the Admiralty’s response to its lone captain was “solely…because he is a Tory.” Maybe. The Whigs, Britain’s liberal reforming party, had recently been elected to office after a long hiatus from power, and the mood in government was set against the more conservative Tories, with whom FitzRoy’s aristocratic family was traditionally associated. But more likely he was feeling the Admiralty’s indifference or even antipathy to his mission, which, after all, had been engineered by his influential uncle. The Lords had given him a ship, outfitted it handsomely, and let him go; that was enough. Beaufort seems to have been quite alone in his strong championing of FitzRoy and his voyage. And certainly nobody gave any thought to opportunities afforded the Beagle’s naturalist, an unknown student, the captain’s supernumerary indulgence.

  Finally, the cost of buying and running the Adventure began to exceed FitzRoy’s income and drive him into debt, and “after a most painful struggle,” he found a buyer in Chile and sold it. Through being “dispirited and careless” he mismanaged the sale, getting close to what he had paid for the ship, but far less than he’d spent on her outfitting and renovation. It was a double loss that depressed him deeply.

  The Beagle spent the winter months refitting in Concepción and Valparaiso. At times FitzRoy and his officers moved ashore to collate their surveys and draw their charts in good light and peace and quiet, away from the bustle aboard ship. He tried to bury himself and his disappointment in the work, but he was besieged by Chilean hospitality: constant invitations to entertain the captain and his officers distracted him and brought with them the obligations to return such favors in kind. His mood continued to tumble. He snapped viciously at Darwin, causing the second of their two quarrels, which Darwin remembered years later.

  At Conception in Chile, poor FitzRoy was sadly overworked and in very low spirits; he complained bitterly to me that he must give a great party to all the inhabitants of the place. I remonstrated and said that I could see no such necessity on his part under the circumstances. He then burst out in a fury, declaring that I was the sort of man who would receive any favours and make no return. I got up and left the cabin without saying a word, and returned to Conception where I was then lodging. After a few days I came back to the ship and was received by the Captain as cordially as ever.

  During that winter, FitzRoy’s depression reached a state that seemed to Darwin to be “bordering on insanity.” He refused to visit or be visited. He stopped eating. Darwin described his condition in a letter home: “a morbid depression of spirits, & a loss of all decision & resolution. The Captain was afraid that his mind was becoming deranged.”

  FitzRoy, the consummate navigator, had lost his way. He saw gaps in his information, gaps in his charts of the coasts, and became convinced he would have to sail south again and spend another season—their fourth—in Tierra del Fuego, a prospect that all aboard, including FitzRoy, dreaded. He lost sight of where to draw the line. He was succumbing to the overload that had driven Pringle Stokes to despair and suicide. He was having a nervous breakdown.

  Bynoe, the ship’s surgeon, told him he was suffering from overwork, that he should ease up and he would recover. But FitzRoy would not believe him. He felt madness burrowing its way through him. He spoke of the suicide of his uncle who had slashed his own throat, and he grew convinced that a hereditary susceptibility to that same maggoty decay was now attacking his mind. Both he and Bynoe were right: overwork, strain, uncertainty, and disappointment had crushed his delicate mental foundation and sent him spinning into a void.

  He finally did the unthinkable: he relieved himself of command, appointing First Lieutenant Wickham commander of the Beagle. FitzRoy’s instructions from the Admiralty always allowed for such an occurrence and were eerily clear about what was then to happen:

  In the event of any unfortunate accident happening to yourself, the officer on whom the command of the Beagle may in consequence devolve, is hereby required and directed to complete, as far as in him lies, that part of the survey on which the vessel may be then engaged, but not to proceed to a new step in the voyage; as, for instance, if at that time carrying on the coast survey on the western side of South America, he is not to cross the Pacific, but to return to England by Rio de Janeiro and the Atlantic.

  There would, in this case, be no continuing the voyage around the world.

  Darwin wrote home of his profound disappointment, and his conflicted feelings about the voyage’s growing length.

  As soon as the captain invalided, I was at once determined to leave the Beagle; but it was quite absurd what a revolution in five minutes was effected in all my feelings. I have long been grieved and most sorry at the interminable length of the voyage (although I never would have quitted it). But the minute it was all over, I could not make up my mind to return—I could not give up all the geological castles in the air which I had been building…. One whole night I tried to think over the pleasure of seeing Shrewsbury again, but the barren plains of Peru gained the day.

  It was Lieutenant Wickham, FitzRoy’s loyal second-in-command, who brought his captain round. He pointed out that the Adm
iralty’s instructions for the survey of the southwest coast of South America were to do not all of it but as much as was conveniently possible within a reasonable period—and then to proceed across the Pacific. If he took command, Wickham said, nothing would induce him to spend more time in Tierra del Fuego. So what was to be gained by the captain’s resignation? he asked FitzRoy. Wickham urged him to reconsider, to accept the sufficiency of what they had already done, to continue the mission by crossing the Pacific and returning to England at the conclusion of the circumnavigation all hoped to achieve. FitzRoy pondered this a short while and then agreed. He withdrew his resignation. Darwin wrote home with the good news.

  To have endured Tierra del Fuego and not seen the Pacific would have been miserable…. When we are once at sea, I am sure the captain will be all right again. He has already regained his cool inflexible manner, which he had quite lost.

  FitzRoy spent another year surveying the west coast of South America, but he stayed north of Tierra del Fuego, ranging between the temperate Patagonian island of Chiloé and the tropical waters above Lima, Peru.

  On September 7, 1835, almost four years after leaving England, the Beagle at last sailed away from the continental coast of America, out onto the vast and storied Pacific.

  History had wobbled for a moment as FitzRoy’s despair got the better of him; the Beagle had almost turned around and sailed for home. But then her captain recovered, and she pointed her bow northwest toward a small scattering of islands on the equator, and history shifted its weight onto the Beagle’s unsuspecting natural philosopher.