This Thing Of Darkness (111 page)

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.

One day in 1873, an Alikhoolip canoe, foraging deep into Yamana territory, arrived at Bridges’s mission. Paddled by two young men, it contained a vast, toothless old woman in a battered old bonnet. Bridges came out to meet the visitor, flanked by his own two infant children. ‘Little boy, little gal,’ said the old lady, stepping out of the boat. It was Fuegia Basket, who had heard tell of the lone white man living on the eastern shores of the channel and had demanded to be taken to him. They talked at length. Fuegia’s memories of London were vivid, and her recollections of FitzRoy fond and detailed; bizarrely, however, she had forgotten how to sit on a chair. York Minster, she revealed, had been murdered, speared in the back by the brothers of a man he himself had killed. She had a new husband now, aged just eighteen. Ten years later, in 1883, Bridges returned the compliment and visited Fuegia at her home. She was in poor health, and he later heard that she had died soon afterwards.

Bridges’s idyll could not last, of course. The genocidal wars set in train by General Rosas had inched their way southwards down the South American continent throughout the intervening years. The Araucanians (or Mapuche, or Oens-men) had fought a long, brave and desperate battle akin to that of the Native Americans of the USA, but their mounted cavalry could never be a match for heavy artillery, or the newly invented machine gun. Finally, by the 1880s, they were massacred and defeated, and Tierra del Fuego lay at the mercy of the whites. In September 1884, four warships of the Argentinian Navy arrived at the mission, and informed Bridges that all his land was now military property. The mission was to become a penal colony. A garrison of twenty men was left behind, one of whom was suffering from measles. The resulting epidemic killed every single Fuegian in the area, including William Beckenham Button and Jemmy FitzRoy Button. Forced from the land, Bridges gave up missionary work and founded a ranch to the east of the Beagle Channel called Harberton, after his wife’s home village in Devon. It is still there today.

The Argentinian government decided to open up the whole of Tierra del Fuego to sheep farming, and systematically wiped out the native guanaco population, which would otherwise have competed with the sheep for the limited amount of grass. The guanaco, of course, also sustained the local native population. Mass starvation followed, and the Fuegians became a ‘problem’ for the white settlers, especially if they tried to hunt the sheep instead. A few years later it was officially decided that the Fuegians themselves were ‘vermin’, and should be eradicated. A reward of a pound was paid for each decapitated Fuegian head. Packs of armed gauchos on horseback descended on Tierra del Fuego, eager for the kill; indeed, blood-thirsty bounty hunters arrived from all over the world. One Scotsman named McInch, who styled himself ‘King of the Rio Grande’, managed to shoot and behead fourteen Fuegians in a single day. In the weasel words so common to colonial genocide, the eradication of the starving Fuegians was described as a ‘humanitarian’ measure. By 1908, only 170 pure-bred natives remained in the whole of Tierra del Fuego. By 1947, their number had dwindled to forty-three. Today there are none. Bridges’s mission has become the Argentinian town of Ushuaia.

The man who began the extermination progress, President Juan Manuel de Rosas, tore up the constitution of Argentina and made himself dictator for life. He imposed domestic ‘law and order’ through a network of spies and secret police, and by the disappearance of political opponents. His portrait was compulsorily displayed in public places and in churches. The frontispiece of this book bears the legend ‘closely based upon real events’, and indeed it is so; but this is a novel, not a history book, so I have felt free to fill in gaps and invent conversations where records are incomplete. No record exists of Rosas’ speech that so impressed Charles Darwin; we know he was impressed, because we have his notebook, although he had learned enough of Rosas to revise his opinion by the time he came to write up the Beagle voyage. In inventing Rosas’ self-justification, I have taken the liberty of drawing almost exclusively on the words of Tony Blair, and the various self-justifications he produced to defend his foreign policy adventures with George Bush in the Middle East and Central Asia. It is only an exercise, perhaps, but the words do seem to fit extraordinarily well. In fairness to Darwin, I should say that he did not directly witness the execution of the three prisoners; this ‘privilege’ was conferred upon another European traveller whom Darwin met there.

Rosas, like so many of his ilk, eventually pushed his military adventures a step too far. Eager to increase his territory, he attempted to invade both Brazil and Uruguay at the same time. It was a vicious and senseless war: at one point, he ordered the execution in cold blood of five hundred Uruguayan prisoners-of-war (of Indian extraction, naturally). But Rosas had bitten off more than he could chew, and his armies were eventually defeated at the battle of Caseros. Where did the fallen dictator go? Why, to England, of course, where this most brutal of mass-murderers was received by the British government with open arms. He was treated as a dignitary and given a luxurious retirement home at Swaythling, Hampshire, funded by the taxpayer, where he peacefully ended his days in 1884.

Britain’s subsequent colonial involvement in the other territories that FitzRoy had tried to defend was equally inglorious. When the French brutally invaded Tahiti without provocation in 1843 (they still haven’t given it back), the British offered their protection to Queen Pomare, and initially sheltered her aboard a Royal Navy warship. Although she was no warrior, she stoutly launched an armed revolt against the French occupiers, having secured a guarantee of British support. The government in Paris, however, came to an arrangement with the government in London: the British, behind Pomare’s back, tore up their treaty and betrayed her to the French in return for a cash payment.

In New Zealand, with official backing (prompted by the New Zealand Company), the new governor launched yet another genocidal campaign to exterminate the native population. George Grey was granted all the benefits that FitzRoy had been denied: twice his predecessor’s salary, triple his operating budget, a cash sum of
£
10,000 to fill the hole left by the company’s dubious financial practices and, of course, a large force of troops. The treaty of Waitangi was unceremoniously ripped up as Grey plunged the entire country into war. Ironically, he hit upon the ingenious plan of attacking the Maori (as they now call themselves) on a Sunday, when many of those converted to Christianity would be at prayer. In the early battles, a substantial number of native chiefs fought on the British side, because they had been promised that their ancestral lands would not be touched if they did so. It was a lie. Eventually, Grey succeeded in appropriating all native land for the New Zealand Company, and in exterminating most of the native population. He was knighted for his efforts.