FitzRoy split his men into four groups. ‘Mr Hamond. Salvage what timber you can and have the carpenter’s crew build temporary shelters in the centre of the plaza - away from the rubble, in case of aftershocks. Mr Bynoe. You will see to the wounded. Mr Sulivan. You and your men shall search through the rubble for survivors. Mr Wickham. See to it that everyone here receives food, clean water and at least one blanket. And try to keep them quiet - we shall not hear any tapping from beneath the rubble if there is a commotion.’
As the four officers moved smoothly to complete their appointed tasks, a shout rang out in English: ‘Lord be praised! Young Hodges! You’re alive!’ A short, rotund gentleman emerged gasping into the plaza: the top hat on his head had been concertina’d almost flat, and his suit was coated from head to foot with white dust, as if he had come hot-foot from a scrap in a flour-mill.
‘Who is that, Mr Hodges?’ asked FitzRoy.
‘That is Mr Rouse, sir,’ answered Hodges, from beneath the comforting shadow of FitzRoy’s peaked cap.
FitzRoy extended a hand as Rouse panted towards them. ‘Captain FitzRoy of HMS Beagle, at your service.’
‘You are Englishmen - thank God! How do? I am Rouse, the British consul.’
FitzRoy passed his water bottle to the consul, who took a healthy swig.
‘Keep it - it’s yours.’
‘Most generous of you, sir. And I cannot tell you how mighty glad I am to see you, young Hodges!’
‘Mr Hodges here has been a sound good fellow ever since we plucked him from the water.’
‘Excellent! Sterling work, Hodges.’ Rouse wiped his wet lips with the back of his hand, leaving a clown’s pink smear bordering his mouth. ‘And the, um ... parents?’ he mumbled, in the direction of his own floury feet.
FitzRoy shook his head wordlessly.
At that moment a low bass rumble echoed from the direction of the sea, and the ground seesawed gently beneath their feet. Hodges tightened his panicky grip.
‘Aftershocks,’ explained the consul. ‘Nothing to worry about, young shaver. We’ve had several hundred in the last two days. But the tides have gone to the very d — ... the tides have gone all over the place. They don’t know when to come in and out. Everything is topsy-turvy.’
‘It appears you have had an abominable time of it.’
‘You can say that again. The whole town was flattened inside six seconds. I’ve lived here since a good few years, so I ran into the courtyard at the first rumble. I had just reached the middle when the wall behind me came thundering down, just where I had run from. I couldn’t stand up for the shaking, so I crawled to the top of the pile, thinking that if I once got on top of that part which had already fallen, I would be safe. A moment later the opposite wall collapsed - a great big beam swept this close in front of my head! I could barely see a thing for dust. I managed to clamber over the rubble and out into the street. From there I could see Talcahuano and the bay - and then, Captain FitzRoy, I saw the damnedest thing. Forgive me, the most deuced thing. The sea was boiling!’
‘Boiling?’
‘It had turned quite black, and columns of sulphurous vapour were belching forth. There were explosions in the sea, like cannon-fire. All the water in the bay had receded, as if someone had pulled out a gigantic plug. Then I saw the first wave, many miles out to sea, racing in. When it reached the shore it tore up cottages and trees. At the head of the bay it broke into a fearful white breaker, at least thirty feet in height. It was a monstrous awful sight. And there were three waves in all, each more enormous than the last!’
FitzRoy, who had felt Hodges’s little hands tighten like thumb-screws as the consul’s account unfolded, attempted to indicate with his eyes that perhaps the subject was best saved for later. He was excused from having to explain himself verbally by a tremendous outbreak of yapping, as Coxswain Bennet marched into the plaza holding aloft a slab of tinned beef, pursued by an enormous pack of hungry dogs.
‘Mr Bennet, what ever ...’
‘Forgive me absenting myself from duty for a few moments, sir,’ apologized Bennet, poker-faced but for the hint of a grin, ‘but I felt it important that we should find the absent Davy. It is my notion he shall be here somewhere.’
Sure enough, with a squeal of recognition, Hodges had located his errant pet. FitzRoy restored him gently to the ground, whereupon he charged headlong into the pack and flung his arms round a large black mongrel. FitzRoy recovered his cap from the dust, brushed it down and replaced it on his head. ‘Mr Rouse, it is your business, I believe, to see to the welfare of British subjects on this coast.’
‘Indeed, sir, but what — ’
‘If you would oblige me by seeing to the welfare of Mr Hodges here, I do believe I have some digging to do.’
FitzRoy removed the beef from Bennet’s hand and transferred it to that of the consul. In an instant, Rouse was surrounded by the pack of yapping dogs. Propelling his coxswain forward with a friendly hand, FitzRoy took his leave of the helpless diplomat. ‘I bid you good day, sir.’
Rouse attempted to return the greeting but his mouth simply gaped instead. The two men marched off in step to join in the rescue effort, leaving the consul a beleaguered island in a frothing canine sea.
Three days on, and the Beagle’s crew had succeeded in feeding, clothing and housing upwards of a hundred survivors. Innumerable broken bones had been splinted, and bruises treated with vinegar and brown paper. A further six people had been pulled alive from the rubble, including two members of a work gang who had been restoring the ceiling of the cathedral when it had collapsed upon them in an explosion of masonry. A further eight bodies had been found crushed in the wreckage of the building: the other seven members of the work gang, and an old man who had rashly tried to take refuge beneath the sculpted arch of the great door. FitzRoy had ordered a huge pit dug for the burial of the dead, and had done the best he could to approximate a Catholic service, although one old half-caste lady had wailed that a Christian burial was of no account, for the Christian God had proved Himself weaker than the volcano-god who had sent the earthquake.
Now the men of the Beagle lay exhausted, sprawled on their tarpaulins in the plaza, having done everything in their power to help. Only Wickham — who had been deputized to act as emergency ship’s artist - was still hard at work, producing a highly polished line-drawing of the ravaged cathedral. A figure trotted into the plaza from the Talcahuano side: it was Rensfrey, one of the foretopmen.
‘Begging your pardon, sir, but the compliments of Mr King. He says to tell you there’s a schooner in the bay, sir. He believes it to be the philosopher, sir.’
‘Mr Darwin?’
‘Mr King says to say so, sir.’
FitzRoy grabbed his cap and sprang to his feet. ‘Excellent news indeed! Thank you, Rensfrey, for your trouble.’
With the foretopman in tow, FitzRoy strode anxiously down to the shore, where he encountered Darwin stepping out of a dinghy, accompanied by a short, dapper man in an expensive hat. In the bay behind, a small but elegant private vessel of some thirty-five tons lay at anchor. Overwhelmed with delight and riven with guilt, the two friends embraced on the strand.
‘Captain FitzRoy, may I have the honour of presenting to your acquaintance Mr Richard Corfield, merchant, of Valparayso?’
‘How do, Captain FitzRoy?’ said the swell.
‘The honour is entirely mine, Mr Corfield. Forgive me, but I cannot help but admire your schooner, if indeed she is yours.’
‘The Constitución? Oh, she’s not a bad old girl. She’s my boat after a fashion - that is to say, as of today she is yours.’
‘Mine? Forgive me, but ...’
‘I am making you a present of her, old man, for as long as you require her.’
‘I informed Corfield of your having to sell the Adventure,’ Darwin chipped in. ‘How you have insufficient boats to complete the South American survey.’
‘Mr Corfield, I beg you will not do such a thing. Your generosity is too g
reat - I cannot trespass upon your kind offices in this manner.’
‘Nonsense, old boy,’ said Corfield, jamming his hands in his coat pockets like a gleeful schoolboy. ‘I never use her anyway. I’m always so monstrous busy. Make what you will of her.’
‘Mr Corfield, I ... I am speechless with gratitude ...’
‘Tish!’ Corfield waved away FitzRoy’s awestruck thanks.
‘But my dear friend,’ said Darwin, ‘how marvellous to find you quite yourself again!’
‘And as anxious to reach dear old England as you are.’
‘But we have news for you, FitzRoy. A missive from Commodore Mason in Valparayso. Good news.’ A grinning Corfield extracted the folded letter from an inside pocket. ‘Forgive the intrusion into your privacy, old man, but the commodore made us sensible of the contents when he appointed us his messengers.’
FitzRoy broke the seal and unfolded the paper. After six years as a commander - an acting captain - he had finally been made post. He was a full captain at last. He should have been pleased as punch. Instead he felt strangely empty. He perused the rest of the letter. There remained only an order to report to Mason in Valparayso at his earliest convenience.
‘Were there any news of further promotions - for Wickham or Stokes?’
‘I do not believe so.’
‘I had made representations ... I had hoped that their exertions might have obtained satisfactory notice at headquarters ...’
‘But are you not pleased?’ asked Darwin, concerned. ‘I apprehend that all goes by seniority from this point on — that this will like as not make you an admiral in due course.’
‘That is so. Forgive me for seeming so ungrateful. I just wish that I could get one or two of my hard-working shipmates promoted. That would have gratified me much more than my own advance, which has been too tardy to be much valued. Six years - some stay a commander for only a year. Plenty have gone over my head. I deserve it, of course, for having burned my fingers with politics.’
His star, he realized, which had once burned so brightly, had dimmed with time. To be given his own vessel at twenty-three - that had been special. Captain of a little brig at thirty, or nearly thirty — that was no great accolade. The promotion was no more than a poultice applied by Beaufort, or some other interested friend in high places, to cover the gaping sore of his recent run-in with their lordships. The true test would come when he returned to England, and received his next commission. Then he would discover whether or not he was still considered a high-flier. Perhaps a change of administration, from Liberal back to Tory once more, would make life easier for him and his crew.
‘Are there any news yet of who holds sway in Parliament? Is there a successor to Grey?’
‘My dear fellow, have you not heard?’ blurted out Corfield. ‘Parliament is no more. It has burned down!’
‘Burned down! When?’
‘Last October. The whole Palace of Westminster is gone — St Stephen’s Chapel, the cloisters, the Painted Chamber, all of it. Only Westminster Hall has survived. Concepción is not the only place to have suffered a conflagration. Everything is in chaos.’
‘¿Quien sabe, my friend?’ said Darwin, clapping FitzRoy encouragingly on the back. ‘Perhaps it is a bonfire that will instigate much-needed change.’
Let us hope so, thought FitzRoy.
The trio strolled uphill, to give Corfield and Darwin their first sight of the ruins of Concepción. All conversation ceased as the newcomers took in the scale of the devastation, the serried lines of silent debris where once people had lived, shopped and prayed.
‘It is a bitter and humiliating thing to see,’ said Darwin at last. ‘Works that cost man so much time and labour, overthrown in one minute. Such is the insignificance of man’s boasted power. It is most wonderful to witness.’
‘I say, steady on, old man,’ said Corfield under his breath.
‘Forgive me - I do not mean to forget my compassion — but from a scientific aspect this is absolutely fascinating.’
‘Have you noticed how all the walls running north-west to south-east have been flattened,’ said FitzRoy, ‘but those running the other way have by and large survived?’
‘By God, you are absolutely right.’
‘It is like a ship in a heavy sea. Lined up with the waves, she will ride the shocks, but bring her broadside-on, and she will be put over on her beam-ends. Proof that the shocks of an earthquake arrive by a kind of wave motion, flowing in a single direction.’
Both men were charged with excitement now. They were passing the ruins of a spacious merchant’s house, when Darwin dived in suddenly, reappearing with a torn rug and a scattering of books extricated from the rubble. Swiftly, he laid the rug in the street and stood the books upon it spine uppermost, half of them aligned with the rug, the others at right-angles.
‘Observe,’ he commanded.
Kneeling at one end of the rug, he proceeded to tug it gently back and forth. At once, those books standing at right-angles to the direction of movement toppled over, but those aligned with it stayed upright.
‘As I said, Darwin old man,’ exclaimed Corfield, balling his hands deep into his pockets, ‘you’re a confounded marvel!’
Dusk found FitzRoy and Darwin many miles along the Pacific shore, kicking their heels on what remained of the outer wall of Penco Castle, a seventeenth-century Spanish sea-fort. The building had been devastated even before the recent earthquake; it now wore a battered, defeated aspect entirely in keeping with the imperial ambitions of its mother country. The tide was in, and dark magenta waves lapped at the old Spanish battlements, gradually teasing the ancient stones from their crumbling bed of mortar. As the sun had sunk towards the blue wall of the horizon, Darwin had breathlessly expounded his discoveries in the mountains, and the startling conclusions he had reached — all except one. He had withheld his disturbing ideas about the divergence of the wildlife on either side of the Andean cordillera: those deductions were of such devastating import that he would - he knew - have to choose his moment carefully. But his evidence for the intermittent and continuing uplift of the mountains seemed overwhelming.
‘So you see,’ he concluded, ‘the uplift is not caused by the earthquakes. The uplift is the cause of the earthquakes.’
‘From what you say I must do you justice,’ conceded FitzRoy graciously. ‘I shall write to Lyell confirming that it is so.’
‘You oblige me by your understanding. But ... does this new evidence not bring the story of the Biblical flood into question?’
‘Not in the least. The one does not preclude the other. Earthquake and flood may exist side by side - indeed, the two may have occurred in tandem.’
‘But surely all the evidence of land having been under water is caused by the earth’s crust being in a continual state of change. Places now far above the sea were once beneath it. Districts may have been inundated in one quarter — but a universal deluge could never have happened!’
‘My friend,’ said FitzRoy gently, ‘everything might not be as clear-cut as you think. You say the land has been rising regularly for thousands of years, and continues to do so?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then why is this two-hundred-year-old Spanish fort, built by the water’s edge, still by the water’s edge?’
Darwin looked about him. FitzRoy was right.
Why had Penco Castle not been uplifted from the water, preferring to crumble where it stood? He had no answer. It had all seemed so simple, up in the mountains, in his delight at finding what appeared to be a universal solution. It would take a lifetime of study, he realized, merely to chip away at a few of the lesser complexities of God’s universe. He laughed out loud at the sheer size of the task, and how easily he had underestimated it.
‘I am sure you are correct in your observations,’ said a placatory FitzRoy, as the pair wound their way home, ‘but I am afraid I cannot bring myself to question the written word of God. I am sure there is room in the scheme of things for both even
tualities.’
As he spoke, a deep roar echoed from the unseen caverns of the underworld, and the earth shook as if a huge subterranean beast were rattling its cage. It was the biggest aftershock so far. FitzRoy and Darwin found themselves hurled to the ground, like two statues in the cathedrals of old Byzantium thrown down by the armies of the Saracens. Thus forcibly prostrated, both men spread their arms and legs wide to avoid being rolled over and over in the grass. A few seconds later, when the assault had finished, they raised their heads warily. There was something odd, something different about their surroundings. Darwin was first to his feet and first to realize what had happened, scrambling eagerly down the slope towards the shore.
‘Look!’ he said, literally hopping from one foot to the other with excitement. ‘FitzRoy, look! Look at this!’
There, behind the frantic naturalist, a glistening mussel bed adhered to the rock. But the shellfish did not lie beneath the lapping water, as they had a few moments previously: they lay with rivulets of clear salt water streaming between them, several feet clear of the high-water mark.
Chapter Twenty-three
Valparayso, Chili, 16 June 1835
‘Captain FitzRoy! Captain FitzRoy, sir!’
FitzRoy wheeled round. He had just stepped out of a dockside masthoop merchant’s on to the cobbled main street of Valparayso. Perhaps fifty yards distant, on their way up from the wharf and standing out like a sore thumb among the respectable Chilean gentlefolk, were three filthy, emaciated Englishmen. Their hair was matted, their clothing ripped, and two of them wore what looked suspiciously like the remains of British naval officers’ uniforms. Really, FitzRoy was not in the best of moods. He had brought the Beagle back to Valparayso to replenish her hold for the journey home, and to report to Commodore Mason as requested; but when he had rowed out to HMS Blonde, the commodore’s flagship, her crew had been surly and diffident. The commodore was no longer in residence aboard, the lieutenant in charge had wearily explained. No, he did not know when, or indeed if, the commodore would be back. No, he could not be of any further help. The Blonde, FitzRoy knew, had once been the proud frigate of Admiral Byron himself. What on earth would the admiral have made of the state of the modern-day Blonde? Her unkempt decks and mildewed sails indicated a ship in decline, ill-disciplined and rudderless. Such neglect of a fine old vessel invariably roused his ire.