To the Fuegians’ further frustration, the voyage home, which should have lasted no more than three or four days, took three weeks. The ship stopped off in the Falklands capital, Port Stanley, for five days; once it reached Tierra del Fuego, stops were made at various anchorages, gales delayed progress, and the Fuegians rightly felt the Englishmen were being insensitive to their now ardent desire to set foot on their own soil again.
The ship reached Woollya on November 2. Jemmy Button, “naked, and as wild-looking as ever,” recorded Captain Fell in his diary, immediately came alongside in his canoe and boarded the ship expecting gifts, as the Fuegians’ premier ambassador. What he got wasn’t enough to please him, and he went away angry. Captain Fell lacked his predecessor Captain Snow’s more sensitive touch. Fell also had the nine returning Fuegians searched again before leaving the ship. Two of them, Macalwense and Schwaiamugunjiz, or Squire Muggins as he was called, attacked Fell, though he pushed them off. The outraged Fuegians again flung down their blankets and boxes, tore off their white man’s clothes, climbed over the rail, and paddled away in waiting canoes. Fell later brought their belongings ashore, together with more clothes and gifts for Jemmy Button. The missionaries got their Fuegians back to work cutting wood for new buildings for the settlement ashore in Woollya. But unease and ill-feeling lingered.
On Sunday, November 6, four days after the ship’s arrival, the entire complement of the ship’s English crew, with the exception of the cook, Alfred Coles, rowed ashore for a church service in their small wooden building. About 300 Fuegians were camped on the beach around the building. As the voices inside rose in a hymn, Coles, out on the Allen Gardiner, saw the natives begin to move. A group of them ran to the ship’s boat and snatched the oars, carrying them away to a wigwam, and pushed the boat out into the water off the beach. The rest swarmed around the small building with clubs and spears. The doors were pushed open, and Coles heard the singing stop. He heard shouts and yells. He saw the Englishmen fight their way out of the building, to be clubbed to the ground and speared by the mob of natives. He saw August Petersen, one of the seamen, break away from the group and rush to the water. Garland Phillips ran after him. They splashed through the shallows after the drifting boat. Coles saw Tommy Button, Jemmy’s brother, hurl a stone that hit Phillips in the temple, dropping him into the water. Another stone hit Petersen. Coles watched them both drown. He saw Captain Fell and the remainder of the Englishmen, eight of them altogether, clubbed and speared to death on the beach.
Coles jumped into the ship’s dinghy and rowed across the harbor. He was pursued by native canoes but reached the shore ahead of them and disappeared into the woods.
Four months later, the American ship Nancy, Captain William Smyley, sailed into Woollya cove. It had been chartered by the Reverend Despard, who had remained behind in the Falklands and was worried about the nonappearance of the Allen Gardiner. The mission’s ship lay derelict at anchor. The Nancy hove alongside, hailing anyone aboard and getting silence for an answer. Soon, as always with any ship, the Nancy was surrounded by native canoes. From one of them, Alfred Coles climbed up the ship’s side to the deck. Jemmy Button climbed up from another canoe and went straight to the galley for food. While Jemmy was busy eating, Coles told his story to Smyley, who wrote it down as he spoke.
After a few days hiding out following the massacre, Coles had been taken in by the natives who remained friendly to him; their anger apparently dissipated. The women had looked after him. He spent four months with them in Woollya; the natives had even given him one of the murdered men’s guns to shoot geese with. He had gone aboard the Allen Gardiner a number of times to forage for anything useful, but the ship had been stripped of everything by the natives. He told Smyley that he believed Jemmy Button, angry at the poor gifts brought to him by the ship, had instigated the massacre, whipping up the animosity for the Englishmen still harbored by Squire Muggins and the others who had returned from the Falklands.
The years of capture, handouts, and humiliation, had finally brimmed over inside Jemmy Button. His admiration and real affection for Robert FitzRoy, who had raised him up to such vertiginous heights, allowed him to glimpse and touch what he could never be, and then cast him adrift to slide back down to his primordial station, had turned to the bitterest resentment and anger.
“The boys of the tribe,” Coles said to Smyley, “told me that Jemmy Button and the others went on board the Allen Gardiner the evening of the massacre and that Jemmy slept in the captain’s cabin.”
24
Robert FitzRoy read of the massacre in the British press in early May 1860. In statements provided at an official inquiry in the Falkland Islands, Jemmy Button denied any part in the massacre. He blamed the “Oens-men,” the bad Fuegians who had appeared at the scene of his every misfortune. He claimed he had not slept in the murdered captain’s berth. The accusations against him were hearsay, nothing was proved. FitzRoy would not have believed Jemmy capable of murder, or even of inciting the massacre, but he felt deeply the disgrace of his protégé. He despaired at the unfolding destinies of Jemmy Button and Fuegia Basket.
His own destiny had also veered far off its plotted course. In the years since his return in the Beagle, he had conspicuously failed to capitalize on that triumphant success. The recognition and the advancement he had once imagined would be the proper inheritance of his undoubted gifts and accomplishments had not materialized. Meanwhile, many close to him were seeing such hopes fulfilled: his own half-brother had become governor of Australia and been knighted for his efforts. Friends, fellow naval captains of his own age, were receiving promotions and knighthoods.
Since returning from New Zealand, he had tried to put politics and his failure as a governor behind him, and to reinvigorate his maritime career, something he still believed held prospects for him. But in the Admiralty, and in the high places where favor was bestowed upon the overflowing pool of peacetime candidates for every position, men winced unhappily when FitzRoy’s name was put forward. Such early promise, they said, shaking their heads, sucking in their breath. Such brilliant achievements as a surveyor and a roving scientist; what a rare seaman and navigator; what he did with the Beagle…. But the man was difficult, he acted too much off his own bat—more than that, he was “sensitive, severe, fanatical.” FitzRoy’s superiors clearly recognized his strengths but they didn’t know what to do with him. They saw what Darwin had seen: “some part of his brain wants mending.” They knew him too well: the clubby pack of lords, dukes, viscounts, and their cronies who peopled the Admiralty and the government knew FitzRoy’s family as well as their own—by one distant connection or another, he was related to half of them—and they could see he had not surmounted the dark strain in his blood that had driven his uncle to madness and suicide. They feared letting him loose, giving him his head. He was a most unfortunate case; they simply wanted him to go away.
Nowhere is it recorded what FitzRoy felt when he returned to England from New Zealand, recalled, a failure, which in his eyes equaled disgrace. Nothing to spell out the anguish of a brilliant but unbalanced man in agonized limbo through what should have been his best years, the way before him lost, the terrifying sense of insubstantiality, of unstoppable freefall—all the more so after his wife Mary died in 1853. She left him with four young children. Then in 1856, his eldest daughter, “a beautiful and charming girl,” according to Darwin, died. FitzRoy’s fragile hold on his sanity through this period would have been a heroic daily effort.
His fortune, which was evidently all too finite an inheritance, had taken big hits during his Beagle years, and again in New Zealand. He had spent willingly and unstintingly as he had thought necessary, mostly in the service of his government, with the faith that excellence of outcome would bring reimbursement, and ultimately the sort of position (for example, a governorship) that would provide its own rewards. It hadn’t worked out that way. For financial as well as emotional reasons, FitzRoy needed a job.
His search for a sui
table post only resulted in what were, for a man of his rank, seniority, and talents, a series of insignificant, demeaning, dead-end posts. In 1848 he was made superintendent of Woolwich Dockyard—the Beagle’s home port, her commissioning yard, a place he knew well, but hardly a choice move, going from governor to dockmaster. Just six months later, he was given command of a new ship. This was better, and the ship’s design made it a reasonably important commission. It was the 360-ton HMS Arrogant, the navy’s first steamship expressly designed to be driven by screw propeller, the outcome of a lengthy and disputatious association between the Admiralty and engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of the SS Great Britain, the world’s largest steamship when launched in 1843, and the first designed for a screw propeller. Brunel had tried to convince their hidebound lordships at the Admiralty that propellers were superior to side paddles. Eventually they came around to believing him, but denied him public recognition for his work and incurred his lasting disgust. FitzRoy, known from his earliest days as an enthusiastic embracer of the latest scientific advances wherever they might improve a ship’s performance—from the canned food he shipped aboard the Beagle to her lightning conduction apparatus—appeared the perfect choice. But the command and his ship took him no farther than a number of trips up- and down-Channel between Woolwich and Portsmouth dockyards for sea trials and repairs. The commission was unsatisfactory and he resigned.
For just a few months in 1853, as Turkey and Russia began to fight each other and the Crimean War loomed, FitzRoy obtained a position as private secretary to Lord Hardinge (an uncle by marriage), commander-in-chief of the British Army. This was a nepotistic handout, perhaps extended with the kindest of intentions in the months of grief following the death of his wife, but it was hardly the right job. FitzRoy must have asked for and found a galling absence of opportunity with the Admiralty, which had given his one-time junior lieutenant from the Beagle, Bartholomew Sulivan, a warship in which Sulivan fought a successful action against the Russians, for which he too was knighted.
FitzRoy was rescued by a humbler but more suitable appointment. The Board of Trade, acting on suggestions made at a conference of maritime powers in Brussels to devote more attention to the science of meteorology, began searching for a chief weatherman. The board approached the Royal Society, England’s most exclusive club of scientists—Darwin, Lyell, and FitzRoy were among its members—for a recommendation. The society named FitzRoy. He was made the government’s meteorological statist, given a small office and a staff of three, and directed, vaguely, to study the weather. This was the beginning of what is today the government’s Meteorological, or “Met,” Office.
There was no glory in such a post; perhaps that’s why FitzRoy tried to leave it in 1857, applying for the position of chief naval officer in the Board of Trade’s Maritime Department. But this was given to Sulivan, and FitzRoy went back to weather.
In truth, it suited him. The position was an obscure cubbyhole in the vast office of government. No one paid him much attention. He filed annual reports. He was left to get on with the rather nebulous job description of paying attention to the weather as it pertained to the shipping interests of Britain. And in doing so, FitzRoy discovered in himself an enthusiasm and aptitude for a line of work as ardent as Darwin’s pursuit of beetles.
He began by soliciting and collecting weather observations—wind force and direction, sea currents, atmospheric pressure, air and sea temperature—from captains of British merchant and naval ships. He collated this information and began plotting it visually on sea charts. He created “wind stars”—they looked like small-hubbed wheels with spokes of uneven length indicating the force and direction of prevailing winds—and stuck them, each shaped according to received information, in the middle of 10-degree squares of sea area on a chart. FitzRoy’s intention was to produce such self-evident weather charts for every month of the year for British coastal waters, and eventually for all the world’s oceans. The information given on such a chart would enable navigators to pilot their vessels along the most advantageous, and safest, routes for any season. It wasn’t a new idea. An almost identical weather chart system was already being developed in the United States by American naval lieutenant Matthew Maury, but no such scheme was underway in Britain and FitzRoy, recognizing Maury’s brilliant innovation, was eager to adapt it to British concerns.
More than most readers of daily newspapers (and he certainly did read what he once decried as “those fritterers of the mind”), FitzRoy noticed the constant stories of death and disaster faced by fishermen along Britain’s stormy, tide-swept, rocky coasts. Commercial fishing today, despite every modern aid to navigation and well-funded coast guards, is still arguably the world’s most dangerous industrial occupation. In the nineteenth century, the casualties were like the steady slaughter of war. FitzRoy believed many lives could be saved by more efficient weather forecasting. He was particularly intrigued by the predictive possibilities of barometer readings. “Comparisons and the judicious inferences drawn from them afford the means of foretelling wind and weather during the next following period,” he wrote in a report.
But only naval and large merchant ships were equipped with barometers. Small fishing vessels certainly didn’t carry them, and even ashore in seaside communities, if not on the walls of the odd natural-philosophizing parson, there were few barometers and fewer savants who knew how to read them. FitzRoy enlisted the help of the recently formed British and Scottish Meteorological Societies, the national Lifeboat Institution, and the funding of numerous philanthropic citizens to manufacture a type of barometer that quickly became known as a FitzRoy barometer. These were gothic miniweather stations, housed in tall, narrow, glassed-in frames, their reading tubes set against elaborately lettered calibrations, providing readings of temperature and humidity in addition to a reading of atmospheric pressure.*
FitzRoy sent these instruments out to fishing villages around the country, accompanied by a fifty-page instructional Barometer Manual. The manual became best known for its weather rhymes—ancient, time-honored doggerel passed down through generations of fishermen—which FitzRoy collected together for the first time:
A red sky in the morning is a sailor’s warning;
But a red sky at night is a sailor’s delight.
When rain comes before wind,
Halyards, sheets, and braces mind!
But when wind comes before rain,
Soon you may make sail again.
Several of these rhymes were specifically aimed at barometric readings.
When rise begins, after low,
Squalls expect and clear blow.
and,
Long foretold, long last;
Short notice, soon past.
The manual also contained time-proven weather lore based on simple observations.
A grey sky in the morning, fine weather; a high dawn (when the first light in the sky is some distance above the horizon), wind; a low dawn, fair weather.
A dark, gloomy blue sky is windy; but a light bright blue sky indicates fine weather.
A bright yellow sky at sunset presages wind; a pale yellow sky, wet.
Small, inky-looking clouds foretell rain; a light scud driving across heavy clouds presages wind and rain.
Soft-looking or delicate clouds foretell fine weather with moderate or light breezes; hard-edged, oily-looking clouds, wind.
Generally speaking natural, quiet, delicate tints or colours, with soft undefined forms of clouds, foretell fine weather; but gaudy colours or unusual lines, with hard definite outlines presage wind or rain.
FitzRoy was the first to disseminate and popularize such weather lore. Today’s modern sailors are increasingly glued to their satellite-enabled weather-fax machines, but some still know and learn these helpful rhymes, and the connection with older followers of the sea is one of the pleasures of their use.
It was many years before the popularizing of barometers and such weather lore affected the ingrained habits of fisher
men and others who lived by the sea, but a maritime disaster in the autumn of 1859 brought a sudden national imperative to FitzRoy’s efforts. On the night of October 25, the Royal Charter, an iron sailing clipper with an auxiliary steam engine, near the end of a long passage from Melbourne to Liverpool, was blown onto the rocky coast of Anglesey, off north Wales, by a hurricane. The ship’s entire complement of passengers and crew, over 400 men, women, and children, was lost. Sea disasters were not uncommon, but the ship was a large one and the number of lives lost, without a single person saved, appalled the public. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the first crash of a jumbo jet; the numbers, the totality of the casualties, were shocking. The hurricane’s approach was something that could only have been detected by barometer readings, and while hurricanes move with a suddenness that may have made any warning too late for the Royal Charter, safety from weather at sea instantly became a hot issue. It was discussed at that year’s meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, presided over by Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, the Prince Consort, who afterward continued discussions through two further meetings at Buckingham Palace. FitzRoy was prominent in these, and suddenly found himself well-positioned to push ahead with a new cause.
Around the coast of Britain he set up eighteen weather stations connected by telegraph to his office in London. Another six stations were established on the European coast between Portugal and Scandinavia. With the daily and hourly observations telegraphed to him, he drew charts that provided a visual synopsis of the existing and predicted weather for the sea areas around each of these twenty-four stations. FitzRoy called these “synoptic charts,” and so they are still called today. He was then able to transmit back to the weather stations forecasts for the next day. In tandem with this, he developed a visual warning system of cones that could be displayed in ports and harbors at the approach of bad weather. This information was useful well beyond maritime communities, and soon FitzRoy was sending his synoptic charts to the newspapers, which for the first time began printing daily weather forecasts.
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