Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  It was the last moment in history when the thicknesses of drawing and writing paper could be comfortably used to explain the mysteries of life on Earth.

  22

  The book—in three volumes: King’s, FitzRoy’s, and Darwin’s, with a fourth of appendixes; hardbound in dark blue-gray cloth—was published by Henry Colburn in the early summer of 1839. The full, ponderous title ran:

  NARRATIVE

  OF THE

  SURVEYING VOYAGES

  OF HIS MAJESTY’S SHIPS

  ADVENTURE AND BEAGLE

  BETWEEN

  THE YEARS 1826 AND 1836

  DESCRIBING THEIR

  EXAMINATION OF THE SOUTHERN SHORES

  OF

  SOUTH AMERICA

  AND

  THE BEAGLE’S CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE

  IN THREE VOLUMES

  Darwin’s Volume 3 was inauspiciously titled Journal and Remarks, 1832–1836. The volumes could be purchased separately, and Darwin’s fast became a best-seller, requiring Colburn to reprint it in August, this time giving it a new and grander title: JOURNAL OF RESEARCHES into the GEOLOGY and NATURAL HISTORY of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle Under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N. From 1832 to 1836. It was subsequently reprinted many times. Darwin revised it for an 1845 edition brought out by John Murray, Lyell’s publisher, and this became, for at least a century, the most widely published and reprinted version. In time it acquired a third, more lasting title, The Voyage of the Beagle. It remains a steady seller, one of the world’s great travel books.

  The rest was dull stuff, except to navigators or armchair sailors keen for the minutiae of the ships’ wearyingly repetitive movements on an exhaustive surveying mission. For modern sailors, King’s, Stokes’s, and FitzRoy’s descriptions of wind, wave, and anchorages hold great value as early navigational records, and as curiosities. And FitzRoy’s account of his dealings with the Fuegians has always made fascinating reading. But in 1839, as today, it was Darwin’s book that was bought and talked about. The other volumes were not then and have rarely since been reprinted. Complete sets of all four volumes were purchased by a few gentlemen, naval officers, travel enthusiasts, clubs and libraries, and after a quick thumb-through, the other three volumes were shelved away.

  Reviewers quickly singled out Darwin for praise: a “first-rate landscape-painter with a pen”; “a strong intellectual man and an acute and deep observer.” FitzRoy’s long-labored-over, dense account of seafaring was generally passed by with the briefest mention. Only his remarks on geology and biblical history drew much response, and this was unfavorable and withering: “On this subject the gallant captain has got quite beyond his depth….”

  Ironically, most of the general public, the God-fearing, church-going readers who held an unquestioning belief in the biblical account, would have agreed with FitzRoy. They would have been comforted by his interpretation of geology and anthropology, embraced such a scientific corroboration of the Holy Word. But the general public didn’t buy, read, or review such books. They read popular and sensational novels, mostly by installment in magazines, religious tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, and the Penny Cyclopaedia. The qualified opinions settling and hardening on both Darwin’s and FitzRoy’s efforts (Charles Lyell’s response to FitzRoy’s last chapter, “it beats all the other nonsense I ever read on the subject,” was typical) were those of a tiny, smugly enlightened minority, a nearly vaporous film floating on the upper surface of society. But they were the only opinions that counted. They determined the rank and importance of the authors.

  This was the moment when all FitzRoy’s talents, energies, ambitions, and accomplishments began to be swallowed up by what would increasingly become his singular place in history: as the man who took Charles Darwin around the world, who provided Darwin with the vehicle for his ideas—and in whose shadow he would forever remain a footnote.

  He could not have had any idea of the depth and extent of that shadow, but he felt eclipsed, and unappreciated. Darwin’s book got all the attention; it sold more, was reprinted, its author was talked about. FitzRoy’s book was ignored or, when noted, ridiculed.

  He did not have the temperament or the mental equilibrium to navigate through such a devastation.

  There is no record of FitzRoy’s activity for the next twenty-four months. He did not write, he did not seek another sea commission, he completed no work. Some men, recently married, new to father-hood, of independent means, might have enjoyed a period of rest after years of voyaging, followed by several years more of intense writing. FitzRoy did not. He had no inclination to idleness—he’d been driving himself relentlessly toward a very personal interpretation of excellence since entering the Royal Naval College at the age of twelve, twenty-two years earlier. Achievement, duty, a deep roving curiosity, and an equally deep but blinkered intelligence, characterized his nature. Relaxation was alien, even unhinging, to him. The two-year gap is conspicuous.

  In Chile, when reprimanded by the Admiralty for overstepping his orders, he had suffered a breakdown, “a morbid depression of spirits, & a loss of all decision and resolution,” severe enough to remove himself from command. He had been afraid then “that his mind was becoming deranged (being aware of his hereditary disposition).”

  That disposition, from his suicidal uncle on his mother’s side, was very real, giving him a bottomless inheritance of mercurial mood swings, depression, paranoia, and suspicion of slights, that left him no cushion to absorb life’s setbacks. With his big book finished, his conclusions tittered at, glory bestowed on his younger and vastly less accomplished friend, FitzRoy spun into two years of drowning blackness.

  He was rescued, again, by an uncle. In the summer of 1841, the Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne resigned, and a general election followed. Sir Robert Peel campaigned to bring the Tories back into power, and Lord Londonderry, Peel’s friend and FitzRoy’s uncle (elder brother of Viscount Castlereagh, FitzRoy’s uncle who had slashed his own throat), offered his nephew the candidature of a parliamentary seat for County Durham in place of the retiring Tory MP. Whether FitzRoy had sought or even considered such a position, he grabbed at this life buoy and decided to run.

  Durham was a two-seat constituency, Whig and Tory—or Liberal and Conservative as the parties were beginning to call themselves—and FitzRoy appeared to be a shoe-in. Londonderry was a local landowner and feudal loyalties still prevailed: Londonderry’s man would normally get his tenants’ votes.

  But a second Conservative candidate decided to run. Twenty-six-year-old William Sheppard wasn’t much of a threat to a Londonderry-backed nominee, and at first he and FitzRoy assumed a friendly, gentlemanly rivalry. Sheppard later wrote, in the effusive idiom of the day, that they spent time together “in unreserved intimacy.”

  Then a Londonderry tenant told somebody he’d been directed by his landlord to vote for FitzRoy, and the situation turned ungentlemanly. FitzRoy heatedly denied any knowledge of such an attempt at persuasion, but Sheppard didn’t believe him. Rather than fight FitzRoy over their seat about this, Sheppard withdrew his candidacy, but he let it be known why. FitzRoy was infuriated, and in a speech in Durham, he called Sheppard’s behavior “disgraceful…an event unparalleled in the annals of electioneering.”

  Acrimonious letters flew back and forth between the two antagonists. Both soon claimed that their honor had been impugned. They nominated seconds and demanded satisfaction. Dueling days were almost over, but not quite among the aristocracy: Lord Cardigan had dueled with and wounded an opponent within the last year, and been acquitted of any crime. The Duke of Wellington had fought a duel twelve years earlier. And a demand for satisfaction from the hot-headed FitzRoy had to be taken seriously: his melancholic uncle, Viscount Castlereagh, had fought two duels before ultimately dispatching himself. The notion that political bickering would evolve into a meeting at dawn with pistols was unlikely, but the language exchanged, and form, demanded procedure along certain lines.

  The s
econds met and discussed terms, which mainly revolved around the wording of conciliatory letters of clarification of what had been said and meant that would be agreeable to both principles. Accord was almost reached, but then fell apart. FitzRoy was too touchy, too outraged, and in Sheppard he met his match for sensitivity and sense of persecution. Sheppard denounced him as “a liar and a slanderer…a coward and a knave.” Nothing was resolved. FitzRoy was elected. Londonderry advised him to let the matter go, and he did. There it rested until August 25, when FitzRoy came out of a gentleman’s club in the Mall and found Sheppard waiting for him with a whip.

  “Captain FitzRoy!” shouted the aggrieved loser. “I will not strike you. But consider yourself horsewhipped!”

  FitzRoy attacked Sheppard immediately with his umbrella. The umbrella dropped to the pavement, and the two men exchanged punches. Sheppard fell, and a friend who had accompanied him yelled: “Don’t strike him, Captain FitzRoy, now he’s down!” And FitzRoy stepped back.

  Letters to the press followed, from each man expressing his outrage and attempting to justify his action. Colonel Pringle Taylor, who had been Sheppard’s second, wrote a letter referring to Captain FitzRoy’s “lost station as a gentleman.” Both men published sixpenny pamphlets explaining their versions of the affair: The Conduct of Captain Robert FitzRoy R.N. in reference to the Electors of Durham and the Laws of Honour, exposed by William Sheppard Esquire; and Captain FitzRoy’s Statement re Collision between William Sheppard and the Author.

  The episode was small beer, except to Sheppard and FitzRoy. It was soon forgotten, and FitzRoy entered into his life as a member of Parliament. He was competent. He spoke on colonial matters, naval armament, and the building of breakwaters. He took an interest in matters that tapped into his ardent Christian wish to uplift those less fortunate than himself—earlier acted out on the Fuegians—such as the provisions of the Poor Law, which attempted to provide for the destitute. He proposed a bill to require and regulate the examination of seamen wishing to become masters or chief mates aboard merchant vessels, making certificates, or masters and mates “tickets” as they are known today, compulsory (eventually made law by the Mercantile Marine Act of 1850). He was made an Elder of Trinity House, the organization responsible for the building and maintenance of Britain’s lighthouses, buoys, and aids to navigation. He was appointed Acting Conservator of the River Mersey. But FitzRoy didn’t enter Parliament to pass his days in sleepy if honorable legislation. He saw it as a stepping stone to some greater glory, something that would use his talents and experience, rather than his lineage. The apparently tailor-made opportunity appeared just a year after his election.

  In 1842, Archduke Frederick of Austria brought his warship to Plymouth for repairs, and FitzRoy, still a naval officer, was directed by the Admiralty to accompany the Archduke on a two-and-a-half-month-long tour of England, which included naval inspections of Woolwich Dockyard and Arsenal. The Times covered this visit, and within a few months FitzRoy’s profile grew statesmanlike. So when Royal Navy Captain Hobson, the first Lieutenant Governor of New Zealand, died of a stroke that same year, FitzRoy suddenly appeared an obvious replacement. He had been to New Zealand—no ordinary thing in 1842. He had taken an active interest in colonial affairs in Parliament. It was felt by some that he had never been properly rewarded for his services to the Crown as a navigator and surveyor. The secretary of the Church Missionary Society, who had close ties to the Colonial Office, was still Dandeson Coates, who in 1830 had helped FitzRoy to secure a place for his three Fuegians at Walthamstow and was later the primary contributor of the goods (those tea services and beaver hats) they had taken back to Tierra del Fuego with them. Coates’s approval of FitzRoy carried weight in the Colonial Office. FitzRoy’s experience with difficult natives was well known and exemplary. And finally, his class and aristocratic background were most suitable. He was appointed the new governor of New Zealand, ending his career as a member of Parliament.

  The main “situation” to be dealt with in New Zealand was the perennial constant of every nineteenth-century colony: the relationship between the white colonizers and the natives. New Zealand’s Maoris were confirmed cannibals and ferocious fighters, and foreign powers had been hesitant to take them on, but the abundant sealing and whaling grounds around the two islands had made them a desirable possession. The arrival of a French Catholic mission in New Zealand at nearly the same time as a wave of British immigrants had finally prompted the British government to act, securing the country for itself. It declared that the Australian colony of New South Wales was extended to include as much of New Zealand as could be purchased from the Maoris. The government didn’t want to subdue the natives—apart from any other reason, it didn’t have the troops—and this ruling recognized the independence of the Maoris. Captain Hobson had been sent to persuade them to accept British sovereignty. His main inducement was to offer them the laws and protection of the white government against the lawlessness and land theft of the whites. Matters were naturally delicate. To protect the Maoris—who had been given “all the rights and privileges of British subjects”—Hobson appointed a land commissioner to review the agreements of all land purchases made between Maoris and the immigrants and their agents. As shiploads of British settlers began arriving in Cook’s Strait, they faced delays taking possession of their properties in the new settlements of Wellington, Nelson, and New Plymouth. The local government was caught between the inevitably conflicting interests of the natives and the newcomers. Relations between whites, natives, and government had already deteriorated by the time of Hobson’s death.

  FitzRoy, his wife, and now three small children, sailed from England in July 1843. This voyage—down the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, and eastward halfway across the world skirting the northern edge of the Roaring Forties—was hardly yet routine or safe. It was five and a half months before they reached Auckland, where Hobson had set up the government’s seat of office. While they were at sea, a property dispute over land in the Wairau Valley southeast of Nelson between an inexperienced magistrate, a rabble of white immigrants, and two Maori chiefs turned into a skirmish. The Maoris prevailed, most of the whites ran away, and the situation might have subsided had the Maoris not tomahawked to death their nineteen white prisoners.

  The FitzRoys reached Auckland in December 1843. They stepped ashore to meet a cheerful welcoming committee from the “native department,” local officials, soldiers, and a small band with two drummer boys.

  “I have come among you to do all the good I can,” announced FitzRoy. The band began to play, marching His Excellency and family to Government House.

  Mary FitzRoy wrote home to FitzRoy’s sister, Fanny Rice-Trevor in England, that they had been met by “a respectable show of ladies.” The challenge of the new appointment invigorated FitzRoy. Robert, she wrote, was up every morning at 5: “he looks very well and is as cheerful as possible.” The governor’s house, recently built, unfinished, and suffering months of disuse, was primitive after London, but Mrs. FitzRoy did her best with it.

  We are to have two little dinner parties this week, but except in a small way there can be no society when people are so scattered and have no carriages: the nearest family live at a great distance, and except them I hear of nobody to associate with of the better kind, but among the subordinates there are some pleasing and good people…. The natives are certainly a most intelligent, interesting race—many very well dressed in European clothing have been with us at different meals and behaved perfectly…. They appear to understand every measure of govt. thoroughly.

  Presumably, her husband’s opinion of the natives agreed with her own. The Maoris were definitely a cut above the Fuegians, though both Darwin and FitzRoy had agreed in 1835, fresh from Tahiti, that they did not measure up to the Tahitians in grace or intelligence. But by 1843, many Maoris had been accustomed to living among and in tandem with whites for many years, and the English found them, on the whole, amenable neighbors. Syms Covington’s
1835 description of New Zealand settlements would have described Auckland in 1843. “Here are a great many English and Church Missionaries. Chapel with organ and many well built houses besides the Native or Indian huts which are built of rushes etc.”

  Once the house was tidied and the two little dinner parties were over, FitzRoy sailed aboard the naval frigate North Star for Nelson, to clear up the still smoldering aftermath of the Wairau massacre. He made a hash of it.

  In Nelson, he spoke with the local magistrates. Then he traveled with a small group of whites—the magistrates, officials, missionaries, settlers—to a pas, or fortified village, to meet with the two Maori chiefs who had killed the nineteen whites. He arrived on a Sunday. One of the chiefs, Te Rauperaha, had recently converted to Christianity, and FitzRoy attended a church service at the pas.

  The official meeting between FitzRoy and the chiefs, attended by the whites and 500 Maoris, was held the next day. FitzRoy had prepared some opening remarks:

  [On first hearing of the massacre] I was exceedingly angry; my heart was very dark, and my mind was filled with gloom. My first thought was to revenge the death of…the paheka [white men]…and for that purpose to bring many ships of war, sailing vessels, and vessels moved by fire, with many soldiers; and had I done so, you would have been sacrificed and your pas destroyed. But when I considered, I saw that the paheka had, in the first instance, been very much to blame; and I determined to come down and enquire into all the circumstances, and see who was really in the wrong. I…have heard the white man’s story; now I have come here—tell me your story, the native’s story, that I may judge between them.