Evolution's Captain (19 page)
Read Evolution's Captain Online
Authors: Peter Nichols
I never saw more miserable creatures; stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint & quite naked.âOne full aged woman absolutely so, the rain & spray were dripping from her body; their red skins filthy & greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gesticulation violent & without any dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same worldâ¦. Although essentially the same creature, how little must the mind of one of these beings resemble that of an educated man. What a scale of improvement is comprehended between the faculties of a Fuegian savage & a Sir Isaac NewtonâWhence have these people come? Have they remained in the same state since the creation of the world? What could have
tempted a tribe of men leaving the fine regions of the North to travel down the Cordilleras the backbone of America, to invent & build canoes, & then to enter upon one of the most inhospitable countries in the worldâ¦. Nature, by making habit omnipotent, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate & productions of his country.
Just as they exchanged views about Falkland foxes, Darwin and FitzRoy surely had countless dinner table discussions along exactly these lines. Both men found the Fuegians equally instructive grist for later conclusions.
The only thing more fascinating than seeing these time-capsule humans in their natural habitatâlike cave dwellers from a diorama come to life before one's eyesâwas to dress them up as English gentlefolk, drop them off in the wild, and see how long the patina of civilization could last. The ship was now back in Jemmy Button's country, and FitzRoyâalong with everyone else aboardâwas eager to know what had become of the three Fuegians they had left ashore almost a year earlier. On March 5, after days of beating to windward through the Beagle Channel, the Beagle rode the tide through Murray Narrows and came to anchor at Woollya.
“Not a living soul was visible any where,” wrote FitzRoy, noting only what he was looking for on land; the ship had been followed through the narrows by seven canoes full of Fuegians waving bows and arrows. Going ashore with some men he found the
Beagle
-built wigwams were still standing, undisturbed but empty, and showing no signs of recent habitation. The garden appeared trampled and neglected, but the seamen dug up some turnips and potatoes “of moderate size” which the captain later ate for dinner.
Back aboard the ship, FitzRoy feared the worst, particularly in view of the aggressive behavior of the natives in the canoes. But an hour or two later, three more canoes were sighted, paddling strongly for the ship from a nearby island. FitzRoy raised a telescope in their direction.
I saw that two of the natives in them were washing their faces, while the rest were paddling with might and main: I was then sure that some of our acquaintances were there, and in a few minutes recognized Tommy Button, Jemmy's brother. In the other canoe was a face which I knew yet could not name. “It must be some one I have seen before,” said I, when his sharp eye detected me, and a sudden movement of the hand to his head (as a sailor touches his hat) at once told me it was indeed Jemmy Buttonâbut how altered!
In shame, Jemmy kept his back to the ship until the canoe came alongside. Up he scrambled onto the deck. The fat, vain dandy was no more. In his place, observed Darwin, was a thin, haggard savage, with long matted hair, and naked, except for a skin around his waist. “I could hardly restrain my feelings,” wrote FitzRoy, “and I was not, by any means, the only one so touched by his squalid, miserable appearance.”
With an unfailing sense of what was most important, the Englishmen hurried Jemmy below to be clothed. In half an hour he was sitting at the captain's table. He ate lunch with his manners unimpaired, using his knife and fork as correctly as ever. FitzRoy thought he looked ill, but Jemmy assured him that he was “hearty, sir, never better.” He hadn't been sick a day since he had last seen them, and ate “plenty fruits, plenty birdies, ten guanacos in snow time,” and “too much fish.”
What had happened to York and Fuegia? FitzRoy asked.
After the
Beagle
had left, the year before, Jemmy told them, other FuegiansâJemmy's enemies the Oens-men, not of his countryâhearing of the settlement, had raided the camp at Woollya. They looted whatever Jemmy and his family had not been able to escape with in their canoes. York had managed to save most of his belongings, including the large canoe FitzRoy had seen him building beside his wigwam. He and Fuegia then urged Jemmy and his family to move with them, with all their remaining belongings, to York's country, farther west, where he
had first been taken from. They traveled as far as Devil Island at the western end of the Beagle Channel where they came upon York's brother and other members of his tribe, the Alacalufes (or the Alikhoolips, as FitzRoy called them). There, while Jemmy and his family slept on Devil Island, York made off with all his worldly goods, leaving him in his naked, original state. An act of consummate villainy, Darwin thought. FitzRoy, when he heard this, saw in it considerable cunning.
York's fine canoe was evidently not built for transporting himself alone; neither was the meeting with his brother accidental. I am now quite sure that from the time of his changing his mind [the year before, in January 1833, when the
Beagle
had spent weeks trying to fight its way west below Cape Horn toward York's country around March Harbour], and desiring to be placed at Woollya, with Matthews and Jemmy, he meditated taking a good opportunity of possessing himself of every thing; and that he thought, if he were left in his own country without Matthews, he would not have many things given to him, neither would he know where he might afterwards look for and plunder poor Jemmy.
They must have asked Jemmy if he wanted to come away with them again, because both FitzRoy and Darwin wrote that he was happy and contented with his life and had no wish to change it or to return to England.
After lunch Jemmy visited with members of the crew. He had brought two otter skins, one for FitzRoy, and the other for the captain's steady coxswain, James Bennet, who had overseen all the Fuegians' arrangements in England and spent so much time with them there.
While Jemmy's English appeared as good as ever, he told FitzRoy that his Fuegian was still poor, but that he spoke with his family now in both languages, and they appeared to under
stand him. They were speaking a little English. This seemed like the thin end of the wedge that FitzRoy had always hoped for.
In the evening, another canoe came alongside the ship with an attractive young woman in it. She was crying fearfully, unstoppably, for Jemmy Button. It was his wife, Jemmy told the crew. Immediately she was showered with giftsâshawls, handkerchiefs, and a gold-laced capâbut would not stop crying until Jemmy appeared on deck close by. His brother, Tommy, also felt the visit had gone on long enough, for he began to bellow in his stentorian Fuenglais: “Jemmy Button, canoe, come!”
Jemmy paddled away with his family for the night. They did not head for Woollya. The wigwams there had been too good: they were too high and cold in the winter. And the terrain around the settlementâa parklike setting that appealed to English tastes, sketched and painted by the
Beagle
's artistsâmade them too vulnerable to attack. They steered instead for nearby “Button Island,” as all now called it, where Jemmy felt better off.
After farewells and more present giving the next day, the
Beagle
sailed away. Jemmy sailed with it for a short distance, until his wife's violent crying got him back into her canoe. He had developed a fondness for ships and the shipboard life. He would not forget it.
Darwin was glad to see the last of the Fuegians. Scientifically they fascinated him, but he had grown sick of their incessant, importuning “yammerschoonering.” “Saying their favorite word in as many intonations as possible, they would then use it in a neuter sense, and vacantly repeat, âyammerschooner.' On leaving some place we have said to each other, âThank Heaven, we have at last fairly left these wretches!' when one more faint halloo from an all-powerful voice, heard at prodigious distance, would reach our ears, and clearly could we distinguishââ
Yammerschooner.'”
To Darwin, FitzRoy's great experiment seemed to have failed utterly. Prefiguring his long cogitation on adaptation and the pecking order of evolving species, the young naturalist intuited a
crucial impediment to the improvement of the aborigines of Tierra del Fuego:
The perfect equality of all the inhabitants will for many years prevent their civilization: even a shirt or other article of clothing [given to one as a gift] is immediately torn into pieces [to be shared].âUntil some chief rises, who by his power might be able to keep to himself such presents as animals &c &c, there must be an end to all hopes of bettering their condition.
FitzRoy would not admit it. He persisted, even now, in seeing a hopeful outcome.
I cannot help still hoping that some benefit, however slight, may result from the intercourse of these people, Jemmy, York, and Fuegia, with other natives of Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps a shipwrecked seaman may hereafter receive help and kind treatment from Jemmy Button's children; prompted, as they can hardly fail to be, by the traditions they will have heard of men of other lands; and by an idea, however faint, of their duty to God as well as their neighbour.
Jemmy Button would prove how terribly wrong FitzRoy was.
F
itzRoy never counted on Admiralty support for his extracurricular
hiring and buying of additional vessels to aid his surveying efforts, but he had certainly hoped for it. Financially he needed it.
“I believe that their Lordships will approve of what I have done,” FitzRoy had written to Captain Beaufort, “but if I am wrong, no inconvenience will result to the public service, since I alone am responsible for the agreementâ¦and am able and willing to pay the stipulated sum.”
The dispatch secretary at the Admiralty underlined the phrase “am able and willing” and asked Beaufort for a report on this irregularity at the next Board Day meeting of the Lords. Beaufort's response was as supportive of his man out mapping the edge of the world as he could make it.
There is no expression in the Sailing Orders, or surveying instructions, given to Commander FitzRoy which convey to him any authority for hiring and employing any vessels whatever.
On the other hand, there can be no doubt that by the aid of small craft he will be sooner and better able to accomplish the great length of coast which he has to examineâand which seems to contain so many unknown and valuable harbours;â
especially if he finds it necessary to trace the course of a great river, which had been reported to him as being navigable almost to the other side of America.
It may also be stated to their Lordships that the
Beagle
is the only surveying ship to which a smaller vessel or Tender has not been attached.
In the last paragraph, Beaufort invokes the ideal and more usual practice of all exploring voyages since Man first set out on logs across a lagoon: sailing in company with another vessel as insurance. Columbus did it, as did Magellan and Cook. It was unusual and risky to send a ship alone to explore a remote corner of the world. If she struck a reef, her crew could easily perish unless a companion ship stood nearby. Of Magellan's five-vessel squadron that set out from Spain to circumnavigate the world in 1519, only one ship, battered and manned by 31 of the 270 men who had started the voyage, returned to Seville. On her first voyage to Tierra del Fuego, the
Beagle
had sailed with HMS
Adventure
commanded by Captain King, and this, as Beaufort points out, was standard practice with surveying missions.
In another letter, FitzRoy reminded Beaufort of the time slipping by, and the opportunity made possible by a sister vessel.
I cannot help feeling rather strongly that the
Adventure
and
Beagle
have been several years about this survey, and that Foreigners as well as Englishmen are anxiously expecting the results of the “English Survey.” Officers acquainted with these countries are now employed who may be elsewhere in a short time. Chronometers will not continue to go well for
many
years, without cleaningâThe
Beagle
has many measurements to make and much work to do in the Pacific. And a certain troubled spirit and conscience is always goading me to do all I can, for the sake of doing what is
right
; without seeking for credit, or being cast down because everyone does not see things in the same light. These are some of the reasons which occasion my outgoings.
What is
now
left undone, will long be neglected. Not only the character of those actually engaged in the survey will suffer, but the credit of the English as surveyors will be injured.
Despite his avowed willingness to bear the expense, FitzRoy was banking on Admiralty approval. After purchasing the
Unicorn
and rechristening her
Adventure
, he bought stores and gear to refit her from the wrecked French whaler
Le Magellan
, had her careened (hauled over on her side at the water's edge, exposing the bottom of the hull) and her bottom coppered, and fitted her out with no expense spared to sail in convoy with the
Beagle
around the world. He was hugely excited by the opportunities made possible with a second ship. She would virtually double his charting and exploring of the Pacific islands; she would offer his crew safety; and she might help to make him famous. FitzRoy knew his history, and he saw the
Beagle
and her consort
Adventure
taking their place in the pantheon of landmark voyages. The supplies aboard both vessels, and the mandate of his mission, gave FitzRoy the chance to make an exceptional mark on the world. He believed that no one on Earth at that moment had the chance and the wherewithal to open up the globe, to delve into its natural and scientific mysteries, as he now hoped to do. All these hopes lay gathered in his purchase of the schooner.
He was inordinately proud and protective of his new little ship. As the
Beagle
and the
Adventure
neared the western shores of Tierra del Fuego, ready to sail out into the Pacific, poor weather and visibility kept them pinned inside the Furies, a rock-studded constellation of small islets that posed a death trap for ships. Night came on with heavy, view-obliterating rain squalls. There was one safe anchorage in the area, a tiny cove with room in it for a single vessel. FitzRoy sent the
Adventure
in to shelter in safety while he kept the
Beagle
underway all night, tacking and wearing back and forth through the black foul weather and racing tides in a space of four square miles. It was a purely emotional, and strikingly unsound and unseaman-like decision to
keep the mother shipâthe bluffer, unhandier, less efficient sailer, with the greater amount of stores and number of men aboardâturning and turning about between the rocks through the long black hours. But he carried it off with his usual consummate, relished seamanship:
It was necessary to keep under a reasonable press of sail part of the time, to hold our ground against the lee tide; but with the ebb we had often to bear up and run to leeward, when we got too near the islets westward of us. In a case of this kind a ship is so much more manageable while going through the water than she is while hove-to, and those on board are in general so much more on the alert than when the vessel herself seems half asleep, that I have always been an advocate for short tacks under manageable sail, so as to keep as much as possible near the same place, in preference to heaving-to and drifting.
When the day at last brokeâ¦we saw the Adventure coming out to us from the cove where she had passed the night, and then both vessels sailed out of the Channel, past Mount Skyring and all the Furies, as fast as sails could urge them. At sunset we were near the Tower Rocks, and with a fresh north-west wind stood out into the Pacific, with every inch of canvas set which we could carry.
The Furies have always made strong men quail. Sixty-two years later, in March 1896, Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail alone around the world, found himself trapped among them in his 37-foot sloop, at night in a roaring gale.
Night closed in before the sloop reached land, leaving her feeling the way in pitchy darkness. I saw breakers ahead before long. At this I wore ship and stood offshore, but was immediately startled by the tremendous roaring of breakers again ahead and on the lee bow. This puzzled me, for there should have been no broken water where I supposed myself to be. I kept off a good bit, then wore round, but finding broken water also there,
threw her head again offshore. In this way, among dangers, I spent the rest of the night. Hail and sleet in the fierce squalls cut my flesh till the blood trickled over my face; but what of that? It was daylight, and the sloop was in the midst of the Milky Way of the sea, which is northwest of Cape Horn, and it was the white breakers of a huge sea over sunken rocks which had threatened to engulf her through the night. It was Fury Island I had sighted and steered for, and what a panorama was before me now and all around! It was not the time to complain of a broken skin. What could I do but fill away among the breakers and find a channel between them, now that it was day? Since she had escaped the rocks through the night, surely she would find her way by daylight. This was the greatest sea adventure of my life. God knows how my vessel escapedâ¦. The great naturalist Darwin looked over this seascape from the deck of the
Beagle
, and wrote in his journal “Any landsman seeing the Milky Way would have nightmares for a week.” He might have added, “or seaman” as well.
Darwin did indeed find the Furies and their environs nightmarish; this is what he actually wrote.
Outside the main islands, there are numberless rocks & breakers on which the long swell of the open Pacific incessantly rages.âWe passed out between the “East & West Furies”; a little further to the North, the Captain from the number of breakers called the sea the “Milky Way”.âThe sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, & shipwreck.
So it was FitzRoy who, that night, coined the name by which seamen ever afterward called this deadly scattering of rocks.
The frightening view astern was Darwin's, FitzRoy's, and the rest of both ships' crews' last sight of Tierra del Fuego.
The
Adventure
proved a fast sailer, and even Darwin caught some of FitzRoy's pride and enjoyment in their consort: “The
Adventure
kept ahead of us, which rejoiced us all, as there were strong fears about her sailing. It is a great amusement having a companion to gaze at.”
But he was aware of the price being paid, and it worried him. “He [FitzRoy] is eating an enormous hole into his capital for the sake of advancing all the objects of the voyage,” Darwin wrote home. “The schooner which will so very mainly be conducive to our safety he entirely pays for.”
So FitzRoy was emotionally unprepared for the Admiralty's response, which finally reached him on the west coast of Chile.
Their Lordships do not approve of hiring [and buying] vessels for the service and therefore desire that they may be discharged as soon as possible.
There would be no reimbursement.
By the time he let go the other two schooners, the
Pax
and the
Liebre
, which he had hired the year before to help him survey the South American Atlantic coast, FitzRoy had spent a total of £1680 to charter them, and more to refit them for the work. At a time when the average per capita income in Britain was about £20 per year, this was a fortune, lost in the zealous service of his commission. Now he had spent almost as much for the
Adventure
alone, and more to outfit her. He was so reluctant to give her up, and “all my cherished hopes,” that he held onto her a little longer, hoping for an official change of heart. It did not come.
Darwin believed the “cold manner” of the Admiralty's response to its lone captain was “solelyâ¦because he is a Tory.” Maybe. The Whigs, Britain's liberal reforming party, had recently been elected to office after a long hiatus from power, and the mood in government was set against the more conservative Tories, with whom FitzRoy's aristocratic family was traditionally associated. But more likely he was feeling the Admiralty's indifference or even antipathy to his mission, which, after all, had been engineered by
his influential uncle. The Lords had given him a ship, outfitted it handsomely, and let him go; that was enough. Beaufort seems to have been quite alone in his strong championing of FitzRoy and his voyage. And certainly nobody gave any thought to opportunities afforded the
Beagle
's naturalist, an unknown student, the captain's supernumerary indulgence.
Finally, the cost of buying and running the
Adventure
began to exceed FitzRoy's income and drive him into debt, and “after a most painful struggle,” he found a buyer in Chile and sold it. Through being “dispirited and careless” he mismanaged the sale, getting close to what he had paid for the ship, but far less than he'd spent on her outfitting and renovation. It was a double loss that depressed him deeply.
The
Beagle
spent the winter months refitting in Concepción and Valparaiso. At times FitzRoy and his officers moved ashore to collate their surveys and draw their charts in good light and peace and quiet, away from the bustle aboard ship. He tried to bury himself and his disappointment in the work, but he was besieged by Chilean hospitality: constant invitations to entertain the captain and his officers distracted him and brought with them the obligations to return such favors in kind. His mood continued to tumble. He snapped viciously at Darwin, causing the second of their two quarrels, which Darwin remembered years later.
At Conception in Chile, poor FitzRoy was sadly overworked and in very low spirits; he complained bitterly to me that he must give a great party to all the inhabitants of the place. I remonstrated and said that I could see no such necessity on his part under the circumstances. He then burst out in a fury, declaring that I was the sort of man who would receive any favours and make no return. I got up and left the cabin without saying a word, and returned to Conception where I was then lodging. After a few days I came back to the ship and was received by the Captain as cordially as ever.
During that winter, FitzRoy's depression reached a state that seemed to Darwin to be “bordering on insanity.” He refused to visit or be visited. He stopped eating. Darwin described his condition in a letter home: “a morbid depression of spirits, & a loss of all decision & resolution. The Captain was afraid that his mind was becoming deranged.”
FitzRoy, the consummate navigator, had lost his way. He saw gaps in his information, gaps in his charts of the coasts, and became convinced he would have to sail south again and spend another seasonâtheir fourthâin Tierra del Fuego, a prospect that all aboard, including FitzRoy, dreaded. He lost sight of where to draw the line. He was succumbing to the overload that had driven Pringle Stokes to despair and suicide. He was having a nervous breakdown.