Evolution's Captain (3 page)

I
n 1934, Nora Barlow, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin,
visited Robert FitzRoy's elderly spinster daughter, Laura FitzRoy, at her home in London. The dark, cluttered Victorian drawing room, resisting any influence of the twentieth century, was dominated by a large white marble bust of Miss FitzRoy's father. “A remarkable face,” Nora Barlow later wrote, “sensitive, severe, fanatical; combining a strength of purpose with some weakness or uncertainty.”

He was also handsome. Drawings of FitzRoy as a young man show a long, thin, aquiline nose; the smudged impression of a wispy moustache; limpid, long-lashed, feminine eyes; and a high forehead, suggesting that the dark hair combed forward at the top and along the temples covered a receding hairline. It is indeed a sensitive, narrow, introspective, finely featured face, and in the line of the thin lips, in a certain lift in the brow, there is more than a hint of a volatile mix of intellectual brilliance, intolerance, and arrogance. It could be the face of a supercilious young classics scholar at Oxford too sure of his own capacity, or of a young Sherlock Holmes—picture his first Hollywood incarnation, the chilly, long-nosed actor Basil Rathbone, as a twenty-three-year-old. Undoubtedly FitzRoy liked the way he looked and paid attention to his appearance.

Robert FitzRoy as Darwin first knew him, at about the time of his second voyage aboard the
Beagle.
(
Drawing of Robert FitzRoy by Phillip Parker King, by permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand
)

He was a great believer in phrenology, the bogus science in such vogue during the nineteenth century, that supposed that the shape and size of the human cranium, together with its telling bumps, determined character and mental faculties. FitzRoy drew instant conclusions about people based on such evidence. He had a distrust of people with coarse features or wide spatulate noses. He believed them untrustworthy and inferior.

In one sense, Robert FitzRoy himself was exactly what he appeared to be: a highly strung aristocrat. The FitzRoys had descended as the dukes of Grafton, a favored though illegitimate branch of royalty, from a liaison between Barbara Villiers and King Charles II. For generations, the Graftons were at the highest level of British society. They were members of the royal court, they were high-ranking Tories in government, they owned great estates in England and Ireland. They legislated and they controlled. At least three dukes of Grafton were admirals, men used to getting their way in every respect. One of them, Lord Augustus FitzRoy, third duke of Grafton, commanded a small fleet of four vessels to fire on four passing French ships in the Caribbean one day in 1737 when they wouldn't stop at his hail, this precipitated a full-scale naval action between all eight ships. Britain and France were not at war at the time; the battle finally ended with gracious apologies on both sides, and the ships sailing on.

Another duke of Grafton was briefly acting prime minister in 1767, between the governments of the ailing William Pitt the Elder and Lord North. FitzRoy's father, Lord Charles FitzRoy, became a general in the British Army, an aide-de-camp to George III, and a member of Parliament. His mother, Lady Frances Anne Stewart, came from an equally dominant strain; she was the eldest daughter of the first Marquis of Londonderry.

FitzRoy's connections were impeccable, except in one respect: from his mother he inherited a kinship with mental instability. In 1820, when Robert FitzRoy was fifteen, his uncle, the third Marquis of Londonderry, who had teetered for years on the edge of madness, finally committed suicide, with terrible efficiency, by slashing
his own throat with a razor. His uncle's death and its manner made an impression on the boy that he never forgot. He spoke about it and feared it all his life. It loomed forever just beyond the foreground in his mind as a specter of his own predisposition.

 

Sir Robert Otway's faith in him was justified: FitzRoy was
certainly capable. In his competence and zeal he was light-years from Pringle Stokes.

He had been sent off to the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth when he was only twelve years old—possibly he was already exhibiting an unusual precocity at his studies and was deemed ready for more, but more probably because of the cold practice among the English upper classes of sending small children away to school at a still tender age, breaking off their childhood with a brutal snap. At Portsmouth, in addition to classical studies in Greek, Latin, mathematics (including the spherical trigonometry necessary for celestial navigation), French, drawing and painting, fencing, and dancing, the syllabus included:

FitzRoy tore through the three-year course at Portsmouth in less than twenty months and graduated with full marks and a gold medal, neither of which had ever been awarded to any cadet. In 1819, at the age of fourteen, he went to sea. He served aboard ships in the Mediterranean and with the South American fleet, where he became a favorite of Sir Robert Otway. There was an inquiring, scientific bent to his mind, and by the time of
the “death vacancy” resulting from Pringle Stokes's suicide, FitzRoy was abreast of the latest thinking in geology, paleontology, and “natural philosophy,” as the study of nature was then known. It was as well for him that Otway liked him, and that his family was intimately connected with the Admiralty and the powers that determined advancement. He hardly needed these connections to get ahead, but a man of such dazzling and superior ability, with self-assurance, vanity, willfulness, and a personal fortune, probably made few friends. He was admired but rarely liked. Otway had fought with Nelson at Copenhagen and had been the legendary admiral's flag captain; perhaps he saw something of himself in the ambitious young FitzRoy.

It was a plum assignment. Without the opportunities provided by war, the captaincy of the
Beagle
offered FitzRoy a unique chance to prove himself—more than he could imagine.

FitzRoy and the
Beagle
were kismet for each other.

 

The young captain's new command was a 90-foot-long, 235-ton,
10-gun brig; a member of the Cherokee class (named for the first to be built), designed in 1807 by Sir Henry Peake, Surveyor of the Navy. Its firepower comprised eight 16- or 18-pound carronades and two 6-pound chase guns. Carronades (named for the Carron Iron Founding and Shipping Company that invented them) were short, light carriage guns that fired heavy shot over a short range. They were developed for close-in brawling in the Napoleonic naval battles of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These small but powerful guns allowed a smaller ship to carry them, thus reducing the size and costs, for a given firepower, of certain classes of fighting vessel for the Admiralty.

In size and armaments, the Cherokee-class ship was about halfway between the
Sophie
and the
Polychrest
, Captain Jack Aubrey's first two commands in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series of naval adventure novels. They were handy, economical infighters, but after the wars were over many went on to peacetime
work, and it was discovered that they could be a liability at sea. They had low freeboard, and waves readily broke over their decks; high, solid bulwarks prevented this water from easily running off back into the sea. Several heavy waves breaking over the deck of a Cherokee-class ship could quickly make her top-heavy and, in a stiff breeze, capsize her. Almost a quarter of the approximately 100 Cherokees built were wrecked or foundered in heavy weather. Seamen called them “coffin brigs.”

Yet they sailed well, for a square-rigged vessel; they were sea-kindly, with a comfortable motion; deep, capacious holds could carry an enormous quantity of stores and spares, clear decks held numerous boats, gear, equipment—qualities that would be desirable in a modern cruising yacht.

The keel of the forty-fifth vessel to be built to this design was laid in 1818 at Woolwich Dockyard on the River Thames. The ship was launched exactly two years later, at a cost of £7803. She was christened
Beagle
—history has left no record why; perhaps the whim of some hunting admiral. She was placed “in ordinary”—that is, tied up with nothing to do—for five years until she was allocated to the Navy's surveying service in 1825, which commissioned her to sail with HMS
Adventure
to South America. By this time, however, some of her planking was already rotting in the tidal river water, so she was sent back to Woolwich dockyard for repairs and much else that was needed for her coming voyage. The bulwarks were lowered to allow water to drain off more easily; a chartroom was built over the quarterdeck, more cabins built forward of this new poop deck for additional storage and an assistant surveyor; skylight hatches were fitted over the captain's cabin and the gun-room, where the officers slept, to make the long months and years aboard less gloomy. A mizzenmast, carrying two fore-and-aft (rather than square) sails, was added to her stern, greatly increasing her maneuverability. This changed her rig from a two-masted brig to a barque.

Six months after she went into the dockyard, on May 22, 1826, HMS
Beagle
sailed from England on her first mission to
Tierra del Fuego, under the command of her first captain, Pringle Stokes.

Designed for war, one of a bunch built for a price, she sailed away to explore the unknown world, into maelstroms of unholy wind and weather, and she proved herself one of the ablest little ships in history.

I
n January 1829, HMS
Adventure
, with Captain King, HMS
Beagle
, with her new captain, Robert FitzRoy, and a smaller schooner, HMS
Adelaide
, sailed south again on their surveying mission. (Not often mentioned, the
Adelaide
, named for England's queen, the wife of William IV, had been purchased by Captain King earlier in the expedition, and had accompanied the
Adventure
for much of 1828. Being a “fore-and-after” rather than a square-rigged vessel, she was a handier sailer, able to point closer to the wind than either of the other two ships, and was used for survey work in tighter channels and harbors.)

Captain FitzRoy encountered misfortune early in his command. On January 30, off Maldonado on the coast of Uruguay, the
Beagle
was caught by a
pampero
, a vicious squall blowing off the pampas, later said to be the worst in many years. It lasted only twenty minutes, but the
Beagle
, newly loaded to the brim with supplies, exacerbating the already top-heavy tendency of her class, was knocked over on her beam, and lay pinned by blasts of wind for long minutes, during which it appeared she might capsize. Topmasts, topsails, all sorts of sails and small spars, were torn away and blown to pieces. Two seamen who had been furling sail high in the rigging were blown away with them into the sea and lost.

Such sudden “white squalls” can catch a ship by surprise and knock it down in seconds, long before its captain has time to notice what's coming and take in sail. The incident was not FitzRoy's fault (though in later years he was to blame his inexperience for not being more alert and ready for such a possibility), but to lose men so early in his command would have had his crew (seamen are a highly superstitious lot) wondering if their new skipper had the curse of being unlucky.

 

Two months later, the ships reached the eastern entrance to the
Strait of Magellan.

On April 13, as the
Beagle
was beating down into the strait near Cape Negro against a light southerly breeze, the crew spotted some natives: two women and a child in a canoe near the shore, two men and their dogs close by on the beach. FitzRoy had a whaleboat lowered and a crew of seamen pull him shoreward for a closer look, the people “being the first savages I had ever met.”

To Englishmen, they appeared remarkably unattractive. “hideous…filthy and most disagreeable” was Captain King's first and lasting impression.

To the Fuegians, the British naval officers and their crew, appearing from seaward in their grand and intricate vessels, with their elaborate clothing, their gadgets, and their inexplicable powers, were as otherworldly as little green men coming out of a spaceship—except that the locals were no longer astonished. Such visitors had been turning up for some time; the occasional glimpses of the Magellans, Sarmientos, and Schoutens had increased to nearly regular traffic. By 1827, the year King's expedition reached the Strait of Magellan for the first time, sealing and whaling vessels (usually ignored by history because their crews didn't plant flags, slaughter locals, colonize, or make claims for distant sovereigns) had been passing through Tierra del Fuego, harvesting seals and penguins, and trading with the natives for more than fifty years. Relations had evolved consid
erably since the earliest contact. The Fuegians had largely forgotten their initial fears and become instead cheeky opportunists. It was the latecomers on the scene, the Englishmen in 1827, who
were the naive ones. They were smugly and vastly amused by their own abilities to impress the locals with their beads and cheap magic, underestimating not only the Fuegians' cleverness, but their self-respect.

Fuegian native of the “Yapoo Tekeenika” tribe, as FitzRoy mistakenly believed they called themselves. (Narrative of HMS
Adventure
and
Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy
)

“They were pleased by a ticking watch,” wrote King, of his first encounter with a group of them. While dazzling them with his watch, he surprised a Fuegian by deftly cutting off a lock of the native's hair with a pair of scissors (perhaps he fancied a small trophy brush fashioned of the coarse hair by the ship's carpenter, not an unusual item). The man objected until King gave the hair back to him. “Assuming a grave look, he very carefully wrapped the hair up, and handed it to a woman in the canoe, who, as carefully, stowed it away in a basket…the man then turned round, requesting me, very seriously, to put away the scissors, and my compliance restored him to good humor.”

At another encounter, “one of the party, who seemed more than half an idiot, spit in my face; but as it was not apparently done angrily, and he was reproved by his companions, his uncourteous conduct was forgiven.” The Fuegians spat at them, and the English sneakily cut off their hair; what was courteous or idiotic was misunderstood by both sides.

Two years later, Robert FitzRoy saw them in much the same way: they were dirty and primitive. And he brought his own elevated learning, particularly his ideas about physical appearances and phrenology, to the deduction of their innate character.

FitzRoy was not quite so scientific about the younger of the two women in the canoe. She “would not have been ill-looking, had she been well-scrubbed, and all the yellow clay with which she was bedaubed, washed away.”

It was the late, too tender Pringle Stokes who saw these people most clearly. His journal descriptions of his first encounters with Fuegians in 1827 were full of carefully observed details, largely without the prejudicial filter of a self-righteous European sensibility.

They also smeared themselves with seal oil and blubber, which “combined with the filth of their persons, produced,” to Captain King, “a most offensive smell.” This seemed manifest lowliness, the benighted savage rolling in filth. The Englishmen didn't realize it was an effective weatherproofing, something perfectly suited to the climate. No contemporary clothing, no oiled or painted canvas, could keep the densely wet weather of Tierra del Fuego from reaching the body. The English sailors' habit of wrapping themselves in clammy, moisture-retaining layers ensured constant misery: “Our discomfort in an open boat was
very great, since we were all constantly wet to the skin,” they complained.

Stokes carefully noted the natives' diet—shellfish, seal, sea-otter, porpoise and whale, wild berries, and certain seaweeds—and the fact that they weren't particular.

Of the Fuegians' typical shelter, which Europeans generally called “wigwams” and characterized as “the last degree of wretchedness,” Stokes again was not content with second-hand descriptions but brought to them his own accurate eye.

In other words, like the North American Indians (as Europeans, with the lingering cultural memory of the motivations of the first westbound explorers, still referred to aboriginal peoples everywhere west of the Atlantic), the Fuegians had evolved methods and techniques well-adapted to their environment and
climate. But this was rarely appreciated by Europeans, who invariably interpreted what they saw as squalor and ungodly sloth.

To a degree greater than anyone else on first acquaintance, Stokes saw in them some of the sweeter traits of the universal human family.

They were all too human. And the history of their relationship with the technologically advanced white men who came from over the horizon followed the same ineluctable course it did everywhere else. Years of trading with sealers had given them a taste for, in the beginning, beads and mirrors, and later the more useful things: metal, cloth, tools, and weapons. In North America, the single most useful item introduced to the natives at their first contact with Europeans, the Spanish conquistadores, was the horse. That tool brought them speed, efficiency, and power; it altered their view of their world and what they could do in it. It was the transforming bone tossed into the air by Stanley Kubrick's ape that turns into a spaceship.

In the waterworld of Tierra del Fuego, what the Fuegians coveted most were the white men's boats.

To the elegant, aristocratic, accomplished Robert FitzRoy, looking down at the naked, greasy primitives in their canoes
from the immeasurably loftier height of the
Beagle's
deck, the Fuegians seemed at first no more than curious local fauna. They bore no relation to him or his work. He was there to survey for the British Admiralty, to employ the formidable skills he had developed and make a name for himself in the world he knew. Yet it was a profoundly fateful encounter. His life and unique place in history, and the entire arc of scientific and religious thinking in the nineteenth century, were to turn on the meeting between Robert FitzRoy and these “savages.”

 

It was the southern autumn when the survey ships reached
Tierra del Fuego. The
Beagle
, and the schooner
Adelaide
, now commanded by Lieutenant Skyring, were sent to explore the western half of the Strait of Magellan.

Unlike Stokes, FitzRoy admired the landscape: “I cannot help here remarking that the scenery this day appeared to me magnificent,” he wrote in his journal on April 14, near Port Famine. He so remarked on many days.

In May, FitzRoy anchored the
Beagle
and set out with some of his crew and a month's supplies in the ship's small cutter and a whaleboat, both of which could be easily rowed and sailed, and in these poked far into small bays and narrow channels where the larger ship could have sailed only with difficulty. This small mobile expedition traveled for more than a month, the men camping ashore at night. Following a small, twisting channel that led north from the strait through high snow- and ice-covered hills, they discovered and partially surveyed two vast sea-lakes, each about forty miles long and connected by a narrow channel, hidden away in the southern Andes. FitzRoy named these Otway Water, after his patron, and, with a nod to his loyal subordinate who had gracefully made way for him, Skyring Water.