Peter Nichols - Evolutions Captain: The Dark Fate of the Man Who Sailed Charles Darwin Around the World

Port Famine, Strait of Magellan, August 2, 1828. It is

In 1934, Nora Barlow, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, visited

In January 1829, HMS Adventure, with Captain King, HMS Beagle,

Small wonder the job had driven Pringle Stokes mad.

FitzRoy has been characterized as going after the Fuegians who

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The term collecting had a particular weight attached to it

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Perhaps only the dawn of the Internet, and the computer

Or so FitzRoy told Alexander Charles Wood, his cousin, a

Darwin traveled to Devonport by coach on October 24, 1831.

As the Beagle rolled and pitched across the Bay of

They had come a remarkably long way. There was no

Nowhere are the designs of men more subject to the

Darwin was among the large group that set out on

A year and more into this second voyage aboard the

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Early voyagers called them the Enchanted Islands, but not because

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Sometime between coming home in October 1836 and finishing his

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In October 1838I happened to read for amusement Malthus

In late June 1860, FitzRoy traveled by train to Oxford

Late in 1863, two years before FitzRoys death, Reverend Whait

P ort Famine, Strait of Magellan, August 2, 1828. It is midwinter at the bottom of the world. Snow drives at gale force across the small vessel at anchor. Daylight comes as a few gloomy hours of crepuscular dimness, and the afternoon is already growing dark. Four years later in this same anchorage, in this same vessel even, a young man of unusually sunny temperamentthe twenty-four-year-old Charles Darwinwill write in his journal: I never saw a more cheerless prospect; the dusky woods, piebald with snow, were only indistinctly to be seen through an atmosphere composed of two thirds rain & one of fog; the rest, as an Irishman would say, was very cold unpleasant air.

Alone in his cabin beneath the poop, the vessels commander, a man still in his twenties, is in the last stage of despair. For him time has lost its swift flow; it has flattened into an unending, intolerable stasis. He sees no relief. He has been in these desolate waters for two years: years more stretch ahead. HomeEngland, a place as distant as Earth from this cold Plutois beyond imagining, beyond regaining.

He raises to his head a small pocket pistol. He is certain of this now, eager for it, and his finger at last tugs with resolve on the trigger.

But there is still too much time: in the long second that stretches between the release of the hammer, the spark of flint, the flash of powder, and the explosion that sends the ball on its path, his hand wavers, crucially.

He was Captain Pringle Stokes; the vessel, HMS Beagle . It lay at anchor in Port Famine with a larger ship, HMS Adventure . The two ships, under the overall command of Captain Phillip Parker King, had been dispatched by the British Admiralty in May 1826 to survey the southern coasts of South America, from Montevideo on the Atlantic to Chilo Island in the Pacific. They were particularly instructed to map what they could of the still largely unknown seacoast of Tierra del Fuego, the desolate, tortuously labyrinthine southernmost tip of the drowned Andes.

The first passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific had been discovered by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in 1520. He was looking, as was Columbus, as were they all, for that still elusive western route to the spice islands of the Indies. Columbus died in 1506, never knowing he had not found them. It was the Spaniard Vasco Nez de Balboa who, on September 26, 1513, scaled a hilltop on the isthmus of Darien, in what is now Panama, and first saw the South Sea stretching away in limitless distance beyond Columbuss mistaken Orient. This information expanded the known circumference of the world by more than a third. Seven years later, Magellan, seeking access to that South Sea, found a wide, navigable passage between the bottom of the Americas and, below that to the south, a bleak Terra Incognita. His chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with him, recorded the discovery with an exultant pride:

We found by a miracle, a strait which we call the strait of the Eleven Thousand Virgins; this strait is a hundred and ten leagues long which are four hundred and forty miles, and almost as wide as less than half a league, and it issues into another sea which is called the Peaceful Sea; it is surrounded by very great and high mountains covered with snow. I think there is not in the world a more beautiful country, or a better strait than this one.

Magellans strait is actually 310 miles long from Atlantic to Pacific; but in the weeks they took to pass through it, Magellan and the four ships in his small fleet probably sailed five times that distance. To port, to the south as they tacked endlessly against westerly winds, they saw signs of natives in the dim fires and smoke on the shores of Terra Incognita. Much later, back in Spain, in accounts of the voyage, the land on this southern shore of the strait became known as Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire.

The only other route from the Atlantic into the Pacific, the open sea passage around a rock mistaken for the southerly cape of Tierra del Fuego, discovered in 1616 by the Dutch captain Willem Schouten of Hoorn, was an exposed and awful place. There, icy winds blast at hurricane force down the glaciers of the Andes, and freak waves driven by westerly winds unimpeded around the bottom of the globe meet off Schoutens false cape in a nightmare maelstrom that was and remains a desperate place for any vessel. Seeking a fast passage to Tahiti in 1788, William Bligh tried to force his ship, HMS Bounty , past this Cape Horn. He spent over a month tacking back and forth, making only a handful of miles to westward in all that time. He, and more especially his crew, became so demoralized that he turned around and sailed the other way to Tahiti, eastward around a good part of the world, just to have the winds at his back.