by John Darnton
‘Have you not heard of the giraffe whose long neck allows him to eat from the tall tree? Or the tortoise who carries his house around with him for protection? Or the skunk whose odour keeps away other animals? That is Temaukl.’
‘If you are correct,’ said Mr McCormick, ‘then every living thing has grown from an earlier but lesser version of itself. And everything is related.
The zebra is related to the horse. The wolf is related to the dog. And men—we’re related to—’
‘Apes!’ I interjected, for at this point I could keep my silence no longer.
‘Look here’, I added, ‘that’s a bit much.’
Having spoken from feeling, without having planned out what I was to say, I looked around and my eyes happened upon a ladder leaning against a nearby house. I pointed to it and said: ‘See that. That represents the world as God made it. There are higher and lower species and they are forever fixed. We are at the top. Monkeys are on a lower rung and your skunks and your turtles and your what-nots, they’re on still lower rungs.’
The Chief smiled and I must say, I did not like the smirk upon his face. I had already taken note of the fact that he had not directed much of his speech towards me.
‘That ladder was made by man,’ he said. Then he pointed to the large tree. ‘That is the world as we see it. Each leaf is an animal, each branch a group of animals. You see how they grow one from another and how they all come from the main trunk?’
I held my ground, insisting that each and every species had been made by the hand of God and that they remained fixed and immutable through all eternity. I said I did not believe that accidents could simply happen, such that an offspring would be so very different from its parents.
Without replying directly, the Chief rose and motioned for us to follow.
Philos was roused. The ground was slippery but the Chief moved with more agility than I expected. His staff, I observed, was nothing more than a walking stick, with animal skin to facilitate the grip.
The Chief led us to a hut—the very one whose contents had shocked Mr McCormick on the way into the village. He held up a flaming torch, which a boy had handed him, so that we could see what was inside. There was a pile of bones, a whole sea of them, old and bleached and laid out in patterns I could not fathom.
Holding up one that looked like a large femur, the Chief said that the animal it belonged to was no more. I replied that that was obvious. But he said, no, I did not understand him—it had belonged to a creature that once walked the earth but was gone out of existence. All of the bones, he said, were of animals that had lived long ago and disappeared.
How, he asked, could that be if, as we had maintained, all the species were created by God and never varied?
I must say that was a difficult question to answer. My mind was still addled by the cigar I had inhaled and I found the distant thunder and lightning very unsettling. I was beginning to regret that we had ever come to this place.
Then the Chief did something I shall never forget all my days. He led us to a house nearby where several women were tending babies. I imagine it was a sort of communal nursery. We walked through to an adjoining room where we saw a single mother and baby, nesting upon a mat. We crowded in and all managed to just fit inside the room.
The baby was red-faced and holding his fists tightly as if to keep from crying. The Chief asked the mother to perform some task, which she was clearly reluctant to do. Jemmy said he wanted her to unwrap him from the swaddling-clothes. Still she did not move, until the Chief barked out something in a harsh tone, which I took to be a command.
Outside, we could hear the rain starting up again, pounding down upon the roof.
As the baby’s clothes fell to one side, we looked at the infant. So help me, at that very moment a brilliant flash of lightning lit up the room so that we got a full and clear view of the horror before us. Philos gasped and Mr McCormick turned away in disgust. I could not believe my eyes, for I had never even dreamt that such a thing could exist. We saw that its genitals were deformed: it bore organs both male and female.
‘Temaukl works in ways that none of us understand ,’ said the Chief, as we all quietly left.
That night, after all that had passed and with the storm still raging, we did not sleep well. The next morning we departed early, without saying good-bye to the Chief, who remained inside his house. Perhaps he was sleeping late. Jemmy guided us back to the ship, as the route was hard to follow.
The trip seemed shorter this time but it passed mostly in silence; neither Philos nor Mr McCormick uttered a single word the entire way. When we came to the harbour and saw the dear old Beagle anchored there, I don’t mind telling you, I breathed a sigh of relief.
But Jemmy had fallen into a sulk the likes of which I have never seen. His mood seemed to build so that by the time we reached the bay, his temper exploded into a full-out tantrum. He ripped off his dress-clothes, throwing them on the ground, and said he no longer wanted to be called Jemmy Button. From now on he was Orundellico and he wanted nothing more to do with us.
What do you make of that? After all we had done for him! I for one believe I will never understand the minds of these primitive people.
There is one more thing worth mentioning. That evening when we were all safely aboard the Beagle, I chanced to overhear Mr McCormick and Philos talking about the encounter. Mr McCormick was most animated. As far as I could tell, he was recounting everything the Chief had said, explaining that business about how all creatures came from a single form of life and even describing the ‘tree of life’, as he called it. ‘Yes,’ Philos replied. ‘But what is the mechanism? The question is not what happens but how it happens. How can an entirely new species come into being?’
And here Mr McCormick grew even more excited, saying that he had been thinking of little else all evening and had come upon the answer (which I wrote down, wanting to be able to reproduce it), namely, that ‘given the intense struggle for existence, Nature favours those whose variations, no matter how small, give them an advantage.’ And on top of that, he said, ‘animals change in such a way as to occupy their own little place in the general scheme of things. They evolve or otherwise run the risk of losing out and turning into fossils such as those exhibited by the Chief.’ Furthermore, he continued,
‘Nature sometimes throws up an obstacle, such as a desert or an ocean, with the result that animals that were once alike are separated and grow up to be different.’ As an example, he cited the two varieties of ostriches in South America, the larger species in the north and the smaller one in the south, the very one whose bones Philos had collected as specimens.
I must say that even though I could catch only the barest drift, what he was saying struck me as nothing short of ridiculous. To take but one example, I have, as you well know, been separated from my brother by half the world; I have been growing all that time, and yet I am confident that when we finally meet he will see that I have not changed all that much.
But Philos seemed to accept what Mr McCormick had to say and he too became excited, rubbing his hands together and pacing around the deck. ‘By Jove, do you realise the implications of this?’ he demanded, very solemn.
‘I do,’ replied Mr McCormick, his equal in sober demeanour. ‘I have just struck down the basic tenets of the Church.’ To which Philos declared:
‘You have aimed higher than that. You have struck a blow at the Creator Himself!’
‘Blasphemer!’ a voice suddenly thundered. ‘You have nailed Our Lord to the Cross once more! You shall pay dearly for this!’ Captain FitzRoy stepped forward. He had apparently been standing in the shadows, listening to everything. He ordered the two men below and they complied like children guilty of raiding the pantry.
I must say, I was glad the Captain intervened. For though I could not fully capture the gist of the conversation that night, I did not like the smell of it. Nothing good comes from mixing with savages, I have often thought.
And that, Mother, is
what occurred during that extraordinary visit to Jemmy Button’s village. Sometimes, thinking back upon it, it seems to me as if it all transpired in a dream. Perhaps that sensation comes from those strange cigars.
Your loving son,
Richard
CHAPTER 30
Hugh and Beth slept late, then descended to an outdoor terrace overlooking the lake, where they treated themselves to an old-fashioned English breakfast: eggs, sausage, bacon, tomatoes, and baked beans.
Beth smiled, stretching in the sunlight—like a contented cat, thought Hugh. He had also slept well. He could not remember the last time he had felt as good as he did now, both completely alive and completely relaxed.
They decided to spend the rest of the morning touring the Lake District and set out in the car. The road rose and fell before them, curving along hedgerows, leading them into wooded valleys one minute and the next shooting them up hills where they could look down on green pastureland dotted with tiny villages. White clouds rolled across the blue sky.
They had recovered from the shock of Matthews’s letter, but in the cold light of day, they realized they had certainly uncovered more than they had bargained for.
“Think anyone will believe us?” Hugh asked.
“I don’t see why not,” Beth had replied. “We’ve got proof. Though I grant you it’s a lot to swallow all at once.”
They discussed their evidence: Lizzie’s journal, the missing chapter from Darwin’s autobiography, Matthews’s letter. Each told a different part of the story and each reinforced the other two.
They stopped for lunch at a roadside pub in the town of Hawkshead, sitting at a table outside, barely an arm’s length from the winding cobblestone road that cut through town.
They ordered the ploughman’s lunch—bread and cheese—and split a shepherd’s pie. When Hugh returned with a second round of beers, Beth was staring off into the distance and he asked her what she was thinking.
“About Lizzie. Poor Lizzie. Her father was even worse than she knew.”
“You could say that. He not only managed to dispose of his rival, intentionally or otherwise, and wipe him clean out of the history books, but it now turns out he stole his famous theory from him.”
“Isn’t it curious that he never owned up to that part of it, even in his missing chapter? Do you think that was because he was so ashamed of the theft or because he didn’t view it as all that serious compared with McCormick’s death?”
“He probably thought McCormick was well within his rights in expropriating it from the Indians,” Hugh replied. “Don’t forget, the Victorians were nothing if not entitled. They were the advanced British, the superior white race. The same way Lord Elgin could take statues from the Parthenon without a second thought and Rhodes could cart boxcars of diamonds from southern Africa, McCormick could help himself to a little bit of theoretical talk over a campfire.
“But McCormick didn’t really plunder the theory wholesale from the shaman. What the shaman said about evolution—that one species is derived from another—had been said before by a number of Westerners. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus, said it. The new element, the crucial one supplied by McCormick, was how it happened—by natural selection. That was the touch of genius. So Darwin stole it all right, but basically he stole it from a white man, a fellow Brit.”
Beth sighed. “And once they had it, they realized that whoever could hotfoot it back to England first and publish it would get all the credit. A world of wealth and fame. No wonder the Beagle was too small for the two of them. And no wonder Darwin was wracked with guilt over McCormick’s death. On some level he wanted him to plunge into that inferno. He ends up with the glory, but as a consequence he spends the rest of his life sick and paranoid. It almost makes you feel sorry for him.”
“McCormick’s last words must have haunted him. Darwin may not have believed in God, but I bet he came to believe in the Devil.”
Beth nodded. “You know, the one I feel sorry for is Jemmy Button.”
“He lived in two worlds and got the worst of both.”
“And how about the Chief? He was hoping for enlightenment and all he got was feckless Brits spouting mumbo-jumbo. How disillusioning was that?”
“Well, it explains a note I found up in Scotland. I forgot to tell you about it. Jemmy wrote it to Darwin a long time after the voyage. It said:
‘Yet you Inglish know life less as we poor Yamana.’ ”
“That’s certainly true. They did know less about life—literally. Do you think Jemmy engineered that massacre?”
“I do.”
“What do you think filled him with such rage?”
“I don’t think he was angry just because the all-powerful English weren’t able to help save his tribe. I think it was because he realized that his Chief had a deeper understanding of the world but the English were too arrogant to recognize that—aside, of course, from McCormick and then, when it was explained to him, Darwin. But Jemmy didn’t know that.”
“Whatever happened to the tribe?”
“Wiped out. Every last one of them.”
They drank deeply.
“One more thing,” Beth said. “As I see it, all this means that Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the theory. Darwin himself conceded as much—so Wallace should end up getting some of the credit, right?”
“Wrong.”
“Explain. And while you’re at it, what was all that business about Huxley and the others paying him off? What could he have been blackmailing them about?”
Hugh reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.
“Here’s another letter written by Matthews. This one is to his cousins.
He wrote it sometime in early 1858, long after his mother’s death.”
“What does he say?”
“He tells of his subsequent travels. He bummed around for quite a while and, incidentally, gave up his religious beliefs, and—I’m reading between the lines here—he went native, or whatever passed for going native in those days. He washed up on the shores of Sarawak.”
“Where’s that?”
“A tiny kingdom on the north coast of Borneo. Back then it was run by an eccentric Englishman named James Brooke. He had a wide circle of friends, including the Dyaks, the notorious headhunters.”
“Go on. Get to the point.”
“Well, Brooke was a generous man. He let just about anyone put up for free—provided of course that you were white. So Matthews turns up and stays a while. And guess who else is a houseguest?”
“No! Wallace?”
“Yes. Collecting beetles and having a grand old time. One night the two of them get drunk, start telling war stories, and Matthews pours out this interesting tale of what happened in the mountains of Tierra del Fuego.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Matthews, clueless to the end, thinks it’s just an interesting yarn. He has no idea that he’s just passed along one of the great theoretical insights of all time. Wallace is as good a liar as the rest of them. He makes up this story about the theory coming to him in a malarial fever; he writes to Darwin—who, he knows, has the same information but for whatever reason can’t seem to set it down on paper. Then he finds out that Darwin has basically put forth the theory as his own. So he decides he might as well make a little money and he threatens to reveal everything unless the X Club pays him. They also had to pay off FitzRoy, who overheard enough to cause trouble. And the rest, as they say, is history.”
“So the true discoverer is a little Scotsman we’ve barely heard of.
And he was inspired by an ignominious shaman whose bones are buried somewhere at the ends of the earth.”
“That’s right.”
Beth was quiet for a few seconds.
“Think they’ll believe us?”
“Don’t forget, as you say, we’ve got proof.”
They left the table and walked through Hawkshead until they came to an old building, whitewashed stucco with wooden trim.
Over the door hung a sundial and a tablet dedicated to its founder, the Arch-bishop of York. A plaque proclaimed it the Hawkshead Grammar School, which closed in 1909.
“I’ll be damned,” said Hugh. “Let’s go in.”
The ground-floor classroom seemed undisturbed from generations back. Wooden desks were bolted to the floor, blackboards lined the walls, the plaster was yellowing and bulging here and there. Hugh quickly found what he was looking for: a long desk to the right of the entrance. On the near end a small piece of glass was affixed to the surface. Underneath it, gouged into the wood, expertly carved in large letters, was the name W Wordsworth.
A sign noted that the poet attended the school from 1778 to 1787 and quoted a few words from “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”:
. . . nature never did betray The heart that loved her
Hugh smiled at the sentiment and put his arm around Beth as they walked back out onto the street.
“I’m not sure he got that right,” he said.
They walked back through the town, got in the car, and headed back toward the bed and breakfast. Hugh turned on the radio and found a good station, playing the Beatles. He drove with the windows open and the wind streaming in so fast his eyes teared. Beth looked over at him and smiled. Tomorrow would be time enough for them to start writing.
Afterword
Thomas Carlyle, Darwin’s contemporary, called history “the distillation of rumor.” This book was undertaken in that spirit.
It is a work of fiction. The historical characters are all real—in the sense that they actually existed—and almost all their actions here correspond with what the historical record tells us about them.
I have, however, taken significant liberties in several areas.
One is the end that befell Robert McCormick, Darwin’s jealous rival on the Beagle. Another is the portrayal of Elizabeth Darwin, about whom little is known. I have seized upon this blank canvas to construct a portrait and an imaginary lineage that suits my alternative narrative.