This Thing of Darkness

  ‘So Smith, who stutters, is on the tops’lyard. And he shouts to the mate below, “Me w-w-whatnots are j-j-jammed in the block of the reefing tackle.” “Yer what?” shouts the mate. “I said me w-w-whatnots are j-j-jammed in the block of the reefing tackle.” So the mate shouts, “If yer can’t speak it, me bucko, sing it.” So Smith sings out, clear as you like,‘“Slack away yer reefy tackle, reefy tackle, reefy tackle, Slack away yer reefy tackle, me whatnots are jammed!”’

  A pent-up explosion of masculine laughter greeted the final lines, and FitzRoy was overcome with a desire to join in, to bathe in the atmosphere of camaraderie and warmth. He descended the after companionway and opened the messroom door; but the instant he did so, the atmosphere died as if asphyxiated.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ said Murray politely.

  ‘Evening, sir,’ from Bynoe.

  Drinks were hastily put down, and pipes and snuff were laid on the table. Stokes was there too, and Wilson and Kempe.

  FitzRoy did his best to muster an urbane smile. ‘Good evening, men.’

  ‘Anything we can do for you, sir?’

  ‘No, thank you, Mr Stokes. I am much obliged. I merely came by to thank you most kindly for all your efforts today, and to bid you all goodnight.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Goodnight, sir.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  And with that FitzRoy withdrew, outwardly unruffled, but inwardly smarting that he could make such a fool of himself. On the Thetis or the Ganges, of course, he would have been part of such an evening’s entertainment; not by any means the most gregarious part but an integral part nonetheless. Now he was excluded by his rank. That was the way of the world, and he must accept it. Never again must he entertain such absurd emotional disarray. I may guide them and shepherd them through difficulty and help them learn, but I cannot engage with them. I am not allowed to be their friend He shut the messroom door, crossed the planks, and made his way into his own cramped cabin. There he sat at his table, lit a lantern and drew the salt-stained volume of Admiral Byron’s voyages from the shelf.

  Byron had been shipwrecked in Tierra del Fuego on the Wager half a century before, one of four to make it home to England from a ship’s company of some two hundred men. Something FitzRoy had read in Byron’s account stirred in his memory now, and he leafed restlessly through the pages to find it. There it was:‘What we thought strange, upon the summits of the highest hills were found beds of shells, a foot or two thick.’

  Beds of shells. On the summits of hills. Higher than those on the Patagonian shoreline. Higher than the salt crystals of the inshore salinas. Shell beds actually on the summits of hills. He took down the copy of the scriptures that Sulivan had presented him, and turned to Genesis 6: 7: ‘And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.’ Was this not proof, then, of Genesis? How else did shell beds come to be on mountaintops, unless the mountains themselves had been inundated by floodwaters? There had been just eight survivors, according to the weather prayer. Had eight survivors really repopulated the entire planet? His eyes were drawn across the page, as if invisibly guided, to Genesis 6: 4:‘There were giants in the earth in those days ... mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’

  Giants in the earth in those days. The giants of Patagonia? Eagerly, he began to devour the verses that followed, dealing with the repopulation of the earth by Noah’s sons Shem, Ham and Japheth: how Shem begat the Semitic people, how Ham begat the Egyptians and Libyans and Cushites - the blacks - and how Japheth begat the Greeks, Parthians, Persians, Medes and Romans. How, a generation or two later, Esau married a daughter of Ishmael and begat the copper-coloured men. The red men of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

  Why, then, the disparity in height between the seven-foot Patagonians and the tiny fat Fuegians they so despised? The Fuegians apparently resembled the Esquimaux and Laplanders of the north. Perhaps the exposure to cold, wet and wind, the long winters cocooned in their tents, had shortened the legs of the Fuegians and increased their body fat. Perhaps the Patagonians, like the Swahili tribesmen of Africa, had grown tall and wiry because of the fine climate, the flat terrain and the enormous distances they had to cover in following the herds. Was it really possible that humans, originally cut from the same divine template, had adapted into a score of different varieties at the behest of the climate and of their surroundings? He had so much to discuss, and no one to discuss it with. He would have given so much, at that moment, to engage in conversation with a skilled anthropologist, mineralogist, or even a priest. Did Noah, he wondered, have anyone to converse with? How unimaginably great would have been the pressures of a divine command!

  A commotion outside woke him from his reverie, and there was a knock at the cabin door. It was Boatswain Sorrell, perspiring slightly. ‘If you please, sir, I think you may care to come up on deck.’

  FitzRoy ducked out of his cabin and leaped up the companionway to the maindeck. It took his eyes a moment or two to adjust to the darkness, but he could already guess what had transpired from the sounds of cheering about him. Across the bay to the east, two small dark shapes had emerged from the gloom and the drizzle of the first narrows. After a week of fruitless, back-breaking toil, the Adventure and the Adelaide had taken a leaf out of FitzRoy’s book, and had slithered through the rocky gates - thankfully unscathed - on the tidal current.

  Chapter Five

  Desolate Bay, Tierra del Fuego, 4 February 1830

  ‘Are there any news, Mr Kempe?’

  ‘None, sir. The search parties have found no traces.’

  FitzRoy clamped his teeth in exasperation. Murray was now more than a week overdue. He had taken a party in one of the two whale-boats to survey Cape Desolation and the south-western side of the bay. Their provisions would have run out four days ago. It was a wild, surf-pounded coast, exposed to all the moods and frustrations of the Pacific Ocean, which made it all the more dangerous for men in a small open boat.

  Up to this point, everything had gone as smoothly as FitzRoy could have hoped. The ships had sailed south from Gregory Bay towards Tierra del Fuego, the scenery changing dramatically as they did so. Ahead of them stood a battalion of sombre mountains, their sides plunging sheer into the sea, their summits white-capped, shrouded by mists and swirling storms. Gloomy beech forests, some of the trunks a good twelve or thirteen feet across at the base, clung in a tangled, yellow-green mass to the leeward shores. Wherever one looked, the mountain wall was riven with inlets; islands dotted its feet, mere crumbs of stone, as if the cliffs had been hewn by a giant with an axe. Here and there, in isolated coves, slender crescents of shingle provided the only flat land. Low clouds raced and tore themselves into strips against the bare rock. Once, just once, through a ripped coverlet of grey, a glittering, frosty peak had revealed itself, towering above its fellows. This was the awesome ‘Volcan Nevado’ recorded by Pedro Sarmiento in the sixteenth century. Captain King had seen it too, in the early days of the expedition, and had renamed it Mount Sarmiento. Nowhere in all this forbidding vista was there any sign of life. If the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego were observing the ships, they gave no indication as yet of their presence. Instead, the dark channels that sliced through the mountains appeared to lead beyond the confines of the world of men, to the far ends of the earth.

  King had split the three ships up. He had turned east in the Adventure. Skyring in the Adelaide had been sent into the labyrinth ahead, to explore and map the Cockburn channel as it wound between sheer rock walls to the south coast. FitzRoy in the Beagle had been ordered to follow the Straits of Magellan, turning west at Point Shut-up, then beating north-west towards the Pacific. There were inlets and channels leading off the north side of the straits, recorded a half-century before by Byron, Wallis and Carteret, that still had not been explored, surveyed or named; or, as in the case of Point Shut-up, renamed. They would keep the mountai
n wall of Tierra del Fuego to their port side, tacking up into the westerlies, while they explored the flatter, barren tundra of southern Patagonia to starboard. FitzRoy was looking forward to the task with enthusiasm; the only sour note was that King had transferred Bynoe to the Adelaide, where Skyring was in want of a surgeon, leaving FitzRoy to the conversational mercies of Mr Wilson in his place. Once again he had been denied the company of a potential kindred spirit.

  He had sought solace in the solid efficiency of Midshipman Stokes. Crop-haired, compact and muscular, the Yorkshireman belied his eighteen years with a performance of almost metronomic reliability. Once an order had been given to Stokes, it could be safely forgotten. Swiftly, he became FitzRoy’s most trusted surveyor. Although taciturn by nature - he was not one for a messroom chat about the finer aspects of stratigraphy or anthropology - he was unfailingly even-tempered, and stuck by his captain through thick and thin.

  As autumn had turned to winter, FitzRoy and Stokes - the former commanding the whaleboat, the latter towed behind in the yawl - had set out with a month’s supplies to investigate the Jerome Channel, a narrow opening on the north side of the strait. They were well prepared: every man in their party carried a painted canvas cloak and a south-wester hat like a coal-heaver’s cap. In the absence of fresh food they packed the boats with tin canisters of Donkin’s preserved meats, which made an agreeable mess when mixed with the occasional wildfowl - any bird unlucky enough to have delayed its winter migration found Stokes an unerring marksman. But despite all FitzRoy’s precautions the weather tested their powers of endurance to the limit. Sometimes icy rain would set in for days; in the mornings their cloaks would be frozen hard about them. The winds whipped up short, awkward seas, which frequently threatened to capsize them, and made it impossible to land in the high-breaking surf; on occasions they had to row all night just to keep the two boats aligned with the waves.

  Then there was the time-consuming, exhaustive work of the survey itself. This was modern, scientific map-making, not the broad guess-work of old. Soundings had to be made in every bay using the yawl’s leadline, while the whaleboat foraged in the shallows rudder up, making transects with the lead line at various angles. At every land station, heavy theodolites had to be manhandled up hills, small portable observatories had to be set up, and the ship’s chronometers had to be rated. It was a thankless task, but the men set to it with vigour.

  And what discoveries they made. To their astonishment, the Jerome Channel widened out into a vast inland sea some sixty miles wide, hitherto unsuspected, which FitzRoy named Otway Water. A side-channel was named Sulivan Sound in honour of his departed friend; the celebrated Mr Donkin’s preserved meats were commemorated at Donkin Cove, while bays were named after Lieutenant Wickham of the Adventure and FitzRoy’s sister Fanny. At the far end of Otway Water, a narrow, twisting passage opened in the hills, which led, astonishingly, to another vast inland sea sixty miles long by twenty miles across. Frozen blue Niagaras of ice marked its western terminus, riven by serrated channels, where improbably shaped icebergs barged and jostled each other with silent grace. FitzRoy named this second reach Skyring Water, in honour of that gentleman’s steadfast good humour in accepting his situation. Their provisions ran low before they could ascertain whether or not there was any exit from Skyring Water to the sea; so they made their way back to the Beagle, their thick winter beards streaked with ice. FitzRoy himself had lost two toes through frostbite; but no man had uttered a word of complaint, and their commander burned inside with a fierce pride. He would turn the Beagle into the best, the most efficient survey packet the Royal Navy had ever sent forth.

  The rest of the winter had been taken up with following the straits to their conclusion, searching for channels in the cold rain and sparse daylight. Sulivan had been remembered again at Cape Bartholomew; King had been commemorated thrice in one vista at Cape Philip, Cape Parker and King Island. They had seen seals teaching their pups to swim, supporting them with one flipper, then gently pushing them away into deep water to fend for themselves. At a dark reach lined by black cliffs, now for ever entered into posterity as Whale Sound, Boatswain Sorrell had screamed ‘Hard a-port! There are rocks under the bows!’ which had revealed themselves instead to be a passing school of humpback whales. The beasts had accompanied the ship for some miles before peeling off to the south, at which juncture one had performed a graceful leap of farewell across the Beagle’s stern.

  The human inhabitants of the straits had revealed themselves rather more cautiously at first. Not that they could hope to hide themselves from the strangers - far from it. The continuous fires - the most precious possessions of each Fuegian family, which were never allowed to go out - signalled their presence on the hillsides in the dark of night, like ascending banks of church candles. Theirs was a world revealed by darkness, when their dogs barked and their drums spoke. In the daytime the Indians fell silent, and followed at a careful distance in their boats. These canoes were curious, collapsible little vessels, sewn together from tree bark and invariably split into three sections: women, children and dogs in the rear, the women paddling; men at the front, armed with sticks, stones, wooden spears or daggers, the points beaten from shipwrecked iron; and taking pride of place in the centre, the divine, unceasing fire on its bed of clay. Alongside the fire, invariably, green leaves would be piled high for making smoke signals, so that the Beagle’s progress was tracked and monitored by all as she passed slowly up the straits. Occasionally, naked men would come to the shore in brave little clusters, shouting the single word ‘Yammerschooner!’ and waving ragged pieces of skin at the strangers; but whenever FitzRoy put down boats to establish contact, the Indians would flee into the trees long before the shore party made the beach.

  These men were nothing like the ‘noble savages’ of Patagonia. They were short, round, oily creatures, four feet fully grown, who seemed to spend as much time in the icy water - which could not have been more than a degree or two above freezing - as they did on land. They could hold their breath for several minutes at a time, before emerging from the cold black depths with the mussels and sea-eggs that seemed to comprise the bulk of their diet. It was hard to connect them with any other tribe on earth. Indeed, they seemed more like porpoises than men. They were, thought FitzRoy, like a satire on humanity.

  At Mount de la Cruz, in that part of the western straits that Cook had christened ‘The Land of Desolation’, they made contact. A group of men appeared furtively on the shore, waving skins and shouting, ‘Yammerschooner!’ as ever. One was painted white all over, another blue, another bright red. The rest were daubed with white streaks. FitzRoy gave orders for the ship to pull in to shore. It had been sleeting heavily for days, her yards and rigging were icebound, and the men’s fingers were blue with cold. The Beagle pirouetted slowly round, like a fat ballerina. Despite the temperature, the natives on the shore were quite naked, except for the occasional tattered fox pelt thrown about their shoulders.

  Bennet squinted through a spyglass as the Indians began to jabber and gesticulate excitedly.

  ‘My eye! That crimson fellow reminds me of the sign of the Red Lion on Holborn Hill.’

  ‘Red, white and blue,’ pointed out Kempe. ‘They’ve run up the Union flag to greet us.’

  ‘It looks a regular crush on that beach, my boys,’ laughed Murray. ‘Do you reckon that shore is Terra del’s equivalent of a fashionable saloon?’

  ‘And what would you know of fashionable saloons, Mr Murray, hailing from Glasgow?’

  A chuckle ran around the poop deck.

  ‘Do you think I could hit him from here?’ pondered King, raising his gun to the port rail. ‘That would light a fire under the red savage’s tail!’

  ‘Put that down!’ snapped FitzRoy. He strode across the deck, eyes blazing, and grabbed the weapon. ‘What the deuce do you think you’re about?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ King was smarting, bewildered. ‘I was only going to fire over his head, sir. You should see the sav
ages scoot, sir, like ducks. It’s funny, sir. Captain Stokes always permitted gun amusements, sir. I wasn’t really going to shoot him, sir.’

  ‘So I should think not. They are not animals, put on God’s earth for our sport! I’m ashamed of you, Mr King.’

  ‘But - but they ain’t human, sir.’

  ‘They most certainly are men, just as you or I. Unfortunate men, maybe, forced by accident of circumstance to inhabit this Godforsaken spot, but they are our brothers nonetheless. They do not look like us because their physiognomy has adapted itself to the cold and rain. Were I to cast you ashore, Mr King, and were the good Lord to take pity on your soul and spare your life, then within a generation or two your progeny would very likely be short, plump and jabbering away like the lowliest Fuegian.’

  ‘But it doesn’t mean anything - does it, sir? Those noises they make?’

  ‘How do you know? To the best of my knowledge, no Dr Johnson has ever taken the trouble to compile a dictionary of their language. An omission I intend to remedy personally. Instead of waving a loaded gun about the maindeck, Mr King, you would be better advised to improve your intelligence of such matters. I suggest you consult the scriptures, commencing with the Book of Genesis.’

  With that, FitzRoy turned on his heel and stalked away, leaving a silence both uneasy and amused in his wake.

  ‘They say the bottle is a strict master,’ murmured Lieutenant Kempe, ‘but the good Lord is far stricter, and no easier to turn aside from.’

  They put the boats down, but by the time they reached the shingle, the natives had fled. In a clearing amid the first few trees of the wood, they found abandoned wigwams: not the spindly, elegant constructions of the Patagonians, but clumsy, squat affairs made from branches, leaves, dung and rotten sealskins piled into rounds. Carefully, FitzRoy positioned two empty preserved meat canisters at the entrance to one of the tents, then withdrew.