Charles Darwin Read online

  They set off together in July. Sedgwick was a restless companion. One morning, having left their inn a mile or two behind them, Sedgwick began to speculate about a sixpence which he had put into the hands of the waiter, telling him to give it to their chambermaid. What if that ‘damned scoundrel’ had failed to give the girl the money and pocketed it himself? It was all Darwin could do to persuade Sedgwick that there were no reasons for his suspicions and that a tiring walk back to the inn to confront the waiter would have been a waste of time.38

  From the first, Sedgwick treated Darwin, not as some ignorant student brought along for the fun of a walking trip, but as a serious geologist who was knowledgeable enough to help him in his searches – he was looking for the reported presence of an extended layer of Old Red Sandstone (Devonian) in contact with Carboniferous Limestone in the Vale of Clwyd – and also debate with him. Darwin had attended Sedgwick’s geology lectures at Cambridge – something which he would later deny having done,39 even though two of his contemporaries remembered seeing him there. When Sedgwick and Darwin separated on their Welsh journey, Sedgwick sent Darwin a detailed letter about the organic remains of slate in Moel Shabod in Snowdonia. Darwin had meanwhile encountered an Oxford undergraduate hiking in the mountains, the future Lord Sherbrooke, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Gladstone’s first administration, who remembered:

  He was making a geological tour in Wales, and carried with him, in addition to his other burdens, a hammer of 14 lbs weight. I remember he was full of modesty, and was always lamenting his bad memory for languages . . . I saw something in him which marked him out as superior to anyone I had ever met: the proof which I have of this was somewhat canine in nature, I followed him. I walked twenty-two miles with him.40

  Darwin, however, had ambitions to travel further than Wales. With Henslow, he had hatched some as yet inarticulate plans to study tropical vegetation in Tenerife, the Darwin money effecting, in the younger man’s life, the fulfilment of ambitions which Henslow had never managed to accomplish in his own. Whether it would have been possible to persuade Dr Robert Darwin to let him go to Tenerife, we do not know. It would seem likely that, without his quite knowing it, Darwin, when he set forth with Sedgwick, was on probation. Surely one Cambridge professor would report back to another how the budding young geologist had acquitted himself. And, as Sherbrooke’s memory attests, there was something intensely motivated and immediately impressive about Darwin. While Darwin tapped and hammered the rocks of Upper Carboniferous deposits in North Wales, however, Henslow was preparing him for a life-changing opportunity.

  5

  The Voyage of the Beagle

  HMS BEAGLE WAS built as a ten-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy – in other words, a small fighting vessel, originally 235 tons, just over 90 feet in length, 24–25 foot in the beam and designed to hold 120 men as a ship-of-war. In fact, she was never used for hostilities, and five years after she was launched she was refitted, in 1825, as a survey ship. Ever since the great voyages of Captain Cook in the 1770s, it had been realized that the sloop, rather than an enormous ship, was the ideal vessel of survey, because it could be taken inshore easily, either for cartography or for observation of natural phenomena. The Beagle’s first voyage of discovery had been in 1826, under the command of Captain Pringle Stokes, and its task was a hydrographic survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. It is a desolate place, the weather is terrible, the semi-naked inhabitants presented a woeful appearance, and Captain Pringle Stokes fell into a dangerous depression. He shot himself on 2 August 1828, and died ten days later. The First Lieutenant, W. G. Skyring, was appointed commander and the poor little Beagle made her miserable way to Rio de Janeiro for refitting and provisions. The Commander-in-Chief of the South American station was Admiral Sir Robert Otway, and he ordered the Beagle to Montevideo for repairs. It was there that he made the bold decision to place her under the command of a twenty-three-year-old aristocrat named Robert FitzRoy, son of Lord Charles FitzRoy, grandson of the Duke of Grafton, and the nephew of Lord Castlereagh who had been Foreign Secretary at the time of the Congress of Vienna. It was a highly unbalanced family – Castlereagh committed suicide in 1822, fearing his unmasking as a homosexual, and he was one of the most unpopular politicians in British history. (Although he had cut his own throat, which would have disqualified lesser mortals from Christian burial at that date, Castlereagh was given a funeral in Westminster Abbey and his coffin was greeted by whoops of merriment when it came out into the street.)

  Captain FitzRoy was, however, a largely competent officer. Passing back through Tierra del Fuego, the Beagle suffered the loss of one of her jolly-boats, stolen by natives. In retaliation, FitzRoy took four Fuegian hostages with him back to London, naming them Jemmy Button, York Minster and – this was a young girl – Fuegia Basket. The fourth died when they reached England.

  FitzRoy had them educated at his own expense, but it was obvious that they should be returned to their own people, and a supplementary reason for the second voyage of the Beagle was that Jemmy Button, York Minster and Fuegia Basket, now accompanied by a missionary called Richard Matthews, should return to their desolate homeland and win the natives for the Church of England.

  FitzRoy was a scientifically interested man, and, apart from giving the Fuegians safe transport home, he planned to make a survey of South America. For this, he wanted to take the most up-to-date navigational instruments. On the first voyage, he had felt keenly the lack of a good geologist, and his aim, should the Admiralty agree, was to set out again in the Beagle with a geologist ‘qualified to examine the land; while the officers, and myself, would attend to hydrography’.1 FitzRoy was destined to become a distinguished meteorologist who invented the term ‘synoptic chart’, by which he pioneered a method of giving reliable gale warnings to ships. The daily recitation of weather conditions in British coastal waters which is heard on British radio – a secular equivalent to the Angelus in other cultures – is one of the direct consequences of FitzRoy’s work.

  The successor of a captain who had taken his own life in the gloomy, windy, rain-tossed Tierra del Fuego, the nephew of a famous suicide and, as it happens, a man who was doomed himself, aged sixty, to take his own life, FitzRoy was a vulnerable man, and he knew that Captain Pringle Stokes would probably still have been alive if he had enjoyed the comradeship of some congenial fellow human beings during the darkest days at sea.

  When FitzRoy eventually received permission from the Admiralty, therefore, to go ahead with his voyage of survey, he began to ask around, to see if a companion of about his age could be found.

  While Darwin was in Wales with Sedgwick, in August 1831, George Peacock, tutor in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge – future Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at Cambridge, and Dean of Ely – wrote to Henslow. ‘Captain Fitz Roy [sic] is going out to survey the southern coast of Terra [sic] del Fuego & afterwards to visit many of the South Sea Islands & to return by the Indian Archipelago: the vessel is fitted out expressly for scientific purposes, combined with the survey: it will furnish therefore a rare opportunity for a naturalist & it would be a great misfortune that it should be lost . . .’2 Peacock floated the name of Leonard Jenyns, a naturalist-clergyman, who was a friend of Darwin’s. Henslow himself would have loved to realize a lifetime’s ambition in making such a voyage, but by now he was married with a child.

  It is not clear who, precisely, was using Peacock as the go-between to find a suitable naturalist. Sir Francis Beaufort, Hydrographer of the Navy and inventor of the Beaufort scale of wind-measurement, had told him about the voyage, and it may well have been Beaufort, rather than FitzRoy,3 who first began the search via the Cambridge network. Jenyns was approached, but decided that he could not leave his parish (Swaffham Bulbeck). It was then that Peacock wrote to Darwin, who found the letter at The Mount awaiting his return from North Wales. Peacock emphasized that there was no time to lose, and that Darwin should make up his mind immediately, since the Beagle was to sail at the
end of September. After a day’s lengthy discussion with his father, Darwin wrote to Henslow:

  My Father, although he does not decidedly refuse me, gives such strong advice against going. – that I should not be comfortable, if I did not follow it. – My Fathers objections are these; the unfitting me to settle down as a clergyman. – my little habit of seafaring. – the shortness of the time & the chance of my not suiting Captain Fitzroy [sic] . . . But if it had not been for my Father, I would have taken all risks.4

  Darwin then turned to his Uncle Jos at Maer Hall, who on 31 August wrote to ‘My dear Doctor’ the letter which sealed Darwin’s destiny. He itemized the objections and answered them. The journey would not be ‘in any degree disreputable to his character as a clergyman’. It was inconceivable that the Admiralty would ‘send out a bad vessel on such a service’. ‘The undertaking would be useless as regards his profession, but looking upon him as a man of enlarged curiosity, it affords him such an opportunity of seeing men and things as happens to few.’5 This letter won Dr Darwin round.

  The objections raised by Dr Darwin about the comfort and safety of a small sailing ship were very reasonable ones. The Cherokee-class ships of which the Beagle was an example were known in the Royal Navy as ‘coffin brigs’. They were frequently top-heavy and it required great skill to sail them without capsizing. The Beagle had been extensively rebuilt since she first saw the light of day in 1820. She was adapted as a barque not a brig when her function changed from ship-of-war to sailing vessel. This involved reducing her ten cannon to six, and adding a mizzen mast to improve manoeuvrability.6 In readiness for this new voyage, FitzRoy had her taken to Devonport for refitting. A new deck was added, but, with the constant danger of being top-heavy, this involved raising the upper deck by a mere eight inches aft and twelve inches forward. FitzRoy’s aim was to make the vessel less likely to topple, the extra deck-space allowing the boat drainage. (One of the reasons they toppled was that water collected in the gunwales.)7

  So Dr Darwin’s fear that the voyage would not be safe was no mere landlubber’s fantasy. These boats were highly dangerous. The six cannon were necessary. The purpose of FitzRoy and his crew was peaceful – charting the coast of South America, and to fix a more accurate measurement of longitude, hence FitzRoy’s purchase of the most modern and accurate chronometers which had ever set sail. These peaceful and scientific aims would not be known, or necessarily believed, in every South American port where they tried to dock. The Beagle would witness military action in Montevideo. She would be caught up in a major naval blockade in Buenos Aires. Moreover, many of her stopping places would be controversial: for example, it was intended that they call at the Falkland Islands,8 then as now disputed territory with Argentina. Dr Johnson’s words might well have come to Dr Darwin’s lips as he tried to dissuade his son from the journey: ‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’9

  Darwin was not a fat man, like his father, but he was, like Dr Robert, tall. When not on deck, or in the very centre of the Captain’s cabin, he would be obliged to stoop all the time. The ninety-foot barque would contain, as well as York Minster, Jemmy Button and Fuegia Basket, over seventy other people: the master, two mates, the boatswain, the carpenter, clerks, eight marines, thirty-four seamen and six boys. Then there were the officers – John Wickham, First Lieutenant, James Sulivan, the Second, and John Lort Stokes, who would assist FitzRoy with the surveying. Then there was Robert McCormick, the ship’s surgeon. Here was a thorny problem. By convention, the ship’s surgeon was the person who also doubled as ship’s naturalist. It would normally be the surgeon who made the special collections of flora and fauna and fossils, so that the addition of a special naturalist, to keep the Captain company, was controversial from the start, and whoever went aboard the Beagle as the naturalist was going to incur McCormick’s hatred. In addition to McCormick, there was his assistant Benjamin Bynoe the purser George Rowlett, a midshipman – King – and an artist, Augustus Earle,10 a vital figure in those pre-photographic days, to record what they saw. This was a lot of people to squeeze into a very small space, and it was essential that they should coexist in reasonable harmony. Was Darwin, used to large houses and large rooms, prepared for the expedition? Was he prepared to be cooped up in this ship, not for a few weeks but for – as they then supposed – two years? And, a vitally important question, was he temperamentally suited to be the companion of Captain FitzRoy?

  It was to answer this final question that Darwin set off for London at the beginning of September. On the first of the month, Sir Francis Beaufort had written to the Captain, ‘I believe my friend Mr Peacock of Trinity College Camb has succeeded in getting a “Savant” for you – A Mr Darwin grandson of the well known philosopher and poet – full of zeal and enterprize and having contemplated a voyage of his own to S. America.’11

  This letter makes clear that FitzRoy was on the look-out, not merely for a collector, such as the ship’s surgeon might be, but for a real man of science, such as he, FitzRoy, considered himself to be. By the time he reached London, Darwin had been warned by Henslow that he was not, in fact, the only man being considered for the post. A naturalist called Chester was another candidate, and much would depend upon the impression Darwin made upon FitzRoy.

  FitzRoy was twenty-six, Darwin twenty-two. Both men were depressives – FitzRoy was what would now be called bipolar. Both had uncles who had committed suicide. Both had lost their mothers at an early age. Both were obsessed by their health. Both looked upon themselves as scientists, though pursuing different callings. Both were highly intelligent and well read.12 It was hugely cheering to Darwin to hear that FitzRoy was taking a large library on the voyage.

  Although after their first meeting Darwin was euphoric – ‘You cannot imagine anything more pleasant, kind & open than Cap. FitzRoy’s manners were to me’13 – FitzRoy was still keeping his options open. He confided in a friend that he had developed cold feet about taking on board ‘someone he should not like’.14 The two men met again the next day, and it appeared that they were to be congenial companions. The Captain’s bipolar character was quite unsuspected by Darwin. He had no idea of what lay in store – FitzRoy’s captaincy was that of a martinet; as a companion, he could be cordial and friendly one moment, and cold and distant the next. He was full of aristocratic hauteur and made it clear that he was Darwin’s social superior. And if, in leaving The Mount, Darwin thought he was escaping outbursts of rage, he would be proven wrong. FitzRoy was more wildly irascible even than Dr Robert.

  But on that September day in London FitzRoy was all cordiality. The sailing had been delayed until 10 October, so there would be time for Darwin to kit himself out. Seasickness? Stormy seas had been much exaggerated, said FitzRoy. If Darwin ever decided he had had enough of life at sea, he could leave. As for their getting along together, FitzRoy ‘asked me at once. – “shall you bear being told that I want the cabin to myself? When I want to be alone. – if we treat each other this way, I hope we shall suit, if not, probably we shall wish each other at the Devil” . . .’15

  Darwin wrote home to his sister Susan for stuff – ‘Tell Nancy to make me soon 12 instead of 8 shirts,’ he wrote, with only a month to go before he sailed. In addition, he asked her to get arsenic from his father to treat the eczema on his hands. And he wanted his carpet bag, his Spanish books, his slippers, his walking shoes. He also used Susan as the go-between over the delicate question of money. Would she please tell their father – interestingly, Darwin refers to him as ‘my Father’ when writing to his siblings – that Captain FitzRoy ‘is all for Economy excepting on one point, viz fire arms he recommends me strongly to get a case of pistols like his which cost £60!! & never to go on shore anywhere without loaded ones’.16 They were not very reassuring words for a father to hear, particularly at second hand. In fact FitzRoy had spent over £400 on his own firearms, as Darwin discovered when the pair set out
to buy guns on the following day.

  They set off round town in a gig. London was filled with crowds, swarming in to witness the coronation procession for William IV, so that Regent Street was a solid jam of coaches. Darwin bought a ticket to watch the procession on 8 September, and to see the Sailor King trot past in his gold coach with his German wife Queen Adelaide. It was a punctual ceremony, the coach arriving at Westminster Abbey at exactly the moment the clock struck eleven. Only six months before, the first Reform Bill had been read in the House of Commons, and the King had been hooted and pelted with stones when he went to the theatre.17 In May, when Reform was being debated in Parliament, the Queen’s carriage had been surrounded by the mob.18

  On 11 September, as a little trial of their compatibility as shipmates, FitzRoy took Darwin from London to Plymouth by ship to see the Beagle in dock. Darwin’s praise for the Captain was ecstatic. To a male friend, Charles Whitley, he wrote that ‘Cap FitzRoy is very scientific.’19 To Susan, ‘Perhaps you thought I admired my beau ideal of a Captain in my former letters: all that is quite a joke to what I now feel. – Everybody praises him . . .’20

  It was something of a shock to see how very small the ship was, but he consoled himself by saying that, although ‘the want of room is very bad’, his cabin was the second largest in the ship, next to FitzRoy’s. The date of their departure had now been put back to 20 October, and, as he wrote to Susan from Devonport, ‘I found the money at the Bank, & I am much obliged to my Father for it.’21 Again – ‘my’ Father, not ‘papa’ or ‘Father’, as would be natural when addressing a sibling; and no direct thanks to the father himself.

  Back in London, Darwin wrote to thank FitzRoy. Already, the sore question of the ship’s surgeon had arisen. Darwin clearly wanted no ambiguity, so put in writing that ‘I mentioned [to Beaufort] that I believed the Surgeons collection would be at the disposal of Government, and this he thought would make it much easier for me to retain the disposal of my collection among the different bodies in London.’22 The specimens collected by Dr McCormick would therefore belong to the government; Darwin’s collection – and how vast this would turn out to be no one could at this date have predicted – was his. He generously would distribute this among the London museums, but in doing so made abundantly clear his foremost position in this sphere. It is interesting to note that, even before he set sail, this was part of his ambition.