Evolution's Captain (21 page)

T
he
Beagle
dropped anchor in Falmouth, England, on October
2, 1836. On her voyage of 58 months, 43 had been spent in South America. From Peru, she had sailed home in just 13 months, all aboard her ready to be done with the voyage, their thoughts fastened upon England and home.

Darwin, who had been seasick through one last gale in the Bay of Biscay as the
Beagle
worked her way up to the Western Approaches, was packed and thoroughly ready. He disembarked at once. That night (“a dreadfully stormy one”) he started north from Falmouth by mail coach to Shrewsbury and reached The Mount, the Darwin family home, at breakfast time on Wednesday, October 5.

“Why, the shape of his head is quite altered,” said his father to Darwin's gaping sisters. Though neither Darwin nor his father were adherents of phrenology, both seemed to have believed, as FitzRoy did about his Fuegians, that concentration and employment of mental powers could affect the shape of the cranium. Darwin cites this observation by his father, “the most acute observer whom I ever saw,” as evidence that “my mind became developed through my pursuits during the voyage.” In fact, Darwin was balding prematurely. While away at sea he had lost most of the hair on top of his head.

The
Beagle
was an instant dockside attraction. In Falmouth,
newspapers announced her arrival from around the world. People crowded the quays to see her, board her, put their hands upon her as they would today the space shuttle, and to question her crew about storms and savages. Her captain's company was eagerly sought. On October 3, the day after her arrival, FitzRoy was invited to the home of Robert Were Fox, Falmouth's eminent Quaker scientist. His daughter, Caroline Fox, recorded the visit in her journal.

The
Beagle
sailed on to Plymouth and Portsmouth to receive visits from Admiralty bigwigs, “repectable-looking people,” (who came aboard by the accommodation ladder) and “others” (humbler sightseers who were permitted to climb into the ship on a rough plank).

Darwin wrote to FitzRoy from Shrewsbury, offering sympathy at finding himself once more in “that horrid Plymouth,” where he had languished for so many months before beginning the voyage. But the time had been well spent for FitzRoy, as he revealed in his reply to Darwin.

On top of all the anxieties FitzRoy had suffered through his mission, there had been the question many seamen take with them when they leave a loved one at home: Will she still be there?

The
Beagle
sailed on up the Channel and into the Thames to Greenwich, where she let go her anchor on the zero meridian and FitzRoy made his final observations of the voyage. The ship remained at Greenwich for two and a half weeks for visits by the Astronomer Royal and other guests, then dropped downstream on the tide to Woolwich Dockyard, where she had been built and launched sixteen years before. On November 17 the ship decommissioned, her crew paid off.

Many of the seamen and officers who left the ship and parted from one another had been aboard the
Beagle
on both her voyages, under FitzRoy's command for more than six years. They had faced something very like war during those years; together they had fought the sea, the Fuegians, and the most ferocious weather on Earth, and many times they had saved one another's lives. A few of their number had died. FitzRoy did not write about it, but disbanding beside the
Beagle
on the dock in Woolwich that day would have been as emotional and wrenching for those seamen as the breakup of a tight battalion of long-serving soldiers at the end of a world war. The men went home, or they found berths aboard other ships. Some of the officers went on to notable careers. Most of the crew simply disappear from record.

FitzRoy went home to Onslow Square in London to prepare for his wedding and begin the work of overseeing the drawing and production of new, wonderfully accurate nautical charts from his years of prodigious surveying.

 

Darwin felt awkward at home. He had left as a boy just graduated
from university and come back a grown man, an adventurer, a working scientist. He'd spent years galloping around South America with gauchos and soldiers, eating wild animals
over camp fires, trading with natives, roaming through jungles, sharing desperate adventures with tough seamen.

The Mount was filled with sisters. They fussed over him. They expected him now to stay at home and settle into life as a country gentleman, to pick up again the threads of his preparation to be a country parson. But Darwin had been around the world, and while travel no longer held any attraction, the disciplines of the natural sciences, in which he had steeped himself for five years, and the community of his fellow scientists, now beckoned and urged him on to new exploration. He could not go home again.

Darwin came home to the fruit of his tremendous industry over the course of the last five years. His collection amounted to a full museum's worth of the world's natural marvels: whole groups of plants and insects, birds, small and large animals and reptiles, corals, shellfish and other sea creatures and invertebrates, bones, fossils, rocks, and minerals. His labeling, cataloging, wrapping, drying, and bottling of specimens had been meticulous and thorough.

Everything had gone to Darwin's mentor, Professor Henslow in Cambridge, who unpacked each box and crate on arrival, checked its condition and need for further preservation, and stored it for Darwin's return. Henslow had been unable to resist putting out word of the magnificent collection accumulating, or publishing extracts of Darwin's letters to him. He had spent five years paving the way for Darwin's reappearance, so that in the world of the professors and the burgeoning natural sciences, Darwin was already famous. Charles Lyell wanted to meet him, the Geological Society wanted to elect him a Fellow. Museums everywhere wanted his bones and butterflies. There was no going back, no more search for a career. He had become somebody. All that running away from his studies—beetle collecting, riding, hunting, and shooting—had found him a destiny.

After ten days at home, he escaped to London, to stay with his older brother Erasmus. His life there became frantic with activity—tea parties with the Lyells, irresistible invitations from leading scientists. In December he moved to Cambridge, to the site of his collection. There, with the help of his
Beagle
assistant, Syms Covington, he began to look through everything, to unravel his voyage, to see what he had really done.

He sent his specimens off to the experts who could identify them, determine whether he had found new species, give them their official Latin names. Most of the early excitement was naturally generated by the big fossilized bones of the extinct creature Darwin had dug up on the east coast of Patagonia, the
Megatherium
—or was it a
Scelidotherium
, or a
Toxodon
, or all three? Here was something tangible to wonder at, obviously destined for the museums already clamoring for them. The smaller stuff—the Galapagos birds with their varying sizes of beaks, the different shells of the tortoises—were of subtler interest, and it would be some time before Darwin began to cogitate on just why they varied.

He had a book to write. Late in the voyage, while FitzRoy was beginning to prepare and collate his own journals for publi
cation, he asked Darwin if he could read some of what he had been writing in his journals. FitzRoy thought “Philos's” observations good enough to incorporate into the long narrative of the
Beagle
's two voyages he was planning to publish. Initially, both Darwin and FitzRoy saw this contribution as sections slipped into the larger work, but later the size and readability of Darwin's diary led them both to believe it could form a distinct volume on the natural history of the countries the ship had visited. Out at sea, at the time of FitzRoy's suggestion, Darwin was flattered, excited by the idea of another book to write (in addition to the book on the geology of the counties visited, which he had first conceived early in the voyage at the Cape Verde Islands). But by late 1836, surrounded by overflowing crates of specimens in Cambridge, his head filled with a kaleidescope of images and ideas, such a book had become a mounting imperative to him. Threads and shapes and anomalies of creation were coursing through Darwin's brain, hot-wiring his synapses, and he felt an urgent need to make sense of it all.

Such a book would also, he knew from the attention he was getting, put him on the map in the scientific community. This was what he wanted now, to take his place, as Sedgwick had suggested, among the leading scientists of the day, men like Lyell, whom Darwin respected and admired hugely, who influenced the thinking of the civilized world. He wanted to be one of them. A book about his voyage would do it.

Darwin began writing it in Cambridge in January 1837. In March, with most of his collection dispersed to the experts for identification, he moved back to London, renting rooms in Great Marlborough Street for himself and Covington who was still working as his general assistant. There he continued work on his book. It closely followed the daily journal he had kept throughout the voyage, on land and sea.

 

FitzRoy was at least as busy. After his marriage, he and his wife
settled into domestic life in London, and Mary was soon pregnant.

FitzRoy returned to accolades rare for a naval officer in peacetime. He was publically thanked in Parliament. The Royal Geographic Society presented him with their gold medal. The appreciation of the Admiralty—for him more important than any honor—was deep. The quality of his work as a marine surveyor was immediately evident. It was so thorough and accurate that the resulting charts were used for more than a century.

In aristocratic, social, and scientific circles, FitzRoy was famous—much more so than Darwin, whose renown was narrowly confined to the community of academics and naturalists. On his return to London FitzRoy was much sought after: a dashing, witty, charming officer, a gentleman, seaman, and scientist of extraordinary accomplishments, with equally extraordinary tales to tell. More than anything, he had sailed around the world, and the neat geometry of this feat provided the shape and allure to all he had done. He was England's nineteenth-century astronaut returned to Earth. Everyone wanted to meet and talk with Captain Robert FitzRoy.

When his work on his surveys and charts was completed, FitzRoy didn't seek another sailing commission. Despite the inroads he had made in his personal fortune he was still financially independent, and with Mary pregnant and his own book of the voyage to write, he had more than enough to keep him at home.

The narrative he had long planned to publish consisted of two main parts. A first volume would cover the voyages of the
Adventure
and the
Beagle
during the years 1826–1830 (with Pringle Stokes and FitzRoy as successive captains of the
Beagle
), when both ships had been under the overall command of Captain Phillip Parker King; a second volume for the
Beagle
's five-year voyage, from 1831 to 1836. Volume One was to be authored
by Captain King, but as he had moved to Australia, the production of this fell entirely to FitzRoy, who had to put together and edit the first book from his own, Stokes's, and King's thick pile of notes and logs.

Volume Two, FitzRoy's own dense day-by-day account of the second voyage, was enormous, if not quite epic. With lengthy essays on the state of native peoples, descriptions of coastlines, weather, sea conditions, shiphandling, adventures ashore, and, not least, the repatriation of the Fuegians, it would run to 695 pages and a quarter of a million words when completed. Multiple appendixes covered 350 pages in a separate volume. Darwin's book would form a third volume, but apart from that it was all FitzRoy's to do. He began early in 1837.

It must have seemed to him at first an enjoyable task: to stay at home with his wife and coming child, to voyage daily no farther than from bedroom to study. To suffer no setbacks from storms but rather to sit in a peaceful room in England and view the weather from the dry side of a windowpane—to a seaman such a secure berth holds an intense appreciation. To be free of the bedevilment of hostile natives. To light a fire, trim a wick, and spread around him at his desk the notebooks, logbooks, maps, and drawings from which he could select and produce a coherent account; to draw up a good chair, dip a smooth nib into a still inkwell, and begin.