This Thing Of Darkness (66 page)

Darwin lay flat on his back in a sunlit apple-orchard, reading a letter from his sisters, their convivial words waving in and out of the dappled light. Fanny Owen had become the proud mother of a baby daughter. ‘We look forward to visiting you and
your
little wife in
your
little parsonage’ - yes, yes. Catherine had included a pamphlet from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge:
Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated,
by Harriet Martineau. Oh, yes - she was that dreadful fierce bluestocking who tried to popularize Liberal policy by dressing it up in cheap romantic novellas. Ridiculous. What was this one about? A new theory devised by the recently deceased Reverend Thomas Malthus, an economist who had worked for the East India Company. Hmm.

Bereft of anything better to occupy his mind while his dinner chugged through his digestive system, Darwin began to read. Malthus’s theory was pretty bleak. Apparently the population of Great Britain had doubled from twelve million to twenty-four million in just thirty years. Good grief. With the population rising faster than the food supply, struggle and starvation must inevitably result. Charity only aggravated the problem. Poor-relief hand-outs made paupers comfortable, and only encouraged them to breed. It was a vicious circle. The only answer was enshrined in a new Liberal Act of Parliament, the Poor Law Amendment Act, which established a national network of segregated workhouses. By making poor relief available only to new workhouses, pauper husbands and wives could be kept apart from each other and prevented from breeding. This would benefit the poor in the long run by making them self-reliant, and according dignity to their labours. It all made perfect sense. It certainly improved upon years of masterly Tory inactivity. The Tories had sat on their complacent aristocratic backsides for years, expecting the same little fields and allotments to produce sufficient food for ever-increasing hordes of starving, destitute peasants. The governments of Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Wellington had created a situation where the weakest went to the wall, and only the strongest survived. It was inhuman.

A faint rumbling interrupted Darwin’s philosophizing, followed by a creak from the branches above, and a plump apple fell soundlessly on to his forehead. The moment, however unpleasant, served as a reminder that the problems of an overcrowded island were thousands of miles away, and of no immediate relevance to the greater concerns that currently occupied his mind. But no sooner had he filed the Reverend Thomas Malthus away in the further recesses of his brain than the ground was gripped by another low rumble - much louder this time, like the roaring of a bull in distant underground caverns - and a score of ripe apples plummeted from the trees above. The bombardment felt like being punched by several small boys at once. He noticed, as he attempted to compose himself following the assault, that his flagon of cider had glugged its contents wastefully on to the grass.

Darwin looked across to where Covington was attempting to untether Corfield’s horse, but the manservant was fighting to keep his balance like a novice ice-skater. The solid earth of the orchard seemed to have lost all physical substance, as louder and louder bass rumbles shivered through the tree-roots. Covington had grabbed the animal’s bridle for support, but the frightened beast’s legs had simply given way, splaying out in opposite directions as it neighed in terror. Darwin felt himself being rolled from side to side, a helpless sausage in a pan. He tried to stand, but it was no use: waves were rolling in from the east, and he felt as sick as he ever had aboard the
Beagle
in a heaving sea. He sat down again with a bump. The tree trunks were swaying, the lighter branches thrashing madly about, the ground undulating as if all the laws of physics had been suspended for the duration. It was absolutely fascinating. It was an earthquake all right. But not one of the inconsequential daily tremors that plagued Valparayso. This was a really, really big one.

 

‘A large star on the horizon to starboard, sir.’

FitzRoy glanced at his watch. It was after midnight. A star on the horizon should not have been entirely unexpected. Had the watch taken up astronomy?

‘Correction sir. A large signal light on the horizon to starboard. A red signal light, sir.’

Again, it was not entirely unexpected that another ship should be ploughing the same furrow as the
Beagle
, hugging the Chilean coast rather than standing out into the Pacific. They were running north-west through the Chacao Narrows, which separated the mainland from Chiloé Island - a huge, wet, forested bulk that acted as a handy wind-break for Valparayso-bound merchantmen and packet-ships. The mainland was Araucanian territory, but in all their surveying operations they had seen hardly a sign of those redoubtable warriors, so feared on the Patagonian plains to the east. The Araucanians remained hidden in their hills, dim shadows in a veil of perpetual mist marking the western boundary of their proud, unconquered nation. Chiloé Island by contrast had been settled by the Spanish, but the settlers had merged with the native population to produce a desperately poor race of forgotten
mestizo
farmers, whose hand-pushed ploughs would have been considered primitive in medieval Europe. They used charcoal for money; pigs and potatoes were their only produce. With its endless rain-soaked bogs, woods and dank fields, Chiloé reminded FitzRoy uncomfortably of Ireland. The main town, Castro, was forlorn and deserted, with grass growing in its streets. At the big old church, built from shipwreck planks and iron, an elderly man rang the hour on the bell by guess-work, for there were no clocks or watches on the island. Travel was by
piragua,
a type of native canoe that - FitzRoy was excited to discover - exactly matched the
maseulah
canoes of south-east India. Had early man settled South America by ship from across the Pacific? No ships stopped at Castro now, that was for sure. Civilization seemed to have brought few benefits in its wake.

‘Sorry sir.’ The lookout changed tack again. ‘I don’t think it is a signal light, sir. Leastways, I don’t think it’s another ship. It’s uncommon bright, sir.’

All hands were crowded at the starboard rail now. The red pinpoint scintillated in the darkness, an impossibly sharp ruby glowing fiercely in a black velvet sky.

‘It’s b-beautiful, whatever it is,’ said Hamond.

‘It’s like the star as what the three wise men followed to Bethlehem,’ breathed a reverential Chadwick, one of the maintopmen.

‘It’s not a star,’ concluded FitzRoy. ‘There are no other stars in the sky, so I think we may safely assume high clouds. And it is not another vessel, for I can observe no sign of motion. It is on the land, it is prodigious far off, and I should guess it is several thousand feet up.’

As if on cue, the mysterious light chose to reveal its identity. With a searing crimson flare and an ear-splitting explosion of rock, a column of light funnelled vertically upwards from the cone of the volcano. Torrents of lava spewed from splits in the mountain’s nozzle, pouring in gorgeous, glowing rivulets down its slopes. Brilliant jets of flame lit up the night sky, bursting like the royal fireworks before scattering their abrupt reflections across the surface of the intervening sea. The silhouettes of vast boulders, each bigger than a house, were tossed effortlessly into the air by unseen forces lurking deep within the earth.

‘It is Volcan Osorno!’ said FitzRoy. ‘Great God - this is incredible!’

While the crew stood transfixed by the light show, Stebbing fetched the captain’s theodolite, and together they calculated the height of the eruption at 7550 feet.

‘Look sir! To the north!’

Bennet was gesticulating at the prow. In the distance, beyond his outstretched finger, a further scarlet pinpoint had appeared in the dark; and beyond that, another, fainter spark.

‘All the other volcanoes are erupting!’

‘The whole of the Andes is going off tonight!’

‘It’s a regular knock-down!’

It was indeed an unbelievable sight.

The first shock hit the
Beagle
early the next morning, by which time the night’s pyrotechnics had faded in the light of dawn, reduced to mere columns of smoke issuing sootily from the pristine file of snowy cones.

A shudder ran through the ship’s timbers, juddering from one end of the deck to the other, turning her crew’s knees instantly to india-rubber. It was not the sickening crunch that follows an encounter with a submerged rock; rather, a sudden, convulsing check to her momentum, as if she had collided with a whale.

‘What the deuce was that?’

‘Something in the water?’

‘An earthquake!’ said FitzRoy. ‘By God, an earthquake! It is connected to the volcanic eruptions! It’s not just a passing tremor - it is an absolutely
massive
earthquake!’

 

Just how massive an earthquake became apparent a few days later, as they neared the little town of Concepción, which lay concealed on a gentle slope behind the peninsular port of Talcahuano. With a clatter, the
Beagle
ran through a shoal of seaborne timber: odd beams and planks at first, then huge joists and entire pieces of furniture, as if a thousand ships had been shattered in a gale. Eventually the master had to take evasive action, as whole chairs, tables, shelves, even an entire wooden cottage-roof shouldered their way through the jumble of flotsam. A whole file of bobbing church pews followed, and a seventy-strong congregation of dead cows, swept in a moment of bewilderment from some exposed headland. Then came the human corpses: white-faced, open-mouthed rag dolls, many of them incomplete, wallowing helplessly on the undulating sea, their arms thrown wide in various attitudes of supplication. FitzRoy slowed the
Beagle’s
speed, to minimize the risk of a serious collision. The sheer volume of debris had the effect of quietening the swell, so they glided gently forward, the funereal silence broken only by the dead and all the accoutrements of their former lives, knocking sightlessly at the hull as if in search of readmission to the land of the living. The crew’s excitement at experiencing both a volcanic eruption and a full-scale earthquake had slowly subsided, to be replaced by a horror that escalated in leaps and bounds.

Ahead in the sea, they saw movement: a small child, pale as a sheet, sitting bolt upright in the prow of a skiff. The boy’s hand tightly clasped that of an Indian woman, who lay face down in the bottom of the boat, her other arm thrown across the top of her head as if in self-protection. A few feet beyond this point of fervent union, both the woman and the skiff came to an abrupt end. Her body had been sheared off at the waist, along with the stern of the little craft, both sliced away in parallel as if by an enormous rough-edged scythe. Somehow the skiff remained afloat, the boy’s weight shifting the centre of balance and raising the shattered edge clear of the water.

‘Lower the dinghy, fast as you can!’

‘Aye aye sir!’

A few short minutes later, the small boy’s reluctant fingers had been prised from the hand of his dead guardian, and he stood wide-eyed at attention on the
Beagle’s
maindeck, swathed in a woollen blanket. FitzRoy knelt down and spoke to him, in the gentlest tones he knew.
‘¿Cómo se llama?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but I do not speak Spanish.’

‘Well, well. You are an English boy. What is your name, young man?’

‘Hodges, sir.’

‘Well, Hodges, I think you have been a remarkably brave boy. My name is Captain FitzRoy. Do you live in Concepción?’

‘In Talcahuano, sir.’

‘And your mother and father? Do they live in Talcahuano with you?’

‘My mother and father are dead, sir. The roof fell on them, sir. There was an earthquake.’

‘I am very sorry, Hodges,’ said FitzRoy, gravely, ‘but let us thank God that you are alive. You have had a most remarkable escape. Where were you, when the roof fell in?’

‘My governess Isabela took my hand and ran into the street when she heard the rumbling noise, sir.’

‘Was that Isabela in the boat with you?’

‘Yes sir. But my dog knew there was going to be an earthquake, sir. He ran away.’

‘Your dog?’

‘My dog Davy. All the dogs in town ran away before the earthquake, sir, into the hills. And all the birds flew away too, sir. Hundreds of them. Will Davy be all right, sir?’

‘I should think so. Davy sounds like a very clever dog. I am sure he will have found a safe place to hide. But tell me, Hodges, how did you get into the boat?’

‘After the earthquake Isabela said there would be a big wave, sir. A giant wave. She said we would be drowned if we stayed in Talcahuano with the Europeans. She said we had to take a boat into the bay. She said if boats are out far enough, they rise over the wave and it doesn’t break on them, sir.’

‘Is that what you did?’

‘Yes sir, but all the water in the bay was gone, and all the fish were dead. There was no sea, sir. We had to run through the mud. Then we found a boat, and we started to row out, but then the first wave came sir.’

‘The first wave?’

‘There were three waves sir. They landed in the town, sir. Then the water came back with lots of tables and chairs and dead people in it. The first one landed on our heads. There was a big fishing-boat in the wave, sir, and the wave picked it up and it landed on Isabela.’

The little boy stiffened perceptibly at the memory, and FitzRoy reached out to place a comforting arm round his shoulders.

‘I didn’t let go of Isabela’s hand, sir, because she told me not to. I did what Isabela said, sir. Nobody will be cross with me, will they, sir?’

‘No, Hodges. You did the right thing, so you must not despond. You are a very brave boy.’

FitzRoy bit his lip. He simply could not find any adequate words. A clammy little hand gripped his, the tiny white fingers digging into his skin with astonishing intensity. His rosy flesh turned pale as death where the boy’s grasp held him tight.