This Thing Of Darkness (49 page)

‘Obviously they have never encountered a firearm,’ said FitzRoy. ‘Wait here.’

He ducked into Matthews’s cottage and reappeared, holding a cut-glass Walthamstow vase, tapping it to indicate its solidity. Then, with the missionary framed open-mouthed in silent protest between his doorposts, FitzRoy placed the vase at a distance and blew it to pieces with his rifle. The old man stood paralysed with amazement, the stolen axe frozen mid-whirl above his head. A ripple of consternation passed through the native ranks. FitzRoy put down the gun, walked back to the old man, and gently prised the weapon from his fingers, giving him a polite pat on the back as he did so, as if to apologize for the peremptory nature of his display.

‘That’s told ’em, sir,’ muttered McCurdy, under his breath.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, but there was no hiding the palpable air of tension that clung about both sides of the divide like a chill mist. FitzRoy doubled the guard on the camp that night but, as it turned out, there was no need. When dawn broke, it transpired that - without any of the sentries seeing anything — every single one of the Fuegians had simply melted away. The little cove was utterly deserted.

The sailors’ departure was postponed for several days, but the great army of Fuegians did not come back. Were they merely biding their time, or had the display of firepower frightened them away for good? How FitzRoy fervently hoped that the latter was the case, that the little mission would be given a fair chance to take root.

One day in late January he gave the order for Bennet to head back to the
Beagle
with one of the whaleboats and the yawl, while he and the other officers explored and surveyed the western arm of the Beagle Channel. They would return to Woollya to check on the progress of the mission after a month. Lashing rain attended the day of their departure. Before leaving, he went to see Matthews in his snug little parlour, where he found him buried deep in the scriptures.

‘I feel obliged to make clear, Mr Matthews, that whatever your heart may feel, if your head tells you to return to England aboard the Beagle, then you must grasp the opportunity at once. No shame would attach to you, were you to take that decision. No honest man would blame you for such a course of action.’

‘Captain FitzRoy, whether or not I should be blamed is neither here nor there,’ replied Matthews blandly. ‘The Lord God has given me a task, which I intend to fulfil to the best of my ability.’

‘You are certain?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Then I wish you the very best of British luck, and may God protect and preserve you.’

‘Thank you.’

Down at the little jetty they had constructed, they said their farewells to Jemmy, York and Fuegia.

‘You don’t have to stay, Jemmy, if you don’t want to,’ FitzRoy offered. ‘You may return to England with us, if you prefer.’

Jemmy shivered damply in his favourite pink suit, a bright slash of incongruous colour against the glowering sky. He stared at his shoes, where teeming raindrops were attempting unsuccessfully to garner a foothold on the glossy leather.

‘No, Capp’en Fitz’oy. This is my country. These are my people. These are my friends and my family. I must stay here at Woollya. And - Capp’en Fitz’oy?’

‘Yes Jemmy?’

‘Thank you, Capp’en Fitz’oy.’

‘Thank
you
, Jemmy.’

‘Goodbye, Jemmy, old son,’ said Bennet.

‘Goodbye, Mr Bennet.’

‘Now you’ll be able to build that city you always dreamed about,’ added Bennet softly. ‘That big white city, with wide avenues, and squares, and fountains, and coaches, and all the ladies and gentlemen parading about.’

‘Maybe one day you will come back to see it, Mr Bennet?’

‘Yes, Jemmy, yes, I will. I will come back to see it.’ And Bennet felt himself crumple inside, and he hugged Jemmy tightly, as much to disguise the tears that were coursing down his cheeks as anything else.

‘Goodbye, Jemmy,’ said Bynoe.

‘Goodbye, my
confidential
friend.’

A little round cannonball rushed at FitzRoy, almost knocking him over. ‘Fuegia love Capp’en Fitz’oy. Fuegia
love
Capp’en Fitz’oy.’

‘Captain FitzRoy loves Fuegia,’ he whispered, and stroked her hair, and York did not object because he saw that the captain’s eyes were wet with tears as well.

The four boats pulled away into the sound, until the waving figures on the jetty were enfolded by the gloom and lost in streaming rain. Eventually, the distant glow of the mission oil lamp was all that remained, a tiny spark in the great dark shadow of Tierra del Fuego.

‘It is amazing!’ remarked Darwin.

‘What is? The glacier?’

The surveying party were setting up their instruments on a level stretch of beach opposite the face of a sheer, overhanging glacier, a frozen cascade of beryl not a mile distant across the channel. It was a gorgeous and unexpectedly sunny day, and the brilliant colours within the ice cliff seemed to oscillate as they watched, shifting from jade through to amethyst and back again.

‘No! I mean - of course — that the glacier is beautiful, but I was referring to Lyell.’ Darwin sat down on a rock, quite oblivious of its slimy coat of putrefying seaweed, so excited that the book shook in his hands. ‘Lyell has rejected the Biblical flood!’

‘What?’ FitzRoy could not believe his ears. Lyell, the eminent geologist, who had personally asked FitzRoy to supply specimens from the voyage to provide proof of the Noachian deluge?

‘Here — he rejects the idea of a sudden débâcle at any point in the earth’s history. He claims that any changes have been “gradual, constant and unimaginably slow”.’

FitzRoy felt the cold knife of betrayal slide between his ribs. ‘Then how does he explain the disappearance of the great beasts that once roamed the earth?’

‘He thinks they simply died out of their own accord. That all species have a natural lifespan.’

‘But what of our Megatherium, with its modern-day shells above and below?’

‘Ah — here - he has an answer to that very question. He believes that marine invertebrates, no, any cold-blooded species, have a longer lifespan than their warm-blooded equivalents.’

‘Indeed? And how, pray, did a land animal drown fifteen feet above the sea?’

‘Well... I suppose it would have to have fallen into a river, drowned, then the body would have to have floated out to sea, sunk, and then the land would have to have risen above sea level. Over many, many thousands of years.’

‘Lyell has taken leave of his senses.’

Darwin thought that he had better divert the course of the conversation.

‘By the bye - do you think that this channel will lead us to the sea?’

‘I am certain of it.’

‘Then the south side - the mountain range on either side of the Murray Narrows - is effectively broken into two huge islands.’

‘Indeed.’

‘The island to the east side of the narrows consisted of stratified alluvium, like the north side of the channel here. But the island to the west’ — he indicated the glacier suspended implausibly over the opposite shore - ‘is constructed from old crystalline rock. Look.’

‘What of it?’ said FitzRoy irritably.

‘Well, Jemmy told me that the land on his side of the narrows teems with fox and guanaco. But the island across the narrows, just a few hundred yards away, has neither. It is why such animals are unknown in York’s country. So the animals only exist on the newer, alluvial rock.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, the conditions, the vegetation, the habitat of the western side are the same. But if the guanaco or the fox ever lived there, something wiped them out. Then, when the lands were repopulated, the animals were obviously unable to get back westward across the channel. If the species indeed has a “natural lifespan”, it was not that which ended their existence on those shores opposite.’

‘By Jove, Philos, I do believe you are right.’ FitzRoy found himself immensely cheered all of a sudden. ‘Hang Lyell — I think you have it!’

Darwin smiled, happy to bathe in the glow of his friend’s approval. Inwardly, he remained unsure, his mind a whirl of questions and answers - Lyell’s suggestion that the land could rise and fall posed many of them - but he was relieved at least to have restored FitzRoy’s mood.

‘Excuse me, sir.’ It was Hamond. ‘I thought you m-might like a m-mug of t-tea, sir.’ Since the storm off Cape Horn, his stutter seemed to have got worse.

‘Why, thank you, Mr Hamond. Another mug would certainly not go amiss.’ Between them, the surveying party had worked their way through four gallons that day already.

‘The theodolite is set up, sir, and the m-micrometer and b-board, and Mr B-Bynoe is waiting with the b-bearing book.’

‘Excellent, Mr Hamond. I shall be there as soon as I have drained this tea.’ FitzRoy bent down to pick up his sextant and chronometer.

‘Sir!’ Hamond almost shouted. ‘L-1-1-1-’

‘What is it, Mr Hamond?’

‘L-1-1-1-
look
, sir!’

Their gaze followed the line of Hamond’s jabbing finger. There, right before their very eyes, the glacier was in calf. A huge sliver of ice a thousand feet high had parted from the ice cliff, and was falling, silently and gracefully, away from the main body and into the sound, like a white lace handkerchief dropped from a marble balcony into a deep blue pool. A moment later, an earsplitting thunderclap reached their ears; the three men stood transfixed as sound and vision were reunited, rapturous at one of nature’s most awesome sights. As they watched, the enormous ice-spear scythed into the depths of the channel, then re-emerged in glittering, shattered chunks. A creamy wash furled out from the impact, no more than a distant spreading line on the smooth surface of the water, and a moment later a reverberating crash echoed from one cliff to another.

‘Incredible. Quite incredible.’

’M-m-magnificent.’

‘Oh, my God,’ said Darwin, horror-stricken. ‘The boats!’

‘What?’

But Darwin was already away, hurtling hell for leather, Mr Lyell’s considered opinions scattered wildly across the pebbles, as he raced down the shore towards the two whaleboats. A second or two later, FitzRoy and Hamond realized what Darwin had been quick-witted enough to apprehend first: that the boats were drawn up untethered on the quiet shore, that the huge wave now racing across the channel would surely suck them out to sea in its undertow, and that they were many a mile from the relative safety of the Woollya mission. Some of the crew had realized the danger too, and were rushing pell-mell down the beach; but it was clear, as the surging barrier of foam arched into a curling ten-foot breaker, that Darwin was the only one with a chance of reaching the boats first. Indeed, as long as he did not stumble over his own bootlaces, he was their only chance. Gasping for breath, his lungs bursting with pain, his long legs devouring the shingle, he flung himself forward, hurling himself upon the adjacent boat-ropes just as the wave erupted in a convulsing maelstrom over his head.

It was, in fact, the second time in less than a month that the philosopher had suddenly found himself on the end of a battering-ram of icy seawater. This time, as he swirled upside-down in the churning spume, he suffered the added discomfiture of being pelted with a thousand stones by the frothing, maddened undertow. His feet jammed in the shingle and he straightened his knees, doggedly fighting to hold on to the boats as they shot past him on the accelerating backwash. The first crewman got to him in four feet of cerulean water and crushed ice, on the point of being dragged out into the middle of the channel. They formed a human chain to reel the two whaleboats and their protector back to the shore.

‘I n-never knew how d-devilish p-painful cold could be,’ stuttered Darwin, in a passable imitation of Mr Hamond, as they pulled him out half frozen to death.

He was their hero that night, and they fêted him as such around their campfire under the stars. They exchanged his sodden morning-dress for spare sailors’ ducks and an old coat, so that - with his winter beard - he looked more like an inmate of the parish workhouse than a gentleman naturalist. ‘I feel like a bear in an overcoat, grizzled and rough,’ he complained, with a big grin plastered over his face.

Everybody roared with laughter, and ladled extra rations of salt pork, venison and ship’s biscuit into his bowl.

 

That night, as Bynoe, Hamond and the men slumbered softly in the firelight, FitzRoy and Darwin sat up late, wreathed in blankets on the bare shore, tendrils of warm smoke entwining themselves round the swirls of their condensing breath.

‘I say, FitzRoy.’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you ever think about ... women?’

‘Women?’

‘Yes.’

FitzRoy’s mind darted back to the recurring image of a pool of hot wax, congealing against Mary O’Brien’s white skin.

‘No. That is, I try not to. It is a distraction.’

‘I have been thinking about women. All my sisters’ letters ask me if I shall settle down upon my return - if I shall have a little wife for my little parsonage.’

‘And what have you decided?’

‘I have been considering the claims of my cousin, Emma Wedgwood. In many ways she is an eminently suitable candidate.’

‘Do you love her?’

‘Of course not.’ Darwin laughed. ‘She is my cousin. I love her as such, I suppose. But she is personable and charming and kind, qualities that augur well. What qualities would you look for in a potential wife?’

‘I fear I have given it no thought. I do not really have time for such matters. I do not even write home.’

‘You do not write
home
?’