Mr Darwin's Shooter

by Roger McDonald

  Covington raised one eyebrow and said, ‘Who is that intended you mean?’ and Revd Matthews nodded in the direction of Yorker, another of her tribe, who played with his knuckles as if he would pull bones from them, and was glowering at Covington something fierce.

  ‘They shall be joined under holy law,’ said Revd, who called Capt ‘his Nazarene’ and made listeners retch. It would make Covington fling a punch if ever anyone took him for a Methodist.

  They longed for a breeze, a diversion. The dolphins returned. The lads named the leader that still followed the bark Malty, from his drunken cavortings; another was called Do-Little Sword, after a midshipman’s dirk; there was Pin-Buttock and Quatch-Buttock, on account of their thin arses; and the smallest that lingered behind was called Come Out of That.

  ‘He is a right shallock, a dirty, lazy fellow,’ said Covington. ‘Malty is the one I like best.’

  ‘I’ll put my shirt on Come Out of That,’ said Mr Earle, with his sketchbook held open on his lap. ‘He suits my style.’

  ‘Your fish,’ said Covington, ‘is lazy as the tinker who laid down his budget to fart.’

  MacCurdy and Door started putting tobacco and rum on who would gallop around the ship first—it was always Malty, slick as a fist in a muslin wave.

  Earle did a likeness of MacCurdy, a fearsome seaman bared to the waist and wearing sailcloth trousers with a careless sashband. He was first done in outline and then Earle rattled his brushes and gave him colour, and it was like a rainbow filled MacCurdy in, while the waves and decking around him stayed dim.

  Something in Covington’s thoughts turned his head around. The gent was at it again, assessing a person while seeming vague. He looked at Covington, who was without his shirt also. Gent dropped his gaze forthwith, getting an eyeful of pustules that were still in their last stages of healing (and giving the boy lumps under the arms from the poison in them). Covington would not let his gent go so easily, and with wheezy lung baited his eye.

  ‘Would you have somethin’ for a cough?’

  The gent nodded, then turned on his heel and made for the lower deck. He returned with a phial of eucalyptus oil. ‘Try this on your handkerchief.’

  Covington produced a rag, ‘My thanks,’ and trickled the stuff on, and inhaled it deep.

  When he was quite well again, with tropic air and salt water doing their part, he went to the ship’s library in the poop cabin where officers were told to go before eight-thirty in the morning, if they wanted a loan of books. There were hundreds of volumes close-packed, among them the Encyclopaedia Britannica in twenty volumes which Mr Stebbings pulled down for him with good humour when Covington said there was a wager going on over who was the greatest fool among them.

  ‘Bumpology, is that what you want?’ asked Stebbings, and Covington said, ‘Yoi, whatever’ll do’—and he conned the entry quick smart. It was like the brain had several parts, each representing a faculty of thought, such as love, morality, veneration, greed, preferment, lasciviousness. He knew that his own head was a lumpy job. He knew which qualities gave him an itch in the belly, and which made him whistle with hope and pleasure when he woke in the morning and jumped to his duties after saying his prayers. Between the bumps on his head and the blood in his veins there was this third capacity making him glad. It was the spirit of the Lord, the joy of being alive. He would be robbed of his meaning without it.

  The night was close. Along the deck sailors sprawled in all manner of comfort, some snoring, some singing. The officers were drunk. The bark swayed as if at anchor on the smooth plain of the sea. When a breeze wafted across the water the officers scrambled on deck and cooled themselves, flapping their shirt-tails like chickens, and then they marched below again, spouting nonsense.

  Covington waited by a hatchway for orders, and he slept. Then his name was called and he was in the galley and into the gunroom smartly.

  They were getting up a good chatter in there. Four of them were close-packed dining and gossiping. Covington took up a post within earshot. Soon enough he came round as a topic of conversation, for he dropped a pan, spilling haricot beans, and made a bother of himself. Mr Earle knew Covington as one who liked to draw. Mr Wickham, the first lieutenant, traded on the merit of Covington’s eye for ‘that fiendish little bit of frock’—he was, said Wickham, ‘admiral of petticoats’. All laughed. FitzRoy hurrumphed. Darwin said nowt. FitzRoy then said words that sparkled in Covington’s ears: he said he knew Covington as one who might serve any man as a clerk—that Capt King had taught his boys Penmanship and Style as he surveyed La Plata waters amid eddies of weed and mud, and King would often test them with spelling and grammar, and this admiral came up trumps. ‘The Adventure, why, she was a very Dame School,’ FitzRoy brayed, somewhat competitively.

  This was all very good. But then there was something more, for there was always something more on that Beagle, a mood of taking every small thing to bits. It happened when Capt’s voice softened and he said for Covington to hear—when he pressed himself against the dark, crouching doglike in the companionway—that while the boy had a clever hand, and cunning wits, there was something about him incorrigibly rough.

  He heard Earle protesting, ‘I very much like him,’ and another: ‘Not at all, not at all,’ though whether for or against, or who it was who spoke, he was not certain.

  Covington marked FitzRoy down for his loveless snipes. He was a man who knew everyone between those timbers, down to the last cockroach riding the last scampering rat. He had a greedy eye for weather and all manner of terms for noting it down, so that every cloud had its own description. If the breeze, God send them one, raised the brim of a hat from the deck or tapped ever so gently in the rigging, it got a name and a number, as if it had appeared again, and was not a new minting of creation, but had only been out below the horizon awaiting its turn to be shewn to them once more like a shy bride returning.

  One night Covington entered the mess with jam roly-poly, and they all four fell upon it with cries of sport in the nursery manner that spelled their liking for fun. Capt, gone on Madeira, cried in his piping voice, ‘I had a black mammy who baked this sticky mess bedad I loved her!’ Covington nipped back and told Pinchgut of his triumph, he should try this jam more often, and the cook clipped Covington on the ear, for it was every day that he baked it. Covington was new to his duties in the toffs’ corner of the bark, he wailed, where they told all manner of tales to pass the time.

  ‘What manner of tales?’ Pinchgut sniffed advantage, holding back his hand. He was not attracted to rumours of how the world was made. He wanted a quiet time among his smoking coals and greasy griddles.

  Covington smiled and licked his fingers, wiped them in his hair, said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to know,’ and went and fetched his Polly Pochette. She had not been called for those many weeks of the voyage, but he would show his spirit a chance in an atmosphere that melted to butter.

  They saw it, the winking curves of walnut wood. And presto Covington was enjoined to render a tune, a merry jig played in the inn near the crowded kennel where Spit and Polish were fart-daniels in his Pa’s litter. Pelting over the bridge Covington bowed, raising a fine dust of resin. Soon his four were fox-hunting, with all the tally-hos and taran-taras in their tiny State Room, their sweaty shirts and stitch-busting breeches jerking around in the close air, the smells of their guts thickening the tropic night. Mr Earle went leapfrogging over the back of the gent with neither room to bend nor turn, and Capt deep in his cups was obliged to render Covington invisible to his emotion. He asked for his shoes to be wrenched off, and Covington hated doing it, but lo he fulfilled the task, the green insides slick with personal moisture. When Covington met his eye he looked startled. A scurry of shy brides again. It was better that Covington was not there. He went up on deck, out under the stars. The commotion continued under his feet; he could feel it through his flat foot-soles.

  Any time such rumpus was heard from the gentry the crew took no notice, except to grumble, ‘They sh
ould have a flogging for being so drunk,’ and really it was as if their betters were farther away than the stars dusted through the cross-trees.

  Covington was unlike that crew. When Covington found his betters at play he felt a longing to know the cause of it. He was one of those who conspire with their own fate, or else bewilder themselves to death. In this he was unlike the men. He was without the fatalism of the born sailor. And in this the crew sensed his difference, his longing for preferment. Meantime the gentry repulsed him as being dissimilar to their kind absolutely, an upstart catechist with the instincts of a jack donkey.

  Covington threaded his way to the bowsprit and hung over the oily waters, watching the figurehead in black reflection. The carpenter had him scrubbing the beagle-hound till her wood was white and hairy, and then painting her up. He hung over one hundred fathoms deep. He inked her eyes in the shining black that Mr Earle called cachou de Laval.

  They broke with the Doldrums and entered the Trades. Midshipman King got beside himself on the booms.

  ‘We have a wind, now, Covington-chappy, a wind.’

  ‘Aye, and thanks to ye,’ thought Covington, ‘I would not have felt it if ye had not said so!’

  Now air bubbles twinkled in the Beagle’s wake, ocean hissed against the side. Covington’s wooden bitch went smiling as she angled her nose against the slippery deeps. Mr Earle could be seen sketching down the length of the deck, always at his pencils and keeping his hand in. Covington was doing a hard think. He had located more bumps on his head, smaller than split peas, cavities and corrugations. What did they mean, that he was wiser than he knew? For the Patagonians’ heads were round as coconuts and they were foolish as horses. Likewise Volunteer Musters, his skull was simple as a plumseed.

  MacCurdy saw Covington plucking his scalp and gave him a jab. ‘There got he a knock, and down goes poor Cobby.’

  He carried plates, cleaned up bones and gristle that had fallen to the deck. His watch was that of a dayman, an idler: by rights meaning he should sleep the night through, except he was called any hour to fix what was easy, running with a tar-bucket to stop leaks in the decking from wetting men’s heads, and mending the seats that hung above the water on either side of the stem, that they called the Spice Islands, or heads, where they did their grunts.

  A whistling came from the rigging as they heaved down a wave and counted the days till landfall. They made good speed. On such days they seemed to be motionless, or falling, yet FitzRoy crowded on sail. It was effortless, you might say, yet there was their commander on the quarterdeck with his legs planted firmly apart, his eyes narrowed and his gingery eyelashes watching every move the crew made. He spoke from the side of his mouth to Mr Wickham, who passed the orders along. At the far reach of his word men twitched every angle of sail and spread the vessel’s wings like a bird.

  Mr Wickham called Covington up and said, ‘Make a good copy of the captain’s weather notes, he wishes to see what you can do.’

  ‘I don’t find my captain “uncongenial”,’ thought Covington as he savoured the duty. ‘I never had such thoughts and would never use such a word.’ A grin fixed on his face till it hurt. Why, Capt had brought him righteous punishment just in time. The result was as he wished, his grief for Joey being calmed, making him merry and willing again. The Lord acted through Capt, God bless ’im.

  Covington whistled as he dipped his pen and made his curlicues of d’s and y’s. FitzRoy loved all weather and had a lexicon for describing it. It seemed that FitzRoy had a great hero. It was William Dampier, in whose voyage to New Holland there was a mine of meteorology with respect to winds and storms. Covington saw Dampier, a buccaneer, somewhat like him, crusted with salt, burnt black at the eyelids, hard, observant, and as it were the devil’s adversary in his law.

  When all other duties were done, Covington cleaned. He whistled while he cleaned. Even the passengers cleaned.

  ‘Open all hatches,’ quoth Wickham, ‘and let the ship air. Do your washing. Clean your bodies. We are not dirty in this navy, like Nick Frog’s.’ There would be the added matter of foul air and fevers once they reached their mooring, for which Bahia was famous. ‘Let the ship smell sweet.’

  They sailed through brown Brazilian waters, came about with a wallow, and entered the Bay of All Saints and saw the town of Bahia lying on the slopes and steaming after rain. The crew’s jaws hung open at the idea of shoregoing but orders ran contrariwise. FitzRoy strode the quarterdeck, rattled his lid, and bade the sails snap in salute to other vessels, of which there were more than one hundred in the anchorage.

  ‘Boy!’ the cry went up. Covington grabbed the holystone and scampered along the deck. If Capt had his way Covington would spend his time in Brazil caulking and painting and winning Fleet prizes. At least he would not die of fever.

  The foretopmen mocked Covington as they dangled across the sky: ‘Pity the poor sailor, there will be no ran-tan-tara for Cobby.’ They all had something on their minds to follow from getting their toes on terra firma. MacCurdy yelled he would be taking his pay in Portugee wine; Door bared his front teeth and said he would break curly heads; Robson, Hare and Rensfrey said they all ached for a handful of turf, and would grab it wherever, taking loud wagers on who would be first to harvest a moll. You would think from their bragging there was nothing else for it in Brazil but the breaking open of things.

  Covington watched out for their gent, whose mind was intent on getting ashore as strong as anyone else’s. Darwin went below with King and Usborne, his designated companions for the day. Covington heard those midshipmen singing ‘A-Hunting We Shall Go’ and wondered, was he wanting too much to have what they had? What law under heaven said no?

  On the water a black slave appeared. He poled a tree-trunk with his master in a rowboat alongside, being protected by a gaudy umbrella. Crew hung over the rail appreciating the picture, some of them in thought, while others laughed. A second party of blackies appeared poling a barge carrying a heavy weight of old iron; it was an anchor, and they were in grave danger of sinking. A third boatload was heard keening, and Musters opined it was a happy song, but as for Covington, his heart was made heavy observing such poor niggers at work, because they reminded him of one of the last matters he and Joey ever talked about.

  ‘I doubt they are joyous,’ said Covington, ‘seeing as how they have cramp-rings on their toes.’

  ‘I don’t see no chains,’ sniffed Musters, looking the other way.

  ‘An’ I don’t give a damn for anyone,’ added King, tossing a plumstone at the unfortunates. When none of them responded, King answered a question that was never posed: ‘I have read all of Lord Byron, that’s why.’

  Nearby was a vessel of their own, the pride of the South American fleet, the man-of-war Samarang under Capt Paget, her sides as high as a golden cliff. Mr Wickham gave a great cheer, ‘God bless old England!’ and was answered by the roar of many throats. On their starboard side was a leaky old tub called the Rio Trader, a Carolina slaver of ill-repute. Some of the men spat to see her, while others gave the low hurrah as men do when they take sides in an argument. On board the Beagle it was often said that slavery was a good thing in the hot countries; how families who were against slavery at home, such as the Darwins of Derbyshire, would soon change their tune in tropic parts, where slaves could be heard singing at the tops of their voices. Chief of all slave enthusiasts was Volunteer Musters, a very schoolboy in all his virtues, full of facts about men expressed in a voice that belonged in choirs. ‘I would have one,’ says he, ‘I would have six or seven of the rogues.’ Covington gave allowance to Musters as one who had never dirtied his hammock with longing, who knew his fellow-men only as he knew toys. It was in this resemblance to Joey Middleton that Covington liked him; though in his difference from Joey—a want of heart—he itched to set him right.

  Bahia made a fine perch for Portuguese men of wealth, with its whitewashed walls of mansions and churches, and palm trees clutching the sky. So bright was the sun that the walls
created squared-off shadows in the afterlight of men’s stares. The slave-masters lived above the swamps, wherein they tipped their chamber pots and flushed their drains, and if one of their Africans died by breathing the miasma, why then, it little mattered, they would go to the markets and bargain themselves another. Phipps ranted against the practice, speaking from the corner of his mouth as if he would strangle each word. Bahia was ever a place of slavery, he said, where a fellow for a few vintem could have another being for his keeping, and every Man Jack could have for his Miss a chosen black beauty—indeed, as many as his pocket and their jealousy allowed. Until recent times the murderous Portuguese ordered themselves carried in hammocks through the streets, pausing where it pleased them, making conversation while their slaves hung the hammocks on metal spikes, bearing their weight under the blazing sun of twelve degrees south.

  Gent with his gear hauled himself on deck and awaited rowing to shore. Capt and the gent kept a distance from each other as was proper in those busy hours. Gent’s tools were a rock hammer and a gun. Under his arm he clutched a spyglass, that the Fuegians with good naval flair called the ‘bring ’em near’. He swept the wooded hillsides with it, capping and uncapping it excitedly, grabbing it to his eye while sweat tickled his cheeks. On his back he carried his rectangular basket slung by a canvas strap. He said he wished to enter the forests and clamber the hills and get himself a paroquet as soon as he could, and Covington caught the coat-tails of a dispute in his peevishness; namely, that Capt would not allow him a boat just yet.

  During their waiting little Musters sped at Mr D, pretending to wield his Do-Little Sword, and the gent got his spirits up and played along, crying ‘Allons!’ and praising Musters’s swordplay as he slumped against the mainmast: ‘Un petit morceau de tout droit, monsieur, au revoir.’