Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  He sent his specimens off to the experts who could identify them, determine whether he had found new species, give them their official Latin names. Most of the early excitement was naturally generated by the big fossilized bones of the extinct creature Darwin had dug up on the east coast of Patagonia, the Megatherium—or was it a Scelidotherium, or a Toxodon, or all three? Here was something tangible to wonder at, obviously destined for the museums already clamoring for them. The smaller stuff—the Galapagos birds with their varying sizes of beaks, the different shells of the tortoises—were of subtler interest, and it would be some time before Darwin began to cogitate on just why they varied.

  He had a book to write. Late in the voyage, while FitzRoy was beginning to prepare and collate his own journals for publication, he asked Darwin if he could read some of what he had been writing in his journals. FitzRoy thought “Philos’s” observations good enough to incorporate into the long narrative of the Beagle’s two voyages he was planning to publish. Initially, both Darwin and FitzRoy saw this contribution as sections slipped into the larger work, but later the size and readability of Darwin’s diary led them both to believe it could form a distinct volume on the natural history of the countries the ship had visited. Out at sea, at the time of FitzRoy’s suggestion, Darwin was flattered, excited by the idea of another book to write (in addition to the book on the geology of the counties visited, which he had first conceived early in the voyage at the Cape Verde Islands). But by late 1836, surrounded by overflowing crates of specimens in Cambridge, his head filled with a kaleidescope of images and ideas, such a book had become a mounting imperative to him. Threads and shapes and anomalies of creation were coursing through Darwin’s brain, hot-wiring his synapses, and he felt an urgent need to make sense of it all.

  Such a book would also, he knew from the attention he was getting, put him on the map in the scientific community. This was what he wanted now, to take his place, as Sedgwick had suggested, among the leading scientists of the day, men like Lyell, whom Darwin respected and admired hugely, who influenced the thinking of the civilized world. He wanted to be one of them. A book about his voyage would do it.

  Darwin began writing it in Cambridge in January 1837. In March, with most of his collection dispersed to the experts for identification, he moved back to London, renting rooms in Great Marlborough Street for himself and Covington who was still working as his general assistant. There he continued work on his book. It closely followed the daily journal he had kept throughout the voyage, on land and sea.

  FitzRoy was at least as busy. After his marriage, he and his wife settled into domestic life in London, and Mary was soon pregnant.

  FitzRoy returned to accolades rare for a naval officer in peacetime. He was publically thanked in Parliament. The Royal Geographic Society presented him with their gold medal. The appreciation of the Admiralty—for him more important than any honor—was deep. The quality of his work as a marine surveyor was immediately evident. It was so thorough and accurate that the resulting charts were used for more than a century.

  In aristocratic, social, and scientific circles, FitzRoy was famous—much more so than Darwin, whose renown was narrowly confined to the community of academics and naturalists. On his return to London FitzRoy was much sought after: a dashing, witty, charming officer, a gentleman, seaman, and scientist of extraordinary accomplishments, with equally extraordinary tales to tell. More than anything, he had sailed around the world, and the neat geometry of this feat provided the shape and allure to all he had done. He was England’s nineteenth-century astronaut returned to Earth. Everyone wanted to meet and talk with Captain Robert FitzRoy.

  When his work on his surveys and charts was completed, FitzRoy didn’t seek another sailing commission. Despite the inroads he had made in his personal fortune he was still financially independent, and with Mary pregnant and his own book of the voyage to write, he had more than enough to keep him at home.

  The narrative he had long planned to publish consisted of two main parts. A first volume would cover the voyages of the Adventure and the Beagle during the years 1826–1830 (with Pringle Stokes and FitzRoy as successive captains of the Beagle), when both ships had been under the overall command of Captain Phillip Parker King; a second volume for the Beagle’s five-year voyage, from 1831 to 1836. Volume One was to be authored by Captain King, but as he had moved to Australia, the production of this fell entirely to FitzRoy, who had to put together and edit the first book from his own, Stokes’s, and King’s thick pile of notes and logs.

  Volume Two, FitzRoy’s own dense day-by-day account of the second voyage, was enormous, if not quite epic. With lengthy essays on the state of native peoples, descriptions of coastlines, weather, sea conditions, shiphandling, adventures ashore, and, not least, the repatriation of the Fuegians, it would run to 695 pages and a quarter of a million words when completed. Multiple appendixes covered 350 pages in a separate volume. Darwin’s book would form a third volume, but apart from that it was all FitzRoy’s to do. He began early in 1837.

  It must have seemed to him at first an enjoyable task: to stay at home with his wife and coming child, to voyage daily no farther than from bedroom to study. To suffer no setbacks from storms but rather to sit in a peaceful room in England and view the weather from the dry side of a windowpane—to a seaman such a secure berth holds an intense appreciation. To be free of the bedevilment of hostile natives. To light a fire, trim a wick, and spread around him at his desk the notebooks, logbooks, maps, and drawings from which he could select and produce a coherent account; to draw up a good chair, dip a smooth nib into a still inkwell, and begin.

  He was swamped. Deciphering the handwritten logs of two other men, King and Stokes, going over their every word, checking each estimation of time or distance for mistakes or inconsistencies—it would be their accounts but his name would testify to it all—proved the most serious drudgery. This was not writing, not the creative effort that returns some glow of satisfaction for long hours in a chair.

  He dined out, spent time with Mary and his new daughter, took walks—from his house in Onslow Square, which faced a garden, it was a ten-minute stroll to the Royal Geographic Society, or Hyde Park, a short cab ride from Admiralty House, Whitehall, Mayfair, or his club in St. James—but always the enormity of the work to be done gnawed in his mind and pulled him back to his study. It pulled him out of sleep with a jolt in the predawn hours, and it kept him bent over his desk late into the night. The two volumes, and a third comprised of essays and appendixes, amounted to 1,650 pages and over half a million words (six times the size of this book), and none of it could be done by anybody else. He still had his servant from the Beagle, Fuller, whom he’d recruited to be his clerk after Hellyer’s death, to assist him, to run errands, to help arrange for the engravings of plates for illustrations, but no assistant or clerk could check what only FitzRoy knew. The work pulled FitzRoy’s high tension wires tighter.

  He and Darwin saw each other rarely after the voyage. Even when both were living in London, they seemed to grow farther apart.

  I saw FitzRoy only occasionally after our return home [Darwin wrote many years later], for I was always afraid of unintentionally offending him, and did so once, almost beyond mutual reconciliation.

  In the spring of 1837, Darwin came to tea with the FitzRoys. “So very beautiful & religious a lady,” he thought Mrs. FitzRoy. But the visit was probably less for social reasons than to confer about specimens both had taken from the Galapagos Islands: Darwin needed FitzRoy’s help to identify his birds.

  It was not a happy reunion. Darwin came away bristling over FitzRoy’s ill humor, firing off several letters about his former messmate.

  The Captain is going on very well [he wrote to his sister],—that is for a man, who has the most consummate skill in looking at everything & every body in a perverted manner.

  And he wrote to Charles Lyell, with whom he had now become close friends.

  I never cease wondering at his charact
er, so full of good & generous traits but spoiled by such an unlucky temper.—Some part of his brain wants mending: nothing else will account for his manner of viewing things.

  Nevertheless, FitzRoy gave him what he asked for.

  Darwin had sent his bird, mammal, reptile, and insect specimens to the London Zoological Society for identification. One of its fellows, John Gould, undertook the classification of his birds. Gould was a widely respected ornithologist and taxonomist, so Darwin had to believe what Gould told him about his Galapagos collection: three mockingbirds Darwin had collected from three different islands were not variations of South American birds but three new and distinct species. A number of birds Darwin had labeled variously as finches, wrens, and blackbirds, were all finches, Gould claimed, of a new group unknown beyond the Galapagos Islands. Their very different beaks made them finches of different species, and Gould believed that, like the mockingbirds, each species came from a different island.

  Or so it appeared, but here Darwin’s collecting had been uncharacteristically clumsy. He had commingled specimens from several islands, never imagining that different but identical islands, not far apart, might produce different birds. Gould needed more Galapagos finches, properly labeled. Darwin could hardly return to the Pacific, so he had approached FitzRoy to borrow birds the captain, his assistant Fuller, and various seamen had clubbed and taken away from the islands, which FitzRoy had already presented to the British Museum. Despite their quarrel over tea, FitzRoy had two sets of bird skins sent to Darwin. Syms Covington had his own four birds from the Galapagos. All these were examined by Darwin and Gould and compared with Darwin’s lists and catalogs, in an effort to confirm what Gould claimed: different islands, different species.

  One genus; different species. The finches with varying beaks that Darwin found at the Galapagos Islands. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy)

  Another fellow from the Royal Zoological Society, Thomas Bell, who had been identifying Darwin’s reptiles, came back with a parallel conclusion: each island of the Galapagos chain had produced its own distinct species of iguana lizard.

  Darwin received this news in the spring of 1837 while he was deep in the writing of his book about the voyage. It concurred with a remark the islands’ vice governor had made to him while he was there eighteen months earlier, something about the markings on the shells of the islands’ tortoises. He hadn’t taken much notice at the time, but now the memory of it pealed through his mind. He put it all together in his chapter on the Galapagos Islands.

  By far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago [is] that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings. My attention was first called to this fact by the Vice-Governor, Mr Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from two of the islands. I never dreamed that islands, about 50 or 60 miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted.

  On March 14, while Darwin was preoccupied with identifying his finches, he attended a lecture given by Gould at the Zoological Society, on the subject of the South American Rheas, or ostriches, specimens of which Darwin had brought back and presented to the society. In northern Patagonia, ostriches were common. The gauchos who ate them had told Darwin of a similar but much rarer bird they called the Avestruz petiso (“little ostrich”). Darwin had looked for this bird with no success, until farther south, at Port Desire in January 1834, he was eating what he thought was an ostrich, shot by one of the Beagle’s company, when he noticed it was smaller. The meal was over and the bird fully consumed by the time Darwin realized it was an Avestruz petiso. But rooting through the spat-out bones, skin, feathers, and leftovers, he came up with “a very nearly perfect specimen” that was later exhibited at the Zoological Society. But it was not the rarity he had been led to believe.

  Among the Patagonian Indians in the Strait of Magellan, we found a half Indian, who had lived some years with the tribe, but had been born in the northern provinces. I asked him if he had ever heard of the Avestruz Petise? He answered by saying, “Why, there are none others in these southern countries.”

  Gould did Darwin the honor of naming the smaller, southerly ostrich Rhea darwinii, after the man who had eaten it. The point of his lecture was that the Rhea darwinii was just as common in southern Patagonia as the bigger bird was farther north, yet there were differences enough between the two to classify them as different species. Different places, different birds, though of essentially the same feather. Just like the finches.

  Why, Darwin began to wonder, had the creator bothered with such subtle differences? Why not make one species of finch and let it suffice for one small group of islands? Why make a baker’s dozen? Why two ostriches where one would do?

  A little over a year earlier, on a sunny afternoon in January 1836, while out hunting kangaroo in New South Wales, Australia, such questions hadn’t troubled him.

  I had been lying on a sunny bank & was reflecting on the strange character of the Animals of this country as compared with the rest of the World. An unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason, might exclaim “Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work; their object however has been the same & certainly the end in each case is complete.”—Whilst thus thinking, I observed the conical pitfall of a Lion-ant:—A fly fell in & immediately disappeared; then came a large but unwary Ant; his struggles to escape being very violent, the little jets of sand…were promptly directed against him. His fate however was better than that of the poor fly’s:—Without a doubt this predæcious Larva belongs to the same genus, but to a different species from the European one. Now what would the Disbeliever say to this? Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple & yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought so.—The one hand has surely worked throughout the universe. A Geologist perhaps would suggest, that the periods of Creation have been distinct & remote the one from the other; that the Creator rested in his labor.

  Darwin did not, in January 1836, question why the creator had bothered to make two different versions of the same insect. Like most nineteenth-century scientists and thinkers, he did not question that a creator had been behind it all. Time, he suggested, like a good Lyellian geologist, had simply made the creator rethink his model. It didn’t occur to Darwin then that the place, which after all looked not unlike England, might have something to do with it.

  Fourteen months later, however, he was questioning the creator’s efforts. Nevertheless he transcribed this diary entry almost exactly into the book he was writing—his questions had not yet led him to a solid conclusion. (By 1845, when the second, revised, edition of his book was published, that conclusion had come, and Darwin relegated this incident with the lion ant to a footnote, shorn entirely of his ruminations about what a disbeliever might think of the creator’s scheme of things. By then he had become, in his own words, “an unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason.”)

  Darwin’s reasoning brought him to an inescapable idea: perhaps the creator had not created, at the beginning of time—on day five according to the Book of Genesis—all those different finches and placed them on the Galapagos. It seemed more reasonable that the islands might have been populated by South American birds, which, in time, could have adapted to the peculiarities and food sources on each island, until they became so distinctly, consistently different that they had become a new species. The same was possible with the South American ostriches. One species might have evolved from another.

  It wasn’t a new idea, and certainly not to Darwin: his own grandfather had been an evolutionist. The Frenchman Lamarck had suggested the same thing almost forty years earlier,
but in far more controversial terms: that humans had evolved from apes. Lamarck believed each plant, each animal, contained a “nervous fluid” that enabled it to generate in new directions, adapting to its local environment. The ancestors of giraffes, he suggested, extended their necks over time by stretching to eat the leaves on overhead trees, causing their nervous fluid to flow into their necks which, over successive generations, grew longer. Apes might similarly have dropped to the ground from trees and found that walking or running upright was the more efficient posture.

  However clever or reasonable an idea this might have seemed, it was religious heresy. It suggested a godless world propelled by ungoverned, earthly forces. Such an anarchy of creation would produce a nightmare world of incessant haphazard mutation, of gargoyle monsters. And that could not be so, people believed, for the order and beauty of the world was everywhere apparent.

  But Darwin saw a middle way: the transforming of one species into another, a process guided by nature, not by God, whereby a plant or animal gradually selected the physical peculiarities best adapted to its environment.

  Inescapably with this came the corollary that Adam and Eve were not the semi-angels created by God in the Garden of Eden, but animals descended from other animals, most closely and recently from monkeys. Nothing encouraged this notion more than Darwin’s acquaintance with Fuegians. “Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world,” he had written in his voyaging diary.

  He had found it difficult to believe that he and they were one species. Bent, hulking, primitive, living in shelters far less complex than a bird’s nest, the Fuegians had seemed to provide a picture of Man at the dawn of his transformation from ape, perhaps closer to the root they had sprung from than to the apotheosis represented by European man. At the Zoological Society in London he had observed an orangutan named Jenny throwing a tantrum when her keeper would not give her an apple.