Evolution's Captain (20 page)

Bynoe, the ship's surgeon, told him he was suffering from overwork, that he should ease up and he would recover. But FitzRoy would not believe him. He felt madness burrowing its way through him. He spoke of the suicide of his uncle who had slashed his own throat, and he grew convinced that a hereditary susceptibility to that same maggoty decay was now attacking his mind. Both he and Bynoe were right: overwork, strain, uncertainty, and disappointment had crushed his delicate mental foundation and sent him spinning into a void.

He finally did the unthinkable: he relieved himself of command, appointing First Lieutenant Wickham commander of the
Beagle
. FitzRoy's instructions from the Admiralty always allowed for such an occurrence and were eerily clear about what was then to happen:

There would, in this case, be no continuing the voyage around the world.

Darwin wrote home of his profound disappointment, and his conflicted feelings about the voyage's growing length.

It was Lieutenant Wickham, FitzRoy's loyal second-in-command, who brought his captain round. He pointed out that the Admiralty's instructions for the survey of the southwest coast of South America were to do not all of it but as much as was conveniently possible within a reasonable period—and then to proceed across the Pacific. If he took command, Wickham said, nothing would induce him to spend more time in Tierra del Fuego. So what was to be gained by the captain's resignation? he asked FitzRoy. Wickham urged him to reconsider, to accept the sufficiency of what they had already done, to continue the mission by crossing the Pacific and returning to England at the conclusion of the circumnavigation all hoped to achieve. FitzRoy pondered this a short while and then agreed. He withdrew his resignation. Darwin wrote home with the good news.

FitzRoy spent another year surveying the west coast of South America, but he stayed north of Tierra del Fuego, ranging between the temperate Patagonian island of Chiloé and the tropical waters above Lima, Peru.

On September 7, 1835, almost four years after leaving England, the
Beagle
at last sailed away from the continental coast of America, out onto the vast and storied Pacific.

History had wobbled for a moment as FitzRoy's despair got the better of him; the
Beagle
had almost turned around and sailed for home. But then her captain recovered, and she pointed her bow northwest toward a small scattering of islands on the equator, and history shifted its weight onto the
Beagle
's unsuspecting natural philosopher.

E
arly voyagers called them the Enchanted Islands, but not
because of anything they offered a passing sailor. They were hard to find, elusive, chimerical. They lay in a belt of fitful winds and humid cloud known as the Doldrums. Strong ocean currents played around them. With skies too overcast for celestial navigation, their ships drifting in unknown directions and spinning on ocean gyres, early navigators felt as if their instruments and the sea itself around these islands were bewitched. FitzRoy's task was to fix their location exactly.

Darwin's was to discover the clues that would underwrite his enduring fame. He would do it quickly: his momentous visit to the Galapagos Islands lasted just thirty-four days, and it would be more than a year later until he had any idea what he had really found there.

After the lushness of the tropics and the epic grandeur of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, Darwin found the islands disappointing. They were hot and uncharming. “All the plants have a wretched, weedy appearance, and I did not see one beautiful flower.” The flowers he did find were “insignificant, ugly little flowers.” He took great pains to collect insects but, “excepting Tierra del Fuego, I never saw in this respect so poor a country.
Even in the upper and damp region I procured very few,” and those he found were “of very small size and dull colours.”

The tortoises were more fun.

He found the iguana lizards “most disgusting.”

He noticed what everyone notices, or used to, in the Galapagos Islands: “The birds are strangers to man and think him as innocent as their countrymen the huge tortoises. Little birds, within three or four feet, quietly hopped about the bushes and were not frightened by stones being thrown at them. Mr King killed one with his hat and I pushed off a branch with the end of my gun a large hawk.”

Most notably, Darwin observed and collected a number of birds with very different beaks. At the time, he believed these different beaks indicated different genera, or kinds, of birds: thrushes, finches, blackbirds.

It was not until much later, when his specimens had been examined by experts in England, that Darwin learned what was remarkable about his collections from the Galapagos Islands: the majority of all the animals and flowering plants were aboriginal. They were not found anywhere else.

While Darwin fossicked and collected, the
Beagle
sailed through the islands on its surveying mission.

One of the ship's anchorages was Post Office Bay on Floreana
Island. The name had sprung from a custom established by whaling ships, mostly those from Nantucket and New Bedford, that had been calling at the Galapagos Islands since the 1780s, almost fifty years before the
Beagle
's arrival. Not only did the islands lie across the migratory path of whales; they provided the whaleships with large numbers of tortoises, which lumbered around their decks until slaughtered for fresh meat. In this sheltered bay, a whale-oil barrel had been erected with a small roof over it to hold letters which could be deposited and collected by newly arrived and homebound vessels. On voyages often lasting three or four years, such a mail drop was a treasure trove for seamen anxious for news of their families.

“Since the island has been peopled the box (barrel) has been empty, for letters are now left at the settlement,” wrote FitzRoy. He was mistaken. The tradition held among the whalers for much of the nineteenth century and was continued by cruisers aboard sailing yachts well into the twentieth century. In December 1928, American William Albert Robinson, bound from New York around the world aboard the 32-foot ketch
Svaap
, posted a letter here. The barrel in which he left his letter was “a new one erected not long ago by the
St George
—a British scientific expedition. But a few feet back in the brush I found a very old weathered cask with the letters
U.S
.
MAIL
still faintly visible. It was the last remaining trace of what was probably the world's most romantic postal service.” Robinson's letter followed him shortly afterward, taken on to Tahiti by the
Illyria
, a brigantine on a scientific cruise of the South Seas.

In December 1933, Irving and Electa Johnson and their crew aboard the 92-foot schooner
Yankee
left a letter in “the barrel stuck on top of a pole…and many months later found it had worked: a passing yacht had acted as mailman.”

John Caldwell, a newly discharged American GI, stopped here in his 29-foot boat
Pagan
in July 1946. Caldwell had left his Australian war bride Mary in Sydney almost a year earlier
and, with the immediate postwar scarcity of transportation, had been unable to get back to her since by plane or ship. In desperation, stranded in Panama, he bought
Pagan
, a rundown cutter, and headed across the Pacific without knowing how to sail or navigate. He did manage to reach Post Office Bay and left the bulky letter he'd been writing to Mary, wrapped with a five-dollar bill and a rubber band, in “the parched ornamental barrel” he found on the beach. His voyage had already been hellish, and Caldwell was very uncertain that he'd live to make it across the Pacific to his wife.

Caldwell “posted” his letter on July 22 and sailed away the next day. Some vessel picked it up because ten weeks later, in early October, Mary received it in Sydney. It informed her that he hoped to arrive in
Pagan
around the end of September. In other words, he was then at least a week late. But
Pagan
didn't make it. Caldwell survived a hurricane, but shipwrecked on the reefs of the Fiji Islands. He lived, though, to crawl ashore across the rocks and eventually make his way by copra ship, motor bus, and army bomber to Sydney, where he was reunited with Mary on December 3, 1946. (John Caldwell wrote the full story of this adventure in his book
Desperate Voyage
.)

 

Watered, wooded, and carrying “thirty large terrapin on board,”
the
Beagle
dropped the Galapagos Islands astern on October 20 and sailed southwest across the Pacific.

FitzRoy's instructions, beyond the South American survey, were to take only what time he needed to make celestial observations that would establish a chain of consecutive longitude distances around the globe, back to the vessel's starting point at Plymouth—back to that rock in Plymouth breakwater which had been the starting point for all his longitude observations. The rest of the world, after South America, was covered with the thoroughness of a five-day, ten-country bus trip across Europe. The ship spent only ten days in both Tahiti and New Zealand. The speed of the return voyage, the light duty now that surveying was largely behind them, gave the men aboard the relative leisure to view the world as regular tourists.

FitzRoy was astonished at the size of Sydney. “I saw a well-built city covering the country near the port.” But he didn't think it would last, and, like many since, he had a low opinion of Australian culture.

Map from FitzRoy's
Narrative
showing the
Beagle
's track around the world. (Narrative of HMS
Adventure
and
Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy
)

The
Beagle
remained in Sydney only two weeks. As the ship moved across the globe toward England, its crew grew hungrier for home. None more so than her captain, on whom the weight of the voyage had taken a visible toll. Phillip Parker King, FitzRoy's commander aboard HMS
Adventure
on the
Beagle
's first voyage, had moved to Sydney, and FitzRoy called upon him there. King was appalled at the change in his former youthful commander, now still only thirty years old.

And Darwin, in a letter home at the same time, echoed King's concern, and added one more thought.