by John Darnton
No sooner had the warship left than the local chief of police, rowing frantically to the ship, clambered aboard to ask FitzRoy for help.
Negro soldiers had seized the town’s arsenal and were in full rebellion.
Charles, standing next to the Captain, felt his blood rise: at long last, a chance for action!
FitzRoy dispatched some fifty crewmen armed to the teeth, and Charles jumped in a boat to join them. Jamming his pistols into his belt, he couldn’t wait to reach shore. They marched through the dusty streets as a hoard of merchants rushed to their doorways and leaned out of windows to cheer. Grinning ear to ear, Charles felt a warm camaraderie with his shipmates. Looking behind, he spotted McCormick and was surprised to find the feeling of kinship extended even to him.
The two men smiled at each other. Charles raised a pistol in the air and mimicked firing it.
But the rebellion, sadly, quickly fizzled. The insurgents promptly gave up, and when the crew arrived at the arsenal, there was little to do but round up the prisoners and sniff around the fort for holdouts.
Come evening, they were cooking beefsteak over roaring fires in the courtyard. Still, wolfing down the sizzling red meat, Charles appreciated the few moments of exhilaration.
“If only they hadn’t given in,” he said ruefully to McCormick, who, with a cutlass slung from his belt, looked more dashing than Charles had thought possible. They shared a spot of rum.
For all its comic opera overtones, the adventure stirred Darwin’s spirit.
As the ship moved four hundred miles south to Bahia Blanc and began to survey the coastline in earnest, he spent his days on land. The pas-times of his youth played to his advantage. On horseback he roamed the windswept plains of the Pampas, shooting ostrich, deer, cavia, and guanaco. He brought fresh meat back to the Captain’s table and a grateful crew—no more dried beef and biscuit but instead armadillo roasted in its shell. He took to the outdoor life with passion, even venturing deep into territory where wild Indians were known to torture and kill foreign wayfarers.
He rode with the rugged gauchos, who admired his marksmanship, and tried to learn to sling bolas, the three rocks connected by strands of rawhide. One day he tripped up his own horse with the infernal weapon; that night, smoking a cigarrito, he wrote to his sister: “The gauchos roared with laughter; they cried they had seen every sort of animal caught, but had never before seen a man caught by himself.”
He hired a cabin boy, Syms Covington, to help with his shooting and skin his specimens. Now that he had a companion to witness his exploits, there was no stopping him. His blood was up and he was filled with a twenty-four-year-old’s conviction that great exploits and great discoveries awaited him.
And sure enough, one fine September day, when Charles, FitzRoy, McCormick (still unaccountably amiable), and two others were in a launch exploring the mudbanks of the coast, they made a significant find. They were rounding a headland, Punta Alta, when McCormick, alone facing the shore, yelled out: “I say, what’s that over there?” The others rushed to his side. He pointed to a mudbank some twenty feet high, in which curious white objects were embedded, rising up behind a forest of reeds. At first it looked like a quarry of purest marble, collapsing in on itself, gleaming in the sunlight. But when the launch pulled closer, they saw that it was something much more interesting—bones packed firmly inside the solidified silt.
Darwin leapt from the craft and waded to shore, parting the reeds with his cosh and sending crabs scurrying out of his path. By the time the others caught up with him, he was already deep into the embankment, which contained a soft sedimentary deposit of gravel and clay.
Forking out handfuls, he dug up to his elbows until finally, with a burst of energy, he pried loose a massive three-foot-long bone and held it up like a prize.
“By the lord Harry, what do you suppose it is?” he cried out. “A massive thigh bone of some sort? Do you think it possible—could it be a fossil?”
They looked around. Gigantic bones surrounded them, tusks and femurs and a rounded carapace, sticking out from the earth as if trapped there by a landslide. They were in a natural ossuary, and the fossilized bones were more than likely from an earlier era—they were much bigger than those of beasts walking the earth today. All afternoon they worked the graveyard, unearthing immense relics, which they left on the narrow beach before returning to the ship.
That evening Charles could talk of nothing else, speculating on what the bones might be, poring through books on zoology, biology, and paleontology, coming up with one theory, abandoning it for another, then circling back to it. Finally, after dinner, FitzRoy, amused at the mania that had seized his friend, pushed him out the cabin door, saying:
“You have the look of a man possessed who is likely to pace about ruminating all the night long. I require a respite. Wake me only if the bones come to life.”
The next morning, Charles returned with McCormick, who almost matched him in enthusiasm. Covington and a band of crewmen carried pickaxes. They labored through the day, stopping only for a meal of salt beef and biscuit, which Charles would have gladly forgone if the others could have. By dusk the two scientists conferred over an array of twenty bones laid out upon the sand. The two were in agreement: they were prehistoric and extinct. Though some bore a resemblance to living animals, like the common guanaco, they were two and three times their size. Charles thought one, a skull that took hours to dislodge, belonged to a Megatherium, which he had once heard described in a lecture.
McCormick thought it might be a Megalonyx instead. Together, they tried to drum up the snatches of learning they retained from Edinburgh. Sitting there exhausted on the beach, their faces streaked with dirt and their beards caked with mud, they began smiling, then laughing. Charles loped up and down imitating a giant sloth. McCormick picked up a skull and drew it over his head, staggering around under the weight. The crew howled with laughter. On the ride back, Charles looked over at his companion and thought: He’s not such a bad bloke.
After a week, the main deck of the Beagle was so strewn about with fossils that it was difficult to walk from one end to the other. First Lieutenant Wickham grumbled about “the bedevilment” of his ship—
“turned as it is into some sort of museum”—but his consternation was feigned. Much of the crew was swept up by the enterprise. They listened attentively as Charles endlessly theorized as to what had driven the animals to extinction. He talked of changing habitats and mountains rising up and of an emerging landbridge in the isthmus between North and South America. FitzRoy roundly disagreed: they died out, he insisted during one of his on-board Sunday sermons, because they did not make it to Noah’s Ark.
Jemmy Button was for some reason especially excited by the bones.
He walked around touching them at every opportunity, and was heard to remark that he had seen such things before, close to his home village.
Charles marveled at how cleverly the savage succeeded in thrusting himself into the limelight.
After two weeks, FitzRoy put a stop to the excavation. It was time for the Beagle to move on. He was eager to resume his surveying and, not incidentally, to get on with his own project—transporting the Yamana Indians back to their native land and planting the seeds of Christianity in that forlorn part of the world.
The departure from Buenos Aires was rushed and complicated. Charles was eager to send the entire consignment of bones on a ship that was to leave for England the same day as the Beagle was to travel across the river to pick up supplies, including bottles and preserving spirits and walking boots that he himself had ordered. So he arranged for Edward
Lumb, an Englishman long in residence, to handle the transfer. Charles returned two days later to pay him and was relieved to learn that the shipment had left on schedule.
As Charles handed over a stack of pound notes, Lumb posed a question: “By the by, sir, I should have asked before it went, but I noticed that there were two of you fellows—what do you call yourselves?—nat
uralists. Yourself and that other one—what the devil’s his name?”
“Mr. McCormick. What of it?”
“Well, sir, the manifold asked for only a single name, so I put down yours. Is that all right, I’m wondering?”
Charles felt his breath catch. So the fossils went to Henslow under his name alone. He felt a rush of excitement, followed by a pang of guilt. He could not take credit for them alone, it must be shared. After all, McCormick was the one who first spotted the site, though Charles was quite sure he would have seen it himself at some point. Well, there was nothing for it—the questions of ownership and credit would have to be settled later. In the meantime, the fossils were headed to safekeeping in Cambridge—that was the important thing. And undoubtedly there would be many more fossils ahead.
“That’s fine,” he said to Lumb. “Pray do not exercise yourself about it. We’ll sort it all out back in England.”
CHAPTER 13
10 April 1865
I have lately come upon something very curious. Papa has long had the habit of leaving a stack of paper in the staircase-cupboard for the younger children to draw on and, since he is exceedingly frugal, these are often the reverse sides of drafts of his writing. Two days ago, when I fetched some paper for Horace and Leonard, I began reading the pages, which were early versions of his book The Voyage of the Beagle. I could not help but notice that there were discrepancies. For some reason or other he had decided to make various changes.
In the pages I read, I could see he had excised entire passages describing events that transpired during the voyage. In particular, he eliminated several conversations that occurred between himself and one Robert McCormick, who, if memory serves, was on board in the capacity of ship’s surgeon. I compared the manuscript pages to those in the published journals and found that much of what they said to each other, some of it argumentative, had never appeared in print. In particular, I noted the elimination of sections that showed Mr McCormick to be jealous of the many kindnesses proffered to Papa by Captain FitzRoy. There is one episode in which Mr McCormick, who is put out because the Captain brought Papa and not him to visit some island or other, turns his back and walks away while Papa is speaking to him. Why he should have deleted this material I have no idea, especially since he is so thorough in recounting all other aspects of the voyage. Perhaps he did so because the passages cast Mr McCormick in a bad light—indeed, he appears to have been a most unpleasant, spleen-filled man.
Still, the omissions set me to thinking and I resolved to see if there were others. Surreptitiously, as my brothers were occupied drawing, and as Papa was outside taking his constitutional on the Sandwalk, I slipped into his study. There, on a shelf above his wooden desk, I found some of the notebooks he kept on his voyage. They were numbered, so I could tell at a glance that some were missing. There was no indication where they might have been put.
I glanced at some of the others, pulling them down carefully so that I might replace them exactly as they were to avoid discovery, and I was surprised in looking through them to find that Papa had changed some of the entries after the fact. I could discern this because the ink was of a noticeably different shade than that of the original entries and was also uniform throughout, whereas the writing done during the trip varied from week to week. In some instances, the jottings were fitted in awkwardly, sometimes scrawled along the margins, making it obvious that they had been added subsequently. In addition, some earlier entries had been crossed out altogether.
I wondered if these changes might be the sort that one might make upon re-reading a draft and wanting to add some further reflection or elaboration.
But they did not appear to be of that nature, since it was clear from even a cursory reading that they tended to alter the very narrative itself. Some of the changes dealt with Captain FitzRoy and others were about Jemmy Button, the infamous savage whose treachery knows no bounds. Still others concerned the aforementioned Mr McCormick.
But I did not dare to linger too long to read them and, truth be told, I was feeling sorely guilty, knowing that I was reading something that was not intended for my eyes—or for that matter, the eyes of anyone. As soon as I heard the tapping of Papa’s cane on the front step, I quickly replaced the notebooks and closed the study door only seconds before he entered the hall.
As I write this, I think I may search for some opportunity tomorrow, perhaps when Papa is once again out on the Sandwalk, to continue my investigation into his writings.
11 April 1865
Somehow I must contrive to meet Captain FitzRoy. I must talk to him and implore him to provide explanations, for all this is simply too much! There are too many mysteries that set my head spinning. I must find out what happened during the journey of the Beagle. From reading Papa’s journals—the unexpurgated journals, I hasten to point out—it is clear that certain events transpired in the course of the voyage, events of great importance, which were not properly recorded. I have no inkling of what they were, but that they were crucial to the outcome of the trip, I have no doubt.
Something happened when the ship was in South America. What it was, I do not know, but Papa writes about it in guarded but tantalising language.
He refers to it as a nuit de feu. What he means by that is not at all clear, but the term suggests some sort of violent upheaval. Perhaps it occurred when the Englishmen met the savage Indians, whose appearance was depicted as most frightening; Papa has described it vividly, how they stood on shore slobbering like wild animals, their long hair matted, their faces streaked in red and white and their bodies greased and naked save for mantles of guanaco skin about the shoulders.
Perhaps the nuit de feu was something that happened later in the voyage, some horrible occurrence involving a member of the crew. Or perhaps it had something to do with Jemmy Button, for we now know that, far from being a person who opened his heart to Christian civilisation, he was capable of the most harrowing barbarity.
Captain FitzRoy may prove to be my Rosetta Stone. But I do not know how to approach him and, truth be told, I am apprehensive about the prospect. I have heard enough about him in the whisperings at Down House to know that many feel he is not right in the head. And of course he bears a deep enmity towards Papa, whom he blames for trying to overturn all the beliefs of Christendom, while no doubt blaming himself for commanding the vessel that allowed him to do it.
I know this at first hand, for I was present at the now famous confrontation between Mr Huxley and Soapy Sam Wilberforce at the British Associa-tion for the Advancement of Science in Oxford, where Captain FitzRoy made a spectacle of himself. The scene is still so vivid in my memory—even though I was but twelve years old—I can scarcely believe it happened nearly five years ago. Uncle Ras had sneaked me in and I took pains to make myself inconspicuous behind his chair as I watched the proceedings.
Some five hundred people were packed into the sweltering lecture-hall of the new museum. The Bishop attacked Papa’s theory from every angle and then uttered the famous mocking question: was Mr Huxley related to an ape on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s? Mr Huxley leapt up. He defended Papa’s work with characteristic vigour and concluded with the riposte that rapidly made the rounds: that if he had to choose between having an ape for an ancestor or a man endowed by Nature with reason who yet employs the faculty for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, ‘then I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape’. It let loose pandemonium. People cheered and booed. Some tossed their programmes into the air. I peered over Uncle Ras’ chair. Just in front of us a group of raucous students chanted: ‘Mawnkey, mawnkey!’ A pregnant woman not two rows away rose and suddenly fainted and fell to the floor.
At that moment I saw FitzRoy, dressed in an old rear admiral’s uniform that was so tattered and worn he looked like an Old Testament prophet. He wandered through the crowd like a man possessed, waving aloft a Bible with a trembling hand, a bit of spittle in the corner of his mouth, his hair un
kempt. He pronounced Papa a ‘blasphemer’. He said he regretted the day he agreed to take ‘that man’ on board ship and uttered that his ingratitude was ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’. He called him ‘the Devil’s own Pied Piper, leading the unsuspecting onto the downward path of hellfire and damnation.’ At one point, looking wildly at the cheering gallery, he declared:
“But this is all wrong—the man’s a villain.’ He went on in this vein, muttering various oaths and damnations that I could scarce hear—except for one, which he threw over his shoulder in my direction. It was: ‘So that’s how it is, eh, Mr Darwin?’ He repeated this meaningless sentence several times, delivering it in a bitter-sounding singsong that made my blood run cold.
I could not help but notice that Mr Huxley, surveying the entire scene with a certain satisfaction, like a general whose troops have routed the enemy, spotted Captain FitzRoy, and as he did so, his complexion turned white as candle-wax. He immediately said something in an aside to a young man who moved through the crowd and confronted Captain FitzRoy, who by now had slumped back into a seat in exhaustion. The young man quickly got the Captain to his feet and trundled him off the floor and out a side door, whether out of exasperation or kindness I could not say.
For some time the Captain’s words echoed through my head—‘So that’s how it is, eh, Mr Darwin?’ What could he have possibly meant? I suppose the phrase could have been meaningless twaddle from a mind worn down by grief and suffering to the point of lunacy. Indeed, with his countenance pale and crazed, he did appear a most pathetic figure—sad but unsettling and, I must admit, threatening. Nonetheless, I feel I absolutely must talk to him to seek an explanation! One mystery piles up upon another, and I feel desperate to get to the bottom of it all.
15 April 1865
I’m in luck! We were visited this weekend by the Hookers—Joseph, the botanist at Kew, and his wife, Frances, who is also the daughter of dear old Henslow, Papa’s beloved teacher, departed these four years. Frances, who is most clever, suggested a strategy to reach Captain FitzRoy.
