Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  A ship’s boats comprised by far the most vital part of her gear. They enabled the crew to get ashore, to fuel and reprovision, and, if the ship foundered, offered the only hope of survival. For survey work, particularly as FitzRoy was now using the boats to explore islands and channels while the ship remained at anchor, they were as essential as a sextant or theodolite. The Beagle’s commission could not have been carried on without numbers of them.

  While she was away from England between 1826 and 1830, the Beagle generally carried six boats, and she needed every one of them. The yawl, the largest at twenty-eight feet long, nearly a third of the ship’s length and probably weighing three tons, had been smashed by a wave while being towed astern off the Patagonian coast the year before, deepening Pringle Stokes’s depression and sense of failure. That left the ship’s cutter, a 23-foot rowing and sailing gig; the jolly boat, 14 feet long; and usually three whaleboats, about 25 feet long, the same fast-rowing peapods carried aboard whaling ships. The jolly boat, a sort of general-purpose dinghy, hung over the stern in davits. The cutter and a whaleboat hung over each stern quarter. Two more whaleboats and the yawl, until it was lost, were carried on deck, taking up considerable room and restricting movement of the crew. While several whaleboats might be away from the ship for days at a time on survey work, all the other boats would have been in constant use going between ship and shore. “The people employed wooding ashore” was a daily recurring entry in the Beagle’s logbook whenever she was at anchor, referring to the shore party felling and chopping trees and gathering dried wood for the incessant demand of the ship’s galley, forge, and other fires. Additional groups would be out every day—weather permitting—hunting and fishing to augment the basic rations of salted beef and ship’s biscuit. The Beagle carried its own small, constantly busy fleet to serve its needs, and there was no room aboard for superfluous or extra craft. Every boat was vital. For survey work, none surpassed the efficiency of the light whaleboats: “Our cutter required too many men, and was neither so handy, nor could she pull to windward so well as a whaleboat.”

  The Beagle had left England with enough seasoned planking for its carpenter to make several new boats, and in time he used up every foot of it, for in four years six boats were lost. By now, early 1830, there was not enough wood left in the ship’s hold to build new boats. FitzRoy could not afford the loss of another. He needed it, so he set off with the greatest determination to get it back.

  The very first place we went to, a small island about two miles distant, convinced us still more decidedly of the fate of our lost boat, and gave us hope of retrieving her: for near a lately used wigwam, we found her mast, part of which had been cut off with an axe that was in the boat.

  After finding the first signs of the stolen boat, they pulled and sailed (the whaleboats had short collapsible masts and sails to be used when the wind allowed) northeast, into a large bay dotted with many islands. Toward dusk, they drew level with a canoe being paddled by two Fuegians, a man and a woman. They indicated to the Englishmen, by signs, that they’d seen several boats heading into the northern part of the bay. “This raised our hopes, and we pushed on,” FitzRoy wrote.

  He may well have been angered by the theft of his boat, but he was clearly not disposed to think too badly of Fuegians in general.

  The woman…was the best looking I have seen among the Fuegians, and really well-featured: her voice was pleasing, and her manner neither so suspicious nor timid as that of the rest. Though young she was uncommonly fat, and did justice to a diet of limpets and muscles. Both she and her husband were perfectly naked.

  After two days of fruitless searching, they came across a native family in two canoes near the head of the bay, thirty miles east-northeast of Cape Desolation. Something in these Fuegians’ attitude prompted the Englishmen to search their canoes, which they had not done to the paddling naked couple. In one of the canoes they found the lost whaleboat’s leadline.

  We immediately took the man who had it into our boat, making him comprehend that he must show us where the people were, from whom he got it. He understood our meaning well enough.

  This was all FitzRoy wrote about his first taking of a hostage. For him it was an act that required no justification. It was a quick, practical decision, a tactic born of the necessity of the situation, but it was a signal moment of change in FitzRoy’s relationship with the Fuegians.

  It was probably accomplished by implicit rather than actual force. The native canoe was being held alongside the much larger whaleboat while the sailors searched it. At a word from FitzRoy, two or three uniformed Royal Marines would have risen and, with a leg in each boat, “helped” the Fuegian who “had” the leadline into the whaleboat. With signs, FitzRoy would have indicated what he wanted, and the Fuegian “understood our meaning well enough.” Then the Englishmen, with their captive, pulled away from the canoes.

  The Fuegian led them to a cove containing a camp with wigwams and two more canoes on the beach, a third being built. At the sight of the Englishmen, the Fuegians ran into the nearby bushes with as many of their belongings as they could carry, then returned, empty-handed and naked, and huddled together on the beach.

  FitzRoy’s men found more of the missing boat’s gear—a shredded piece of sail, an oar that had been broken in two (the shaft hacked into a seal club, the blade used as a paddle), and the boat’s axe and toolbag. FitzRoy was convinced he had found the group responsible for the theft. Apart from an old man and a boy aged about seventeen, there were only women in the camp. Their men, he reasoned, were away in the whaleboat on a seal hunt.

  He took a second captive, who may or may not have joined the Englishmen as cheerfully as FitzRoy described.

  The women understood what we wanted, and made eager signs to explain to us where our boat was gone. I did not like to injure them and only took away our own gear, and the young man, who came very readily, to show us where our boat was, and, with the man who had brought us to the place, squatted down in the boat apparently much pleased with some clothes and red caps, which were given to them.

  With their two hostages providing directions, the Englishmen rowed away. They pulled hard against a rising wind through the long twilight, heading deep into Courtenay Sound, a star-shaped bay of many fjordlike arms surrounded by high snowy hills. Four hours later, too dark to go on, they beached the boat for the night and made camp.

  The two Fuegians seemed, to FitzRoy’s eyes, quite at ease, so he decided not to “secure our guides as prisoners” for the night but let them sleep near the fire while the man on watch kept an eye on them. But in the predawn dark, they slipped away into the bushes, naturally taking with them the two tarpaulin coats they had been given to sleep under.

  With daylight, the Englishmen rowed back along shore looking for their runaways. They returned to the “boat stealers’ family” camp where they had taken the second hostage the day before. Again the Fuegians took to the woods as they approached. The Englishmen landed and destroyed the natives’ canoes—to prevent news of their search for the stolen whaleboat traveling beyond the immediate area, FitzRoy wrote, but this act reeks of vengeful frustration.

  For the next few days they rowed and sailed as best they could around the protected arms of Courtenay Sound while a strong gale blew from the south. They found nothing. FitzRoy decided to return once more to the “boat stealers’ family” camp, but this time to take them by surprise and capture as many hostages as possible for the return of the stolen whaleboat.

  The Fuegians had quite sensibly gone. But scouting from a hill the Englishmen spotted them: they’d moved their camp to another cove. The attack was planned for the following day.

  Not knowing if the family’s absent men had returned, FitzRoy armed each of his ten sailors and marines with a pistol or musket, a cutlass, and a length of rope to secure a prisoner. When morning came, they crept through the bushes toward the cove. They had nearly surrounded the camp when the Fuegians’ dogs smelled them and began barking. The
Englishmen rushed the camp.

  At first the Indians began to run away, but hearing us shout on both sides, some tried to hide themselves by squatting under the banks of a stream…. The foremost of our party, Elsmore…in jumping across this stream, slipped, and fell in just where two men and a woman were concealed: they instantly attacked him, trying to hold him down and beat out his brains with stones; and before any one could assist him, he had received several severe blows, and one eye was almost destroyed by a dangerous stroke near the temple. Mr Murray, seeing the man’s danger, fired at one of the Fuegians, who staggered back and let Elsmore escape; but immediately recovering himself, picked up stones from the bed of the stream…and threw them from each hand with astonishing force and precision. His first stone struck the master with much force, broke a powder-horn hung round his neck, and nearly knocked him backwards, and two others were thrown so truly at the heads of those nearest him, that they barely saved themselves by dropping down. All this passed in a few seconds, so quick was he with each hand; but, poor fellow, it was his last struggle; unfortunately he was mortally wounded, and, throwing one more stone, he fell against the bank and expired.

  After some struggling, and a few hard blows, those who tried to secrete themselves were taken, but several who ran away along the beach escaped. So strong and stout were the females, that I, for one, had no idea that it was a woman whose arms I and my coxswain endeavoured to pinion, until I heard some one say so. The oldest woman of the tribe was so powerful that two of the strongest men of our party could scarcely pull her out from under the bank of the stream.

  The Englishmen had bagged eleven prisoners—two men, three women, six children—among them the young man taken from the camp several days earlier. And when the dead, defiant, furiously stone-throwing Fuegian was examined, they recognized their first hostage: the man taken from the canoe because he had appeared to be in possession of the missing boat’s leadline; who had seemed so happy with clothes and a red hat.

  FitzRoy may have misread the Fuegians’ docility, but he felt genuine remorse at having killed one. “That a life should have been lost in the struggle, I lament deeply; but if the Fuegian had not been shot at that moment, his next blow might have killed Elsmore, who was almost under water.”

  It was the first record of such a death at British hands, as FitzRoy surely knew, and this undoubtedly distressed him. He was there for survey work, and killing the locals was an unsanctioned departure from his job description, however he might justify it. It would not commend him to his superiors. But there was more to his regret than that, as his later actions would prove.

  The prisoners appeared anxious to tell the Englishmen where the missing boat was, pointing now in another direction, to the southeast, not to Courtenay Sound. But with twenty-two people in a 25-foot whaleboat, FitzRoy was not going on another long chase. They headed instead for the Beagle, reaching it two days later, on February 15. The hostages were fed and clothed, and the Beagle weighed anchor and sailed southeast to Cape Castlereagh, in the direction the hostages had last indicated, and also where his survey might continue.

  On February 17, FitzRoy and Murray set out to search again, in two boats, with a week’s provisions and Fuegian hostage-guides in each, including two stout women, mothers of children left aboard the Beagle. “As far as we could make out, they appeared to understand perfectly that their safety and future freedom,” and the safety of their children aboard the ship, “depended upon their showing us where to find the whaleboat.”

  Tantalizingly, in the first cove he came to, only two miles from where the Beagle was now anchored, FitzRoy found another piece of the missing boat’s leadline in a “lately deserted” wigwam. They found more signs of a large party of Fuegians among several islands nearby, and he became hopeful that he would soon find his stolen boat. They camped ashore, and again FitzRoy decided not to tie up his prisoners for the night, reasoning that the children back aboard the Beagle would bind the women more securely than any rope.

  I kept watch myself during the first part of the night, as the men were tired by pulling all day, and incautiously allowed the Fuegians to lie between the fire and the bushes, having covered them up so snugly, with old blankets and my own poncho, that their bodies were entirely hidden. About midnight, while standing on the opposite side of the fire, looking at the boats, with my back to the Fuegians, I heard a rustling noise, and turned round; but seeing the heap of blankets unmoved, satisfied me…another rustle, and my dog jumped up and barking, told me that the natives had escaped. Still the blankets looked the same, for they were artfully propped up by bushes.

  For another week the two boats searched the Stewart and Gilbert Islands, a labyrinth of coves and channels where they now believed the stolen whaleboat might be. They saw fires, found deserted camps, they even saw Fuegians running off at their approach, but no boat. They finally returned to the Beagle on February 23, to learn that all the ship’s hostages, except for three children, had escaped.

  Thus, after much trouble and anxiety, much valuable time lost…I found myself with three young children to take care of, and no prospect whatever of recovering the boat.

  But the search for the boat, the continuing attempt to second-guess its thieves, the constant confoundment of all his expectations of the Fuegians’ behavior, had sown in FitzRoy a seed that would grow to a major preoccupation. For weeks, and then months, references to his surveying work—his sole purpose for being there—faded from his journal. Observations on harbors, weather, seafaring, diminished until they were almost entirely eclipsed by his mounting interest in the Fuegians:

  This cruise had…given me more insight into the real character of the Fuegians, than I had then acquired by other means…. I became convinced that so long as we were ignorant of the Fuegian language, and the natives were equally ignorant of ours, we should never know much about them, or the interior of their country; nor would there be the slightest chance of their being raised one step above the low place which they then held in our estimation.

  In this practical observation, with its telling grammatical tense, lie all the imperial ambitions of England at the time when FitzRoy wrote it—not in February 1830 when he was looking for his lost whaleboat, although it is set down as a journal entry for that time, but seven or eight years later, when he was preparing his journals for publication. After Victoria had acceded to the throne in 1837, her love of India, as a prize, and of the concept of empire, was fueling British imperial expansion across the globe. When FitzRoy wrote, in 1837 or 1838, of uplifting the heathen savage while at the same time gaining knowledge of the interior of his country, he was tapping into the major preoccupation of the age to explain and justify the deepening of his own obsessive fascination for the Fuegians, and the turn this was about to take in 1830.

  Late in February, the Beagle sailed on down the ragged southeastern coast of Tierra del Fuego and anchored in Christmas Sound, “in the very spot where the Adventure lay when Cook was here,” FitzRoy wrote in his journal.

  He was mistaken, confusing ships. The Adventure, under the command of Tobias Furneaux, had left England in company with Captain James Cook’s Resolution in July 1772, on Cook’s second great circumnavigation of exploration. The two ships cruised partly in company as far as New Zealand, but they lost touch with each other in 1773. In 1774, Cook reached Tierra del Fuego for the second time, after an icy, high-latitude crossing of the South Pacific from New Zealand, searching for the mythical Terra Incognita, which he concluded did not exist. (He missed seeing Antarctica by only a few hundred miles.) In mid-December 1774, Resolution closed with Tierra del Fuego near the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan, passing a headland that Cook named Cape Gloucester. For two days, Resolution scudded on southeast before a westerly gale (along the same track followed by FitzRoy in the Beagle while surveying and looking for the lost whaleboat) until it neared a black 800-foot-high rocky promontory rising from the sea, which Cook named York Minster after the great cathedral in his home c
ounty of Yorkshire. Here a southeasterly breeze stopped him, and he turned his ship into a channel and found shelter. Resolution was anchored over Christmas while Cook surveyed and charted the surrounding coastline, naming the area Christmas Sound, and so it is still called today.

  Into this spot, fifty-five years and two months later, came FitzRoy in the Beagle. “His [Cook’s] sketch of the sound, and description of York Minster, are very good, and quite enough to guide a ship to the anchoring place.”

  Just east of York Minster was a more protected anchorage, mentioned by Cook, but not examined or named by him, and into this sheltered cove FitzRoy worked the Beagle on March 1, naming it March Harbour. It seemed a good place to leave the ship for several weeks while he and Murray again set out in two different boats, no longer on a wild goose chase, but to continue their mission with surveying instruments. And here FitzRoy set carpenter May to building another whaleboat. Since there was no longer enough planking for this in the ship’s stores, May cut up a spare spar, another ship’s former topmast that was being saved as a replacement for the Beagle’s main topmast. “With reluctance this fine spar…was condemned to the teeth of the saw; but I felt certain that the boat Mr May would produce from it, would be valuable in any part of the world, and that for our voyage it was indispensable.”

  FitzRoy dispatched Murray in the cutter to survey the coast, channels, and islands to the west—back toward the area they had searched for their stolen whaleboat. He sent with him two of the three children remaining aboard the Beagle, to be left with any Fuegians he found.

  The third, who was about eight years old, was still with us: she seemed to be so happy and healthy, that I determined to detain her as a hostage for the stolen boat, and to try to teach her English.