Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  Sir Robert Otway’s faith in him was justified: FitzRoy was certainly capable. In his competence and zeal he was light-years from Pringle Stokes.

  He had been sent off to the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth when he was only twelve years old—possibly he was already exhibiting an unusual precocity at his studies and was deemed ready for more, but more probably because of the cold practice among the English upper classes of sending small children away to school at a still tender age, breaking off their childhood with a brutal snap. At Portsmouth, in addition to classical studies in Greek, Latin, mathematics (including the spherical trigonometry necessary for celestial navigation), French, drawing and painting, fencing, and dancing, the syllabus included:

  Naval history and nautical discoveries; naval architecture; astronomy, motions of heavenly bodies, tides, lunar irregularities; the Principles and other parts of Newton’s philosophy; fortifications, doctrine of projectiles and its application to gunnery; principles of flexions and application to the measurement of surfaces and solids; generation of various curves, resistance to moving bodies; mechanics, and hydrostatics.

  FitzRoy tore through the three-year course at Portsmouth in less than twenty months and graduated with full marks and a gold medal, neither of which had ever been awarded to any cadet. In 1819, at the age of fourteen, he went to sea. He served aboard ships in the Mediterranean and with the South American fleet, where he became a favorite of Sir Robert Otway. There was an inquiring, scientific bent to his mind, and by the time of the “death vacancy” resulting from Pringle Stokes’s suicide, FitzRoy was abreast of the latest thinking in geology, paleontology, and “natural philosophy,” as the study of nature was then known. It was as well for him that Otway liked him, and that his family was intimately connected with the Admiralty and the powers that determined advancement. He hardly needed these connections to get ahead, but a man of such dazzling and superior ability, with self-assurance, vanity, willfulness, and a personal fortune, probably made few friends. He was admired but rarely liked. Otway had fought with Nelson at Copenhagen and had been the legendary admiral’s flag captain; perhaps he saw something of himself in the ambitious young FitzRoy.

  It was a plum assignment. Without the opportunities provided by war, the captaincy of the Beagle offered FitzRoy a unique chance to prove himself—more than he could imagine.

  FitzRoy and the Beagle were kismet for each other.

  The young captain’s new command was a 90-foot-long, 235-ton, 10-gun brig; a member of the Cherokee class (named for the first to be built), designed in 1807 by Sir Henry Peake, Surveyor of the Navy. Its firepower comprised eight 16- or 18-pound carronades and two 6-pound chase guns. Carronades (named for the Carron Iron Founding and Shipping Company that invented them) were short, light carriage guns that fired heavy shot over a short range. They were developed for close-in brawling in the Napoleonic naval battles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These small but powerful guns allowed a smaller ship to carry them, thus reducing the size and costs, for a given firepower, of certain classes of fighting vessel for the Admiralty.

  In size and armaments, the Cherokee-class ship was about halfway between the Sophie and the Polychrest, Captain Jack Aubrey’s first two commands in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series of naval adventure novels. They were handy, economical infighters, but after the wars were over many went on to peacetime work, and it was discovered that they could be a liability at sea. They had low freeboard, and waves readily broke over their decks; high, solid bulwarks prevented this water from easily running off back into the sea. Several heavy waves breaking over the deck of a Cherokee-class ship could quickly make her top-heavy and, in a stiff breeze, capsize her. Almost a quarter of the approximately 100 Cherokees built were wrecked or foundered in heavy weather. Seamen called them “coffin brigs.”

  Yet they sailed well, for a square-rigged vessel; they were sea-kindly, with a comfortable motion; deep, capacious holds could carry an enormous quantity of stores and spares, clear decks held numerous boats, gear, equipment—qualities that would be desirable in a modern cruising yacht.

  The keel of the forty-fifth vessel to be built to this design was laid in 1818 at Woolwich Dockyard on the River Thames. The ship was launched exactly two years later, at a cost of £7803. She was christened Beagle—history has left no record why; perhaps the whim of some hunting admiral. She was placed “in ordinary”—that is, tied up with nothing to do—for five years until she was allocated to the Navy’s surveying service in 1825, which commissioned her to sail with HMS Adventure to South America. By this time, however, some of her planking was already rotting in the tidal river water, so she was sent back to Woolwich dockyard for repairs and much else that was needed for her coming voyage. The bulwarks were lowered to allow water to drain off more easily; a chartroom was built over the quarterdeck, more cabins built forward of this new poop deck for additional storage and an assistant surveyor; skylight hatches were fitted over the captain’s cabin and the gun-room, where the officers slept, to make the long months and years aboard less gloomy. A mizzenmast, carrying two fore-and-aft (rather than square) sails, was added to her stern, greatly increasing her maneuverability. This changed her rig from a two-masted brig to a barque.

  Six months after she went into the dockyard, on May 22, 1826, HMS Beagle sailed from England on her first mission to Tierra del Fuego, under the command of her first captain, Pringle Stokes.

  Designed for war, one of a bunch built for a price, she sailed away to explore the unknown world, into maelstroms of unholy wind and weather, and she proved herself one of the ablest little ships in history.

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  In January 1829, HMS Adventure, with Captain King, HMS Beagle, with her new captain, Robert FitzRoy, and a smaller schooner, HMS Adelaide, sailed south again on their surveying mission. (Not often mentioned, the Adelaide, named for England’s queen, the wife of William IV, had been purchased by Captain King earlier in the expedition, and had accompanied the Adventure for much of 1828. Being a “fore-and-after” rather than a square-rigged vessel, she was a handier sailer, able to point closer to the wind than either of the other two ships, and was used for survey work in tighter channels and harbors.)

  Captain FitzRoy encountered misfortune early in his command. On January 30, off Maldonado on the coast of Uruguay, the Beagle was caught by a pampero, a vicious squall blowing off the pampas, later said to be the worst in many years. It lasted only twenty minutes, but the Beagle, newly loaded to the brim with supplies, exacerbating the already top-heavy tendency of her class, was knocked over on her beam, and lay pinned by blasts of wind for long minutes, during which it appeared she might capsize. Topmasts, topsails, all sorts of sails and small spars, were torn away and blown to pieces. Two seamen who had been furling sail high in the rigging were blown away with them into the sea and lost.

  Such sudden “white squalls” can catch a ship by surprise and knock it down in seconds, long before its captain has time to notice what’s coming and take in sail. The incident was not FitzRoy’s fault (though in later years he was to blame his inexperience for not being more alert and ready for such a possibility), but to lose men so early in his command would have had his crew (seamen are a highly superstitious lot) wondering if their new skipper had the curse of being unlucky.

  Two months later, the ships reached the eastern entrance to the Strait of Magellan.

  On April 13, as the Beagle was beating down into the strait near Cape Negro against a light southerly breeze, the crew spotted some natives: two women and a child in a canoe near the shore, two men and their dogs close by on the beach. FitzRoy had a whaleboat lowered and a crew of seamen pull him shoreward for a closer look, the people “being the first savages I had ever met.”

  To Englishmen, they appeared remarkably unattractive. “hideous…filthy and most disagreeable” was Captain King’s first and lasting impression.

  To the Fuegians, the British naval officers and their crew, appearing from
seaward in their grand and intricate vessels, with their elaborate clothing, their gadgets, and their inexplicable powers, were as otherworldly as little green men coming out of a spaceship—except that the locals were no longer astonished. Such visitors had been turning up for some time; the occasional glimpses of the Magellans, Sarmientos, and Schoutens had increased to nearly regular traffic. By 1827, the year King’s expedition reached the Strait of Magellan for the first time, sealing and whaling vessels (usually ignored by history because their crews didn’t plant flags, slaughter locals, colonize, or make claims for distant sovereigns) had been passing through Tierra del Fuego, harvesting seals and penguins, and trading with the natives for more than fifty years. Relations had evolved considerably since the earliest contact. The Fuegians had largely forgotten their initial fears and become instead cheeky opportunists. It was the latecomers on the scene, the Englishmen in 1827, who were the naive ones. They were smugly and vastly amused by their own abilities to impress the locals with their beads and cheap magic, underestimating not only the Fuegians’ cleverness, but their self-respect.

  Fuegian native of the “Yapoo Tekeenika” tribe, as FitzRoy mistakenly believed they called themselves. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy)

  “They were pleased by a ticking watch,” wrote King, of his first encounter with a group of them. While dazzling them with his watch, he surprised a Fuegian by deftly cutting off a lock of the native’s hair with a pair of scissors (perhaps he fancied a small trophy brush fashioned of the coarse hair by the ship’s carpenter, not an unusual item). The man objected until King gave the hair back to him. “Assuming a grave look, he very carefully wrapped the hair up, and handed it to a woman in the canoe, who, as carefully, stowed it away in a basket…the man then turned round, requesting me, very seriously, to put away the scissors, and my compliance restored him to good humor.”

  At another encounter, “one of the party, who seemed more than half an idiot, spit in my face; but as it was not apparently done angrily, and he was reproved by his companions, his uncourteous conduct was forgiven.” The Fuegians spat at them, and the English sneakily cut off their hair; what was courteous or idiotic was misunderstood by both sides.

  Two years later, Robert FitzRoy saw them in much the same way: they were dirty and primitive. And he brought his own elevated learning, particularly his ideas about physical appearances and phrenology, to the deduction of their innate character.

  Their features were…peculiar; and if physiognomy can be trusted, indicated cunning, indolence, passive fortitude, deficient intellect, and want of energy. I observed that the forehead was very small and ill-shaped, the nose was long, narrow between the eyes and wide at the point; and the upper lip, long and protruding. They had small, retreating chins; bad teeth; high cheekbones; small Chinese eyes at an oblique angle with the nose…. The head was very small, especially at the top and back; there were very few bumps for a craniologist.

  FitzRoy was not quite so scientific about the younger of the two women in the canoe. She “would not have been ill-looking, had she been well-scrubbed, and all the yellow clay with which she was bedaubed, washed away.”

  It was the late, too tender Pringle Stokes who saw these people most clearly. His journal descriptions of his first encounters with Fuegians in 1827 were full of carefully observed details, largely without the prejudicial filter of a self-righteous European sensibility.

  As might be expected from the unkindly climate in which they dwell, the personal appearance of these Indians does not exhibit, either in male or female, any indications of activity or strength. Their average height is five feet five inches; their habit of body is spare; the limbs are badly turned, and deficient in muscle; the hair of their head is black, straight, and coarse; their beards, whiskers, and eyebrows, naturally exceedingly scanty, are carefully plucked out…the mouth is large, and the underlip thick; their teeth are small and regular, but of bad colour. They are of a dirty copper colour; their countenance is dull, and devoid of expression. For protection against the rigours of these inclement regions, their clothing is miserably suited; being only the skin of a seal, or sea-otter, thrown over the shoulders, with the hairy side outward.

  They also smeared themselves with seal oil and blubber, which “combined with the filth of their persons, produced,” to Captain King, “a most offensive smell.” This seemed manifest lowliness, the benighted savage rolling in filth. The Englishmen didn’t realize it was an effective weatherproofing, something perfectly suited to the climate. No contemporary clothing, no oiled or painted canvas, could keep the densely wet weather of Tierra del Fuego from reaching the body. The English sailors’ habit of wrapping themselves in clammy, moisture-retaining layers ensured constant misery: “Our discomfort in an open boat was very great, since we were all constantly wet to the skin,” they complained.

  Stokes carefully noted the natives’ diet—shellfish, seal, sea-otter, porpoise and whale, wild berries, and certain seaweeds—and the fact that they weren’t particular.

  Former voyagers have noted the avidity with which they swallowed the most offensive offal, such as decaying seal-skins, rancid seal, and whale blubber, &c. When on board my ship, they ate or drank greedily whatever was offered to them, salt-beef, salt-pork, preserved meat, pudding, pea-soup, tea, coffee, wine or brandy—nothing came amiss.

  Of the Fuegians’ typical shelter, which Europeans generally called “wigwams” and characterized as “the last degree of wretchedness,” Stokes again was not content with second-hand descriptions but brought to them his own accurate eye.

  To their dwellings have been given, in various books of voyages, the names of huts, wigwams, &c; but, with reference to their structure, I think old Sir John Narborough’s term for them will convey the best idea to an English reader; he calls them “arbours.” They are formed of about a couple of dozen branches, pointed at the larger ends, and stuck into the ground round a circular or elliptical space, about ten feet by six; the upper ends are brought together, and secured by tyers of grass, over which is thrown a thatching of grass and seal-skins, a hole being left at the side as a door, and another at the top as a vent for smoke.

  In other words, like the North American Indians (as Europeans, with the lingering cultural memory of the motivations of the first westbound explorers, still referred to aboriginal peoples everywhere west of the Atlantic), the Fuegians had evolved methods and techniques well-adapted to their environment and climate. But this was rarely appreciated by Europeans, who invariably interpreted what they saw as squalor and ungodly sloth.

  To a degree greater than anyone else on first acquaintance, Stokes saw in them some of the sweeter traits of the universal human family.

  Their manner towards their children is affectionate and caressing. I often witnessed the tenderness with which they tried to quiet the alarms our presence at first occasioned, and the pleasure which they showed when we bestowed upon the little ones any trifling trinkets…. I took a fancy to a dog lying near one of the women…and offered a price for it…. She declined to part with it…. at last my offers became so considerable, that she called a little boy out of the thick jungle (into which he had fled at our approach), who was the owner of the dog. The goods were shown to him, and all his party urged him to sell it, but the little urchin would not consent.

  They were all too human. And the history of their relationship with the technologically advanced white men who came from over the horizon followed the same ineluctable course it did everywhere else. Years of trading with sealers had given them a taste for, in the beginning, beads and mirrors, and later the more useful things: metal, cloth, tools, and weapons. In North America, the single most useful item introduced to the natives at their first contact with Europeans, the Spanish conquistadores, was the horse. That tool brought them speed, efficiency, and power; it altered their view of their world and what they could do in it. It was the transforming bone tossed into the air by Stanley Kubrick’s ape that turns into a spaceship.<
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  In the waterworld of Tierra del Fuego, what the Fuegians coveted most were the white men’s boats.

  To the elegant, aristocratic, accomplished Robert FitzRoy, looking down at the naked, greasy primitives in their canoes from the immeasurably loftier height of the Beagle’s deck, the Fuegians seemed at first no more than curious local fauna. They bore no relation to him or his work. He was there to survey for the British Admiralty, to employ the formidable skills he had developed and make a name for himself in the world he knew. Yet it was a profoundly fateful encounter. His life and unique place in history, and the entire arc of scientific and religious thinking in the nineteenth century, were to turn on the meeting between Robert FitzRoy and these “savages.”

  It was the southern autumn when the survey ships reached Tierra del Fuego. The Beagle, and the schooner Adelaide, now commanded by Lieutenant Skyring, were sent to explore the western half of the Strait of Magellan.

  Unlike Stokes, FitzRoy admired the landscape: “I cannot help here remarking that the scenery this day appeared to me magnificent,” he wrote in his journal on April 14, near Port Famine. He so remarked on many days.

  In May, FitzRoy anchored the Beagle and set out with some of his crew and a month’s supplies in the ship’s small cutter and a whaleboat, both of which could be easily rowed and sailed, and in these poked far into small bays and narrow channels where the larger ship could have sailed only with difficulty. This small mobile expedition traveled for more than a month, the men camping ashore at night. Following a small, twisting channel that led north from the strait through high snow- and ice-covered hills, they discovered and partially surveyed two vast sea-lakes, each about forty miles long and connected by a narrow channel, hidden away in the southern Andes. FitzRoy named these Otway Water, after his patron, and, with a nod to his loyal subordinate who had gracefully made way for him, Skyring Water.