Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  All this and more assaulted the Fuegians, who had just spent a month in the relative quiet and fresh air of Plymouth. Twenty-first-century humans, reared on Star Trek and Star Wars, abducted and taken to another world by intergalactic travelers, would probably be less vertiginously displaced than the natives of Tierra del Fuego in London.

  Their only comfort in this maelstrom of dislocation were their shipmates, Murray, Bennett, and preeminently FitzRoy, the evident master of this universe. They must have placed in him a growing trust born of overwhelming need.

  But a few miles farther on, the city fell away to countryside. Only seven miles from London, as it existed then, Walthamstow lay beyond open fields and across the river Lea, at the edge of Epping Forest, a small country town of 4000 inhabitants. The only way to reach it in 1830 was by road; the railway would not connect with it until the 1840s.

  The master of the infants school, William Jenkins, and his wife awaited them. FitzRoy recorded the arrival.

  [The Fuegians] were much pleased with the rooms prepared for them at Walthamstow; and the schoolmaster and his wife were equally pleased to find the future inmates of their house very well disposed, quiet, and cleanly people; instead of fierce and dirty savages…. The attention of their instructor was directed to teaching them English, and the plainer truths of Christianity, as the first object; and the use of common tools, a slight acquaintance with husbandry, gardening, and mechanism, as the second.

  The Walthamstow Infants School had been established by the Reverend William Wilson in 1824. Wilson had come under the sway of a well-known educator of the day, Samuel Wilderspin, who believed that the age level for children entering national schools—six and seven—was far too late. Wilderspin thought that two was the preferred age, particularly for instruction in spiritual matters, which he felt were too important to be left to the haphazard example of poorly educated parents of dubious moral values. Wilson, the wealthy son of a manufacturer, was persuaded by Wilderspin to sponsor the country’s first Church of England–sanctioned infants school. It was initally housed in a barn. A few years later Wilson had a new building constructed for the school beside the church graveyard.

  Here the Fuegians sat learning English, arithmetic, and “the plainer truths of Christianity” in a classroom adorned with biblical pictures and quotations.

  In 1825, Wilson published a book, The System of Infants Schools, in which he described his ideas and methods. He wanted to see children at school as early as possible,

  [in] the most impressible years of our existence. The evil which is within us is then fomented, or the principles of religion and moral excellence were then first inculcated and encouraged…. Muscular action is made a component and necessary part of the system. Every lesson is accompanied with some movement of the person…the whole frame is at different periods called into action and restored to rest. The beat of the foot, the clap of the hands, the extension of the arms, with various other postures, are measures of the utterance of the lesson as they proceed. The position is also frequently changed. The infants learn sitting, standing or walking.

  Fuegia, aged nine or ten when she arrived at Walthamstow, and Jemmy, about fourteen, made good progress. Their eight months of captivity aboard the Beagle had equipped them with a rudimentary vocabulary—a sailorly argot hardly suitable for a Christian infants school but which nonetheless readied them for further instruction. By all accounts, the two younger Fuegians were responsive, eager pupils, and their “improvement” charmed their benefactors.

  They exhibited distinct traits, recorded by FitzRoy and others: Jemmy Button showed a taste for English dress that bordered on dandyism. He “was fond of admiring himself in a looking glass.” His speech became peppered with some of the quainter expressions of the day, so that his few quotes that have come down to us (probably because his listeners were amused by them) seem almost to satirize his dress and situation: “Hearty, sir, never better,” he would respond to an inquiry after his health. He must have been fun; the butt of much humor, but enjoying the joke himself, and happy to provide it. He made many friends.

  Little, round Fuegia Basket exuded an empathic sweetness that endeared her to everybody. FitzRoy had been the first to come under her spell, and had been more unwilling to part with her, to send her ashore with the other child hostages in Tierra del Fuego, than he was able to convincingly explain. “She seemed to be so happy and healthy, that I determined to detain her as a hostage for the stolen boat,” he wrote at a point when such hostage-taking had proved futile. To the Beagle’s crew, who had made her “a pet on the lower deck”; to the English families she stayed with in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, and to the many people she met in England, Fuegia was an irresistible charmer.

  But the hulking, brooding York Minster, aged twenty-six, charmed no one. He did not enjoy the classroom, in which he was expected to sit alongside two-, three-, and four-year-olds, singing, clapping, mouthing by rote his ABCs and chants about how to wash one’s face and hands, exercising his man’s body in tandem with the movements of babes. There would have been no cultural gap large enough to save him from the most abject humiliation in this. He preferred mechanical instruction in smith’s or carpenter’s work; he paid attention to what he saw and heard about animals; he reluctantly helped with the gardening around the school and church, perhaps feeling this was women’s work; but it’s not surprising that he had “a great dislike” for schoolwork. Or that he was moody and unresponsive to the finer influences he was exposed to. York was too old and fully formed to change, to sparkle with Christian values. He remained a true captive, imprisoned in himself by a culture that had no place or use for him, no appreciation of his natural self, that wanted to eradicate the skills and tendencies formed in him by his own, and only natural, environment. The difference in age between him and his fellow Fuegians was too great to allow for any kind of real friendship with them. He was as marooned in England as was Crusoe on his island, and though no one seems to have guessed as much, blaming his sullen behavior on savage intractability, he must have been a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.

  Because he failed to charm FitzRoy, York Minster was possibly not given the chance to charm anyone else. Fuegia Basket and Jemmy Button, because of their youth and more malleable personalities, were taken on outings with FitzRoy. Whether York Minster accompanied them is unclear: “They [the Fuegians] gave no particular trouble; were very healthy; and the two younger ones became great favourites wherever they were known. Sometimes I took them with me to see a friend or relation of my own, who was anxious to question them,” FitzRoy wrote. If York was left behind on these occasions, it wouldn’t have helped his attitude.

  But the other two became sought-after guests. FitzRoy’s family, social, scientific, and professional worlds gave him an extraordinarily broad acquaintance across the dominant strata of English society. Everyone who knew him or heard about FitzRoy and his savages would have been curious to see them, and he received on their behalf more invitations than they were able, or than he saw fit, to accept. They visited wealthy aristocrats, the foundation of FitzRoy’s world, who received them in large houses dazzling with furnishings and oversize paintings, serviced by retinues of servants. They were frequent visitors to FitzRoy’s sister, Fanny Rice-Trevor, whom the Fuegians called “Cappen Sisser.” She gave them many gifts, paid great attention to them, took them shopping for clothes with FitzRoy or coxswain Bennett, and they developed a real affection for her, talking of her often at the time, and long afterward. Fanny moved in exalted circles, attending events at court such as the queen’s birthday, and undoubtedly spoke of her brother’s “Indians” to many people who would have been eager to meet them.

  Other hosts would have been FitzRoy’s acquaintances in the scientific and professional world, such as Roderick Murchison, a foremost geologist who later became president of the Royal Geographic Society and remained keenly interested in the Fuegians’ welfare for years after meeting them; Cambridge professor-geologist Adam Sed
gwick, one of the most influential educators of his day; probably Charles Lyell, the young barrister-turned-geologist, whose book Principles of Geology enormously influenced FitzRoy’s (and everyone else’s) thinking about the age of the world and its natural history; and his navy friends: Francis Beaufort, the hydrographer of the British Navy who later developed the Beaufort wind scale; Sir John Richardson, the retired naval expert on the natural history of the Arctic; and many others who wished to see these examples of “brute Creation” whom FitzRoy had plucked from the wild and given a swift makeover as English gentlefolk.

  On these occasions, FitzRoy’s specimens would be encased in their stiff, Sunday-best clothes, rather than their schoolday garb, and would arrive at their hosts’ homes with him in his carriage, drilled in the basic graces and polite exchanges. They were questioned about their native land and about their present circumstances; they were served refreshments and full meals. They were given presents. Their answers, in broken English, and their developing table manners, invariably charmed and fascinated their hosts.

  The culminating pinnacle of the Fuegians’ social forays was an audience with the new king, William IV, and his wife, Queen Adelaide. A quiet man and lackluster monarch with a disdain for pomp and ceremony, William had been welcomed by the British public and its government on succeeding his brother, George IV, whose tabloid escapades had been an embarrassment to the country. Never expecting to become king, William had lived quietly with his mistress, Mrs. Dorothea Jordan, for twenty years and fathered ten illegitimate children by her. None of these was a possible heir, so on accession to the throne in 1830 he married Adelaide of Saxe-Coburg and Meinengein, who bore him two daughters, both of whom died in early childhood.* William had joined the Royal Navy at the age of thirteen, traveled widely, and was known as the Sailor King; he hungered for associations beyond the court, for his earlier connection with the exciting world of travel. As king, he often invited explorers and adventurers to meet with him and questioned them about their exploits. With his naval connections and interest, he clearly knew about Captain FitzRoy.

  The only record of the visit is FitzRoy’s.

  During the summer of 1831, His late Majesty expressed a wish to see the Fuegians, and they were taken to St James’s. His Majesty asked a great deal about their country, as well as themselves; and I hope I may be permitted to remark that, during an equal space of time, no person ever asked me so many sensible and thoroughly pertinent questions respecting the Fuegians and their country also relating to the survey in which I had myself been engaged, as did His Majesty. Her Majesty Queen Adelaide also honoured the Fuegians by her presence, and by acts of genuine kindness which they could appreciate, and never forgot.

  It is Fuegia Basket who is singled out for mention in FitzRoy’s account of the meeting. The sweet natural empathy that had prevented him from giving her up in Tierra del Fuego drew Adelaide’s greatest attention. The childless queen was captivated by the gamine native girl in her Christian frock.

  She left the room, in which they were, for a minute, and returned with one of her own bonnets, which she put upon the girl’s head. Her Majesty then put one of her rings upon the girl’s finger, and gave her a sum of money to buy an outfit of clothes when she should leave England to return to her own country.

  As an accomplished amateur scientist and already a renowned explorer, FitzRoy was exhibiting “his” Fuegians as performing curiosities, just as Professor Challenger would unveil his leathery pterodactyl to the members of the Zoological Institute at the conclusion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. They were the fruit of the obsession he had picked up, like sea fever, in Tierra del Fuego, though his interest in them for their own sakes, and for their welfare, was altruistic and sincere. But he felt more than a professional glow of pride at their accomplishments. The space he gave to them in the Narrative, and the language of concern for their well-being and happiness, indicate a strong emotional involvement. FitzRoy was still a young man, only twenty-five in that winter of 1830–1831 when he stepped out in English society with his charges, unmarried and living alone, except for his servants. He almost certainly felt for the two younger Fuegians, children in his care, a fatherly emotion. Perhaps even love.

  When not squiring his Fuegians about on their social engagements, FitzRoy spent the winter and first three months of 1831 in the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty supervising the drawing of charts based on his surveys of Tierra del Fuego, and writing the sailing directions to accompany them. The vast labyrinth of southern South America still remained largely unexplored, yet FitzRoy, Captain Phillip Parker King, and the late Captain Stokes and his more functioning officer Lieutenant Skyring had achieved a great deal for vessels navigating between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

  Two escape routes from the southern part of the Magellan Strait direct to the Pacific Ocean had been charted, enabling westbound vessels encountering northwest winds to make their way more quickly to the open sea; an inshore route had been found on the west coast from the Gulf of Peñas direct to the Magellan Strait for small vessels using the prevailing northwest winds; the rugged coasts around Cape Horn had been charted, as had the Strait of Lemaire; and the remote and dangerous Diego Ramirez Islands had been fixed where they lay, far out to the southwest of Cape Horn. (The Admiralty Chart, Rear Admiral G. S. Ritchie)

  British Admiralty charts had been made available for sale to the merchant fleets of the world since 1821, and the new charts and sailing directions that were the fruit of the Beagle’s and the Adventure’s commission would have been of invaluable assistance to mariners and navigators for the cost of a few shillings.

  Four draughtsmen worked in the Hydrographic Office. These men drew the charts from FitzRoy’s and King’s drawings, under their supervision. When the drawings were completed they were taken to Messrs Walker of Castle Street, Holborn, for engraving onto copper plates. The plates were delivered back to the Admiralty, where they were used on the navy’s copper press, by its own copper printer and assistant, whenever a run of charts was required.

  FitzRoy was doing this work at a time of signal change in the Hydrographic Office, under the direction of a figure whose name is known to seamen the world over today. Two years earlier, Captain Francis Beaufort had been appointed Hydrographer of the Navy (the choice had been between Beaufort and Captain Peter Heywood, the last survivor from the Bounty mutiny). When Beaufort took over the chair in May 1829, the Napoleonic wars had been over for fourteen years, and Britain’s navy was in the early days of a century of peace in Europe that would last (apart from the interruption of the Crimean War) until the outbreak of World War I. The navy’s interest had shifted from defense to the guardianship of its empire, and facilitating the expansion of trade and exploration. Beaufort intensified surveying efforts across the globe, and within a few years of his appointment sent ships and surveyors back to South America; to Africa, Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea, the South China Sea, the Caribbean, Canada, the Mediterranean; and to the home waters around the British Isles. A number of these surveyor-captains who became famous for their work—Skyring, Lort Stokes, and Sulivan—got their training with FitzRoy aboard the Beagle.

  Beaufort was fifty-five when he became hydrographer. His interest in charting came from his father, the Rector of Navan, County Meath, Ireland, an amateur cartographer who had made an excellent map of Ireland. Beaufort joined the navy at thirteen and served under several surveying commanders, including Alexander Dalrymple, who had prepared a chart of descriptions of wind strengths, numbered 0 (“flat calm”) to 12 (“a hurricane such that no canvas could withstand”). Beaufort refined Dalrymple’s scale to give wind speeds in nautical miles per hour and accompanying descriptions of sea states for each “force” on the scale (for example, “Force 8; 34–40 n.m.p.h; Near Gale; Height of Sea in ft: 18; Deep sea criteria: High waves of increasing length, crests form spindrift”). He persuaded the navy’s captains and navigators to employ it in descriptions of sea conditions in their logs and
official reports, and today the Beaufort Scale is used and understood by sailors the world over.

  Like FitzRoy, Beaufort had scientific interests that took him far beyond the navy and made him useful friendships. He was a Fellow of the Geological Society, the Royal Society, the Astronomical Society, and a leading figure in the founding of the Royal Geographical Society in 1830, just as FitzRoy was returning from Tierra del Fuego. The rapid efflorescence of science in the early nineteenth century led the Admiralty, with Beaufort’s urging, to form its own scientific branch in 1831, to contain the Hydrographic Office, the Royal Observatories at Greenwich and Cape Town, the Nautical Almanac and Chronometer Offices, and later the Compass Office. Beaufort was the ideal link between the musty, wooden world of the Georgian navy and the progressive, expanding, enlightened Victorian era that was about to take over.

  A sudden and important presence in the Hydrographic Office over the winter and early spring of 1830–1831, FitzRoy met with his superior regularly. Half Beaufort’s age and always fully conversant with the latest scientific developments, FitzRoy not surprisingly became one of the hydrographer’s favorites.

  Lucky for him. He was soon to have urgent need of Beaufort’s help.

  As the two Fuegian children continued to thrive at Walthamstow, their adult compatriot sank deeper into isolation. Cut off from any meaningful contact with the world, he was also cut off as a man. FitzRoy estimated York Minster’s age as twenty-six in 1830. He was in the physical prime of his life. At home, among his own people, he might have had (possibly he did have) a wife. Certainly he would have been having sex. The straitlaced confines of the church-run Infant School, the constant supervision of Schoolmaster Jenkins, his wife, the Reverend Wilson, and Coxswain Bennett, whom FitzRoy had installed in Walthamstow to keep him posted on the Fuegians, and the unceasing importuning to strict Christian behavior must have been a living hell to a healthy, primitive man. The flourishing prostitution industry in London was far beyond his reach, geographically and socially.