The following weekend the two young men traveled by steam packet from London to Plymouth, to see the Beagle in the Devonport dockyard. Darwin could only have gained the poorest grasp of what she would be like to live aboard: the ship was without masts or interior bulkheads, and he thought she looked like a wreck. His own quarters in the chartroom aft were cluttered with carpenters and appeared dismayingly small, but FitzRoy assured him that he would make him comfortable and provide him with a workshop. The voyage around the coast had been pleasant, and Darwin’s initial worries that he might suffer from seasickness were calmed.
It was settled. FitzRoy wrote to Beaufort that he approved of Darwin and wanted him aboard as naturalist. He told Darwin to do and buy what he must for the voyage and to report on board the Beagle by the end of October; he had chosen November 4 as their tentative departure date.
Then he set about preparing the ship.
After six years of service, most of the Beagle’s planking and deck frames were rotten and had to be replaced. As this work, along with a general refit of all her gear commenced at Devonport, FitzRoy got permission to make some other changes. When he had filled the “death vacancy” made by Captain Stokes and boarded the Beagle in Rio de Janeiro in 1828, FitzRoy had done his best with what he was given. Now, after two seasons in the far south and 20,000 miles of voyaging, he had definite ideas for the vessel’s improvement. He had the upper deck raised eight inches throughout the ship, giving increased headroom for the whole crew, who had formerly moved about belowdecks in an uncomfortable stoop. This not only made life below more comfortable for everyone (a condition FitzRoy placed great value upon), but it added to the ship’s buoyancy, literally providing more air inside the hull to resist a capsize when pushed over onto her beam by wind and seas. (Raising the deck would also have lifted the vessel’s center of gravity, possibly increasing her tendency to roll, making her less stable, but nobody seems to have noticed or remarked on this.) FitzRoy was pleased with the alteration, which “proved to be of the greatest advantage to her as a sea-boat, besides adding so materially to the comfort of all on board,” he later wrote.
Heading out across a world of storms, FitzRoy—a tireless follower of modern scientific developments—installed lightning conductors of a type recently invented by William Snow Harris, a Fellow of the Royal Society. These were heavy-gauge continuous copper strips built into the masts and spars and bowsprit, running from the very top of the ship down through the rigging, down the outside of the hull into the ship’s copper-sheathed bottom for grounding in the water. Struck by lightning a number of times in the voyage to come, the Beagle never received any damage.
Other improvements included a new type of rudder, designed by Captain Lihou of the Royal Navy, which enabled the rudder’s pintle, or hinge, to be replaced if broken on a distant shore. The galley’s open fireplace was torn out and “one of Frazer’s stoves” with an oven installed in its place. This was more efficient in its consumption of fuel and made cooking on board safer in all weathers.
While these intrinsic shippy improvements were being carried out, FitzRoy turned to the equipping of his vessel for scientific purposes. Both he and Beaufort, with the full weight of the Admiralty behind them, were determined to provide the Beagle with the best, most up-to-date equipment and instruments possible.
Preeminent among these, as necessary as a compass, were the ship’s chronometers. Accurate time was vital to accurate navigation, the determination of longitude, and the consequential correct placing of rocks, islands, and coasts in FitzRoy’s surveys—his primary mission. Since the groundbreaking work of John Harrison a century earlier, which had won him the government’s £20,000 award for a chronometer that would provide mariners with longitude, timepieces had been continually refined. A chronometer is not a clock that keeps perfect time, but one whose mechanism gains or loses it at a nearly consistent, measurable rate. Thus once set with the correct time at Greenwich, that Greenwich Mean Time—the basis for all celestial navigation—can still be accurately known weeks later, far out at sea, after the correction for loss or gain is applied. That was the theory. But a chronometer, like any mechanical device, can go wrong or break down, so several were carried aboard ships, their rates of loss or gain observed and compared with each other, and an average assumed.
Twenty-two chronometers were carried aboard the Beagle on her second voyage. The Admiralty provided sixteen, and FitzRoy, in his pursuit of absolute sufficiency, even redundancy, bought a further six. They were the finest money could buy, each a jewel of mechanical contrivance, purchased from different clockmakers. Their storage aboard the ship and the conditions of their use were as important as their construction for keeping good time. Each was housed in a small wooden box, suspended by well-oiled gimbals that kept the clock level despite the rocking of the ship and its own box around it. The twenty-two boxes were kept in a small cabin beside FitzRoy’s own, placed in sawdust three inches thick beneath and at the sides of each box as a shock absorber.
Placed in this manner [wrote FitzRoy], neither the running of men upon deck, nor firing guns, nor the running-out of chain cables, caused the slightest vibration in the chronometers, as I often proved by scattering powder upon their glasses and watching it with a magnifying glass, while the vessel herself was vibrating to some jar or shock.
A good fix on this punctilious scientist-captain is provided by imagining him in a gale at sea, oiled coat thrown off, head toweled to avoid dripping, bent over his chronometers as the ship pitches around him, magnifying glass in hand, to observe the fine sprinkling of powder on the glass tops in his rookery of clocks.
The greatest disturbance to the clocks was their daily winding. To tend them, and ensure a consistency of attention and handling, FitzRoy hired a supernumerary to the ship’s crew, George James Stebbing, eldest son of a mathematical instrument maker from Portsmouth, who came along for the entire voyage. Only Stebbing touched the clocks, winding them every morning at 9 A.M. He came again at noon daily to compare their times and rate their gains and losses. Only FitzRoy and Stebbing ever entered the small cabin of chronometers. Most of the boxes were never moved after first being secured in sawdust in 1831 until the completion of the voyage in 1836.
Between voyages, FitzRoy had his sextant, theodolite, small portable compasses, telescopes of several powers, and other instruments cleaned and repaired as necessary. New ones were purchased for this voyage. Once aboard ship, Stebbing looked after these too.
As with the extra chronometers, FitzRoy paid for Stebbing out of his own pocket.
The whaleboat built by Jonathan May on Chiloé Island in 1829, stolen by Fuegians a few months later, is one of the great lost artifacts of history. FitzRoy couldn’t have recognized it as such, but the first voyage had nonetheless given him the keenest appreciation for a sufficient quantity of ship’s boats. It may have occurred to him that this second voyage of the Beagle might never have happened if he’d had more boats on the first. Six new boats were now built: two 25-foot whaleboats, two 28-foot whaleboats, a 23-foot cutter, and a 26-foot yawl. Their tough hulls were made from a double layer of diagonal planks, a method refined by a foreman at Plymouth Dockyard, a Mr. Jones. The Admiralty felt four were enough, but FitzRoy disagreed. He paid for the other two. These were carried on deck, the cutter nesting inside the yawl in the forward waist, the two larger whaleboats carried upside down aft, the smaller whaleboats held outboard on davits aft. A seventh boat, a 15-foot dinghy (dingy is an Indian word for small boat) was carried in davits astern. These boats greatly interfered with movement on deck, and the handling of the rig, but they were an accepted part of any ship’s gear and the sailors scrambled over and around them.
Although Frenchman Louis Daguerre was already experimenting with capturing permanent images on silver-plated sheets of copper used with a camera obscura, photography was still virtually unknown. To make a visual record of the voyage, FitzRoy hired another civilian supernumerary, an artist, Augustus Earle, and, as with Stebbi
ng, paid for him out of his own pocket. The son of an American painter living in England, Earle had studied at the Royal Academy in London. But he was unable to settle into the role of society painter; afflicted by a serious wanderlust, he had already traveled to Australia, New Zealand, India, and South America as an itinerant artist, earning a scratchy living painting portraits of colonial governors. When FitzRoy met him in London he was thirty-seven years old, peddling his paintings of Maoris and finding no takers. His lack of success was probably because Earle had an eye for the truth in a subject, rather than for what might be pleasing to European taste. His subsequent drawings and paintings of the Beagle and the people and places it encountered are among the most valuable and accurate records of nineteenth-century exploration. FitzRoy could not have chosen better.
(Two years later, Earle’s health forced him to leave the Beagle in South America. FitzRoy replaced him with Conrad Martens, a landscape painter. “By my faith in bumpology, I am sure you will like him,” FitzRoy wrote to Darwin, who was away from the ship, traveling across Argentina at the time. “His landscapes are really good.” FitzRoy’s phrenological assessment of the new artist was justified. Martens’s watercolors of the Beagle are now famous.)
The value of certain foods in combatting scurvy, the age-old scourge of sailors cut off from fresh supplies and restricted to the traditional and revolting seagoing diet of weevil-filled ship’s biscuit, rotten pork, and salt beef, was by then well-known. FitzRoy loaded his ship with the healthiest foods that could be carried in bulk, by the latest methods of preservation, for long periods in the airless confines of a ship’s hull. “Among our provisions were various antiscorbutics—such as pickles, dried apples, and lemon juice—of the best quality, and in as great abundance as we could stow away; we also had on board a very large quantity [5000–6000 cans] of Kilner and Moorsom’s preserved meat, vegetables, and soup; and from the Medical Department we received an ample supply of antiseptics.”
Nothing was spared the Beagle and the preparations for her voyage. The Admiralty and the naval dockyard workers at Devonport gave her their best efforts and materials, and FitzRoy saw that she was as completely equipped for scientific inquiry as the age allowed. The Beagle sailed as loaded with the cutting-edge technology of her time as any rocket ship that ever blasted off into space. She was an ark of discovery on her own five-year mission.
“Perhaps no vessel ever quitted her own country with a better or more ample supply…of every kind of useful provision,” wrote FitzRoy. He paid for much of it. His inheritance that came from his family was sufficient to sustain a comfortable gentleman’s existence ashore, but FitzRoy had better ideas for its use. The expenses he personally undertook for the voyage were considerable, and to pay for them he dug deep into his capital. He did this in the belief that the excellence of results he hoped to obtain would in time reward and reimburse him. It was a conscientious investment in his career and future, and in 1831 it looked a good one. Robert FitzRoy was in so many ways the finest product of his times. Blessed with wealth and station, he didn’t waste his life, as did so many of his peers, hunting, shooting, whoring, and gambling. He joined the navy and made the utmost of the opportunity it afforded him to add not only to his own learning, but to the pool of knowledge that was then beginning to flood the scientific community.
FitzRoy and the Beagle were made for each other. Together they provided Charles Darwin with a unique springboard for his own leap to destiny.
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Darwin traveled to Devonport by coach on October 24, 1831. “Arrived here in the evening after a pleasant drive from London,” was his first entry in the diary he had decided to keep during the voyage. He put up at a hotel and went aboard the Beagle the next day.
25th Went on board the Beagle, found her moored to the Active hulk & in a state of bustle & confusion.—The men were chiefly employed in painting the fore part & fitting up the Cabins.—The last time I saw her was on the 12th of Septr she was in the Dock yard & without her masts or bulkheads & looked more like a wreck than a vessel commissioned to go round the world.
26th Wet cold day, went on board, found the Carpenters busy fitting up the drawers in the Poop Cabin. My own private corner looks so small that I cannot help fearing that many of my things must be left behind.
“Went on board” was his only entry for November 2. Darwin was also writing daily letters to his family and friends, and his better efforts at description went into these. The diary remained, for a time, an uninspired itemization of the main points of his day. His style, expression, and the attention he gave to his daily log were to improve, however: on publication in 1839, his Journal of Researches, fashioned from this diary, became an instant bestseller, and has remained so for 165 years.
The Beagle had been due to sail in early November, but preparations delayed her departure for more than a month, and then westerly gales in the English Channel kept her pinned ashore. At first Darwin amused himself observing the frantic activity aboard the ship, and walking to and from Plymouth with FitzRoy and some of the junior officers, sometimes helping them with their abstruse preparations.
Monday 31st (October) Went with Mr Stokes [mate and assistant surveyor John Lort Stokes, who had been a midshipman on the Beagle’s first voyage] to Plymouth and staid with him whilst he prepared the astronomical house belonging to the Beagle for observations on the dipping needle….
4th (November) Cap FitzRoy took me in the Commissioners boat to the breakwater, where we staid for more than an hour. Cap. FitzRoy was employed in taking angles, so as to connect a particular stone, from which Cap King commenced for the last voyage his longitudes, to the quay at Clarence Baths, where the true time is now taken.
Here, FitzRoy was doing for geography what his chronometers did for time, and what the zero meridian of longitude at Greenwich does for east and west around the world: he was starting with a known position, or value, on which to base all subsequent measurements. His chronometer and sextant readings for the next five years, all his determinations of longitude, and positions of rocks, headlands, shorelines, islands, and continents, would be laid down according to the geographic relationship they bore to a stone in Plymouth’s breakwater. That arbitrary absolute provided the key to a graspable shape of the whole world.
As busy as he was, FitzRoy did not neglect one aspect of his private life: in Plymouth he met a young woman he liked, Mary O’Brien, the daughter of a local gentleman and army major general. She liked him too. The dashing young captain visited the O’Brien house as often as he could, but he kept it to himself; not even Darwin was aware of his interest in anything beyond the demands of the coming voyage.
Darwin continued trying to make himself useful, or at least amuse himself, but this became more difficult as the weeks in port wore on.
5th (November) Wretched, miserable day, remained reading in the house.
6th Went with Musters to the Chapel in the Dock-yard.—It rained torrents all the evening….
Monday 7th Staid at home.
8th In the morning marked time [i.e., Darwin noted the time] whilst Stokes took the altitude of the sun.—Went on board the Beagle; she now begins for the first time to look clean & well arranged.
10th Assisted Cap. FitzRoy at the Athaeneum in reading the various angles of the dipping needle….
11th Went again to the Athaeneum & spent the whole day at the dipping needle.—The end, which it is attempted to obtain, is a knowledge of the exact point in the globe to which the needle points. This means of obtaining it is to take, under all different circumstances, a great number of observations, & from them to find out the mean point.—The operation is a very long & delicate one….
12th Took a walk to some very large Limestone quarries, returned home & then went on board the Beagle.—The men had just finished painting her…. For the first time I felt a fine naval fervour; nobody could look at her without admiration.
13th Walked to Saltram & rode with Lord Borrington to Exmoor to see the Granite for
mation….
15th Went with Cap FitzRoy to Plymouth & were unpleasantly employed in finding out the inaccuracies of Gambeys new dipping needle.
17th A very quiet day.
18th Cap FitzRoy has been busy for these last two days with the Lords of the Admiralty.
20th Went to Church & heard a very stupid sermon, & afterwards took a long walk….
Darwin was more than simply bored. He was suffering crushing loneliness and apprehension. With too much time on his hands he was becoming anxious about the coming voyage. He worried about what might happen to him while he was away, and to loved ones at home. He developed a rash—probably cold sores—around his mouth. Always a vivid hypochondriac, he now became worried about his heart and began to believe he would be too sick to sail. Years later he was able to see this in perspective.
These two months at Plymouth were the most miserable which I ever spent, though I exerted myself in various ways. I was out of spirits at the thought of leaving all my family and friends for so long a time, and the weather seemed to me inexpressibly gloomy. I was also troubled with palpitations and pain about the heart, and like many a young ignorant man, especially one with a smattering of medical knowledge, was convinced that I had heart disease. I did not consult any doctor, as I fully expected to hear the verdict that I was not fit for the voyage, and I was resolved to go at all hazards.
Other passengers gathered at Plymouth. On November 13, the Fuegians arrived by steam packet from London, accompanied by their schoolmaster, Mr. Jenkins. They remained ashore until the Beagle sailed. There is little record of what they did in the weeks while they waited for the ship to sail. There may have been a few occasions when FitzRoy took them to visit curious local notables, admirals, and friends, but such visits would not have been on the scale of their former socializing. FitzRoy was fully occupied with his preparations for the coming voyage, and he was no longer as comfortable showing off his Fuegians as he had been. He was still keeping Fuegia Basket separated from her two male companions; she stayed in Weakley’s Hotel in Devonport, while the other two were put up elsewhere. His primary concern with them now was to hustle them out of the country as quickly as possible.
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