This Thing Of Darkness (10 page)

 

A steady, sleeting rain had set in by afternoon, persisting into the evening, and blotchy watercolour clouds obscured the fires on the shore. As usual the breeze died with the passing of daylight, enabling the
Beagle
to let go its anchors; the hustle and bustle of the afternoon was replaced by the ceaseless, soothing rattle of the chain cable as it passed back and forth over the rocks below. The officers had spent the afternoon teaching the alphabet to the illiterate men. Then FitzRoy had ordered painted canvas awnings to be set up to keep the decks dry, for the official ‘song and skylark’ period during the last dog-watch. Conducted by the ship’s fiddler, this was a compulsory session of horn-pipes and sarabands for the entire company, by order of the Admiralty. As Bynoe earnestly explained, the increased blood-flow generated by dancing helped to combat scurvy.

A perfunctory divine service had rounded off the afternoon’s activities. FitzRoy’s prayer was a standard fair-weather imprecation, but the theme of the Noachian flood had served to bring together the concerns that occupied his mind:

Now FitzRoy paced the damp decks, a solitary figure, trying to thread together the Patagonians, the beds of extinct shells and the events of the Old Testament into a coherent whole.
Who for the sin of man didst once drown all the world.
Was this the deluge that had crushed a million shells to white powder on the Patagonian shore?

The night watches had been colder of late, as the freezing Falklands current brought the sea temperatures plunging, and he pulled his oilskin about him. Below decks, everything had been battened down to keep the warm tobacco fug trapped inside. Through the streaming skylights, smoky oil-lamps swung invitingly on their gimbals. In the fetid, sweaty atmosphere, the men talked about life and drowning and money and women. FitzRoy paused as he paced by the messroom skylight where the sound of Master Murray telling a joke issued forth clearly into the night.

‘So Smith, who stutters, is on the tops’lyard. And he shouts to the mate below, “Me w-w-whatnots are j-j-jammed in the block of the reefing tackle.” “Yer what?” shouts the mate. “I said me w-w-whatnots are j-j-jammed in the block of the reefing tackle.” So the mate shouts, “If yer can’t speak it, me bucko, sing it.” So Smith sings out, clear as you like,

A pent-up explosion of masculine laughter greeted the final lines, and FitzRoy was overcome with a desire to join in, to bathe in the atmosphere of camaraderie and warmth. He descended the after companionway and opened the messroom door; but the instant he did so, the atmosphere died as if asphyxiated.

‘Good evening, sir,’ said Murray politely.

‘Evening, sir,’ from Bynoe.

Drinks were hastily put down, and pipes and snuff were laid on the table. Stokes was there too, and Wilson and Kempe.

FitzRoy did his best to muster an urbane smile. ‘Good evening, men.’

‘Anything we can do for you, sir?’

‘No, thank you, Mr Stokes. I am much obliged. I merely came by to thank you most kindly for all your efforts today, and to bid you all goodnight.’

‘Thank you, sir. Goodnight, sir.’

‘Goodnight.’

And with that FitzRoy withdrew, outwardly unruffled, but inwardly smarting that he could make such a fool of himself. On the
Thetis
or the
Ganges,
of course, he would have been part of such an evening’s entertainment; not by any means the most gregarious part but an integral part nonetheless. Now he was excluded by his rank. That was the way of the world, and he must accept it. Never again must he entertain such absurd emotional disarray.
I may guide them and shepherd them through difficulty and help them learn, but I cannot engage with them. I am not allowed to be their friend
He shut the messroom door, crossed the planks, and made his way into his own cramped cabin. There he sat at his table, lit a lantern and drew the salt-stained volume of Admiral Byron’s voyages from the shelf.

Byron had been shipwrecked in Tierra del Fuego on the
Wager
half a century before, one of four to make it home to England from a ship’s company of some two hundred men. Something FitzRoy had read in Byron’s account stirred in his memory now, and he leafed restlessly through the pages to find it. There it was:

Beds of shells. On the summits of hills. Higher than those on the Patagonian shoreline. Higher than the salt crystals of the inshore salinas. Shell beds actually on the summits of hills. He took down the copy of the scriptures that Sulivan had presented him, and turned to Genesis 6: 7: ‘And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.’ Was this not proof, then, of Genesis? How else did shell beds come to be on mountaintops, unless the mountains themselves had been inundated by floodwaters? There had been just eight survivors, according to the weather prayer. Had eight survivors really repopulated the entire planet? His eyes were drawn across the page, as if invisibly guided, to Genesis 6: 4:

Giants in the earth in those days.
The giants of Patagonia? Eagerly, he began to devour the verses that followed, dealing with the repopulation of the earth by Noah’s sons Shem, Ham and Japheth: how Shem begat the Semitic people, how Ham begat the Egyptians and Libyans and Cushites - the blacks - and how Japheth begat the Greeks, Parthians, Persians, Medes and Romans. How, a generation or two later, Esau married a daughter of Ishmael and begat the copper-coloured men. The red men of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

Why, then, the disparity in height between the seven-foot Patagonians and the tiny fat Fuegians they so despised? The Fuegians apparently resembled the Esquimaux and Laplanders of the north. Perhaps the exposure to cold, wet and wind, the long winters cocooned in their tents, had shortened the legs of the Fuegians and increased their body fat. Perhaps the Patagonians, like the Swahili tribesmen of Africa, had grown tall and wiry because of the fine climate, the flat terrain and the enormous distances they had to cover in following the herds. Was it really possible that humans, originally cut from the same divine template, had adapted into a score of different varieties at the behest of the climate and of their surroundings? He had so much to discuss, and no one to discuss it with. He would have given so much, at that moment, to engage in conversation with a skilled anthropologist, mineralogist, or even a priest. Did Noah, he wondered, have anyone to converse with? How unimaginably great would have been the pressures of a divine command!

A commotion outside woke him from his reverie, and there was a knock at the cabin door. It was Boatswain Sorrell, perspiring slightly. ‘If you please, sir, I think you may care to come up on deck.’

FitzRoy ducked out of his cabin and leaped up the companionway to the maindeck. It took his eyes a moment or two to adjust to the darkness, but he could already guess what had transpired from the sounds of cheering about him. Across the bay to the east, two small dark shapes had emerged from the gloom and the drizzle of the first narrows. After a week of fruitless, back-breaking toil, the
Adventure
and the
Adelaide
had taken a leaf out of FitzRoy’s book, and had slithered through the rocky gates - thankfully unscathed - on the tidal current.

‘Are there any news, Mr Kempe?’

‘None, sir. The search parties have found no traces.’

FitzRoy clamped his teeth in exasperation. Murray was now more than a week overdue. He had taken a party in one of the two whale-boats to survey Cape Desolation and the south-western side of the bay. Their provisions would have run out four days ago. It was a wild, surf-pounded coast, exposed to all the moods and frustrations of the Pacific Ocean, which made it all the more dangerous for men in a small open boat.

Up to this point, everything had gone as smoothly as FitzRoy could have hoped. The ships had sailed south from Gregory Bay towards Tierra del Fuego, the scenery changing dramatically as they did so. Ahead of them stood a battalion of sombre mountains, their sides plunging sheer into the sea, their summits white-capped, shrouded by mists and swirling storms. Gloomy beech forests, some of the trunks a good twelve or thirteen feet across at the base, clung in a tangled, yellow-green mass to the leeward shores. Wherever one looked, the mountain wall was riven with inlets; islands dotted its feet, mere crumbs of stone, as if the cliffs had been hewn by a giant with an axe. Here and there, in isolated coves, slender crescents of shingle provided the only flat land. Low clouds raced and tore themselves into strips against the bare rock. Once, just once, through a ripped coverlet of grey, a glittering, frosty peak had revealed itself, towering above its fellows. This was the awesome ‘Volcan Nevado’ recorded by Pedro Sarmiento in the sixteenth century. Captain King had seen it too, in the early days of the expedition, and had renamed it Mount Sarmiento. Nowhere in all this forbidding vista was there any sign of life. If the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego were observing the ships, they gave no indication as yet of their presence. Instead, the dark channels that sliced through the mountains appeared to lead beyond the confines of the world of men, to the far ends of the earth.

King had split the three ships up. He had turned east in the
Adventure.
Skyring in the
Adelaide
had been sent into the labyrinth ahead, to explore and map the Cockburn channel as it wound between sheer rock walls to the south coast. FitzRoy in the
Beagle
had been ordered to follow the Straits of Magellan, turning west at Point Shut-up, then beating north-west towards the Pacific. There were inlets and channels leading off the north side of the straits, recorded a half-century before by Byron, Wallis and Carteret, that still had not been explored, surveyed or named; or, as in the case of Point Shut-up, renamed. They would keep the mountain wall of Tierra del Fuego to their port side, tacking up into the westerlies, while they explored the flatter, barren tundra of southern Patagonia to starboard. FitzRoy was looking forward to the task with enthusiasm; the only sour note was that King had transferred Bynoe to the
Adelaide
, where Skyring was in want of a surgeon, leaving FitzRoy to the conversational mercies of Mr Wilson in his place. Once again he had been denied the company of a potential kindred spirit.

He had sought solace in the solid efficiency of Midshipman Stokes. Crop-haired, compact and muscular, the Yorkshireman belied his eighteen years with a performance of almost metronomic reliability. Once an order had been given to Stokes, it could be safely forgotten. Swiftly, he became FitzRoy’s most trusted surveyor. Although taciturn by nature - he was not one for a messroom chat about the finer aspects of stratigraphy or anthropology - he was unfailingly even-tempered, and stuck by his captain through thick and thin.

As autumn had turned to winter, FitzRoy and Stokes - the former commanding the whaleboat, the latter towed behind in the yawl - had set out with a month’s supplies to investigate the Jerome Channel, a narrow opening on the north side of the strait. They were well prepared: every man in their party carried a painted canvas cloak and a south-wester hat like a coal-heaver’s cap. In the absence of fresh food they packed the boats with tin canisters of Donkin’s preserved meats, which made an agreeable mess when mixed with the occasional wildfowl - any bird unlucky enough to have delayed its winter migration found Stokes an unerring marksman. But despite all FitzRoy’s precautions the weather tested their powers of endurance to the limit. Sometimes icy rain would set in for days; in the mornings their cloaks would be frozen hard about them. The winds whipped up short, awkward seas, which frequently threatened to capsize them, and made it impossible to land in the high-breaking surf; on occasions they had to row all night just to keep the two boats aligned with the waves.

Then there was the time-consuming, exhaustive work of the survey itself. This was modern, scientific map-making, not the broad guess-work of old. Soundings had to be made in every bay using the yawl’s leadline, while the whaleboat foraged in the shallows rudder up, making transects with the lead line at various angles. At every land station, heavy theodolites had to be manhandled up hills, small portable observatories had to be set up, and the ship’s chronometers had to be rated. It was a thankless task, but the men set to it with vigour.

And what discoveries they made. To their astonishment, the Jerome Channel widened out into a vast inland sea some sixty miles wide, hitherto unsuspected, which FitzRoy named Otway Water. A side-channel was named Sulivan Sound in honour of his departed friend; the celebrated Mr Donkin’s preserved meats were commemorated at Donkin Cove, while bays were named after Lieutenant Wickham of the
Adventure
and FitzRoy’s sister Fanny. At the far end of Otway Water, a narrow, twisting passage opened in the hills, which led, astonishingly, to another vast inland sea sixty miles long by twenty miles across. Frozen blue Niagaras of ice marked its western terminus, riven by serrated channels, where improbably shaped icebergs barged and jostled each other with silent grace. FitzRoy named this second reach Skyring Water, in honour of that gentleman’s steadfast good humour in accepting his situation. Their provisions ran low before they could ascertain whether or not there was any exit from Skyring Water to the sea; so they made their way back to the
Beagle,
their thick winter beards streaked with ice. FitzRoy himself had lost two toes through frostbite; but no man had uttered a word of complaint, and their commander burned inside with a fierce pride. He would turn the
Beagle
into the best, the most efficient survey packet the Royal Navy had ever sent forth.