Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  There is no record of any associations that might possibly have occurred between York Minster and the maidservants and women he would certainly have come into contact with at Walthamstow. There is only the known fact that at some point during their stay there, he fastened his sexual attentions on the ten-year-old Fuegia Basket.

  9

  It was FitzRoy’s man on the scene, Coxswain Bennett, installed in rooms nearby, whose worldly experience beyond straitlaced Walthamstow made him the best and earliest witness to what was afoot.

  And so it went until late one afternoon when Coxswain Bennett happened down the hedge by the Infants School. Fortunately he had left his sharp cutlass at the inn. But, shifting his quid, spitting to windward, and with a look of determination on his mahogany face, he grabbed Fuegia, as York disappeared through the hedge and, turning her over his honest knee, spanked her soundly.

  “It no me, no me! York, he York, only York,” she pleaded.

  “And so, sir,” reported the coxswain, “I quits aspankin’ of her fat little bare bottom, sir, and sets her down…but the way that York’s been aglarin’ at me since has me awearin’ of my cutlass, an’ I sleeps with it, sir, when I does sleep.”

  “Bennett, this is the most terrible thing that yet has happened. I’d rather—I’d rather see her in a Christian grave, like poor Boat.” Captain FitzRoy, in the snug at the inn, to which he had hastened by private appointment, broke a life’s rule. He ordered port, and he and his coxswain fortified themselves in private.

  “Them heathen women ripens rapid, sir. I mind me, in Calicut.”

  “Yes, Bennett—yes, I know. But what is to be done?”

  “Sail, sir, sez I. Slip the cable, Captain, an’ I’m with you, sir.”

  This account comes from Cape Horn, by Felix Reisenberg, a generally splendid, thoroughly researched history of Cape Horn and the mariners and natives who have made the place famous. Reisenberg, a seaman of wide experience, a Columbia graduate, engineer, maritime historian and writer, had a novelist’s feel for situation and character and relates history with gusto. But he was writing a book for the popular market and had no qualms about taking some liberties. This episode, suggesting that Coxswain Bennett caught York Minster and Fuegia Basket in flagrante delicto down by the hedge at the Infants School, is clearly one of them. Fanciful, unsupported, and written as if Reisenberg had stayed up too late reading Treasure Island, it’s the suggestive missing link in the story of FitzRoy’s Fuegians. It is what can be inferred from what was known and subsequently happened, but is nowhere reliably recorded.

  Most discordant is Reisenberg’s FitzRoy. The captain wringing his hands and asking his coxswain “What is to be done?” sounds wholly out of character for the imperious young FitzRoy. Maddeningly, tantalizingly, Reisenberg frequently “quotes” the garrulous coxswain, making of him a salty and salacious commentator on great doings that have been handed down and sealed in the often dull and cloudy aspic of nineteenth-century prose.

  But during the spring of 1831, something happened between the Fuegians at Walthamstow to make FitzRoy suddenly and drastically curtail his original plans to educate them “and, after two or three years…take them back to their country.” Because by June, after the Fuegians had been in Walthamstow only seven months, FitzRoy was going to extraordinary lengths, and digging deep into his own pockets, to get them out of England and back to Tierra del Fuego as soon as possible.

  His official work supervising the production of charts from his surveys was finished in March. “From the various conversations which I had with Captain King…I had been led to suppose that the survey of the southern coasts of South America would be continued; and to some ship, ordered upon such a service, I had looked for an opportunity of restoring the Fuegians to their native land.” But there was no immediate prospect for a further South American commission. Despite Beaufort’s personal desire that the survey of South American waters be continued, and FitzRoy’s accomplishments there, the Admiralty considered an early return to Tierra del Fuego unnecessary in the spring of 1831. Yet, certainly within the two- to three-year time frame of FitzRoy’s original plan for the Fuegians, he would have found a ship bound around Cape Horn that could have taken his passengers. But now he “became anxious about the Fuegians.” And, after so closely detailing his hopes for them, that is all he writes about the sudden turnaround of his scheme.

  So anxious that he arranged to charter a small merchant vessel, the John of London, to carry him, Coxswain Bennett, the three Fuegians, and the supplies amassed and donated to them back to Tierra del Fuego, and eventually land him and Bennett in Valparaiso, where they could find a ship returning to England. No little jaunt this, the cost of chartering the John was £1,000—the equivalent of the price of a London townhouse—to which FitzRoy would have added food and supplies for himself and his retinue for at least six months, plus salary for Bennett.

  York Minster’s attentions to Fuegia Basket were almost certainly responsible for such an extreme departure from his initial design. FitzRoy later admitted as much.

  He had long shown himself attached to her, and had gradually become excessively jealous of her goodwill. If anyone spoke to her, he watched every word; if he was not sitting by her side, he grumbled sulkily…if he was…separated…his behaviour became sullen and morose.

  An episode like the one imagined by Felix Reisenberg, or the slightest suggestion of it, would have been disastrous for FitzRoy. The unseemly possibility that Fuegia Basket might become pregnant was the least of it. This indication of ineradicable savagery breaking through the civilizing glaze on his charges threatened to destroy all the goodwill that had been showered on the Fuegians and FitzRoy himself by the royal family, the court, the Admiralty, FitzRoy’s friends, the public at large, Reverend Wilson, and the kind people at Walthamstow. All had embraced the Fuegians and taken deeply to heart FitzRoy’s own pious sentiment that they offered a rare and quite clearly divinely engineered opportunity not only to deliver three heathen souls from the perils of savagery but to return them home to plant a holy seed that might grow and spread across a Godless continent. Reaction to news that the sweet child adored by so many was having sex with a hulking, unreformable savage at the Walthamstow Infants School would be catastrophic. It could mean disgrace for FitzRoy and the end of his naval career.

  On a more personal level, this development deeply shook FitzRoy’s faith in his grand scheme. He was so certain of the benefits of exposure to the Anglo-Christian civilization that he saw physiological proof of it: he believed the Fuegians’ physical features were altered and improved by their stay in England.

  The nose is always narrow between the eyes, and, except in a few curious instances, is hollow, in profile outline, or almost flat. The mouth is coarsely formed (I speak of them in their savage state, and not of those who were in England, whose features were much improved by altered habits, and by education).

  FitzRoy’s own ink portraits of Jemmy Button reflect this clearly. A comparison between Jemmy in his “savage” state, and the “English” Jemmy, wearing a high collar, cravat, and frock coat, shows features altered as if by cosmetic surgery: Anglo Jemmy’s nose and mouth are finer, flared and expressive, the eyes bright with acuity as if he were attending a lecture on paleontology, his posture upright and proud. Savage Jemmy looks a million years older, a Neanderthal version with an entirely different cranium shape, crouched and hulking, thicker-featured, with dull-witted eyes sunk beneath a heavier brow.

  FitzRoy’s Fuegians, from his own drawings. Top left: the gamine Fuegia Basket in England, aged 10. Center right: Jemmy Button around 1832, after several years of civilizing influence. Center left: Jemmy Button in 1834—FitzRoy believed even his cranium and features had improved in England, and then regressed again to primitive shape after just a year back in Tierra del Fuego. Bottom: York Minster as FitzRoy saw him at every stage, an intractable savage. Top right: Jemmy’s wife in 1824. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy)

&n
bsp; The most fascinating aspect of these two portraits is that the Anglo Jemmy is dated 1833, the Savage, 1834, a year after Jemmy Button had been returned to Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy chose to believe that such physical improvements lasted only as long as the heathen remained under the beneficent sway of God-fearing English culture. Once back in the wild, Jemmy’s lips thickened, his nose widened, his brow bulged, his cranium reverted to its primordial shape.

  FitzRoy’s portait of York Minster in England shows a largely unimproved, thick-featured Fuegian with a tie and a haircut.

  There was an immediate change in their living arrangements. Although FitzRoy later wrote that the Fuegians remained in Walthamstow until October of 1831, this was not the case. In August, the Reverend Wilson referred in a letter to their “late residence” there: FitzRoy had removed them. Where he put them, and to what degree Fuegia and York were separated, is not known.

  But his urgency to leave England with them was real, and finally brought a change at the Admiralty. He confided his anxiety, and his plans to charter the John, to an uncle, the Duke of Grafton, who then interceded on his behalf. The duke, together with Beaufort, persuaded the Admiralty lords that FitzRoy’s earlier survey remained seriously incomplete: trade restrictions between Britain and the newly independent confederation of Latin American states had recently been lifted; French and American interests in the area rivaled and threatened to displace any possible British presence; a more complete survey of southern South American waters, plus the possibility of installing a group of friendly natives, perhaps under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society, could prove to be an incalculable political and economic opportunity.

  Very quickly, FitzRoy was commissioned to embark on a new survey. He still had to pay most of the £1000 he had promised for the John, but now he had what he wanted: a chance to continue the work he had started, which was demanding and provided the best peacetime opportunity for him to shine as a naval officer—and the means to cut and run with the Fuegians.

  Initially, he was appointed to the command of the Chanticleer, a near sistership to the Beagle, recently returned from a surveying voyage in South American waters, where her commander, Henry Foster, the Admiralty’s leading field astronomer, had drowned in an accident on the Chagres River earlier in the year. But when examined, the Chanticleer was found to be too tired for such a voyage, her planking sprung, her gear and rigging worn out from her punishing travels in the Southern Ocean and the tropics. Another ship was quickly found; to FitzRoy’s delight, it was the Beagle. He threw himself into preparations.

  The Beagle was commissioned anew on July 4, 1831, and immediately given prime dock space at Devonport, and the work needed for a long and arduous period at sea commenced. With FitzRoy at the helm, Beaufort devised a much grander plan for this second voyage of the Beagle. In addition to the renewed survey of South American waters, he proposed that FitzRoy return to England by sailing westabout around the world, across the Pacific, through Australasia, across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean. This would enable FitzRoy to track an unbroken chain of meridian distances around the world, which, depending on the accuracy of the chronometers carried with him, would enable the precise charting of the longitude of every port the Beagle called at. Much of the charting and surveying of the Pacific remained unimproved since Captain Cook’s time, and this would be a significant opportunity to refine the mapping of the world, on which hung the expansionist improvements of trade, political power, and colonial possession. In addition, Beaufort and FitzRoy discussed a wide variety of botanical, geological, and meteorological inquiries that might be pursued on such a voyage, turning this circumnavigation into a showpiece of scientific endeavor. FitzRoy, the scientist-captain, was thrilled: “I resolved to spare neither expense nor trouble in making our little expedition as complete, with respect to material and preparation, as my means and exertions would allow, when supported by the considerate and satisfactory arrangements of the Admiralty.”

  But beneath the exciting prospects, he also felt a gnawing concern. It would be a long voyage, several years at least, possibly three or four, during the whole of which he would be effectively alone, cut off from the world and even, especially, the men aboard his ship. FitzRoy was not a friendly commander, not an open-hearted Jack Aubrey or a matey Peter Blake. Although he had sailed and rowed and shared every hardship and success with his officers and men, he lacked ease with them. He was an aristocrat, high-strung, given to fits of depression and querulous anger. There would be no escape for him from the loneliness and isolation of command. This had driven Pringle Stokes, in whose cabin he would now spend years more, to shoot himself. There was madness in FitzRoy’s own family which had resulted in the suicide of his uncle.

  He might have paid less heed to this had it not been for the essential failure of his Fuegian enterprise. This had crucially undermined his confidence in his judgment; he found himself, for the first time in a brilliant career, faltering, unsure. He was suddenly afraid of being so alone.

  In August, as work progressed aboard the Beagle, he approached Beaufort with an unusual request.

  Anxious that no opportunity of collecting useful information, during the voyage, should be lost; I proposed to the hydrographer that some well-educated and scientific person should be sought for who would willingly share such accommodations as I had to offer, in order to profit by the opportunity of visiting distant countries yet little known.

  FitzRoy was asking if he might take a companion.

  Beaufort agreed, even thought it a good idea, and wrote to a friend, George Peacock, a mathematics professor and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, asking him to recommend some “savant” to serve as a naturalist aboard the Beagle.

  Were it not for Robert FitzRoy’s concern over the sexual tension between Fuegia Basket and York Minster, this second voyage of the Beagle would not have occurred at that moment and under the circumstances that it did. Had the timing, or FitzRoy’s need, or his new sense of his own fallibility, been any different, the door would never have opened for a Shropshire doctor’s son—an undistinguished bachelor of arts graduate who, for want of ambition, was preparing to become a clergyman—to voyage around the world and shatter and remake the way we think of ourselves in the profoundest way.

  But he almost didn’t go. He was hardly anyone’s first choice.

  10

  Perhaps only the dawn of the Internet, and the computer technology that coalesced with it into a global ethos at the end of the twentieth century, can give any idea of the excitement generated by the sciences of the physical world in the early nineteenth century.

  Geology was preeminent among these, for its findings had recently shaken the widely held belief that the earth had existed for a mere few thousand years. Calculations from biblical and historical records had previously indicated that the epic first week of creation, described in the book of Genesis, had begun on October 22, 4004 B.C. Six days later, by October 28, Earth and all its glories, including Man, were in place; and on October 29, God rested.

  Science and the Bible had for a time even become comfortable bedfellows. The perennial discovery of fossilized sea creatures far inland seemed to support the biblical story of the great flood that had once washed over the earth.

  And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them: and behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood: rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. (Genesis 6: 13–15)

  The cubit, the biblical unit of measurement, was generally thought to be the length of a man’s arm from elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Men differed, but Sir Isaac Newton set the matter at rest by determining that the cubit must be 20 ½ inches, and was then able to calculate that Noah’s ark, at 300 cubits by
50 cubits, had been 537 feet long, 85 feet wide, 51 feet high, and weighed (Newton must have decided on a unit weight for gopher wood, Cladrastis lutea, and construction scantlings) 18,231 tons.

  This was science at its most tidy and helpful.

  But the deeper geologists looked, the more they saw that confounded them: fossils, and the arrangements of layers and layers of earth that had preserved them, began to indicate subterranean upheavals, erosion, sediment, the existence of ancient seas—signs of tremendous change taking place across the face of the earth. Either these changes had occurred at one cataclysmic moment—during the flood, handily explained by the Bible—or, as geologists began to think, they had taken place over an immense period of time, and were still taking place, continually, but with imperceptible slowness, suggesting such a mind-boggling age to the planet that science and the Holy Word could not be reconciled.

  The result, for those who did not cling to the literal word of the Bible, was an abyssal unknown, a spiritual vacuum. Science rushed in to fill it, and its discoveries, coming in tumbling profusion in the early years of the nineteenth century, were greeted with the excitement of bulletins from a war front. Nowhere was this zone hotter, of greater moment, more closely watched, than in the circles of scientific inquiry at Britain’s universities. In particular, at Cambridge.

  Beaufort’s letter to Professor Peacock asking about a companion for FitzRoy tapped into an elite cream of intellectual movers and shakers at the very top of the British establishment. Cambridge professors like Peacock, Adam Sedgwick, John Stevens Henslow, William Whewell, and John Herschel were intimates of men in the government and the armed forces, men like Beaufort, the leading scientific light at the Admiralty, and the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. They were close to mathematicians like Charles Babbage, whose series of increasingly complicated “difference engines” were the world’s first computers; to geologists like Charles Lyell and Roderick Murchison. Whewell and Herschel wrote books that became, along with Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the most read, talked-about, and influential books of their day. Herschel’s A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy inspired and laid the groundwork for much of the scientific induction and explanation that followed its publication in 1831. Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences was acted out in a game of charades at Lord Northampton’s Christmas party, achieving the sort of buzz generated by popular television shows a century and a half later. These men created an intellectual aristocracy at the core of the world’s greatest empire and shaped the way that world thought.