Evolution's Captain (18 page)

They hurried on, rowing until it was too dark to see. They were in the boats again at daybreak. Sluicing through the Murray Narrows they saw more natives “ornamented with strips of tartan cloth or white linen, which we well knew were obtained from our poor friends. No questions were asked; we thought our progress slow, though wind and tide favoured us: but hurrying on, at noon we reached Woollya.”

The beach was thick with canoes; a hundred Fuegians were gathered along the shore and wandering around the new settlement. “All were much painted, and ornamented with rags of English clothing, which we concluded to be the last remnants of our friends' stock.”

FitzRoy's darkest visions seemed about to be realized when the two whaleboats touched the shore and the Fuegians ran down to the water and surrounded their crews, leaping and shouting at them.

But then Matthews appeared, his clothes and person intact, followed by York and Jemmy, still dressed in their English duds and looking as well as usual.

Fuegia Basket did not appear. She was in York's wigwam, they said. FitzRoy gave no further explanation, but the reason for her indisposition is obvious: her first nights inside the wigwam with York Minster had also been her first alone with him. He had almost certainly had sex with his twelve-year-old bride. He had probably raped her, repeatedly.

FitzRoy pulled Matthews into a whaleboat and instructed the crew to row them a little distance offshore. There, away from the noise and interruption, he heard his story, while the natives squatted on their haunches along the beach watching them, “reminding me,” wrote FitzRoy, “of a pack of hounds waiting for a fox to be unearthed.”

The young missionary's zeal and stoicism had collapsed in the face of the rude attention directed at him.

At first there had been only “a few quiet natives.” But three days after the English boats had left, canoes full of rowdier Fuegians had turned up to bedevil him night and day. They stole anything he left lying around his wigwam; others crowded inside it all day, chattering and imploring him to give them everything they saw. Some of them became belligerent when he refused. More than one, he told FitzRoy, “went out in a rage, and returned immediately with a large stone” implying that he would kill Matthews if he didn't hand over what had been demanded. Others amused themselves by teasing him, “making mouths at him,” and holding him down and pulling the hair out of his face. For a few days Matthews had been able to leave Jemmy guarding his wigwam while he visited the women in theirs, where they fed him and asked nothing in return, but soon the besieging, importuning, thieving mob made it impossible for him to leave his wigwam. Despite
Jemmy's constant assurances to the contrary, Matthews told FitzRoy that he believed he would soon be killed.

York Minster, a superior physical specimen among the Fuegians, had not been bothered and had lost nothing. Fuegia had his protection against everything outside their wigwam. But Jemmy had been “sadly plundered, even by his own family.” “My people very bad,” he told FitzRoy mournfully, “great fool, know nothing at all, very great fool.”

The seamen's prize garden had been wantonly trampled, despite Jemmy's attempt to explain its purpose, and—or perhaps because of—his best efforts to keep people off it.

FitzRoy decided to take Matthews away with him, and the formerly zealous missionary gave no argument. The seamen quickly retrieved his chest and cache of personal possessions from the cellar in his wigwam and got it all into the whaleboats. FitzRoy himself distributed some of Matthews' stores—axes, saws, knives, and nails—among the surrounding natives, as a measure of goodwill, hoping some of this might reflect on his three protégés who were to remain: Jemmy, York, and Fuegia.

FitzRoy promised Jemmy and York he would return in a few days to see how they were getting on. Then the Englishmen pushed off in the whaleboats.

Matthews had spent more than a year and come a long, hard way, with the blessing and endowments of many patrons, to establish the mission settlement in Tierra del Fuego. He may indeed have felt a manic surge of relief at being rescued from his worst imaginings. But if he felt as happy as FitzRoy suggests, he
was fulfilling all Darwin's doubts about him. “He is of an eccentric character & does not appear…to possess much energy,” Darwin had confided to his diary days earlier, before they had left Matthews in his wigwam. “I think it very doubtful how far he is qualified for so arduous an undertaking.”

FitzRoy does not record his own feelings at seeing Matthews so readily abandon his post and this crucial element of his noble design, so long hoped-for, fail so quickly and completely. His remarks about Matthews are charitable. Behind them his own bitter disappointment shouts in mute, raging relief.

 

A week later, after briefly surveying sections of the Wollaston
and Navarin Islands and Ponsonby Sound, FitzRoy returned with a single whaleboat crew to Woollya.

The scene that met him allayed his “considerable anxiety.” The whaleboat passed women fishing peacefully from canoes. On the beach at Woollya, FitzRoy met Jemmy, York, and Fuegia, dressed as usual, Fuegia even “clean and tidily dressed.” There were only a few other natives present, and they seemed “quiet and well disposed.” FitzRoy inspected the three wigwams and found them unchanged and in good repair. The formerly trampled garden had recovered, and was now even sprouting a few vegetables. Beside York and Fuegia's wigwam lay a partly completed canoe that York was building from planks left behind by the crew. The place looked peaceful and productive.

Jemmy complained (he did a lot of this) that many of his things had been stolen. But apart from a few lapses by his own brothers, the thieves had mostly been strangers, now gone, and he and his family were on good terms. Jemmy's mother came down to the boat to greet her son's benefactor—and her own, for she was wearing a dress Jemmy had brought for her.

When FitzRoy and his boat crew shoved off, he was hopeful. “I left the place, with rather sanguine hopes of their effecting among their countrymen some change for the better.”

FitzRoy had done his best—his considerable utmost, with the full backing of the Royal Navy, his king, queen, and the blessings of many like-minded Christians of England. Surely, his faith in all he held to be true assured him, God would now take this seed and make it grow.

Darwin was not so easily persuaded.

Distracted as he had been from his survey work (one gets the feeling, reading FitzRoy's narrative, that he was never again able to bring to it the singlemindedness that had characterized his efforts before the whaleboat had been stolen, just over three years earlier), FitzRoy felt he had covered enough of eastern Tierra del Fuego. On February 26, 1833, the
Beagle
sailed out into a gale in the Strait of Le Maire and ran in heavy seas toward the Falkland Islands.

A
year and more into this second voyage aboard the
Beagle
,
FitzRoy brooded.

He had spent months distracted from his primary, ostensible purpose—surveying and mapping the southern South American coastline, east and west—with the settling of the Fuegians. That now done, unsatisfactorily, the work still to be accomplished loomed before him.

In addition to surveying the Falkland Islands, there were still gaps in his surveys of the Atlantic coast, uncertainties of longitude to be resolved—work he had put aside to take the Fuegians south during the summer season. He would have to sail north again and spend another year crawling along the
pampero
coast of Argentine Patagonia: thousands of miles that included vast river estuaries, gateways to the continent's developing interior, all of it potentially important for future trade and safe navigation, yet it was impossible to sail every mile of it. There was still the whole world to circumnavigate: all those chronometers bought and daily tended to mark off an unbroken chain of longitudes around the globe. The entire voyage was supposed to last just three years and with almost half that time gone, he was still mired on the Atlantic coast. The job seemed endless. He had
brought it on himself, it was what he had wanted, an important peacetime commission. Now it seemed impossible.

He was unfairly overburdened, FitzRoy felt. On the first voyage, the survey area—just Tierra del Fuego—was far smaller, and the
Beagle
had been one of three vessels, with the
Adventure
and the
Adelaide,
carrying out the work. Now, with a single ship, he began to despair of being able to complete the work and justifying the time and expenditure of this voyage as more than simply a repatriation effort on behalf of his three Fuegians.

The young aristocrat's attenuated sensibility stretched and tightened. The captain's cabin aboard the
Beagle
became once again the fraught isolation chamber inside which Pringle Stokes had succumbed to despair.

 

Within days of arriving at the Falklands, an accident occurred that
further isolated him. There was a standing order aboard the
Beagle
that no one venture far ashore alone. FitzRoy's clerk, Edward Hellyer, went off to shoot in the company of a Frenchman from a wrecked French whaler,
Le Magellan
, whose crew were living in tents ashore, awaiting a ride to the South American mainland. After the two men had walked a mile alongshore together, the Frenchman returned to his camp and Hellyer went on alone. An hour later, clothes, a gun, and a watch were found near the shore. Seamen from the
Beagle
and some of the French crew ran along the beach looking for Hellyer, others pulled alongshore and through the kelp beds in whaleboats. After a long search, his body was found, naked, entangled in kelp. Bynoe, the
Beagle
's surgeon, and his French counterpart, tried everything to revive the boy. A duck was found dead in the kelp near Hellyer's body; his gun lying on the beach had been discharged.

FitzRoy expressed his sorrow in the most conventional terms when he came to write up his narrative years later: “Mr Hellyer had been much with me, both as my clerk and because I liked his
company, being a gentlemanly, sensible young man.” But Hellyer's death was a significant loss to him. The complex job of captain's clerk was a plum one, not unlike the position of personal assistant to a CEO. It generally went to young men who could combine an impressive array of secretarial talents with an unusually personable, sensitive nature. Finding such help among a ship's company was difficult, and FitzRoy lost Hellyer at a time when his task threatened to overwhelm him. A deeply emotional man, he was made unhappier by the belief that the boy had shot the duck, of a species they had not seen before, for his captain, and, when it had fallen into the water, stripped and swum after it.

The boy was buried, after a melancholy procession, on a lonely and dreary headland. FitzRoy's burden only felt heavier.

Days later, an opportunity that seemed tailor-made to improve his predicament presented itself. An American sealing schooner, the 170-ton
Unicorn
, had put into the Falklands after a six-month cruise in Cape Horn waters with her hold empty, her master and part owner ruined. An unusually stormy summer season (the great gale of January 13 that had knocked the
Beagle
down had driven
Le Magellan
ashore in the Falklands) had kept the
Unicorn
bottled up in harbors riding out gales for sixty-seven days, preventing the taking of any seals, and her master was ready to sell. The hire of the two schooners, the
Liebre
and the
Paz
, to cover some of the coast to be surveyed had worked so well the year before that FitzRoy's desire to purchase the
Unicorn
was “unconquerable.” The
Beagle
's carpenter, Jonathan May, looked over the ship and reported back that she was sound, her construction first-class: fastened with copper spikes, planked of good oak. She was roomy, easily handled by a small crew, and a good sea boat. She was more: pretty as a yacht, she was a seductress as ships go. FitzRoy seems to have fallen in love with her, in the way that seamen can find their hearts stolen by two or three ships that they will remember for a lifetime, vessels that somehow contrive to be more than their wood and metal and canvas. She was beautiful, and he needed her.

He bought the
Unicorn
for £1300 out of his own pocket. He
hoped that his purpose in doing so—to aid the
Beagle
in covering the territory to be surveyed, to speed up the work, enabling the cruise to continue on around the world without years of delay—would meet with Admiralty approval and see him reimbursed. He renamed her
Adventure
in honor of the
Beagle
's former consort.

It seemed the right thing to do at the time.

 

While FitzRoy and his crew rowed around the islands surveying
from the whaleboats, Darwin explored ashore, often in the company of Syms Covington. He found the Falkland Islands dull and uninteresting: “We have never before stayed so long at a place & with so little for the Journal.”

He spent six days riding across East Falkland with gauchos who had come to the islands to catch some of the wild cattle (descendents of shipborne livestock) that roamed there. “The inhabitants are a curious mixed race,” Darwin wrote of the motley population of shipwrecked sailors, whalers, and sealers of many nations, gauchos, Argentine and Spanish colonists, three women, “two of them negresses,” and the single resident Englishman, Mr. Dixon, under whose flag the islands were in temporary possession. “Their habitations are in a miserable condition & deficient in almost every accomodation. The place bespeaks what it has been, viz a bone of contention between different nations.”

Although Darwin's early focus was geology, the jottings in his notebook while in the Falkland Islands show that he was beginning to be irresistibly drawn into the mystery of the differences between species and their geographic distribution.

And in his published
Journal of Researches
(later renamed
The Voyage of the Beagle
), Darwin wrote:

FitzRoy and Darwin disagreed about the foxes. “Naturalists,” wrote FitzRoy, referring to the only naturalist whose opinion he had sounded on the subject, “say that these foxes are peculiar to this archipelago, and they find difficulty accounting for their presence in that quarter only.” FitzRoy thought them very similar, different only in the shading of their coats, to the Patagonian foxes he had seen. He believed foxes from the mainland had been carried to the islands aboard large chunks of ice riding the current that sets between southern Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands. The Falkland foxes were simply variants of the same species, he reasoned.

The animals they saw in the Falkland Islands (and everywhere else, notably the Galapagos Islands), and their variation from the genus species they were familiar with, made for frequent discussions between the two scientist messmates at the captain's table aboard the
Beagle
.

FitzRoy generally disagreed with Darwin's early musings about the way animals might change from one place to another:

However much he and Darwin disagreed in their thinking, this sort of engaging debate is what FitzRoy had longed for on the
Beagle
's first voyage, what he had appealed to Beaufort to supply him with on this one. It brought him out of himself and kept him connected to the world.

But for Darwin, these constant discussions, turning over the findings and observations of a voyage around the world with a keen scientific mind that often sparked and challenged him with an opposing view, were of incalculable benefit.

Early in April, the
Beagle
and the
Adventure
sailed for Rio Negro on the Argentine mainland.

 

Ten months later, the
Beagle
was back in Tierra del Fuego.
FitzRoy had further chronometric readings to make at Port Famine inside the Strait of Magellan, and he still needed to survey the Fuegian coast below the eastern entrance to the strait—the area around the rolly open anchorage off Cape Santa Iñez that the
Beagle
had fled in foul weather in December 1832.

For many of those intervening ten months, Darwin traveled widely inland. One of these excursions, overland from Rio Negro to Buenos Aires, was an exciting and dangerous adventure. The Argentine General Rosas was engaged in “a bloody war of extermination against the Indians,” but “so fine an opportunity for geology was not to be neglected,” Darwin wrote his sisters. In company with an English trader, James Harris, a peon guide, and a band of gauchos, he traveled between
postas
, Spanish army camps; Darwin and Harris roamed deeper into the country than any previous European travelers. The gauchos, a species unto themselves, made a vivid impression on the young Englishman.

Darwin rejoined the
Beagle
in Montevideo, where, on December 5, 1833, he “took a farewell of the shore & went on board.”

On February 2, 1834, the ship anchored in Port Famine. The harbor of Pringle Stokes's suicide (now 5 ½ years past) was still an unrelievedly depressing place. “I never saw a more cheer-less prospect,” Darwin later wrote of this place, where it seemed to rain continuously, and ashore he found a “death-like scene of desolation [that] exceeds all description…everything was dripping with water; even the very Fungi could not flourish.”

For the next three weeks, FitzRoy worked the ship down the eastern Fuegian coast, through the Strait of Le Maire and back into very familiar waters: up Nassau Bay, through Goree Road, and into the Beagle Channel. Only the
Beagle
's whaleboats, not the ship herself, had floated upon her namesake waters before now.

On February 25, headed shoreward in a whaleboat with a group of seamen, Darwin passed a canoe holding six “Yapoo Tekeenicas.” More than ever, he was struck by the existence of unreconstructed Fuegians in their natural environment. His experiences, his thinking and discussions with FitzRoy over the past year, led him now to a deeper reflection on the extreme lowliness of their condition. They seemed to exhibit a disregard for the meagerest of niceties that might lift a human one notch above the animal state. That day he wrote in his diary: