Evolution's Captain (13 page)

(Two years later, Earle's health forced him to leave the
Beagle
in South America. FitzRoy replaced him with Conrad Martens, a landscape painter. “By my faith in bumpology, I am sure you will like him,” FitzRoy wrote to Darwin, who was away from the ship, traveling across Argentina at the time. “His landscapes are
really
good.” FitzRoy's phrenological assessment of the new artist was justified. Martens's watercolors of the
Beagle
are now famous.)

The value of certain foods in combatting scurvy, the age-old scourge of sailors cut off from fresh supplies and restricted to the traditional and revolting seagoing diet of weevil-filled ship's biscuit, rotten pork, and salt beef, was by then well-known. FitzRoy loaded his ship with the healthiest foods that could be carried in bulk, by the latest methods of preservation, for long periods in the airless confines of a ship's hull. “Among our provisions were various antiscorbutics—such as pickles, dried apples, and lemon juice—of the best quality, and in as great abundance as we could stow away; we also had on board a very large quantity [5000–6000 cans] of Kilner and Moorsom's preserved meat, vegetables, and soup; and from the Medical Department we received an ample supply of antiseptics.”

Nothing was spared the
Beagle
and the preparations for her voyage. The Admiralty and the naval dockyard workers at Devonport gave her their best efforts and materials, and FitzRoy saw that she was as completely equipped for scientific inquiry as the age allowed. The
Beagle
sailed as loaded with the cutting-edge technology of her time as any rocket ship that ever blasted off into space. She was an ark of discovery on her own five-year mission.

“Perhaps no vessel ever quitted her own country with a better or more ample supply…of every kind of useful provision,” wrote FitzRoy. He paid for much of it. His inheritance that came from his family was sufficient to sustain a comfortable gentleman's existence ashore, but FitzRoy had better ideas for its use. The expenses he personally undertook for the voyage were considerable, and to pay for them he dug deep into his capital. He did this in the belief that the excellence of results he hoped to obtain would in time reward and reimburse him. It was a conscientious investment in his career and future, and in 1831 it looked a good one. Robert FitzRoy was in so many ways the finest product of his times. Blessed with wealth and station, he didn't waste his life, as did so many of his peers, hunting, shooting, whoring, and gambling. He joined the navy and made the
utmost of the opportunity it afforded him to add not only to his own learning, but to the pool of knowledge that was then beginning to flood the scientific community.

FitzRoy and the
Beagle
were made for each other. Together they provided Charles Darwin with a unique springboard for his own leap to destiny.

D
arwin traveled to Devonport by coach on October 24,
1831. “Arrived here in the evening after a pleasant drive from London,” was his first entry in the diary he had decided to keep during the voyage. He put up at a hotel and went aboard the
Beagle
the next day.

“Went on board” was his only entry for November 2. Darwin was also writing daily letters to his family and friends, and his better efforts at description went into these. The diary remained, for a time, an uninspired itemization of the main
points of his day. His style, expression, and the attention he gave to his daily log were to improve, however: on publication in 1839, his
Journal of Researches
, fashioned from this diary, became an instant bestseller, and has remained so for 165 years.

The
Beagle
had been due to sail in early November, but preparations delayed her departure for more than a month, and then westerly gales in the English Channel kept her pinned ashore. At first Darwin amused himself observing the frantic activity aboard the ship, and walking to and from Plymouth with FitzRoy and some of the junior officers, sometimes helping them with their abstruse preparations.

Here, FitzRoy was doing for geography what his chronometers did for time, and what the zero meridian of longitude at Greenwich does for east and west around the world: he was starting with a known position, or value, on which to base all subsequent measurements. His chronometer and sextant readings for the next five years, all his determinations of longitude, and positions of rocks, headlands, shorelines, islands, and continents, would be laid down according to the geographic relationship they bore to a stone in Plymouth's breakwater. That arbitrary absolute provided the key to a graspable shape of the whole world.

As busy as he was, FitzRoy did not neglect one aspect of his private life: in Plymouth he met a young woman he liked, Mary O'Brien, the daughter of a local gentleman and army major general. She liked him too. The dashing young captain visited the O'Brien house as often as he could, but he kept it to himself; not even Darwin was aware of his interest in anything beyond the demands of the coming voyage.

Darwin continued trying to make himself useful, or at least amuse himself, but this became more difficult as the weeks in port wore on.

Darwin was more than simply bored. He was suffering crushing loneliness and apprehension. With too much time on his hands he was becoming anxious about the coming voyage. He worried about what might happen to him while he was away, and to loved ones at home. He developed a rash—probably cold sores—around his mouth. Always a vivid hypochondriac, he now became worried about his heart and began to believe he would be too sick to sail. Years later he was able to see this in perspective.

Other passengers gathered at Plymouth. On November 13, the Fuegians arrived by steam packet from London, accompa
nied by their schoolmaster, Mr. Jenkins. They remained ashore until the
Beagle
sailed. There is little record of what they did in the weeks while they waited for the ship to sail. There may have been a few occasions when FitzRoy took them to visit curious local notables, admirals, and friends, but such visits would not have been on the scale of their former socializing. FitzRoy was fully occupied with his preparations for the coming voyage, and he was no longer as comfortable showing off his Fuegians as he had been. He was still keeping Fuegia Basket separated from her two male companions; she stayed in Weakley's Hotel in Devonport, while the other two were put up elsewhere. His primary concern with them now was to hustle them out of the country as quickly as possible.

With them from London came a young missionary, Richard Matthews, recruited by Reverend William Wilson of Walthamstow, who was to sail to Tierra del Fuego and help the newly civilized Fuegians establish a mission. Still a teenager, Matthews was afire with religious fervor and the opportunity to put himself to God's use. His older brother was a missionary in New Zealand, a compelling role model for the younger man. But New Zealand was a sylvan Eden being farmed and settled by English families, and its native Maoris were a fierce, intelligent, highly cultured people. No advice or descriptions of the missionary life from his brother, nor his acquaintance with the roughly Anglicized York, Jemmy, and Fuegia from Walthamstow, could have prepared Matthews for the reality of an existence by himself at the far storm-wracked edge of the world with only unreconstructed Fuegians for neighbors. But he was ready, he believed, quivering with zeal, and, thanks to the generosity of Christian well-wishers, fully equipped. Reverend Wilson had raised a subscription to supply Matthews and the Walthamstow Fuegians with the necessities to recreate a little piece of God-fearing England in that wild foreign place. Stowed aboard the
Beagle
in October were their supplies: chamber pots, tea trays, complete sets of crockery, soup tureens, beaver hats, and white linen, in
addition to books, tools, and blankets. Space was found for all these items inside the
Beagle
's crammed hold, with “some very fair jokes enjoyed by the seamen” who packed them aboard.

 

On Monday November 21, Darwin brought all his books and
instruments aboard the ship. His quarters were the poop cabin, which he shared with Stokes, and midshipman Phillip Gidley King, the seventeen-year-old son of Captain King, who had commanded the
Adventure
. The tiny 10-foot by 10-foot cabin that these three shared and filled with all their belongings was almost entirely taken up by a large chart table and rows of drawers the carpenters had built into the fore and aft bulkheads and along the sides of the hull. Stokes slept in a bunk just outside the chart room, and King's and Darwin's only beds were hammocks slung over the chart table. The space in the cabin was tight and exacting of movement and behavior. Darwin, who was over 6 feet tall and had never before been restricted to such close quarters, was, in the beginning, dismayed by the lack of space.

The rest of the ship was to be equally crammed full of people and their belongings. Seventy-three men and one girl—Fuegia Basket—were now aboard the
Beagle
, or gathered in Plymouth ready to join the ship. FitzRoy listed them as follows:

Darwin did not bring aboard a servant—that would have made seventy-four men—but at first used one of the ship's boys, Henry Fuller, to help him organize and prepare specimens collected ashore. Later, he employed seventeen-year-old Syms Covington as his full-time assistant, co-opting him from the ship's crew and paying him £60 per year. Covington became Darwin's all-purpose assistant, secretary, shooter and co-collector throughout the voyage, and remained in his employment ashore in England until 1839. He was rarely mentioned by Darwin, as servants dressing and feeding their employers and secretaries mailing their letters seldom are, but Covington made significant contributions to Darwin's work during and after the voyage. He is one in a long line of friends and employees whose work and interest became the foundation for Darwin's studies and eventual reputation.

 

On November 23, filled to her newly raised decks with stores
and food—“not one inch of room is lost, the hold would contain scarcely another bag of bread,” wrote Darwin—the
Beagle
left the dock at Devonport and sailed a mile to Barnet Pool near the entrance to Plymouth harbor. There she anchored to await sailing weather, preferably northeasterly winds to blow her down the Channel and out into the Atlantic. But this was weeks in coming. November passed, and through most of December southwesterly gales blew up the Channel, making departure impossible. The heavily laden
Beagle
rolled and pitched in her anchorage, giving Darwin concerns about seasickness. At first, he felt well.

But his hopes were soon dashed.