Mr Darwin's Shooter (29 page)

When Phipps was around the gent took care to explain himself with exceptional patience, valuing the antiquated, beard-stroking, nodding, analogy-loving man who slipped him questions. ‘Why doth the fire fasten upon the candlewick?' was a favourite to consider. ‘Why doth the pelican pierce her own breast with her bill?'

Continuing their camp they talked into the next night too. You could hear the gent's brain cog-turning in the silence. He peopled the plain with horned and armour-plated
creatures all snuffling along and, in the case of the giant armadillo, rupturing the earth with the force of an eighteen-pounder in its claws. It was easy to imagine the thunder of feet coming through gusts of wind, and when Covington asked, ‘Was there men like them too? Say giants before there was us?' he got thoughtful silence for his reply. No giants
before
, was the true answer, for thus it was that the Bible said, that man was placed on the earth and all creatures assembled around him for his use. But giants
somewhere
was a possibility, for who knew all the mysteries of God's creation? They had not seen any in Tierra del Fuego but the natives spoke of them. Wasn't it what this voyage was for, to do some unravelling? When they sailed into the Pacific, which would be soon, what would they find there? It would be a long haul before they saw England again, they were all suddenly thinking, and to break the lonely mood MacCurdy's voice from the dark was heard snorting: ‘There shall be giants again if
you
ever have young 'uns, Cobby, our man,' and even at such a hint Covington had no thought that he could have started a child with Mrs FitzGerald, nor remembered it was through a strange uncertainty of himself in relation to his gent that he had mingled into his passion a sense of rivalry, so that there was, if you fancied it, a kind of marriage afoot between one and the other.

John Phipps stayed the night ashore, arranging a folded coat for his pillow as so often in the past. Covington stretched beside him and Gent surprised them at their devotions, joining them at their Lord's prayer and bidding them good sleep.

Then they were all gathered back to the bark. She sailed, and Covington slipped away from a life on the land into a dimension of sea-living that wasn't like his old shipboard life at all—nor anything else he had known—for it was part comfort, part privilege, part a clerk's assiduous organisation. It was also part exile—his deafness making him an island. It was all summated in the words ‘gentleman's gentleman', a strange vanity to have in those parts.

To Port Desire they sailed where the officers ransacked an Indian grave, looking for antiquarian remains. To Port St Julian, then, where they went out with the guns and shot salt-water-drinking guanacos and stumbled on an old brick-built Spanish oven. Nearby were the remains of a small wooden cross that was three hundred years old. Magellan had been there and executed some murderers, it was said, as also had Drake, doing his punishments and calling the island ‘true justice'.

To the Straits of Magellan. To Port Famine, within a wet circle of latitude, where Covington sat in the poop cabin listening to rain crash down, making lists and waxing fat on good supplies. Plum jam, fresh bread, three spoons of sugar in his coffee and then a sneaked fourth. A good puff on his briarwood pipe whenever he wanted. A warmth in his trowser-region too when his mind ran over Mrs
FitzGerald, the details always violently present to his imagination. Out on the deck, faint cries of the survey-makers as they read depths, and the monkey-chatter disagreements of the midshipmen over their algebra. Faint was the word— only hearable if uttered close to Covington's ear; his left ear by preference, being slightly better than the right, being a little bit farther removed from exploding shot-powder.

On to Tierra del Fuego they sailed, and its maze of waterways, where they had previously sailed in wild storms, but now came into a calm.

‘What a great useless animal a ship is,' said Darwin, ‘without wind.' The sails hung heavy as wet washing.

‘One sugar,' said Covington, mis-hearing absolutely. ‘I had. And a half.'

They had a ration of it going, an absurd restriction. Covington always made out through confessing to a slight indulgence that stuffing himself excessively was quite beyond him. It was a servant's trick. On occasion it meant he could be blind steaming drunk while Darwin believed him abstemious to the limit of a single glass, perhaps two if pressed. He bent his head to his copying.
Entrance of creek, dark blue sandy clay much stratified dipping to NNW or N by W at about 6°
. So much on all this! The feeling of the past reaching out from behind and looming over the present like a shadowy wave. It was a restless deep inquiry they were on. There were times when it came with understanding and times when it came confused. There was no time when it came godless.

The roaming and adventuring in South America were coming to an end; there was only Chile left; and then the Galapagos Islands.
On the beach a succession of thin strata dipping at 15° to W by S—conglomerate quartz and jasper pebbles—with shells
—vide
specimens
. Covington's fingers scrabbled into the bowl and took another chunk of Jamaican molasses-brown that Capt's steward, Harry Fuller, had left for him. It was you scratch my back and I'll
tickle yours between the two of them. Covington had so much sweetness in his coffee now that it made a syrup. He felt a bit sad. What was he mooning about? Mrs FitzGerald?

There was a comfortable mooning in that. He would like to be with her again but he did not wish it always. He would rather be where he was.
On the coast about 12 feet high, and in the conglom. teeth and thigh bone
. But then in a flush of anger he put pen to paper, and asked her—if she were free—would she be his wife?

There was a commotion on deck. It came to Covington through vibration and the long absence of others in the cabin. He went out to look. The rain had stopped. The surface of the sea was as silver as the back of a fish. Whales were passing and men were everywhere watching. It was not unusual but these were leaping from the water, every part of their body came into the air, and when they slapped down the tail made a noise like a ship's gun. Even Covington heard it. It was one of his last great sounds before all went inwards.

Spermaceti
, he was to copy later. Also observations of the people who ran to the shore and paddled about in their flimsy canoes—their formerly civilised Fuegians who were absorbed back into savagery.
One full-aged woman bedaubed with white paint and quite naked, the rain and spray dripping from her body, their red skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gesticulation violent and without any dignity
. What branch of creation did they come from? For what purpose were they created thus?
Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world
. So wrote Darwin, who was in Covington's care—Cobby with one eye open, his head resting on his arms, sentinel of the mess-table while an iron pot sang on the stove, always ready to spring alert when tapped on the shoulder (the bark being used to it now, when he didn't
respond to shouting). There were days when nothing happened, when the gent ‘staid on board,' when ‘there was nothing to be done,' when the vessel ‘remained stationary,' and the gent ‘not being quite well' lay in a darkened bunk with Assam tea poultices on his eyeballs while Covington fetched steamed towels and potions for headaches and cramps. Problems poured into Darwin's brain and solutions withered at the rate of seeds, each one inscribed by the little curl of a question mark done in lampblack ink. Covington had charge of the notes and read them with all the understanding of a fly seeing a pinpoint of light in a dark room and dimly buzzing.
How to explain part of the structure of that Decapod? It is so very anomalous and the animal being pelagic is a beautiful structure for holding to light floating objects.
Quere
if a serpentine rock be not the produce of volcanic baking of a chloritic slate?

 

There came further wonders surpassing imagination before their voyage was done—an earthquake in Chile dissolving the solid perfection of matter, turning forest and hillslope into substance reliable as water; God showing infinite humour, stranding seashells and a line of old beachfront high in the Andean mountains. What did they signify, these shells, if not this?—That the world rose high in perfect mockery of the Flood, as was philosophised between Gent and Capt?

John Phipps had a reply for 'em, if they might listen, an answer from which he never varied, that was good enough for brother Cobby: those beaches meant a playfulness in the mind of the Creator, a great teasing and tricksiness to test man's easy diversion from the Right Way. God rested on the Sabbath in perfect accord with the purpose of Creation, which was to attract praise for his deeds. And was there any contradiction to this in the way Darwin sent their specimens back by available ship to London? Not at
all. The great ones of London turned them over in their hands and decided what they were—mirrors held to God's glory, mysteries of providence. The careful description and placement of material on lists connecting one to the other was elaborate praise. Collecting and praise arched together. They made the rainbow.

It was not for a naturalist to give so forthright an answer as Phipps did—though Darwin's reply on the matter was still godly enough: he said the Biblical calendar was not so accurate as one wished, and warranted considerable stretching to fit such foldings of the earth's coat to its ancient bones, that had, so interestingly, put a beach into the sky where mostly were rainbows. Things had lived on the earth much longer than anyone believed. God's patience was supreme. A-men.

On they had sailed to the weird Galapagos, the Encantadas or Enchanted Isles, so named because contrary currents bewitched shipmasters' intentions—the cold seas lapping the equator's burning hot sands, home of cactus, tortoise and lizard, where Covington shot Darwin's birds, and kept his own from two of the islands they visited, Chatham and James. It was the fourth year of their voyage by then. They marked the birds according to disparity in their beaks as mockingbirds, gross-beaks, fringilla, orioles, meadowlarks, blackbirds and wrens—though many were true fringilla or finches as was later made clear, which was the beginning of the end of Covington's calm, and the start of his shame.

It was a gentle breeze and a gloomy sky. It was an island lowly shaped, uniform except for sundry paps and hillocks, and when Covington and Darwin stepped ashore, there was small leafless brushwood to knock their knees and low trees offering no shade. Black rocks pulsating heat upwards. The sky hammering it back down. An unpleasant sappy smell in the vegetation. Insignificant, ugly little flowers more arctic than tropic. Lizards of the insinuating, crawling, belly-dragging kind, arousing hostility in the naturalist, who called them ‘imps of darkness', and an impatience in Covington over getting and gutting one, because he was there for the birds. Small tame birds came to
within three or four feet of them, and Midshipman King, in a separate boat party—still a raw boy and increasingly a stranger to Covington—threw a stone.

The stone whizzed past Covington's ear. He didn't see it—only the result. The birds were close together on the ground as a carpet sewn with lumps, and sheeny with the light of the vertical sun on their hundreds of backs. They had no predators and were so tame that the stone landed among them and Covington saw the dark birds ripple. None of them even flew up. Darwin prodded a hawk with his gun-barrel. Covington saw King toss his hat like a spinning disc and it landed on one. A mockingbird, it might be, though it could as easily prove to be a finch. King stood with his hands on his hips, laughing. A minute later he lifted the hat and found the bird dead. It was so easy to accomplish that he did it again. So did MacCracken years later and every visitor who came there. The birds were strangers to man and innocent, and so what was to be done with them? Covington spat with contempt. It was no place for a crafty birder.

But how many birds of the same kind did he take, just so?
All he could get
.

Birdskins were capital. Capital unemployed might be useless, but could never be worthless. Covington's imagination stretched like mastic and at the end of the join was London—Leadbeater's agency and a fine stack of guineas in a birdskin purse. So—what did the Galapagos offer him? Innumerable differently shaped beaks among birds of similar plumage! Rare takes! Common as dandelions in a spring field you may say! Well, all birds were common somewhere at some season and the point was, to Covington's brain, common captures were rare captures if you were the main one shooting. He went potting and dunting through a landscape studded with black cones and ancient volcanic chimneys formed from subterranean melted fluids. He shot multiples of birds from island to
island as his master's needs dictated. The mockingbirds interested Darwin as differing between the islands, and these he instructed Covington to tag with their island names. The finches did not attract him this way. It did not seem important with the islands so close to each other, and the finches hard to tell apart. They were everywhere in the lowland thickets, milling around like flies. So Covington paid attention to the shipping tags of the birds he kept for his own, on which he marked, for his own sales' prospects, their island names. So did Harry Fuller, Capt's servant, mark what he shot, when Covington brought him into his game in a quiet way, and favoured him with a few directions on what he might back with his Capt's old gun.

They walked along in separate silences through truncated hillocks, black as the iron furnaces of Wolverhampton—a sea petrified in its worst moments, they likened it to—old craters a ring of cinders, subsided, collapsed. Darwin and Covington went on alone. Through these circular dips came the tortoises, creaking, shuffling, malodorous. They were billiard tables in extent and heavy as anchors. One was eating a cactus and quietly walked away. Another gave a deep loud hiss and drew back its head. Along came the boy-shooter now a man, and the man-boy naturalist— astounded, humbled, thrown back in time and both exactly startled in the same thought for almost the last time: that here they were surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs and large cacti, facing the most old-fashioned antediluvian animals, or rather the inhabitants of some other planet, proof that God's hand sizzled here with one thing, there with another, and the chambers of his gallery were infinite in their on-going.