This Thing Of Darkness (37 page)

‘But why floggings? Why not this “disrating”?’

‘Oh, many a man would prefer the flogging. A disrating involves less pay. But they will get their rates back, and the scars of the floggings will heal. They knew what they were doing, Philos. Drunkenness is the sole and never-failing pleasure to which a sailor always looks forward. They expect to see floggings, and if the skipper does not deliver, why, they will lose all respect for him. They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’

Darwin was silent.

‘There isn’t such a fine captain in all the world, Philos. He would not take this course were it not absolutely necessary.’

The Beagle swung out into the Channel, and as her crew prepared to bring her nose round to starboard, the men began to sing:

Darwin shuddered.
What is this antiquated world of peremptory justice and sadistic medieval vengeance that I bave joined of my own will?
he asked himself.
A world where men take floggings with equanimity and are as like as not to end their lives drowned in soft brown mud? I must have taken leave of my senses.

Sulivan guessed what sentiments lay behind the expression on Darwin’s face, and smiled. ‘It’s only a piece of metal, Philos.’

‘What is?’

‘The dead man’s face. It’s a triangular piece of metal with three holes in it, used when the ship is moored for long periods, to connect the two anchor chains and prevent them twisting round each other. Ofttimes, it gets muddy. That’s why it needs scrubbing.’

Darwin felt small, and stupid, and pale and giddy and sick. He went to his cabin, and climbed with recently acquired expertise into his hammock. As he lay there, he felt waves of nausea undulate through him, so he shut his eyes and listened as the screams of the first of the flogged men echoed through the ship.

They had come for Darwin at dawn. A hand clamped roughly over his mouth had wakened him from sleep, others had pinioned his arms, and a blindfold had been wound round his eyes. He had been led, stumbling and shaking with nerves, up the companionway and out on to the maindeck; there, he was roped roughly to a chair, which was lifted on to a plank and swung out over empty air. Wind blew against his cheek. He could feel the sway of the plank and hear the ripple of water below.

‘Is that you, Darwin?’ It was FitzRoy’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I — I think so. Will they kill us?’

‘Will they kill us? What in heaven do you mean?’

A drumbeat commenced off to Darwin’s right. His blindfold was whipped off, and a hideous apparition leaped into view: a crewman, semi-naked, daubed entirely in green, brandishing a rough-hewn spear. Other demoniacal beings swarmed about him, stripped to the waist, rings of red and yellow paint radiating out from their bulging eyeballs as they danced high and low.

‘Welcome to the Kingdom of the Deep,’ intoned the green crewman. ‘I am King Neptune!’

‘It is a sort of ritual they like to perform whenever we cross the equator,’ explained FitzRoy, wearily. ‘It is called “Crossing the Line”. It affords them the greatest satisfaction.’

Darwin looked down, and saw that the rippling water below was contained in a huge sail held taut by several sailors.

‘Shave them!’ shouted King Neptune.

An evil-smelling mixture of paint and pitch was brushed about their faces, then scraped off again with a rusty iron hoop.

‘Rinse them!’

Two grinning urchins appeared, extravagantly warpainted, who were revealed on closer inspection to be Musters and Hellyer. Gleefully, they emptied buckets of cold salt water over FitzRoy’s and Darwin’s heads.

‘You see?’ said Musters to Hellyer. ‘I told you they would let us do it. What larks!’

‘I assure you, Darwin, it would be a deal worse were you not my travelling companion,’ insisted FitzRoy, in his most placatory tone.

‘I do believe, FitzRoy, that this “ceremony” is in some way parodic of the sacrament of baptism. I am not sure that I entirely approve.’

‘The effects of these mummeries are entirely positive on those who prepare them. They speak of them for a long time afterwards.’

Any further conversation was rendered out of the question as the two planks were dipped forward, and FitzRoy and Darwin tumbled head over heels, still tied to their chairs, into cold salty water.

‘What fools these sailors make of themselves,’ grumbled Darwin, as they towelled themselves off in FitzRoy’s cabin shortly afterwards.

‘It is an absurd piece of folly,’ said FitzRoy.

‘Most disagreeable,’ said Darwin.

 

The rituals of the equator aside, it had been a largely uneventful crossing, punctuated only by the disappointment of not being allowed to put in at Tenerife, where news of London’s cholera outbreak had preceded them. They had picked up the north-east trades at the Cape Verde Islands and had made rapid passage thereafter. Darwin had filled his time trawling for jellyfish and microscopic sea-creatures, using a home-made net constructed from bunting and an iron hoop. Lieutenant Wickham had cursed the ‘Flycatcher Philosopher’ for the specimens that oozed and glistened across his pristine deck, but always with his tongue in his cheek.

‘If I were skipper, all your damned mess would be chucked overboard, and you after it!’ he had bellowed.

FitzRoy’s day was always the same: breakfast at eight, a morning inspection of the ship, a midday check on the chronometers, a one o’clock dinner of rice, peas and bread with Darwin, then the afternoon spent with Hellyer seeing to the ship’s logbook and papers. He still found time, however, to teach Darwin how to dry, preserve and log his sea creatures; how to make drawings, notes and measurements; how to attach matching labels to the specimens and their containers, and how to catalogue when and where they had been caught. Darwin, for his part, was mildly surprised that FitzRoy did not spend his days striding about the deck in full dress uniform, like Nelson in the heat of battle.

When the day was over, after their antiscorbutic supper of meat, pickles, dried apple and lemon juice, Darwin would join Wickham or Sulivan for a little conversation at the wheel; unless it was a Sunday, of course, when Sulivan would be excused duty on religious grounds. On windless evenings in the tropics, Darwin sat out on a boom with Midshipman King, watching the waves furl past the prow. These were the evenings he liked best: when the air was still and deliciously warm, the heavens shone clear and high, and the white sails filled with soft air and flapped gently against the masts.

When the wind got up, however, and the Beagle bowled along, the old seasickness returned, and he took to his cabin at the ‘lively’ end of the ship. If Stokes was working at the chart table, he could not put up his hammock, so the assistant surveyor would allow him to lie curled on the tabletop instead, and would work around the philosopher’s recumbent body. ‘Old fellow, I must take the horizontal for it,’ Darwin would gasp, before prostrating himself across unrolled charts of the Brazilian coast.

Jemmy Button would come by to sympathize. ‘Poor, poor fellow,’ he would exclaim, but then he would turn away, trying not to smile, for he could not understand how the mere motion of the sea could make anybody ill.

Sometimes, when FitzRoy was immersed in his paperwork, and Usborne or Sulivan was officer of the watch, they would discreetly reduce sail to lessen the philosopher’s woes. There never was such a fine body of men, thought Darwin through his queasiness. He even forgave Sulivan for rousing him from sleep one morning, with the excited shout that a grampus bear had been seen swimming off the port bow. Haring up to the maindeck in his nightshirt, he had been greeted by the massed laughter of the morning watch. It was, of course, the first of April.

Two days later they had made Rio harbour, entering proudly under full sail, scattering flocks of yellow-billed boobies left and right. There they had careened to an extravagant stop alongside the
Ganges,
and FitzRoy had ordered every inch of canvas taken in and immediately reset. Every ship in harbour was watching, he knew, but he asked God to forgive him such little acts of vanity. The display was immaculate: no man-of-war of any nation would dare to take on this little sounding ship in a sail-setting competition again. Every skipper in Rio knew of the
Samarang’s
humiliation. Even Darwin volunteered to help with the sail display, so Wickham gave him a main royal sheet to hold in each hand and a topmast studding sail tack to bite between his teeth, and told him to let go the instant he heard the order to ‘shorten sail’. Standing there in his top-coat and tails, his double-breasted waistcoat, his stock and his cravat, a rope in each hand and one clamped in his mouth, he made a remarkable sight. It was perhaps a little mischievous of Wickham to have positioned him like that some five minutes earlier than was necessary, but the philosopher was too excited to be part of South America’s number one crew to notice his shipmates’ amusement.

At midday FitzRoy and Stebbing rated the chronometers, double-checking the position of Rio de Janeiro on the charts, and were able to confirm what they had begun to suspect during the Beagle’s approach to the city: something was seriously wrong with the existing map.

‘It is unmistakable.’ FitzRoy outlined the problem to Darwin over dinner. ‘There is a four-mile discrepancy between the positions of Rio and Bahia. Which means that one of them has always been located in quite the wrong place.’

‘Who made the charts?’

‘They are French, drawn up by Baron Roussin. The Admiralty has never seen the necessity of duplicating his work.’

‘McCormick will be pleased.’

‘The inconvenience is terrible.’

‘Why? How long will it take Stokes to draw a new chart?’

‘As long as it takes us to sail back to Bahia.’

‘Back to Bahia? But that is eight hundred miles up the coast! Can you spare the time?’

‘No. But I have no choice. I cannot complete a chain of meridian distances around the world if there is a flaw at the very commencement of the calculation.’

‘How long will it set us back?’

‘Two months. But I suggest that you would be best served by passing the time on shore, my dear fellow. You might profitably explore the tropical forest and collect specimens. I shall give Earle shore leave also, to make drawings, and Mr King.’

‘Mr King?’

‘To be quite frank with you, Mr Stokes will need the chart cabin all to himself. I do not wish the Admiralty’s new map of the Brazils to have to incorporate our ship’s philosopher’s left knee.’

‘Just think yourself lucky, my dear FitzRoy, that you do not have to journey back over the equator twice more.’

‘Here’s to that.’

They clinked their water-glasses.

 

Darwin removed his Panama hat - he had exchanged his top hat for a Panama as his one concession to informality - and mopped his brow. The thermometer read ninety-six degrees. He looked enviously across at Patrick Lennon, who appeared altogether cooler in an unbuttoned shirt and cotton breeches; but as the natural philosopher of the Beagle, Darwin did have certain standards to uphold. Lennon was a young, charming and energetic Irish coffee planter whom he had encountered at a formal dinner aboard HMS
Warspite,
who had offered to escort Darwin upcountry to see his
fazenda.
Their party was seven-strong in all: four Portuguese and a thirteen-year-old mulatto guide made up the numbers. They had started early, mounted on glossy black horses, and had ridden into the hills behind Praia Grande, through rounded plantations of coffee-bushes and rustling sugar cane. As the sun rose, the blue dawn light had faded away to be replaced by all the intense colours of the forest: slender green palms swaying like ship’s masts, brilliant turquoise butterflies making random sallies, immense copper-coloured anthills inching methodically skyward, and all of it bedded in a warm, rich, red earth that accumulated stickily upon the fetlocks of the horses. Darwin was enraptured: no engraving, he thought, could ever capture the ruddy glow of this scene. The forest was at its most beautiful at midday, he felt, when the upper branches shone bright emerald, and shafts of sunlight filtered down as if through a transept window. Writhing beneath was a wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse, criss-crossed by a hundred shady pathways.

They breakfasted on black
feijão
beans and
farinha
flour at Ithacaia, a poor African village twelve miles north of Rio. It was the Brazilian custom to breakfast many hours into a journey, and to rely on thick black coffee to wake the sleeper. Thereafter they pushed on, through veils of mimosa and mazy skeins of hanging tendrils, in the direction of Ingetado. The silence of the forest was astonishing: while the Beagle’s passage along the Brazilian coast had been greeted by a shore battery of insect-calls audible a hundred yards out above the surf, here in the vaulted forest no sound could be heard. The only exception was the determined chatter of an ebony battalion of shiny-headed leaf-cutter ants, which stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Darwin stopped to place a rock in their path. The ants would not head round it, but instead launched sally after furious sally against their immutable attacker. Was this the species discovered by Linnaeus in 1758? he wondered. Lennon and his companions could provide no help. Every time Darwin asked the given name of a flower, the same answer invariably came back:
‘F/ores.’
Whenever he enquired the identity of an animal, he was told: ‘
Bixos
.’ Taxonomy, it appeared, was not a local speciality.

They slept in a thicket under the dim moonlight, and beneath the stars the forest came alive. A concert of rhythmic frogs began, lit by winking fireflies, the plaintive cries of snipes providing a contralto melody. Breakfast of
feijão
beans and
farinha
flour was taken at Madre de Dios village amid sheets of rain, birds fluttering madly between the passion flowers. After the deluge had abated, steaming columns of dense white vapour poured upwards from the surrounding woods as the moisture returned to the sky.