Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  With them from London came a young missionary, Richard Matthews, recruited by Reverend William Wilson of Walthamstow, who was to sail to Tierra del Fuego and help the newly civilized Fuegians establish a mission. Still a teenager, Matthews was afire with religious fervor and the opportunity to put himself to God’s use. His older brother was a missionary in New Zealand, a compelling role model for the younger man. But New Zealand was a sylvan Eden being farmed and settled by English families, and its native Maoris were a fierce, intelligent, highly cultured people. No advice or descriptions of the missionary life from his brother, nor his acquaintance with the roughly Anglicized York, Jemmy, and Fuegia from Walthamstow, could have prepared Matthews for the reality of an existence by himself at the far storm-wracked edge of the world with only unreconstructed Fuegians for neighbors. But he was ready, he believed, quivering with zeal, and, thanks to the generosity of Christian well-wishers, fully equipped. Reverend Wilson had raised a subscription to supply Matthews and the Walthamstow Fuegians with the necessities to recreate a little piece of God-fearing England in that wild foreign place. Stowed aboard the Beagle in October were their supplies: chamber pots, tea trays, complete sets of crockery, soup tureens, beaver hats, and white linen, in addition to books, tools, and blankets. Space was found for all these items inside the Beagle’s crammed hold, with “some very fair jokes enjoyed by the seamen” who packed them aboard.

  On Monday November 21, Darwin brought all his books and instruments aboard the ship. His quarters were the poop cabin, which he shared with Stokes, and midshipman Phillip Gidley King, the seventeen-year-old son of Captain King, who had commanded the Adventure. The tiny 10-foot by 10-foot cabin that these three shared and filled with all their belongings was almost entirely taken up by a large chart table and rows of drawers the carpenters had built into the fore and aft bulkheads and along the sides of the hull. Stokes slept in a bunk just outside the chart room, and King’s and Darwin’s only beds were hammocks slung over the chart table. The space in the cabin was tight and exacting of movement and behavior. Darwin, who was over 6 feet tall and had never before been restricted to such close quarters, was, in the beginning, dismayed by the lack of space.

  22 November Went on board & returned in a panic on the old subject want of room. returned to the vessel with Cap FitzRoy, who is such an effectual & goodnatured contriver that the very drawers enlarge on his appearance & all difficulties smooth away.

  The rest of the ship was to be equally crammed full of people and their belongings. Seventy-three men and one girl—Fuegia Basket—were now aboard the Beagle, or gathered in Plymouth ready to join the ship. FitzRoy listed them as follows:

  Robert FitzRoy

  Commander and Surveyor

  John Clements Wickham

  Lieutenant

  Bartholomew James Sulivan

  Lieutenant

  Edward Main Chaffers

  Master

  Robert MacCormick

  Surgeon

  George Rowlett

  Purser

  Alexander Derbishire

  Mate

  Peter Benson Stewart

  Mate

  John Lort Stokes

  Mate and Assistant Surveyor

  Benjamin Bynoe

  Assistant Surgeon

  Arthur Mellersh

  Midshipman

  Philip Gidley King

  Midshipman

  Alexander Burns Usborne

  Master’s Assistant

  Charles Musters

  Volunteer 1st Class

  Jonathan May

  Carpenter

  Edward Hellyer

  Clerk

  Acting Boatswain; sergeant of marines and seven privates; thirty-four seamen and six boys.

  Supernumeraries:

  Charles Darwin

  Naturalist

  Augustus Earle

  Draughtsman

  George James Stebbing

  Instrument Maker

  Richard Matthews and three Fuegians; my own steward; and Mr Darwin’s servant.

  Darwin did not bring aboard a servant—that would have made seventy-four men—but at first used one of the ship’s boys, Henry Fuller, to help him organize and prepare specimens collected ashore. Later, he employed seventeen-year-old Syms Covington as his full-time assistant, co-opting him from the ship’s crew and paying him £60 per year. Covington became Darwin’s all-purpose assistant, secretary, shooter and co-collector throughout the voyage, and remained in his employment ashore in England until 1839. He was rarely mentioned by Darwin, as servants dressing and feeding their employers and secretaries mailing their letters seldom are, but Covington made significant contributions to Darwin’s work during and after the voyage. He is one in a long line of friends and employees whose work and interest became the foundation for Darwin’s studies and eventual reputation.

  On November 23, filled to her newly raised decks with stores and food—“not one inch of room is lost, the hold would contain scarcely another bag of bread,” wrote Darwin—the Beagle left the dock at Devonport and sailed a mile to Barnet Pool near the entrance to Plymouth harbor. There she anchored to await sailing weather, preferably northeasterly winds to blow her down the Channel and out into the Atlantic. But this was weeks in coming. November passed, and through most of December southwesterly gales blew up the Channel, making departure impossible. The heavily laden Beagle rolled and pitched in her anchorage, giving Darwin concerns about seasickness. At first, he felt well.

  December 4th…In the morning the ship rolled a good deal, but I did not feel uncomfortable; this gives me great hope of escaping seasickness.

  But his hopes were soon dashed.

  Monday 5th It was a tolerably clear morning & sights were obtained, so we are now ready for our long delayed moment of starting.—it has however blown a heavy gale from the South ever since midday, & perhaps we shall not be able to leave the Harbour. The vessel had a good deal of motion & I was as nearly as possible made sick….

  Sailing was postponed. Darwin went ashore to dine with his brother Erasmus, who had come down to Plymouth to see him off. He spent the night at an inn rather than return to the ship heaving at anchor. He went aboard the next morning, prepared to leave, but again the weather prevented sailing, and Darwin, overcome by seasickness, returned ashore. For the next few days, as the Beagle pitched and rolled in her weatherbound anchorage, Darwin alternately worked at arranging his gear in the poop cabin, and fled ashore when queasiness compelled him. He and Erasmus took walks on Mount Edgcombe, overlooking Plymouth, talked and ate together, assuaging Darwin’s apprehensions and dread of seasickness.

  On December 10 the weather appeared settled at last and the Beagle weighed anchors and sailed at 10 A.M. But as soon as the ship was past Plymouth’s breakwater, Darwin became sick and took to his hammock. In the evening a strong gale began to blow from the southwest—directly on the ship’s nose—forcing it to labor to windward. In a modern yacht, beating down the English Channel toward the open sea, such conditions are vile: the boat will lurch and pound against every oncoming wave like a four-wheel-drive vehicle bouncing over sand dunes. The Beagle, heavily laden and unable to point close to the wind, would have lifted, plunged, and rolled sickeningly in the short steep seas whipped up over the shallow waters of the Channel. It was a cruel baptism for Darwin. “I suffered most dreadfully,” he wrote, “such a night I never passed, on every side nothing but misery.”

  The Beagle could make no headway against such wind and weather. Rather than exhausting and demoralizing his crew to no purpose so early, FitzRoy turned the ship about and she rolled back downwind to Plymouth, anchoring again in Barnet Pool. Darwin immediately fled ashore with seaman Musters, “a fellow companion in misery,” for a long walk.

  More weeks passed, with the Beagle bottled up in her anchorage. FitzRoy could only bide his time in frustration, watching the skies and the weather. Darwin, until now so admiring of his captain in his journal and letters home, got a first look at his c
apricious temper. Accompanying FitzRoy in Plymouth one day, Darwin reported that

  …he was extremely angry with a dealer in crockery who refused to exchange some article purchased in his shop: the Captain asked the man the price of a very expensive set of china and said “I should have purchased this if you had not been so disobliging.” As I knew that the cabin was amply stocked with crockery, I doubted whether he had any such intention; and I must have shown my doubts in my face, for I said not a word. After leaving the shop he looked at me, saying You do not believe what I have said, and I was forced to own that it was so.

  For all his authority, dazzling skill, and mastery of his ship and men, FitzRoy was still only twenty-six years old, a young, imperious, seldom challenged or questioned aristocrat accustomed to getting his way, and this was a new view of him for the amiable Darwin. In the face of physical adversity, FitzRoy was uncowed, resourceful, and brave. But when he was thwarted in any personal way, a bratty petulance broke through his cool demeanor, and a darker side of his character took over. It might be a brief possession, and FitzRoy’s natural grace and charm could quickly dispel it, but it came from a deep reservoir he would never escape.

  The Beagle’s crew also grew bored and fractious during the long enforced delay. The ship was still anchored in Barnet Pool on Christmas Day, which brought Darwin some insight into the character of the English seaman.

  The whole of it has been given up to revelry, at present there is not a sober man in the ship: King is obliged to perform the duty of sentry, the last sentinel came staggering below declaring he would no longer stand on duty, whereupon he is now in irons…. Wherever they may be, they claim Christmas day for themselves, & this they exclusively give up to drunkedness—that sole & never failing pleasure to which a sailor always looks forward to.

  The longed-for break in the weather came the very next day, December 26, and the ship might have sailed except that most of the crew were either drunk or missing ashore. “The ship has been all day in state of anarchy,” wrote Darwin. A number of the drunkards were chained in the hold, while AWOL crew members were rounded up ashore.

  But the good weather held. The Beagle, under command of her master, Edward Chaffers, weighed anchors again at 11 A.M. on December 27. FitzRoy and Darwin celebrated the departure by lunching ashore in a tavern with Lieutenant Bartholomew Sulivan as the Beagle tacked out of Plymouth into the Channel. They ate mutton chops and drank champagne and joined the ship by boat outside the breakwater at 2 P.M. Immediately all sails were set and filled with a fair breeze. The Beagle scudded away down-Channel at 8 knots.

  Darwin, perhaps buoyed by the excitement of the long-awaited departure, and views from the deck of England’s green coastline fast slipping away off the starboard beam, felt fine through the afternoon and evening.

  The great voyage, of such unimagined consequence, was begun.

  PART THREE

  13

  As the Beagle rolled and pitched across the Bay of Biscay, and then turned south into the open Atlantic, Darwin discovered that he was one of those few and unlucky voyagers who suffer from a chronic seasickness that does not get better the longer one is at sea. It was to plague him for five years.

  “The misery is excessive & far exceeds what a person would suppose who had never been at sea more than a few days,” he wrote in his diary on December 29, when the Beagle was 380 miles from Plymouth.

  I found the only relief to be in a horizontal position…. I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking, little did I think with what fervour I should do so.—I can scarcely conceive any more miserable state, than when such dark & gloomy thoughts are haunting the mind as have to day pursued me.

  There was something else sickening him. As he lay in his swinging hammock fighting nausea, Darwin could not avoid hearing the lash and screaming of four seamen being flogged for drunkenness and disobedience on Christmas Day. FitzRoy noted the punishment in his captain’s log of December 28, 1831:

  John Bruce: 25 lashes for drunkenness, quarrelling and insolence.

  David Russel: Carpenter’s crew, with 34 lashes for breaking his leave and disobedience of orders.

  James Phipps: 44 lashes for breaking his leave, drunkenness and insolence.

  Elias Davis: 31 lashes for reported neglect of duty.

  Darwin was appalled. FitzRoy justified such punishment to him in the terms he would later write in his journal: “Hating, abhorring corporal punishment, I am nevertheless fully aware that there are too many coarse natures which cannot be restrained without it, (to the degree required on board a ship,) not to have a thorough conviction that it could only be dispensed with, by sacrificing a great deal of discipline and consequent efficiency.”

  In a time and culture when men could not break the rigid barriers of rank and social class, when reasoning with a crew could be taken for weakness, this was the standard naval practice: discipline through the threat of severe punishment, a fundamental that was respected equally by officers and seamen. FitzRoy was no Bligh, but he was a strict martinet of the old school, which at times could seem like much the same thing.

  Darwin’s sudden immediate proximity to FitzRoy—eating with him daily, often accompanying him ashore—revealed a character that fascinated him as much as any natural phenomenon he encountered on his voyage around the world. His diary jottings, letters home, and passages from his autobiography provide history with the clearest observations of the mercurial young captain. “FitzRoy’s character was a singular one,” Darwin wrote years later,

  with many very noble features; he was devoted to his duty, generous to a fault, bold, determined and indomitably energetic, and an ardent friend to all under his sway. He would undertake any sort of trouble to assist those whom he thought deserved assistance. He was a handsome man, strikingly like a gentleman with highly courteous manners…. FitzRoy’s temper was a most unfortunate one, and was shown not only by passion, but by fits of long-continued moroseness against those who had offended him. His temper was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame. The Junior officers when they relieved each other in the forenoon used to ask “whether much hot coffee had been served out this morning?” which meant how was the captain’s temper?

  In London, on the day he had first met FitzRoy, Darwin had written a letter to his sister Susan expressing his initial enthusiasm for his “beau ideal” of a captain. Writing home from Brazil, he had to qualify this.

  And now for the Captain, as I daresay you feel some interest in him. As far as I can judge, he is a very extraordinary person. I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson. I should not call him clever, yet I feel convinced nothing is too great or too high for him. His ascendancy over everybody is quite curious; the extent to which every officer and man feels the slightest praise or rebuke would have been before seeing him incomprehensible…. His candour and sincerity are to me unparalleled; and using his own words his “vanity and petulance” are nearly so. I have felt the effects of the latter…. His great fault as a companion is his austere silence produced from excessive thinking. His many good qualities are numerous: altogether he is the strongest marked character I ever fell in with.

  But FitzRoy was a very good friend, after his own fashion, to Darwin. He encouraged his naturalist activities, putting his crew and ship and the facilities of the Royal Navy at Darwin’s disposal. As the voyage wore on, Darwin’s mounting collection—boxes and barrels of plants and animals—were constantly shipped back to England, free of charge, by navy ships, under the direction of FitzRoy, with the blessing of the lords of the Admiralty.

  More particularly, aboard the Beagle, FitzRoy and Darwin assumed the sort of respectful friendship Darwin had enjoyed with his peers at Cambridge. They called each other, in the manner of the English upper classes, by their surnames. They ate together, they found in each othe
r a fellow scientist with whom to share findings and triumphs. FitzRoy was tireless in his efforts to make Darwin comfortable aboard the Beagle. With his own hands, the captain retied Darwin’s hammock during their first days at sea. When Darwin later mentioned this kindness in a letter home, his father wept at such solicitude. FitzRoy soon began referring to Darwin as the “ship’s philosopher”—since a naturalist was one who pursued the study of natural philosophy—and this quickly contracted to “Philos,” as Darwin was affectionately called by FitzRoy and the entire crew.

  This friendship with the captain was vital for Darwin, a supernumerary on a voyage that, in the long view, would be all about Darwin. But his singular position as a putative friend, someone who had been invited to express his views to the autocratic spring-wound twenty-six-year-old captain as an equal, would test that friendship to its breaking point.