The Darwin Conspiracy

by John Darnton

  Charles did not know what to make of him. The man was smart but guarded, at times proud and at other times sycophantic. He peppered his English with quaint expressions, so that when a sailor asked after his health, he would reply, with a groveling grin, “Hearty, sir, never better.”

  At other times, he pretended not to understand. He had a bullying streak. He treated Fuegia Basket as if she belonged to a lower animal order, which upset York Minster, who regarded her as his wife. Jemmy’s sight was far better than an Englishman’s—even on deck, he could spot something on the horizon long before the sailors could—and once, angry that the cook would not give him a second helping of pudding, he threatened: “Me see Frenchie ship, me no tell.”

  Charles used his scientific instruments to reel in Jemmy for study.

  The Indian never tired of peering through the microscope, looking at bits of hair and lint. Once, when a bug found in the hold was placed under the instrument and moved a leg, he almost jumped out of his skin. He seemed to feel that he shared a special bond with Charles, much to the amusement of the Englishman, who thought it quaint that the savage entertained the notion that science could unite them.

  Sigheenz, Jemmy pronounced it, though whether he fully grasped the abstract concept was unclear.

  Jemmy abruptly closed the book and looked Charles in the eye—which was unusual. He seemed to have reached some kind of decision, to want to say something important.

  “I go take you to my contree. You go meet my people. You talk much with wise man. Much sigheenz, much talk, much.”

  Charles was touched and hid his amusement at the idea of sitting with a council of naked brown-skinned men to discuss higher realms of knowledge.

  “Yes, I would enjoy that,” he said.

  Then Jemmy said they must not allow York Minster or Fuegia Basket to accompany them. He rose from the table and walked to the door.

  “York a bad man,” he said. “His tribe all bad.”

  With gestures, he began to mimic an action, grinning wildly and making sawing motions across his joints and opening his mouth wide and touching his fingers to it. It took Charles several moments after his departure to realize what he was trying to communicate: York Minster’s tribe practiced cannibalism.

  Propped up one afternoon on FitzRoy’s sofa, reading Humboldt, Charles overheard FitzRoy and Wickham talking quietly on the other side of the cabin door.

  “I am compelled to tell you, sir,” said the lieutenant, “that I believe he will not last out the voyage. When we make landfall, we’ll see the last of him, I warrant.”

  Charles strained to catch the Captain’s response but heard no more.

  He knew that they were discussing him, and he had a complicated reaction. At first he vowed to make a liar of Wickham—he would stick out the voyage, for he wanted nothing so much as to secure the respect of FitzRoy. But then, the thought of a bountiful life upon solid land sinking in, he began to weaken, to feel that he might as well abandon the unendurable hardship of the journey, especially as the two already deemed it likely. They couldn’t think any worse of him than they already did.

  And Charles had continued to harvest nothing but misery. For the last ten days he could keep no food down but raisins and biscuit; even his dinner with the Captain had been lost overboard. He was losing weight fast and felt he would soon be little more than sallow flesh hanging from bone. When the ship had passed within hailing distance of Madeira, the island where so many of his countrymen took vacation, he could not even rouse himself to look.

  Just then FitzRoy entered the cabin and looked embarrassed to see him, confirming Charles’s suspicions that they had been gossiping about him. The Captain covered it with an announcement intended to lift his morale.

  “By Jupiter, do you have any idea where we shall be at daybreak tomorrow? Santa Cruz, that’s where! And for my money, there’s no finer port city. Its steeples rise up before snow-capped mountains. All in all, it’s the doing of the Creator Himself.”

  That night, swinging in his hammock, listening to King’s snoring and looking up through the skylight at the moon and stars turning in revolutions, Charles felt himself aimless and insignificant. He missed the green, gentle sloping hills of Shropshire with a longing he had not thought possible. He made a decision: he would leave the ship in Santa Cruz, let the Devil take the whole lot of them. He was not cut out for a life at sea—strength of will and fortitude had nothing to do with it. It was his damned stomach and there was nothing to be done about it.

  The next morning, as the Beagle dropped anchor in the harbor, he went on deck and felt promise in the salt-flecked balmy air. Before him lay a grand vista. Volcanic mountains, splotched with green, loomed over the town. The houses were painted in brilliant whites, yellows, and reds. He could make out Spanish flags flying from the tops of civic buildings and horse-drawn carts trotting along the quay.

  A boat pulled up with orders from the consul and there followed a brief conference. FitzRoy turned away looking disappointed—there was no way for him to break the news gently. If they wanted to touch land, he reported, they would have to spend twelve days in quarantine.

  “Quarantine!” spluttered Charles without thinking. “But why?

  What diseases are there here that we should fear them?”

  “None here,” replied the Captain. “It’s England. They fear we may be carrying cholera.”

  Jemmy Button, lurking not far away, heard the exchange and turned away, his face distorted in a grimace of delight. It was not lost on him that Englishmen could not bring themselves to think their country the lesser in anything.

  They lifted anchor and set sail.

  Life aboard the Beagle improved as she headed southward toward the Cape Verde Islands. The pitching motion eased as she entered the warm waters of the tropics. The morning sun seemed to shoot straight across the blue sky like a flaming arrow—and evenings it plunged into the ocean, a fiery red ball. The moon sent shivers upon the water.

  Charles began to find a beauty in the ship’s rhythm. He admired the sight of the sailors climbing about the rigging, sometimes seen only as shadows through the canvas. At night he enjoyed the sounds of the waves lapping against the bow and the rustle of the sails flapping around the masts. His shipmates invented a nickname for him—“Philos,” short for “Philosopher,” in recognition of his love for the natural sciences. It quickly caught on, for it sidestepped a dilemma that had made for moments of social awkwardness: what honorific to employ for an upper-class civilian with no official rank.

  As Charles felt better, he turned hopeful, even doing a little work. He constructed a plankton net, four feet deep and held open with a curving stick, to drag behind the vessel. When he pulled it up after only two hours and emptied it on deck, he had captured all manner of sea life, including a Medusa and a Portuguese Man-of-War, which stung his finger.

  “You were foolish to touch it,” said McCormick, hovering about. He had wanted to help but Charles had declined the offer. Charles put his finger in his mouth and tried not to react to the pain the slime caused in the roof of his mouth.

  He looked up at McCormick and thought: This soulless man can no more understand the glories of collecting than my hunting dog.

  How could anyone possibly make him understand the allure of natural science?

  “But look at all these creatures, so low in the scale of Nature and yet so exquisite in form and rich in color,” he said, his voice quivering with emotion. “Does it not create a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose?”

  McCormick stared open-mouthed, then turned his back and walked away.

  In less than a week the Beagle reached the west coast of St. Jago and anchored in the bay of Porto Praya. Charles felt his pulse racing as the rowboat approached shore—at last, to plant one’s feet on solid ground!

  But curiously, once there he found that there was little difference in the physical sensation; being on land did not provide the reli
ef he had long dreamed of. Perhaps he had found his sea legs after all.

  With FitzRoy he made the social rounds, meeting the Portuguese governor and the American consul. Then he walked through town sightseeing, past black soldiers carrying wooden weapons, shirtless brown children, and corrals of goats and pigs. He came to a deep valley on the outskirts and here finally, at long last, he encountered Humboldt’s tropical paradise.

  The hot, moist air struck him full in the face. Unknown insects buzzed around unknown flowers that were brilliant in color. The lushness of the vegetation, the chorus of unfamiliar birdcalls, the canopy of fruit trees and palms and the tangle of vines, shot through with shafts of steaming sunlight—the exotic tumult of it all overwhelmed him. This was what he had been longing for, like a blind man longing for sight.

  The next morning he rowed with FitzRoy to Quail Island, a barren stretch of volcanic rock. He examined the geological formations and searched tidal pools that yielded a wealth of specimens, including an octopus that, to his intense delight, changed color. Returning to the ship, he handed up a basket of specimens to the first pair of hands he saw, without realizing that they belonged to none other than McCormick. The man took the bundle and tossed it upon the deck, fixing him with a hard look. Charles was too content to pay it much mind and set about dissecting some of his trophies and bottling others in spirits to send back home.

  Three days later, in a spirit of magnanimity, Charles put aside his antipathy for McCormick and invited him to accompany him on a trek into the interior. McCormick agreed, which was surprising, for he had barely been able to contain his jealousy as Charles took up more and more of the quarterdeck to air his specimens.

  They had hardly set out when McCormick began complaining about the heat. To take his mind off it, Charles described a curious geological formation he had spotted on Quail Island, a horizontal band of white running through the rocky cliffside about thirty feet above ground; on closer inspection, it was revealed to be a compressed bed of shells and corals. Clearly it had once been part of the seabed. But what had happened to leave it in midair? He posed the question to McCormick.

  The surgeon removed his hat and wiped his forehead. He said the answer was obvious. “At one time the seabed was there and so, self-evidently, the water has receded.”

  Charles was skeptical. “The whole ocean?” he declared. “The volcanic islands themselves do not seem old enough to allow that as an explanation.”

  “What other explanation is there?”

  Charles presented his own theory, based on Lyell, that the cliffside had been propelled upward by violent activity beneath its base. The band was relatively stable, which suggested that the crustal movement causing it had been gradual and incremental, he said.

  McCormick was horrified.

  “The land moving up into the air? What—like a catapult? More clap-trap from you Cantabrigian heretics.”

  He was silent a moment, then added a bitter afterthought: “And I must say it would have been much easier for me to provide an explanation if I had been privileged to view the island in question firsthand.”

  Both men sulked. They were quiet for a full fifteen minutes, until they came upon a sprawling baobab tree whose trunk, sixteen feet across, was covered in carved initials. They sat under it to rest and drank water from a flagon Charles detached from a band across his shoulder.

  “I suppose you know that Captain FitzRoy has taken your side,” said McCormick suddenly.

  “My side? I beg to know to what you are referring.”

  “Come, come. You dine with the man. You read in his cabin. You accompany him on expeditions. How can you possibly expect me to compete under such circumstances?”

  “I had not realized we were in competition.”

  “What’s more—as I’m certain you know—he’s upbraided me. He took me aside five days back and chastised me for upsetting you, for presuming—that was his exact word—that we were equals in our claims to exploration.” McCormick bit his lower lip, but whether it was from anger or sorrow, Charles could not tell.

  “Can you, at the very least, do me some small favor?” he asked after a moment.

  “Most assuredly.”

  “Can you permit me to send out some specimens with your shipments? You are clearly going to be gathering such a multitude, I can hardly imagine you would begrudge me a tiny portion of the space.

  Before signing on, I had thought this voyage would afford me the opportunity to make my name as a collector.”

  Charles thought before answering. He did not want to commit himself to a course he might later regret. But McCormick’s lugubrious face moved his sense of Christian charity. He clapped the man upon the shoulder and said with a false joviality: “Of course! But mind you, within reason.”

  “Within reason.”

  At that, the two relaxed and fell into argument over the dimensions of the baobab tree, with Charles claiming that it was quite tall and McCormick asserting that it simply appeared so because its girth threw off the mind’s perception. They placed a bet upon the matter.

  Several days later, an incident occurred that unsettled Charles more than anything that had happened so far. He and McCormick, still bound by their recent truce, went hiking. They walked across a plateau as flat as a tabletop and came to Flag Staff Hill, a promontory noted chiefly for the wild area surrounding it. North of the hill they found a narrow ravine that descended about two hundred feet. After searching for quite a while, they discovered a steep rocky path that led to the bottom, and they followed it.

  The dell they penetrated was a world apart, filled with a profusion of vegetation. Vines ran the width of the ravine; trees grew from the rocky ledges, heavy with succulent creepers. Hawks and ravens, disturbed by the interlopers, darted unnervingly close to them, cawing and scolding.

  At one point a bird of paradise flew up from a hidden nest, disappearing in the gap of blue sky now far above.

  Charles felt unaccountably nervous as they descended into the gloom, as if they were blundering into the lair of some unknown beast.

  He was not accustomed to such superstitious thoughts and tried in vain to shake off the feeling. Then he heard McCormick, reaching the bottom of the fissure, give out a yelp. He rushed to the spot and found him staring down at an assortment of bones, some with bits of meat still upon them.

  “From goats, I warrant,” said McCormick. “There must be a large animal about.”

  They resolved to explore. Charles, readying his gun, took one end of the ravine and McCormick the other. They were working their way toward the center when Charles heard a sound and turned in time to see McCormick no more than ten feet away, his rifle pointing straight at him. A look of cold calculation played upon his face.

  “For God’s sake, man!” shouted Charles, looking into the gun barrel.

  At that moment, the barrel swerved and Charles heard a rustling behind him and the crack of the gun. Turning, he saw something—a flash of color, the hind leg of an animal bounding into the opening of a cave. He surmised that it was a large cat.

  They hurried to climb the path, and when they reached the open air, Charles breathed a sigh of relief. He felt that he had narrowly escaped a brush with death, though from which quarter—man or animal—was hard to say.

  The following day, an expedition made its way to the baobab tree.

  FitzRoy measured the tree twice, using a pocket sextant and then climbing to the top to let down string. Both methods agreed on the conclusion: the tree was nowhere near as tall as it appeared. FitzRoy drew a rough sketch to prove the point, and McCormick, exulting in his victory over Charles, made a show of demanding his money on the spot.

  As Charles fished in his trousers to hand over a coin, he again spied that cold look upon his antagonist’s face.

  But he was even more troubled by what happened next. As they were walking back to the launch, McCormick sidled over to him and said, with superficial camaraderie: “By the by, I happened to visit Quail Island yest
erday and I spotted that rock formation you mentioned.

  Curious, isn’t it? I do expect your theory as to its formation is correct.”

  Charles was surprised that he had come around so quickly.

  “And did you notice,” McCormick continued, “that the shells in the band were the same as those to be found on the beach?”

  Charles had not noticed. “What of it?” he replied, a bit defensively.

  “To me that indicates that whatever geological activity may have caused it to rise—a quake, say, or some other shifting of the earth—must have occurred relatively recently.”

  “Now it is my turn to salute you,” said Charles, touching his hat.

  “Undoubtedly, you are correct.”

  His words were gracious but his thoughts were less so. This man is no fool, he said to himself. He learns his lesson quickly and he expands upon it to an improvement. We must ensure that the student does not surpass the master.

  After twenty-three days in Cape Verde, during which time FitzRoy fixed the position of the islands with exactitude, the Beagle hoisted sail again.

  As they moved ever southward, the temperature rose by the day.

  Charles, still nauseous most of the time, now also felt drugged by the torpor, remarking to King that the sensation was like being “stewed in melted butter.”

  They stopped briefly at St. Paul’s Rocks off the coast of Brazil to stock up on fresh food. FitzRoy and Charles took a whaleboat to the island, where they had a grand time. The birds were so tame, the crewmen could walk right up and club them. They even grabbed some with their bare hands. A second launch, carrying McCormick, went to join in but was waved away. Instead, it plied the harbor for fish; the sailors 1 0 7

  threw out their lines and pulled in groupers, wielding their oars to fight off pillaging sharks.