Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  He left the hall and made his way to the train station. FitzRoy felt old, passed by. Life around him appeared (apart from the late spread of the railway) much the same as it always had: hansom cabs still clip-clopped down Piccadilly, men still slumbered in their clubs, church congregations were fuller than ever, tweedy hunting parties still flushed game and shot it with fine guns, clipper ships labored their way to Ceylon and home again full of tea, and fashions changed only in small and sensible increments (hoops of baleen were replacing layers of crinoline beneath ladies’ dresses, which made life more pleasant for everyone). The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a testament to Britain’s indisputable dominance over the earth. But FitzRoy felt a dark shift in the world. He was a scientist; all his life he had believed in science. To him, as once for Darwin, it revealed in every aspect of its design the sure indication of an all-knowing creator. But now science was marching in directions he could no longer follow, and it left him unmoored.

  He went back to his weather work. In 1862, Longmans published his Weather Book, 440 pages of FitzRoy’s ideas and conclusions about meteorology, and his recurring mantra: “It should always be remembered that the state of the air foretells coming weather, rather than indicates weather that is present.” It contained a reference to the failure of “a very young commander” to read the warning signs of the approach of a pampero storm off the coast of South America, which resulted in the loss overboard of two men. Also an account of “the writer’s” actions as a passenger aboard a vessel on a “very tediously slow” passage to England from New Zealand in 1846 (his disgraced trip home after being recalled as governor), when, becalmed off a “savage” shore, FitzRoy’s own barometers told him of an approaching storm. The ship’s captain didn’t believe him, so FitzRoy, with the help of several officers, let go a second anchor, veered cable, and waited. A few hours later, violent winds came abruptly out of the night. “Had that ship been taken unprepared, not a soul would have been saved.” A second edition of the Weather Book was published in 1863, and Longmans’ records show that FitzRoy was paid £200 for the copyright.

  But he could not foretell the change of the wind that now turned against him. Once the novelty of his daily forecasts passed, the mistakes in his “prophesies” were thrown back at him. His efforts began to be ridiculed. Even the Times, which ran his daily forecasts, poked fun at him.

  The public has not failed to notice, with interest, and, as we much fear, with some wicked amusement, that we now undertake every morning to prophesy the weather for the two next days to come. While disclaiming all credit for the occasional success, we must however demand to be held free of any responsibility for the too common failures which attend these prognostications. During the last week Nature seems to have taken special pleasure in confounding the conjectures of science.

  He suffered these criticisms and jokes while continuing to do his best, but on June 18, 1864, the Times discontinued his forecasts. On the day of his last published forecast, the newspaper attacked its own sacked contributor:

  “Whatever,” says [a correspondent], “may be the progress of the sciences, never will observers who are trustworthy and careful of their reputations venture to foretell the state of the weather.” Admiral FitzRoy has still to convince the public, and at his task he labours yearly with the most praiseworthy assiduity!…There can be no doubt that when Admiral FitzRoy telegraphs, something or other is pretty sure to happen.

  And with that malicious ridicule, the Times fired him.

  FitzRoy went home and fell into “a severe attack of prostration of strength, threatening paralysis,” his wife Maria wrote to a friend. She began consulting doctors “with regard to the soundness of his poor mind.”

  Soon afterward, they moved for his health from Onslow Square in South Kensington to Upper Norwood, just south of London, between Lambeth and Croyden, on the edge of the North Downs: only nine and a half miles from Darwin at Downe. FitzRoy continued working intermittently, as his health permitted, at the Meteorological Office, traveling into town by train.

  His handwriting, in letters to friends, now grew very large.

  In the spring of 1865, his condition deteriorated. Maria FitzRoy wrote an account of this time.

  Friday, April 21st, in bed all day very ill…Sunday—up, weak and ill, unable to go out, but came downstairs, asked for his bible and prayer book, while we went to church…. Monday 24th, still very weak, able to take a short drive with Ad’l Cary which did him good, and then sat out with me in the garden while the girls played at croquet.

  Tuesday 25th. Much better. Would go to London—did no business at his office, came back in the afternoon early…. Evening played at whist which he seemed to like…

  Thursday 27th, a hot day, he started directly after breakfast for London…came back just after 12 very tired out, and lay down to rest, came down to luncheon…. In the evening he seemed quiet and happy, talking tranquilly with me alone, and seemed to have made up his mind to stay here quietly and really take care of himself. Just before going to bed he received a letter from Mr Tremlett inviting him and myself to come and stay with him from Saturday till Monday to see the last of Capt. Maury [FitzRoy’s American naval counterpart at developing weather charts]. This note seemed completely to upset him, between desire to comply with his request and his just expressed wish of remaining quiet. Of course he did not sleep well that night; the only advice I gave him was to do that which would give his mind the greatest ease.

  On Friday morning he went to London to his office, came back again relieved at having written and refused the invitation, so he told me. And after luncheon he went to his room to write and called me urgently to come to him…. I found him extremely distressed at the quantity of unanswered notes and invitations to public dinner which ought to have been answered long ago. I comforted him and helped him to answer two or three most pressing.

  Saturday morning after breakfast he came to me saying he had got a strong desire to see Maury again; I told him he had better gratify it if he had; he said he was totally incapable of exertion and could only lie down and rest and asked me to make him comfortable, which I did. After luncheon he felt somewhat better, and set out to take a walk with the two eldest girls while I went for a drive…. When I came home I found that he had left them, and gone to London, and did not return till nearly 8 o’clock, worn out by fatigue and excitement and in a worse state of nervous restlessness than I had seen him since we left London [for Upper Norwood]. He seemed totally unable to collect his ideas or thoughts, or give any coherent answer, or make any coherent remark. After dinner he recovered a little….

  I was in bed when he came to bed; he came round to the side where I was, asked me if I was comfortable, kissed me, wished me good night, and then got into bed. It was just 12 o’clock. I was soon asleep….

  …in the morning I said I hoped he had slept better, as he had been so very quiet. He said he had slept he believed, but not refreshingly…. Just then it struck six. From 6 to 7 neither of us spoke, being both half asleep I believe. Soon after the clock struck 7 he asked if the maid was not late in calling us. I said it was Sunday, and she generally was later, as there was no hurry for breakfast on account of the train at 10 o’clock as there was on other days. The maid called us at ½ past 7. He got out of bed before I did, I can’t tell exactly what time, but it must have been about ¼ to eight. He got up before I did and went to his dressing room kissing Laura as he passed through her little room.

  In his dressing room a little before eight o’clock that Sunday morning, April 30, 1865, history—on his mother’s side—and Darwinism, finally caught up with him. FitzRoy picked up his razor and cut his throat.

  EPILOGUE

  Late in 1863, two years before FitzRoy’s death, Reverend Whait Stirling, the new superintendent of the Falkland Islands mission, sailed in the mission’s ship Allen Gardiner to Tierra del Fuego. Since the massacre in 1859, relations had cooled between the missionaries and the natives, who remained fearful of some official
action or punishment. But this never came, and the missionaries’ hopes remained intact. They went looking for a new crop of young Fuegians to convert.

  Thomas Bridges, the adopted son of Reverend Despard, creator of the Yamana-English dictionary, accompanied Stirling on that trip, acting as his translator. He learned from the Fuegians that Jemmy Button had died that year in an epidemic that raged through Tierra del Fuego.

  The missionaries and the natives reestablished a connection, and eventually much friendlier relations. Over the next few years, at least fifty Yamanas visited Keppel Island in the Falklands. Stirling took four of them, including one of Jemmy Button’s sons, Three boys, to England. There, two of them achieved the sort of independence unimagined by FitzRoy’s protégés, traveling around Britain by railway, sometimes alone, to speak at church meetings. They remained in England a year, a successful public relations visit for the missionary society, but Threeboys and another Fuegian boy, Uroopa, both died of illness on their return voyage home.

  In 1867, Reverend Stirling and Thomas Bridges established, at last, a mission beachhead in Tierra del Fuego, at Ushuaia on the north shore of the Beagle Channel, opposite the Murray Narrows. There, among a group of visiting natives in 1873, Bridges met Fuegia Basket, then in her midfifties. Bridges (his son Lucas recorded in Uttermost Part of the Earth) found her “short, thickset and with many teeth missing from a mouth that was large even for a Fuegian.” She evidently retained some of her once considerable charm, for she was accompanied by her current husband, an eighteen-year-old boy. She remembered some English: “knife,” “fork,” “little boy, little gal,” but not enough for conversation. Bridges talked with her in Yamana and heard that her first husband, York Minster, had long ago been killed in retaliation for his murder of another man.

  Ten years later, in February 1883, Bridges met her again, for the last time, in the western part of Tierra del Fuego. Fuegia was “nearing her end…in a very weak condition and an unhappy state of mind.” Her young husband was gone, but “she had two brothers with children of their own [and] would lack for nothing that their circumstances could provide.” Bridges tried to comfort her with “the beautiful Biblical promises in which he himself so firmly believed.”

  Over the years, the mission settlement at Ushuaia grew steadily from a prefabricated hut into a number of buildings; but at the same time the Fuegians were being decimated by disease to near extinction. By 1888, epidemics of measles, pneumonia, and tuberculosis had wiped out every native within thirty miles of the mission. But the remote “civilization” at Ushuaia appealed to the Argentine government, which found its desolation a perfect site for a prison. (Today Ushuaia is a rapidly expanding tourist city at the edge of Argentina’s Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego, a base for trekkers and charter yachts.)

  Thomas Bridges abandoned the mission and took up sheep ranching 40 miles east of the town. Other Europeans arrived, with more sheep. Vast farms spread across Tierra del Fuego, and the Fuegians inexorably went the way of Indians in North America: they became a nuisance, they were driven out, they were hunted down and killed. By 1910 there were fewer than 1,500 natives in all of Tierra del Fuego. Population numbers have only decreased since. Today, the Fuegians are virtually extinct.

  Under new commanders, HMS Beagle made two more long surveying voyages to Australia and Southeast Asia. After returning to home waters, she was sold in 1845 to the coast guard, stripped of her name, and fitted out as a watch vessel to be moored on the Crouch and Roach rivers in Essex. Her upper masts were removed and an ugly “caboose” was built on her deck for watchkeepers on the lookout for smugglers who favored the maze of creeks and marshes of the low Essex coast. There she remained in ignominious service for twenty-five years.

  In 1870, she was sold at public auction for £525, and at that point she disappeared from public record. Various accounts had her either broken up then or shortly after, or, most unlikely, bought by the Japanese navy and used as a training ship.

  Possibly not so. In February of 2004, the Beagle Ship Research Group, using ground-penetrating radar, detected the outline of a Beagle-sized ship lying in the mud at the bottom of the Roach River, in the spot where the Beagle once lay moored. Newspapers excitedly reported plans for the ship to be raised and restored. “Who knows what remnants of Darwin’s trip may still lie down there?” Likely few. Beagle or not, rot would claim most of a wooden vessel that had settled into the bottom of a freshwater river. But even a few timbers, if somehow authenticated, would be treasured relics in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and marvelous to see. What ship, after Noah’s Ark, has carried so far-reaching a cargo?

  Rear Admiral Robert FitzRoy was remembered and lamented by those who knew best what he had done. The naval hydrographer at the time of his death, Admiral George Henry Richards, was clear about FitzRoy’s contribution.

  No naval officer ever did more for the practical benefit of navigation and commerce than he did, and did it too with a means and at an expense to the country which would now be deemed totally inadequate…. In a little vessel of scarcely over 200 tons, assisted by able and zealous officers under his command, many of whom were modelled under his hand and most of whom have since risen to eminence, he explored and surveyed the continent of South America….

  The Strait of Magellan, until then almost a sealed book, has since, mainly through his exertions, become a great highway for the commerce of the world—the path of countless ships of all nations; and the practical result to navigation of these severe and trying labours, which told deeply on the mental as well as the physical constitution of more than one engaged, is shown in the publication to the world of nearly a hundred charts bearing the names of FitzRoy and his officers, as well as the most admirably compiled directions for the guidance of the seamen which perhaps was ever written, and which has passed through five editions….

  His works…will be his most enduring monument, for they will be handed down to generations yet unborn.

  Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, who had presented the returning captain of the Beagle with the society’s gold medal nearly thirty years before, told society members:

  In deploring the loss of this eminent man who was truly esteemed by his former chief, the Prince of Naval Navigators, Sir Francis Beaufort, as by his successors, I may be allowed to suggest that if FitzRoy had not had thrown upon him the heavy and irritating responsibility of never being found at fault in any of his numerous forecasts of storms in our very changeful climate, his valuable life might have been preserved.

  Apart from such appreciation, he was elsewhere quickly forgotten, remembered only, when remembered at all, for the name he gave to a most useful type of barometer, and by sailors for the rhymes in his Weather Book. He died in debt, his fortune exhausted. A collection was raised for Maria FitzRoy, to which Darwin contributed £100.

  History—too often the reductive, diminishing view from the wrong end of a telescope—has known him, until recently, only as the facilitator, the lynchpin, for a far more famous man’s revolutionary idea, an idea FitzRoy thought an abomination.

  Yet 137 years after his death, FitzRoy’s own work—his lonely, dogged, much ridiculed pursuit of an obsession with weather forecasting—was finally recognized by the British government’s Meteorological Office (which he created). At noon on Monday, February 4, 2002, sea area Finisterre off the northwest coast of Spain—one of the twenty-four sea areas first established by FitzRoy for his telegraphed weather reports—was renamed FitzRoy. The BBC now broadcasts radio weather forecasts, vital for shipping, for these sea areas three times every twenty-four hours.

  Mariners listen for his name daily.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people have helped me with this book, and others, and in my writing life, in more ways than there is room to detail here. My gratitude and debt to them are too great to summarize in this finite space.

  Sloan Harris, my friend and agent. Katharine Cluverius, Teri Steinberg a
t ICM. My editor at HarperCollins, Dan Conaway; and Cathy Hemming, Nikola Scott, Justin Loeber, Jane Passberger, Jason Curran, Martha Cameron, and Jill Schwartzman at HarperCollins. Andrew Franklin, Kate Griffin, and all at Profile Books, London. Anita and David Burdett; Anita particularly for her help at the PRO at Kew. Marion and Jeric Perth. Lucy Waitt at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; Helen Harrison of the State Library of New South Wales, Australia; Barbara Brownlie of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

  Sam Manning, again, for his beautiful maps, and Susan Manning for her crucial part in these.

  At Outside magazine, Elizabeth Hightower, for more than she ever imagined, and Hal Espen. Elaine Lembo and Herb McCormick at Cruising World. Judith Miller and Beth Epstein at New York University in Paris.

  Fraser Heston for the good word.

  My mother, Barbara Nichols; David Nichols; Liz and Tony Sharp; Cynthia Hartshorn; Matt deGarmo; Penny and Robert Germaux; Peter Landesman; Doug Grant and Kathryn Van Dyke.

  Josephine Franzheim, Kenneth Franzheim, Gay and Tony Brown for their spectacular hospitality and generosity.

  The booksellers who over the years have invited me to their very special stores and championed my books—it would be unfair to single out one person or store without naming all; Booksense, and everyone associated with that wonderful enterprise; to all these people I am profoundly grateful.

  Bennett Scheuer, a very true friend.

  My wife, Roberta, for the faith, encouragement, and intelligence that allow me to reach higher, to write the right books.