This Thing Of Darkness (65 page)

‘But this - this is a disgrace!’ began Darwin indignantly. ‘This is an entirely political manoeuvring. Much as it grieves me to say it, I fear that this has been effected by the Liberal administration solely because you are of a Tory family.’

‘Headquarters have not thought it proper to give me any assistance. But assistance shall be provided from another quarter.’

Unsure what he meant, Darwin continued to vent his outrage: ‘Whatever shall we do for room? I shall have trouble enough storing my collections! How shall I fit into the library with Stokes, King, Hamond
and
Martens?’

‘Martens? Martens is gone.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘There is no money for Martens. I sold the
Adventure
for seven thousand paper dollars - a loss of fifteen hundred dollars in all. Much of the money I received went to paying off her crew. It grieved me sadly to bring her to the hammer, but my friends here on board were seriously urgent on the matter. So the
Adventure
is gone.’

Suddenly, FitzRoy felt overwhelmed by a wave of sadness, at the loss of his beautiful white schooner, and also at the loss of an old comrade. ‘The
Adventure
is gone. Skyring is gone.’

‘Skyring? Who is Skyring?’

FitzRoy pushed another Admiralty missive across the table. Darwin read it aloud:

‘I took his command,’ explained FitzRoy, mournfully. ‘The Beagle was to have been his. Instead he has been murdered. At first I blamed myself. Then I realized that his death is part of God’s plan. The good Lord has a task for all of us. My task is to return to Tierra del Fuego to begin the survey all over again.’

‘What?’ Darwin almost jumped out of his skin.

‘My task,’ FitzRoy reiterated patiently, ‘is to return to Tierra del Fuego — ’

‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’

‘The good Lord has commanded me — ’

‘Of this the good Lord deliver us!’ Darwin protested. ‘This is madness! You will have a mutiny on your hands! If you think for one minute that I would be prepared to risk my life by going back round the Horn - I signed on for this trip with the intention of visiting the coral islands of the Pacific, not to sit in a glorified skiff being battered by South Atlantic gales year in year out until her brittle perfectionist of a captain is finally satisfied with his labours!’

Of the competing emotions accelerating unchecked through FitzRoy’s brain, anger came to the fore. He felt his gorge rising. ‘My decision on the matter is final.’

Darwin could hardly believe his ears. He, too, began to flush angrily. His weeks at leisure in Chilean society had reminded him what it was to live an independent life, his every move no longer subject to the arbitrary whim of one man.

‘Then I am afraid you must travel without a naturalist. I shall return to stay with Mr Corfield, or Mr Caldcleugh, at whose home I have been convalescing, and shall find a different passage.’

FitzRoy’s eyes flashed. ‘As always, you have taken so much, and have made no provision in return. I suppose we shall have to organize a party on board.’

‘A party? What are you talking about?’

‘A party to thank all those members of the British community here, whose favours you have so readily accepted.’

‘There is no need for that! What ever do you mean by it?’

‘I mean, sir, that you are the sort of man who would receive any favours and make no return!’

His face white with rage, Darwin stood up and stalked out of the cabin, slamming the door behind him. On the maindeck he ran into the shocked figure of Lieutenant Wickham, who tried to remonstrate with him: ‘Confound it, Philosopher, I wish you would not quarrel with the skipper when he is overtired.’

‘Overtired? His mind has become deranged! You may inform him of my resignation as natural philosopher of the
Beagle.
I shall not reside a moment longer in this ship of fools!’

Angrily, Darwin brushed Wickham aside and headed to his quarters to collect his belongings. Wickham, perturbed, knocked softly at the door of FitzRoy’s cabin. There came no answer.

 

The landscape of the captain’s cabin had turned cold, bleak and empty. In the grey, muddy light, the colours of the little room had receded to a flat, dull monotone, the few simple items of furniture assuming ghostly outlines and washed-out hues. The faint noises of the ship - the creaking of the rigging, the slap of water against the hull, the mutter of distant voices - had blended into a continuous note so muffled as to be unintelligible. None of this, however, mattered to Robert FitzRoy: he was no longer there, except physically. He was in another place.

That was the only way to describe his fear: another place. There was no logic to it, he knew that. He wanted to fight whatever it was that held him in the dark, that toyed with him, but there was no physical adversary present. There were not even any physical symptoms about his person. There was just a shapeless, nameless dread that had removed him to its lair, a place more terrifying than any nightmare he had ever endured. The harder he tried to escape, the more tightly he was confined there. Fright and hopelessness crowded his mind, his own personal prison guards in this other place.

His physical body lay curled in its cot, sobbing uncontrollably. How long had he been crying? Hours? Days? They were not tears of relief but tears that drowned him, tears with no beginning and no end, tears that welled up unchecked from somewhere deep inside. And when his tear ducts finally dried up, he continued to sob, heaving incoherently, his misery compounded by shame and self-loathing and lack of comprehension and anger at the pointlessness of it all. Sweat poured from his body. The letters from the Admiralty had prompted this change in his mental state, that much he knew. They had been the trigger, but no more. What had followed had been not just terrifying, but terrifyingly inexplicable. What in God’s name was happening to him? He hugged his pillow for comfort, the only familiar point of reference in this alien environment. He wanted to turn over, but he could not remember how to do it - it seemed a colossal, unimaginable task, too frightening even to contemplate.

He had tried ordering himself out of his malaise.
Get up. Go over to the washstand. Call for water. Shave. Tasks you have completed easily, unthinkingly, a thousand and one times.
He had even got as far as putting his feet on the floor, but as soon as he had done so, a sudden wave of panic, an awful onrushing knowledge of impending doom, had broken over him, had driven the breath from his body. He had subsided back into the cot, palpitating, short of breath, every limb leaden with unaccountable fatigue.

He tried again. Who are you?
Nobody.
What do you fiel?
Nothing.
What can you do?
Nothing.
What do you know
? Nothing.
What do you understand?
Nothing.
I am nothing. There is nothing
. His entire being was reduced to a pure and simple manifestation of panic, an urgent physical discomfort with no prospect of relief, a sense of falling with no concluding impact to bring about merciful release.

Desperately, he fought to clear his mind. Even in the midst of the two great storms they had endured, at Maldonado and off Cape Horn, he had not been so overwhelmingly afraid. But he had to do something.
The more you manage to do, the less you will want to die.
Shaking, unable to stand, weak with lack of food, he succeeded with a supreme effort in surmounting the lip of the cot and collapsing to the floor. Slowly, very slowly, he pulled himself by his fingertips across the floor-boards. At last, he reached up to the tabletop for pen and paper.
Please God, give me the strength to do what I have to do.

He had the pen in his hand now, but he had forgotten how to write. There was no feeling in his arm, no feeling flowing through his hand, no feeling directing the nib.

Laboriously, agonizingly, he began to write, each letter a station of the cross, until finally he was finished. There, on the floor between his enfeebled arms, wet and blotchy with his renewed tears, lay his written resignation as captain of the
Beagle.

 

‘Sir. I must ask you to reconsider. There is a universal and deeply felt grief on board at your decision.’

‘Flattered as I am by the concern of the men, Lieutenant Wickham, I have no option but to resign my command. You saw for yourself that my mental state became quite suddenly maladjusted, so as to unfit me for the leadership of this or any vessel. It is quite clearly a hereditary predisposition.’

‘Sir. Mr Bynoe says it is merely the effect of a want of bodily health, and of exhaustion following a period of onerous application to duty.’

‘My dear friends.’ FitzRoy reached across the table, placing five rake-thin digits across the back of Wickham’s hand, and the remaining five across Sulivan’s. ‘That simply will not do. I must invalid, and appoint Mr Wickham to the command of the
Beagle
. My brains’ - he permitted himself a wry smile - ‘are even more confused than they used to be in London.’

‘Sir — I will not accept it. I will not accept the promotion.’

‘You have no option, Mr Wickham. I order you to assume command.’

Sulivan was almost in tears. ‘Sir, look at the medical evidence. Any man would have been affected by the strain of being ordered to sell the
Adventure -
and at such a loss!’

‘It is true, Mr Sulivan, that I am ... involved in difficulties. My means have been severely taxed. This may even fix me out of England. And I grant you, it was a bitter disappointment to receive such orders. The mortification still preys deeply. But more distressing still - much more distressing - is that all my cherished hopes of completing the survey of South America must now utterly fail. The Admiralty has made it quite impossible for me to fulfil the whole of my instructions. But fail I have, and I must pay the price for it. My feelings and my health no longer respond to my commands, gentlemen. A mutiny has been effected. I must give way to someone better fitted for this command.’

FitzRoy felt exhausted but relieved: relieved that it was all over, relieved to be able to speak freely about his condition at last.

‘But sir - what would be gained by your resignation? Absolutely nothing. The survey would not be completed. The orders in the event of a captain invaliding his command are most explicit.’

‘Remind me.’

Wickham unfolded the Admiralty instruction sheet. ‘“The officer on whom the command of the vessel may in consequence devolve is hereby required and directed not to proceed to a new step in the voyage; as, for instance, if carrying on the coast survey on the western side of South America, he is not to cross the Pacific, but to return to England by Rio de Janeiro and the Atlantic.”’

‘It seems the author was almost prescient.’

‘It means there can be no chain of measurements about the globe. The survey would go unfinished. The stigma of failure would attach not just to yourself but to the
Beagle
and all her officers. But were you to remain in command, there would still be time enough this summer to finish surveying the Chilean coast back down to Tres Montes, before heading home.’

‘And what of northern Chili and Peru?’

Wickham offered a consoling smile. ‘There shall be others after us, who shall survey the north. But our achievement to date
- your
achievement - shall accrue to the benefit of all those on board.’

‘And what if I were to succumb to another attack of the blue devils - what then?’

‘Then you have my word I should accept your invitation to assume command.’

‘Please sir,’ entreated Sulivan, ‘you have been harassed and oppressed by troubles and difficulties of the most unexpected, the most unfortunate kind. It was undoubtedly these that caused you to fall ill for a brief period. But those troubles and difficulties are behind us - by which I do not mean to belittle the drain on your means, merely to say that the worst has now been thrown at you, and here you are, sir, in full command of your faculties, the finest leader and sailor that I, or any of us, have ever sailed under. The best man, the only man, to skipper the
Beagle.
’

FitzRoy looked from Wickham’s round, honest, open, troubled face to Sulivan’s dark imploring gaze. ‘It seems, gentlemen, that the Admiralty has me between Scylla and Charybdis. Either the survey is to be abandoned at once, or it is to be left uncompleted. For the sake of those mariners who come after us, then, and only for their sake, we shall spend one more summer surveying the coast down to Tres Montes.’

Lit up with relief and delight, Wickham and Sulivan rose to shake his hand, but he cut them short with an upraised palm. ‘But I also bear responsibilities to the officers and crew of the
Beagle
. Any sign whatsoever -
any
sign - that I am losing control of my wits once more, then you are to confine me in my cabin, by force if necessary. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir - it is understood.’

The three men shook hands, and it was hard to say which of them prayed most fervently that the latest attack would prove to be FitzRoy’s last.

‘I thank the good Lord that you are back with us,’ said Sulivan, pumping his captain’s hand as if his life depended upon it.

FitzRoy felt himself bathed in the warmth and generosity of their love; but it was not enough to wash away the layers of shame and embarrassment that seemed to him to adhere to his immortal soul.