Savage (11 page)

Having been led to suppose that a vessel would be sent to South America to continue the survey of its shores, and to explore parts yet unknown, I hoped to have seen these people become useful as interpreters, and be the means of establishing a friendly disposition towards Englishmen on the part of their countrymen, if not a regular intercourse with them.

By supplying these natives with some animals, seeds, tools, etc and placing them, with some of their own tribe, on the fertile country lying at the east side of Tierra del Fuego, I thought that, in a few years, ships might have been enabled to obtain fresh provisions, as well as wood and water, during their passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, on a part of the coast which can always be approached with ease and safety …

He concluded with a terse request for a year's leave ‘in order to enable me to keep my faith with the natives' using his own ‘very limited means'.

The Admiralty acceded to his request, and also offered to give the Fuegians passage on the first man-of-war going to South America. But by June, with no sign of a naval vessel going in the right direction, ‘and feeling too much bound to these natives to trust them in any other kind of vessel, unless with myself – because of the risk that would attend their being landed anywhere, excepting on the territories of their own tribes…' FitzRoy took exceptional action that reflected well on him. He accepted the offer of twelve months' annual leave and entered into a contract with a merchant of Stepney, John Mawman, to have himself, the Fuegians, James Bennet and one other shipped to South America aboard Mawman's brig the
John.

With an advance cost of £1,000 and the further expense of provisions and pilotage fees all coming from FitzRoy's pocket, this was a startling demonstration of his commitment to the Fuegians. But shortly after Bennet had bought a herd of goats, with which the party would stock Tierra del Fuego, one of FitzRoy's ‘kindly' and politically powerful uncles stepped in. The survey was reinstated, FitzRoy was appointed to the
Chanticleer,
and when this was found to be unfit, he was commissioned to the
Beagle.

On 2 July 1831 the
Royal Devonport Telegraph
was able to make the following announcement:

His Majesty's sloop
Beagle,
which was paid off at this port in October last … is to be again commissioned by her late gallant and indefatigable Commander Robert Fitzroy, esq. for the purpose of completing his examination of that vast continent … The natives of Terra del Fuego, brought home by Commander Fitzroy, having been taught some of the most useful arts, are, we understand, to return to their native country in the
Beagle.

At around this time, Robert FitzRoy received a special visitor. Colonel John Wood, acting as extra messenger in the King's Household, brought an invitation from Their Majesties King William IV and Queen Adelaide. Word of the Fuegians had reached St James's Palace and they were wanted for a private audience.

When and how this occurred is nowhere recorded. The daily comings and goings of the Court, so fastidiously reported by the morning press, make no mention of the visit of the Fuegians. The Court Circular carries no reference, and neither does the Annual Register for 1831. The Royal Archives at Windsor contain few surviving papers from the short reign of William IV, and there are no references to Robert FitzRoy or the Fuegians attending any of the many levees and balls at which the King and Queen were present that year.

It is most likely that the meeting came about through FitzRoy's sister, Fanny. In the 1830s the royal court was far less formal than it later became, and it was not unusual for the King to meet ‘interesting' foreigners who were in town and of whom he would have heard through court gossip. In the early months of 1831 Fanny was attending important events at the palace and on 24 February she was among those present on the Queen's birthday. The
Morning Post
even described her attire: ‘A satin dress, shot with gold, trimmed with bands of gold; the train velvet with gold.' Two months later she was at the palace again, attending one of the great royal social occasions, the Queen's Drawing Room.

FitzRoy therefore had an insider at court. Tongues would have wagged and news would have reached the monarch's ears. William IV, newly installed on the throne and yet to be crowned, was considered by some a lovable buffoon and by others a licentious boor. To the former, anyone was an improvement on his brother, George IV, known to many as Swellfoot the Tyrant. The latter felt that as William had brawled and drunk his way around the whorehouses of the world as a sailor in the Royal Navy he too was unfit for the Crown. However, the King's navy days had given him a taste for adventure and an interest in the exotic, and the idea of meeting the Fuegians would have appealed to him.

There were few airs and graces about the King. Aged sixty-five when he came to the throne, he was a ruddy-faced, jocund soul with a tendency towards plumpness. As the third son of George III he had never expected to ascend to the throne and had spent much of his life ignoring the pomp of princehood. After a short career in the navy he had fallen in love at the age of twenty-five with the famous actress Mrs Jordan with whom he had ten children over thirteen years. However, when gambling debts mounted he deserted her and moved on to the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, Princess Amelia Adelaide.

Even on the throne William was unable to change his ways. One day, when tired of swearing in new privy councillors and lords lieutenants, he took a stroll down Pall Mall where he was recognised by a lively and enthusiastic crowd. Horrified members of White's jumped from a club window to pull him away as he was kissed by a prostitute. On another occasion in 1830 he threw a party for 3,000 of the poor of Windsor. In 1834, 36,000 bottles of wine were drunk at St James's Palace alone.

William was an essentially bourgeois king, and the audience with the Fuegians was less stiff than might otherwise have been expected. The occasion was nevertheless a great feather in the caps of FitzRoy and his charges. It looked at last as though FitzRoy's investment of £1,500 in his protégés might have been recognised. Sometime in the summer of 1831, Jemmy and his colleagues were taken by carriage from Walthamstow to London and through the gates of the palace. From here they were escorted through grandeur beyond their imagining to where their presence was eagerly awaited in one of the State Apartments.

Against all protocol, the King would probably have extended a hand to the four and asked, ‘How d'ye do?' They would have been shown to seats around a small table and offered tea and biscuits.

FitzRoy was anxious to record the intelligent interest that both the King and the Queen took in his project:

His Majesty asked a great deal about their country, as well as themselves; and I hope I may be permitted to remark that, during an equal space of time, no person ever asked me so many sensible and thoroughly pertinent questions respecting the Fuegians and their country also relating to the Survey in which I had myself been engaged, as did his Majesty.

Queen Adelaide was very different from her husband. An austere and implacable opponent of reform, in a short time she had made herself the most unpopular woman in England. A great supporter of the Duke of Wellington, she was, to many, England's Marie-Antoinette. But she also had an amiable, self-effacing, less public side to her character. She had lost two children – one through miscarriage and a day-old daughter – and thus the chance to present her husband with an heir. It coloured the way she treated the Fuegians and was manifested in ‘acts of genuine kindness which they could appreciate, and never forgot…'. She was particularly taken with Fuegia. At one point during the audience the Queen left the room briefly. She returned with one of her own bonnets, which she placed on Fuegia's head. ‘Her Majesty then put one of her rings upon the girl's finger,' FitzRoy remembered, ‘and gave her a sum of money to buy an outfit of clothes when she should leave England to return to her own country.'

The meeting was short, but not rushed. It made a lasting impression on the Fuegians, who in years to come remembered it and talked about it.

Chapter 9

The recommissioning of the
Beagle
in early July 1830 was the beginning of a difficult few months for FitzRoy. There were repairs to sort out, provisions to purchase, scurvy-preventing antiscorbutics to accumulate and a crew to appoint. If the
Chanticleer
had been unseaworthy, then the
Beagle
was hardly better. The previous voyage had taken a great toll on the barque and an inspection in dock revealed that substantial portions of her were rotten. With so much woodwork to replace, FitzRoy seized the opportunity to make large-scale improvements to the ship.

A new upper deck was built and raised several inches higher than the previous one, giving valuable head room for those living and working below. This, with a new sheathing of planks, felt, and copper nailed to the hull, added 15 tons to the ship's weight and had the extra effect of making her safer in stormy weather. A new rudder was added, along with a patent windlass, a stove and an oven. To the masts were fixed experimental lightning conductors. Ropes, sails and spars were, FitzRoy claimed, ‘the best money could buy', and in his cabin, he stored twenty-two chronometers, which would facilitate the survey's new instructions – not only to carry out an accurate survey of the southern coastlines of South America, but also to complete a running chain of chronometric readings around the world.

Depending on whom one believes, the work was either easy or exhausting. The newly appointed ship's surgeon, Robert McCormick, an abrasive character, complained in his autobiography that by the time the ship left Plymouth ‘six months had been dawdled away in fitting a small 10-gun brig for sea'. More credible, because he had no axe to grind, were the memories of Lieutenant Sulivan. An anecdote in his son's biography of him tells how, at the end of one day's labour, he fell asleep. Before putting his head down he demanded that the steward wake him in two hours' time so that he could have tea before going to a prestigious ball in Plymouth. When he awoke the sun was streaming onto his face. He called the steward and asked the time.

– Eight o'clock, sir.

– What do you mean?

– Eight in the morning, sir.

– What, have I missed the ball? Why did you not call me?

– I did, sir.

– Then when I did not appear at tea, why did you not call me again?

– You did have tea, sir.

Laughter broke out around him. Sulivan had arrived in the mess room in his nightshirt and cap, with a duck-gun over his shoulder. He sat down at the table, drank his tea and marched back to bed. Tiredness had turned him into a sleepwalker.

Many of the newly commissioned crew, including Lieutenants Wickham and Sulivan, the carpenter, Jonathan May, and the assistant surgeon, Benjamin Bynoe, had sailed on the
Beagle
during its previous voyage. There was a total crew of sixty-five and, with supernumaries, the figure rose to seventy-four people living on the tiny craft. They included the artist Augustus Earl, paid £200 a year to record the sights and adventures of the ship, the instrument-maker George Stebbings, brought along to tend FitzRoy's chronometers, the three Fuegians, and a young naturalist, companion for the commander.

FitzRoy feared more than ever the ‘blue evils'. His uncle's suicide, the death of Stokes and the prospect of a long, arduous voyage, played cruel games in his head. His aloof manner and a fear that overfamiliarity with the crew would lead to a breakdown in discipline meant that there was little or no social contact between him and the lower decks. Loneliness might crack him. He needed somebody with whom he could converse, share a meal and from whom he had no fear of mutiny. It was essential that this person was of the right background, sophisticated, intelligent, and preferably, though not essentially, well versed in science and able to take advantage of the many opportunities for research that the voyage would present. Throughout July and August he searched for such an individual.

The Cambridge naturalist John Stevens Henslow was asked to help. For a short while he considered the opportunity for himself, but when his pregnant wife objected to the possibility of a five- or six-year absence, he recommended a student and friend: a twenty-two-year-old named Charles Darwin.

I have stated that I consider you the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation [Henslow told Darwin in August 1831]. I state this not on the supposition of your being a finished Naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing and noting anything worthy to be noted in Natural History … Captain Fitzroy wants a man (I understand) more as a companion than a mere collector, and would not take anyone however good a Naturalist who was not recommended to him likewise as a gentleman … Don't put on any modest doubts or fears about your disqualifications, for I assure you I think you are the very man they are in search of, so conceive yourself to be tapped on the Shoulder by your Bum-bailiff and affectionate friend.

FitzRoy had other ideas and other people to consider. Darwin was rather young, the phrenology of his nose suggested ‘a lack of energy and determination' and, what was more, he was a Whig, with a fervent distaste for slavery. Nevertheless, in September, after a somewhat fraught interview and a far more congenial meal together, FitzRoy offered the young man a place on the ship.

*   *   *

There were other negotiations to occupy FitzRoy's time. On 5 August Mr Wilson wrote to him from Walthamstow, suggesting the despatch of two missionaries with the Fuegians. This would give the opportunity of continuing the good work that had already begun, and help them and their people towards a ‘gradual civilization'.

FitzRoy leaped at the idea and asked the Admiralty for its approval. Until now his plan had been simply to take the three back to their respective homelands and leave them with their compatriots. He would have known that the odds were stacked against them being able to pursue his original plan successfully. Wilson's proposal offered the potential of backup, structure and continuing development. It also provided a watchful eye over his Fuegian charges and even, perhaps, protection.