Gently extricating his hand, he rose and went into the little bedroom where Laura slept, undisturbed by chiming clocks and the calls of servants. He kissed his daughter’s forehead once, then passed into his dressing room and locked the door. A basinful of water had been poured out; all was ready for his morning shave. A clean ewer had been placed atop the washing stand, and his razor lay neatly parallel to the marble splashboard. He removed it from its leather case, unfolded it and inspected the blade, as he did every morning, for sharpness. Then he plunged his hands into the ice-cold water, pausing only momentarily to observe how pallid his skin became, how deathly white viewed through the prism of clear liquid. He thought then of Edward Hellyer, his moonstone face so peaceful amid the drifting kelp. Did God, he wondered, punish those poor souls who had seen fit to disobey a higher authority, even if theirs was a sincere and considered deed? Was it an act of bravery to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or an act of weakness? He brought up two freezing handfuls and splashed his face, trying to clear his mind. He wanted his thoughts to be as lucid as possible, his equilibrium utterly undisturbed.
He attempted to examine himself inwardly, scanning the cognitive landscape for signs of irregularity. Everything was fine, of course. He had learned long ago that the mere process of worrying about mental instability was in itself a sure guarantee that none was present. Only when he allowed himself to become complacent did his condition steal up unawares, and complacency turn to fatal, misdirected certainty. This morning, he realized, he was barely certain of anything any more.
He inspected himself in the looking-glass, embedded so solidly in its scrolled and crested mahogany frame above the splashboard. At the centre of the bevelled rectangle he could see a drawn, grey-haired man staring back at him, a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday, a lifetime of punishing, vigorous, self-imposed toil written into his features. He had lived his life long enough, he realized, to begin feeling the disappointment wrought by change. A common illusion, that softens the prick of death. Old men, wearied at the end of their lives, often took comfort from this: how much easier to quit the world if you feel that you no longer quite belong to it? But was he in need of comfort? No. He was braver than that.
He had been born into another century, almost; a world of coaching inns and sailpower, in which it had taken days, not hours, to travel from London to the coast. Now man had become stupendously powerful, not individually but collectively, and had concertedly begun to assault the bastions of nature. The journey to the coast took just two hours by steam train. News from America reached London in a matter of minutes. Everything had been mechanized, from death itself to the production of undergarments. Man had begun to dismantle the wilderness, recording and cataloguing its constituent parts, eradicating his fear of the unknown, and in doing so had set himself against God. He, Robert FitzRoy, had connived in this process as much as anyone; but even though he had helped to create it, this was no longer his world.
Some things, at least, had not changed. The endless struggle of good against evil still raged. God’s love was still pitted against greed, hatred and selfishness. A lifetime on, and Trafalgar Square was still not completed. For all the changes that advancing knowledge had wrought, man was still, at heart, the same creature he always had been, lazy, venal, cunning, thoughtless and self-seeking. Perhaps, then, it was not man that had changed, not society even, but FitzRoy himself. Yes, that was it. It was he, and not the world, that had changed. He no longer believed. Oh, he still believed in God, but he was no longer sure that there was any point in trying to hold back humanity’s blind march towards the inextricably linked goals of self-advancement and self-destruction. He no longer believed that one man could make a difference. Was that what Captain Stokes had realized, all those years ago, on a freezing, pebbly beach at Port Famine? Or had the race been to the strong, and Stokes merely a weakling?
When I was young, thought FitzRoy, I was a voyager, traversing unknown seas, the master of my own destiny. The wind and the waves may have dashed themselves, against me, but I fought through to discover new shores and unknown worlds. Then I became part of a machine, a mere cog in a wheel. They took away my liberty, my independence. But at least my toil served to smooth the way for other travellers, who followed in my footsteps. Now, they have removed even that small comfort from me. The solution is clear. I must travel to where they cannot reach me. I must voyage once more, to the furthest shore. I must undertake the ultimate journey. A journey without maps.
He had not been given permission to undertake such a journey, of course. Technically speaking, it would be a sin to go. Once he had taken his leave, there could be no turning back. Once he had arrived, his only chance of redemption would be to throw himself upon the retrospective mercy of a higher authority. Would Mary be waiting for him there, he wondered, wreathed in a golden light on that distant shore? Would Jemmy be there too, and Musters and Hellyer, and his father, and old Skyring, and dear Johnny Wickham? Or was Darwin right? Was he just another monkey, too highly developed for his own good? There was only one way to find out.
The razor felt cold against his throat.
Author’s Postscript
Author’s Postscript
Robert FitzRoy was buried at All Saints Church, Upper Norwood, on 6 May 1865. His suicide was reported in the newspapers, but was largely eclipsed as a news event by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The funeral was a quiet family affair. All the surviving officers of the Beagle, with whom (Sulivan excepted) he had long ago lost touch, had written to the Statical Department of the Board of Trade asking to attend but, sadly, as the office had been closed down, their letters remained unanswered. By coincidence, however, Sulivan and Babington went into the office on the day before the funeral to clear away their papers, just as Maria FitzRoy’s brothers arrived to collect her husband’s belongings. As a consequence, the pair received a last-minute invitation and travelled down to Norwood to attend the ceremony. Sulivan later sent Darwin a letter, relating how a grief-stricken Maria FitzRoy had collapsed at the graveside. All FitzRoy’s former crew members were united in their sorrow; the regret expressed by Darwin, although undoubtedly sincere, was noticeably more muted.
Robert FitzRoy, it transpired, was utterly bankrupt. He had expended his entire fortune, over £6000 (equivalent to more than £400,000 in today’s money), in subsidizing the public purse for the benefit of others. When this came to light, Sulivan inaugurated the Admiral FitzRoy Testimonial Fund, to save Maria and Laura from destitution, and succeeded in persuading the government to pay back £3000 of the money FitzRoy had laid out. Darwin contributed a further £100. Queen Victoria, perhaps in gratitude for all those private weather forecasts, gave Mrs FitzRoy the use of a grace and favour apartment at Hampton Court Palace. She died there, peacefully, in December 1889.
After FitzRoy’s death, his storm warning and weather forecasting apparatus was broken up. His drums and cones were taken into storage, his electric telegraph lines ripped apart. Despite an anguished letter of protest from his wife, Augustus Smith MP more or less gloated over FitzRoy’s death in the House of Commons. Just as other European countries and the United States took up weather forecasting in earnest, political pressure exerted by those who stood to benefit financially saw the science of meteorology damned in Britain, the country of its birth, as a nonsense. The fishing-fleet owners, however, had reckoned without the ordinary sailors and fishermen to whom FitzRoy had been a hero. Such was the outcry at the scrapping of his storm warnings that two years later, in 1867, his network was reinstated. Within ten years, daily weather forecasts had made a belated reappearance.
In meteorological terms, FitzRoy had been a man quite astonishingly ahead of his time. Even today, the connection he made between sunspots and weather patterns continues, by and large, to be poohpoohed by the British Meteorological Office. Now, with all the satellite technology available to them, our official forecasters have achieved a 71 per cent accuracy rating for their twenty-four-hour rain fore
cast: but the private company Weather Action, owned by Piers Corbyn, which uses sunspot activity as a basis for its forecasts, achieves a long-range accuracy rating of 85 per cent.
Besides inventing the weather forecast, Robert FitzRoy’s contribution to nautical history was considerable. His navigational charts of Patagonia, Chile, the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego were so exhaustively precise that they continued to be used until recently: only aerial photography has managed to improve upon his extraordinary accuracy. Undoubtedly he saved hundreds, if not thousands of lives. He introduced the system of masters’ certificates for ship’s officers. He pioneered the use of the lightning conductor and the Beaufort Scale. He introduced the terms ‘port’ (as opposed to ‘larboard’) and ‘dinghy’ (as opposed to ‘jolly-boat’) into the Royal Navy. But perhaps FitzRoy’s greatest accomplishment lay in the individual achievements of those who sailed with him in the Beagle. Never can such a concentration of talent have been collected in one place before or since; never can it have been brought to fruition so lovingly. David Stanbury has listed some of the notable positions later held by the officers of the Beagle, including FitzRoy and Darwin: No less than five of the Beagle’s officers were destined to reach the rank of admiral; two became captains of the Beagle, two, eventual Fellows of the Royal Society. They also included Governor Generals-to-be of New Zealand and Queensland; a Member of Parliament; future Heads of the Board of Trade and the Meteorological Office; two artists who achieved considerable renown in the country of their adoption; three doctors; the prospective Secretaries of the Geological Society and the Royal Geographical Society; an Inspector of Coastguards; an Australian property magnate; the founding father of the British colony of the Falkland Islands; six highly professional surveyors; four botanists of sufficient standing to correspond with the great Hooker at Kew; five active collectors whose specimens were to be eagerly described by the Zoological Society and the Natural History Museum; one of the founders of the science of meteorology; and the author of The Origin of Species.
It is an extraordinary list, all the more so because it was entirely achieved by the crew of one tiny surveying-brig.
The work of Charles Darwin aside, one is immediately struck by the career of Bartholomew Sulivan, who not only distinguished himself in the field, invented iron cladding for ships, minesweeping, concentrated mortar fire (thereby anticipating aerial bombardment from aeroplanes) and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, but who also - on a more peaceable note - brought back the common nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) from South America. After FitzRoy’s death he resigned his position, and retired to the south coast with his wife Sophia, where he spent most of his time sailing model ships with his grand-children. He was knighted in 1869, and lived until 1890; although his retirement was marred by the death of his son Tom, who fatally contracted malaria at Monte Video in 1873. FitzRoy’s son Robert was luckier. He enjoyed a glittering naval career, reaching the rank of rear-admiral in 1894, in which year he became commander of the Channel Squadron. He, too, was knighted.
The story of the Beagle and her crew following FitzRoy’s enforced retirement is worth relating. The third voyage, commanded by John Wickham, was a gruelling expedition to survey those Australian coasts left uncharted by Phillip Parker King. After commemorating their old shipmates by naming Port Darwin and the FitzRoy river, the crew began to survey the Victoria river late in 1839. There a shore expedition was surprised by a war party of aborigines, one of whom ran Lieutenant Stokes through with his spear. He was rushed to the operating table where, in an emergency operation, Benjamin Bynoe saved his life. After Wickham (who had suffered repeated attacks of dysentery) left the ship in Sydney for a life in the colonial service, Stokes took over as captain, and brought the Beagle home. She never sailed again, but became a fixed coastguard watch vessel on the river Roach in Essex, renamed the WV7. In 1870, she was sold to Murray and Trainer, scrap merchants, for £525. Stokes came to say goodbye, and salvaged a small piece of timber, which he later had fashioned into a little round keepsake box; it was recently put on display at the National Maritime Museum. Early in 2004, a team of marine archaeologists, using ground-penetrating radar, located the remains of the Beagle under twelve feet of mud and marsh on the north bank of the Roach. She had been stripped of all her beautiful wooden trimmings, so lovingly installed at FitzRoy’s expense: all that remains is her hull. There are now plans to excavate the wreck. Stokes himself completed a further survey of New Zealand in command of the paddle steamer Acheron, before becoming a rear-admiral in 1864, vice-admiral in 1871, and full admiral in 1877.
The careers of all the Beagle’s officers pale into insignificance, of course, beside the lasting, worldwide fame of her passenger, Charles Darwin. He completed eight further major works following The Origin of Species, including The Descent of Man. He was never honoured by the British government, although three of his sons were eventually knighted; but when he died in 1882 he was given a grand funeral at Westminster Abbey, with Wallace, Huxley and Hooker among the pall-bearers. The cause of his crippling illness has remained a mystery ever since. Some detractors regard it as entirely psychosomatic, but a more convincing theory is that he had been struck down by Chagas’ disease, a debilitating condition spread by the benchuca bug, the unpleasant blood-sucking insect he had allowed to crawl over his skin in such numbers in the Andes. It would be an irony indeed if his life had ultimately been ended by an insect that had collectively learned, as a species, to use thatched roofs as a springboard from which to launch attacks on sleeping victims. As to FitzRoy’s illness, his madness was almost certainly undiagnosed manic depression, undiagnosed because the condition had yet to be identified. Today it is treatable with lithium; in the early nineteenth century it was simply a terrifying and inexplicable companion for those - like FitzRoy - who were otherwise of sound mind.
Of the other participants in this story, Darwin’s servant Syms Covington moved to Twofold Bay in New South Wales, from where he would often send specimens of the local fauna back to his former employer. After a time as a gold panner, he became the postmaster of Pambula and started an inn there, named the Retreat; it is still open, and its red tin roof and double chimneys still poke above the trees beside the Princes Highway. He died in 1861. Of the Beagle’s two artists, Augustus Earle returned to London, where he died in 1838; Conrad Martens opened a studio in Pitt Street, Sydney, and became a notable Australian painter. He died in 1878. His neighbour Philip Gidley King became something of an Australian celebrity in his later years, on account of his connection with Charles Darwin and the Beagle.
The preposterous surgeon Robert McCormick continued to blunder his well-connected way from expedition to expedition. He sailed with the great Sir James Ross to the Antarctic, and incensed his commander so greatly that Ross dedicated the rest of his life to blocking McCormick’s further promotion. The surgeon subsequently wrote his autobiography, in which he refused to mention the names of FitzRoy or Darwin, or acknowledge that he had once served aboard the Beagle. He would admit only that for a brief period he had found himself ‘in a false position, on board a small and very uncomfortable vessel’. Robert McCormick lived to an unjustly ripe old age, and died fêted and admired, every inch the famous explorer, in 1890.
The Reverend Richard Matthews suffered a far less respectable end: his days as a missionary in New Zealand came to a premature close when he was discovered to have misappropriated a large quantity of money from the mission at Wanganui. He departed life a destitute bankrupt, having lost the use of one eye. Bishop Wilberforce - ‘Soapy Sam’ - was another man of the cloth to meet an unfortunate fate. He died in 1873 from head injuries caused by a fall from his horse. ‘For once,’ remarked Thomas Huxley, ‘reality and his brains came into contact, and the result was fatal.’ The Reverend George Packenham Despard, forced by pressure from Sulivan to relinquish his tenure as head of the Patagonian Missionary Society, was unable because of the Woollya scandal to find himself an alternative position in the English Church. Harried
through the courts for unfair dismissal by Captain Snow, he too eventually fled to Australia.
Following Despard’s resignation, the new head of the society in Tierra del Fuego, the Reverend Waite Stirling, salvaged the Allen Gardiner and resolved to take a party of Fuegians to be educated in England, just as FitzRoy had done. He set sail in 1866, with four natives on board, including Threeboys. While in England they were introduced to the Reverend Joseph Wigram, the young man who had fixed up their forefathers’ education in Walthamstow all those years before. He was now the Bishop of Rochester. Predictably, perhaps, Stirling’s venture had tragic consequences. Two of the four passengers perished on the trip home. One, Uroopa, died of consumption: he was baptized as John Allen Gardiner shortly before his death, and lies buried in the graveyard at Stanley. Threeboys, by now a young man, died of Bright’s disease, a European kidney complaint unknown in Tierra del Fuego; he, too, was baptized before his death, as George Button. Waite Stirling was rewarded with the bishopric of the Falkland Islands for his efforts.
The sudden removal of Despard and the departure of Stirling left the Fuegian mission in the hands of Despard’s stepson, Thomas Bridges, who appears to have been made of sterner stuff than Despard himself. Bravely, in the light of what had happened to Phillips, Fell and the rest, he built up a one-man mission on the shores of the Beagle Channel. Against the odds, it flourished. His wife came out to join him, and he adopted Jemmy Button’s two orphaned grandsons, with financial assistance from a number of sponsors back in England. The first child, who was sponsored by the Beckenham branch of the Patagonian Missionary Society, he named William Beckenham Button. The other was sponsored by Sulivan, Darwin, Hamond, Stokes and Usborne: he was christened Jemmy FitzRoy Button.
As part of his studies into the Fuegians’ way of life, Bridges made a remarkable discovery: that their language, which Darwin had presumptuously assumed to consist of a few limited clicks and grunts, was astonishingly rich and poetic. The average working vocabulary of an adult Fuegian was around 32,000 words (compared to the 20,000 or so in the vocabulary of the average modern-day European). The word ‘Yammerscbooner’, incidentally, which was common right across Tierra del Fuego, did not mean ‘give to me’, but ‘please be kind to me.