This Thing Of Darkness (9 page)

‘It’s too dark now sir,’ said Bennet, self-evidently, eager to please. It was his turn at the wheel.

‘If there’s a seven-fathom tide flowing eastward through the narrows during the afternoon,’ pondered FitzRoy, ‘then presumably it flows back west during the night.’

‘I suppose so sir.’

‘And this dip in the wind speed. Does it occur every night or is it an aberration? Last time you were here, trying to fight your way through for a week, did the wind speed drop every evening?’

‘I can’t rightly remember, sir.’

‘Mr King, fetch me Captain Stokes’s weather book, if you please.’

The youngster scurried off importantly, and returned with the volume. The late captain’s weather book did not really do justice to its title. It was supposed to contain all the readings of the day and the hour - wind direction and force, sympiesometer and barometer values, air and water temperatures, latitude and longitude readings - but the details recorded were sporadic at best. On this occasion, however, fate had been kind. There, in the entry for December 1826, with early-voyage enthusiasm, Captain Stokes had recorded calm evening after calm evening at the blustery exit of the First Narrows.

‘Pass the word for the bos’n,’ ordered FitzRoy. Duly summoned, Sorrell scurried on deck. ‘Mr Sorrell, bare poles, if you please.’

‘B-bare poles?’ Sorrell could hardly believe his ears.

‘You heard me, Mr Sorrell. Furl all the sails. We are going to ware through the narrows under bare poles. There’s eight knots of tidal stream that will take us through.’

‘But it’s pitch black, sir.’

‘The current can see where it’s going, Mr Sorrell.’

‘But we could hit a shoal, sir, or - or — ’

‘Surely you are not questioning Mr Bennet’s skill at the wheel?’ A grin from Bennet found an answering smile. ‘Those who never run any risk, who sail only when the wind is fair, are doubtless extremely prudent officers, Mr Sorrell, but their names will be forgotten. I do not intend the name of the
Beagle
to be forgotten.’

‘Lord preserve us. Aye aye sir.’

Sorrell piped the order to a disbelieving crew. There was activity, too, on the
Adventure,
where King and his officers came to the side with nightglasses to try to make out what was afoot on board the
Beagle.
Across the water came the characteristic creaks of the capstan turning, as the soaking anchor cable began its journey up the maindeck and back into the cable tier, the ship’s nippers darting here and there to straighten its passage as royal pages would shepherd home a sozzled master. Almost silently by comparison, the great dark sheets of the sails were furled up into the yards, revealing a mass of glittering stars through the
Beagle
’s rigging. And then, slowly, she began to drift on the tide, gliding between the shoals, riding the stream towards the dark gate ahead.

Nobody made a sound on the
Beagle’
s decks as she slid through the chasm, the coxswain at the helm applying the deftest touch here and there to keep her aligned with the current. The rocks to either side appeared as misshapen silhouettes, black spaces where the starlight had been sucked away into nothingness. All ears were strained for the sound of tearing copper or splintering wood that would presage disaster. It never came. The
Beagle
ghosted through the narrows with some elegance, as if guided by an invisible pilot.

After perhaps twenty minutes the hemming rocks on either side took a step back, conceding defeat, and the channel widened out into the flat bowl of Gregory Bay. As the narrows gradually fell astern, it seemed that nobody would dare be the first to speak. Finally, Bennet broke the silence. ‘Well
done
sir,’ he breathed.

‘What
will
my father say?’ wondered King.

Out on the gloom of the maindeck, some unknown voice raised a hurrah.

‘Three cheers for Captain FitzRoy!’ And the crew gave a rousing hip-hip hurrah that brought a broad smile of relief to FitzRoy’s face, and set the dogs barking out by the campfires on the northern shore.

 

A week later, the
Adventure
and the
Adelaide,
their crews no doubt flogged with exhaustion, were still battling miserably to break the wind’s stranglehold on the narrows. From the maindeck of the
Beagle
it was possible to catch occasional glimpses of them tacking back and forth at the entrance, desperate to force a passage but unwilling to emulate FitzRoy’s risky experiment. The delay was becoming a matter for concern, as only two days’ supply of fresh water was left on the
Beagle,
the rest being sealed and stored in the
Adelaide’
s barrels. There would be plenty of fresh water further south, amid the glacial streams of Tierra del Fuego, but here there was precious little: water was the one commodity that the Horse Indians were reluctant to trade. There was no shortage of food, however, and the crew had dined on fresh guanaco meat, mussels and limpets, and an unfortunate pig brought from Monte Video, which had been killed and roasted. The cook had even proudly announced the preparation of a special feast for the captain, of baked shell-pig, in honour of his navigational daring: FitzRoy had eaten the entire baby armadillo upside-down in its carapace. To ward off scurvy, the men had been sent to gather cranberries and wild celery, much to the mystification of the Indians, who seemed to subsist entirely on a diet of lukewarm guanaco meat without suffering the slightest ill effects.

FitzRoy had also dispatched the officers to record their surroundings, dividing them rather arbitrarily by subject on the basis of any slight inclination or aptitude he had been able to discern. Bynoe had been appointed ship’s stratigrapher; Midshipman Stokes, who was revealed to have been a keen huntsman in his native Yorkshire, became the
Beagle‘
s naturalist; the new surgeon, Wilson, rather reluctantly took on the role of collecting and recording sea life; Kempe was put in charge of all meteorological observations; FitzRoy himself concentrated on the anthropology of the native peoples. Midshipman King, desperate to become involved, was appointed general assistant to everybody. No animal, fish or shellfish could be eaten until it had been logged, examined and recorded on paper, preferably in colour. FitzRoy’s cabin was already disappearing under piles of King’s badly illustrated fish. Stokes had made the startling conjecture that the two types of penguin they had seen, distinguished as Patagonian and Magellanic penguins under the ‘Aptenodytes’ section of the ship’s natural encyclopedia, were actually adult and young forms of the same bird. The Indians of the Gregory Bay settlement were becoming used to the sight of FitzRoy and his officers poking about their tents and asking questions using sign language: strange, inquisitive white men, quite unlike the seal-catchers, who only wanted to trade, or purchase women. The investigators from the
Beagle
had also solved the riddle of the stuffed horse: the animal marked the grave of a
cacique
, or chief. All great men, it was discovered, were buried sitting up in the sand, with their favourite horse stuffed and mounted facing the spot, to watch over them.

‘Mr Kempe says that the savages are a different species from us. On account of their dark skin.’

‘Does he, indeed.’

FitzRoy had taken Bynoe, who seemed to be the most intelligent and eager of the officers, on another tour of the Indian camp.

‘Whereas Mr Wilson says they are the same as us. They are only brown because of the smoke and ochre particles incorporated into their skin.’

‘With all due respect to the surgeon, I feel that the absence of a qualified natural philosopher on board leaves us all somewhat in the dark.’ Really, this was too much. Even King’s fish paintings put such nonsense to shame. But the racial origins of the Patagonian tribes presented a conundrum: why were the Horse Indians such wiry giants, while a few miles to the south, across the water in Tierra del Fuego - the
Beagle’
s eventual destination - the Canoe Indians were by all accounts sleek, fat midgets? Every day posed new questions that FitzRoy was desperate to answer.

The Gregory Bay encampment smelt like a penguin colony. Groups of Indians sat amid their tents, spindly affairs constructed from brushwood stakes and guanaco skin, which shuddered in the strong breeze that gusted off the bay yet somehow managed to stay upright. One circle of men passed round a clay pipe; another group played cards with painted squares of guanaco skin; a woman, naked but for decorative smears of clay, grease and animal blood, breast-fed an eight-year-old child. All ignored the two white men. FitzRoy selected an isolated group of three, whom he found sitting in a huddle, combing each other’s hair and munching any lice they found. He reached into his pocket and drew out three of the fruits of European technology: a whistle, a small music-box and his pocket watch. The whistle produced delight; the music-box, curiously, was of little interest; the ticking of the watch, however, left the Indians both fascinated and thunderstruck.

Good relations established, Bynoe produced a notebook and pen from his satchel.

‘¿Habla espanol?’
asked FitzRoy.

The men looked blank. The sailors had found few people at the camp who spoke any Spanish. The celebrated Maria appeared to be absent.

FitzRoy resorted once again to sign language. ‘Englishmen.’ He pointed to himself and Bynoe. One of the Indians heaved himself on to his haunches. His face was dramatically daubed with animal blood and charcoal streaks, an apparently martial design offset by the laconic manner with which its owner now produced a fist-sized block of salt and helped himself to a large bite. Eventually he spoke.
‘Cubba.’

Another bite of salt.

‘Cubba.’
White men.

They had the first entry for FitzRoy’s dictionary. ‘Indians.’ He gestured to the trio.

Bynoe made another entry. The Indians were incurious about this: they appeared to know no system of writing or hieroglyphics. FitzRoy pointed at the tents. These were
‘cau’.
A dog was a
‘wachin’.
A fur mantle was a
‘chorillio’.
And so on, until Bynoe had some fifty everyday words listed.

Now FitzRoy changed tack, and pointed across the bay to the southern horizon where a heaving swirl of grey cloud masked the rain-soaked mountains of Tierra del Fuego.

‘Oscherri.’

With a flat hand, he gestured to indicate a short man from ‘Oscherri’. A Canoe Indian. The men laughed derisively.
‘Sapallios.’

One spat into the dust. Others of the tribe had gathered round to watch now, and FitzRoy noticed that one individual wore a tiny crucifix on a chain round his neck, presumably a gift or trade from the sealers. He pointed it out, and gestured at the sky. It was time to widen his linguistic horizons.

‘God,’ he said, adding a quick mime of thunder and lightning for good measure.

The man nodded that he understood.

FitzRoy gripped Bynoe’s arm in excitement.

‘Mr Bynoe - that’s Caliban, from
The Tempest
! If Shakespeare employed such a word in 1611, it must have been furnished by a matlow from Drake’s expedition - perhaps even by Drake himself!’

The Indian with the crucifix began to speak, jabbing a finger at FitzRoy, then indicating the heavens to the west. Bynoe offered a diagnosis. ‘I think he’s asking if we’ve been sent by God. Or if we know God.’

FitzRoy shook his head at the man, but it seemed to make no difference. The Indian beckoned for the two Englishmen to follow him, and the crowd parted to show them a way through.

‘Let us follow this Caliban, and see where he takes us,’ suggested FitzRoy.

And so, obligingly, they allowed themselves to be led across to a nearby tent. The flap was pulled aside, releasing a thick plume of smoke, and they crawled in. A brushwood fire occupied one corner, which poured smoke into the interior of the tent, although there appeared to be no means for it to escape. Through red eyes they made out a frightened, naked woman crouched over the prone figure of a sweating baby, which was daubed with clay. On the other side of the sick child, a priest or medicine man was waving a rattle in the air, and muttering prayers or incantations over a neat pile of dried bird sinews. He looked at the new arrivals with resentment.

‘They want us to cure the child,’ breathed Bynoe.

‘Then by good fortune they have invited the appropriate person into their tent. What can you do?’

Bynoe placed his palm across the child’s forehead.

‘It seems to be a simple fever, sir. Normally I’d recommend a calomel purgative. Failing that, a draught of hot port wine and a wintersbark tonic. I have tonic and wine with me - the port is cold, but it could be heated easily enough over the fire.’

The young assistant surgeon decanted a measure of port into a small glass vessel, which he laid briefly in the embers, before administering it to the shivering patient. Then he slid the draught of wintersbark down the child’s throat. It was accepted with a hiccuping cough. Coughing himself at the thickness of the woodsmoke, and wiping his streaming eyes on his sleeve, FitzRoy gave quiet thanks for the efficacy of modern medicine. The two phials were passed round the crowd of Indians which had assembled at the tent flap, most of whom took an exploratory sniff. A faint murmur of scepticism seemed to pass among them. Finally, the owner of the crucifix - the father, perhaps? - indicated that he would like to borrow the captain’s pocket watch. FitzRoy obliged. The man took the watch reverentially, and passed it back and forth across the child’s face. The loud ticking filled the tent, seeming to still the buffeting breeze outside, and a whisper of approval passed between the Indians.
If only they knew how useless that is,
thought FitzRoy.