This Thing Of Darkness (112 page)

If I have been unkind to one person, it is to Thomas Moore, the Falklands governor. Although the islands are frequently and erroneously held up as a piece of British colonial thievery, there was in fact no native population to subdue: when the islands were discovered, they were deserted. They were certainly not stolen from Argentina, a country that did not even exist when John Davis first sailed by. Thomas Moore was always careful, though, to uphold the civil rights of any Fuegian natives brought to the islands. I doubt very much that he ever intended to put Jemmy on trial for his life. Although it is true that Jemmy was kidnapped by Smyley, nearly lynched by the mob and accused of murder by Coles, the court case was more in the way of a tribunal; if Moore intended to hammer anyone, it was Despard. The governor probably always intended to release Jemmy in the end. The deliberations of the jury and Sulivan’s last-minute arrival are, I am afraid to say, the one piece of pure fiction in this book; although Fitzroy’s genuine rescue of the Challenger owes much to the imagination, as the real truth was only ever hinted at in the official record.

Elsewhere, I have sometimes conflated events for reasons of simplification: Darwin made more than one trip with the gauchos, for instance, and more than one Andean expedition; the Beagle made two visits to the Falklands. Occasionally, I have conflated the timescale of events, and in the case of Jemmy’s son, two characters: Threeboys is a composite of himself and Billy Button, another son, who confusingly replaced him at the Cranmer Mission midway through the Despards’ tenure. Otherwise, the events in this book are as they happened. The language employed in the story, although remarkably ornate at times, is exactly as it would have sounded, and - where records have been kept - exactly as it was used. The one exception to this is the word ‘ship’, which the sailors of the Beagle would never have employed to describe their own tiny brig. They would have used the word ‘boat’ to describe both the Beagle and her cutters, whaleboats and so forth, which I felt might make some of their dialogue rather confusing, to us if not to them.

Today, intrepid travellers - or simply those interested in maps - will find reminders of Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin wherever the Beagle travelled. There are FitzRoys and Darwins in Australia, Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands. Although he would probably not have approved, El Chaltén, the god of smoke, the holy mountain of the Araucanians, was renamed Mount FitzRoy after the Patagonian tribes lost their fight for survival. In New Zealand, there are FitzRoy streets in Auckland and Wellington (although these were later additions), as well as streets named after Grey, Hobson, the ex-convict Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and even Lieutenant Shortland. In Upper Norwood, now part of London, a small street running off Church Road has been renamed FitzRoy Gardens. Perhaps most significantly of all, in February 2002, the shipping area previously known as Finisterre was renamed FitzRoy, to honour the man who had invented the shipping forecast. It is the only sea area named after a person, which would undoubtedly have delighted the hero of this book.

As for the surviving physical evidence of FitzRoy’s story, there is no longer a great deal to see. The specimens he collected - not those assembled by Darwin - were eventually catalogued by the British Museum, and make up their
‘Beagle
Collection’. FitzRoy’s former residences are all now in private hands, although Down House, where Darwin lived, is open to the public. Outside Britain, the fort in Montevideo is as it was, and the Falkland Islands and the Galapagos Islands are more or less unchanged. A main road has been driven across the Uspallata pass from Mendoza to Santiago, and the remains of the petrified forest that Darwin discovered can still be seen by the roadside; only the bases remain, though, the rest having been carried away by over-enthusiastic souvenir hunters. The fossil beds of Punta Alta fared even less well, being destroyed by the Argentinian Navy during the construction of the Puerto Belgrano naval base. Further south, in 1981, a team from a Chilean survey vessel climbed Mount Skyring: under a cairn at the summit, they discovered the mementos left there by the men of the Beagle 150 years before, still - amazingly - in perfect condition. Perhaps most incredibly of all, at the time of writing, Darwin’s tortoise Harriet is still alive and enjoying a well-deserved retirement in Australia.

FitzRoy’s grave can be visited, of course, in the churchyard of All Saints, Upper Norwood; a Grade II listed monument, it was restored in 1997. Visitors to the Falklands should still be able to find poor Edward Hellyer’s gravestone, on a lonely headland at Duclos Point, near Johnson’s harbour. And should anyone feel especially adventurous, there is a rough track, down by the Straits of Magellan, that leads to a wild and lonely beach, where lies the grave of Captain Pringle Stokes of HMS Beagle, without whose suicide this whole extraordinary story would never have happened.

I should like to thank my father, Gordon Thompson, for his tireless and invaluable assistance, both in the researching and the plotting of this book; the indefatigable Pippa Brown, for coming to the rescue of an abysmal index-finger typist, and typing out the entire manuscript; Martin Fletcher and Bill Hamilton, for all their helpful suggestions, and the wonderful Lisa Whadcock for the benefit of her wisdom and insight; Peter Ackroyd, for pointing me in the direction of George Scharf; the staff of the London Library, for their assistance in locating long-forgotten electoral results and ancient guides to Durham; Robert and Faanya Rose, for graciously inviting me into FitzRoy’s old home in Chester Street; the Norwood Historical Society, for its help in locating FitzRoy’s latterday whereabouts; John Morrish, for allowing me access to his unpublished manuscript about living with manic depression; Tom Russell and Paul Daniels (no, not that one) for slogging up to the fort in Montevideo Bay with me; Patrick Watts (he won’t remember, it was so long ago) for giving me a guided tour of Stanley harbour; the staff of the Fazenda Bananal Engenho de Murycana in Brazil, for showing me round their property; and the penguins of Dungeness Point in Patagonia, for taking care of me when I was the only human being for miles and miles around.

I am, of course, indebted to the various biographers of Robert FitzRoy: H. E. L. Mellersh (
FitzRoy of the Beagle,
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968), Paul Moon (
FitzRoy, Governor in Crisis 1843-1845,
David Ling Publishing, Auckland, 2000), Peter Nichols (
Evolution’s Captain,
Profile, 2003) and those exceptional scholars John and Mary Gribbin (
FitzRoy,
Review Books, 2003). These last two works were suddenly published in the middle of my writing this novel, and afforded me considerable assistance. There are, of course, Darwin biographies by the score, but it would be difficult to better Janet Browne’s
Charles Darwin
(2 vols, Jonathan Cape, 1995), Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s
Darwin
(Michael Joseph, 1991), Randal Keynes’s
Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin,
His
Daughter and Human Evolution
(Fourth Estate, 2001), Ronald W. Clark’s
The Survival of Charles Darwin
(Random House, 1984), and covering this area alone, Richard Keynes’ exceptional and infallible
Fossils, Finches and Fuegians
(HarperCollins, 2002). Keynes was also responsible for
The Beagle Record
(Cambridge University Press, 1979). From a pictorial point of view, Alan Moorehead’s
Darwin and the Beagle
(Hamish Hamilton 1969) and John Chancellor’s
Charles Darwin
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1973) were especially valuable.

Jemmy Button has been the subject of one excellent biography, Nick Hazlewood’s
Savage
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2000), as indeed has the Beagle herself (
HMS Beagle,
Keith S. Thomson, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995). Then, of course, there are FitzRoy and Darwin’s own works. Darwin’s
The Voyage of the Beagle
and
The Origin of Species
are available in many editions. By contrast, FitzRoy’s
Weather Book, Remarks on New Zealand
and
Narrative of the Voyage of HMS Beagle
are hard to find outside the Bodleian (the library’s copies of the latter volumes still had their pages uncut - nobody had bothered to read them in 165 years); extracts from his Narrative were, however, published by the Folio Society of London in 1977. Charles Darwin’s correspondence has been edited for publication over many disparate volumes by his granddaughter Nora Barlow. Bartholomew Sulivan’s letters were edited by his son, Henry Norton Sulivan (published by Murray, 1896), although they too are long out of print; as is Augustus Earle’s
A Narrative of Nine Months’ Residence in New Zealand,
which was published by Longman & Co. in 1832.
The Journal of Syms Covington
has only been published on the Internet, by the Australian Science Archives Project, on ASAPWeb, 23 August 1995. Among other contemporary documents, the report of the 1860 British Association meeting in Oxford was published in the
Athenaeum
magazine. The British Government Select Committee reports on New Zealand are also available for scrutiny, at the House of Lords Record Office, London.

For technical maritime information, I used the book that FitzRoy himself always recommended to his subordinates:
The Young Sea Officer’s Sheet Anchor
by Darcy Lever (John Richardson, 1819, miraculously reprinted by Dover Maritime Books, Toronto, 1998). But I am also indebted to Christopher Lloyd (
The British Seaman 1200-1860
, Collins, 1968), Michael Lewis
(England’s Sea-Officers,
Allen & Unwin, 1939), Henry Baynham (
Before the Mast
, Hutchinson & Co., 1971), Stan Hugill (
Shanties
and
Sailors’ Songs,
Barrie & Jenkins, 1969), Lew Lind (
Sea Jargon,
Kangaroo Press, 1982), Nicholas Blake and Richard Lawrence (
The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy,
Chatham Publishing, 2000), Peter Kemp
(The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea,
Oxford University Press, 1976), Tristan Jones (
Yarns,
Adlard Coles Nautical, 1983), W. E. May (
The Boats of Men of War,
National Maritime Museum/Chatham Publishing, 1974 and 1979), the long-deceased Captain Charles Chapman (
All About Ships,
Ward Lock, 1866), Frederick Wilkinson (
Antique Guns and Gun Collecting,
Hamlyn, 1974), and Colonel H. C. B. Rogers (
Weapons of the British Soldier,
Seeley, Service & Co., 1960); and, of course, I must not forget the contemporary works of Captain Marryat, Sir Francis Beaufort and Sir Home Popham, and the considerable later writings of C. S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian and Dudley Pope.

For help with the descriptions of London, I should like to thank Peter Ackroyd (
London - the Biography,
Chatto & Windus, 2000), Peter Jackson (
George Scharf’s London 1820-50,
John Murray, 1987), Eric de Mare (London 1851, The Folio Society, 1972), and Felix Barker and Peter Jackson once more for
London
(Cassell, 1974). The parliamentary scenes came courtesy of
The Houses of Parliament - History, Art and Architecture
(ed. Christine and Jacqueline Ridley, Merrell, 2000) and
The London Journal of Flora Tristan
(first published in France, 1842; modern edition trans. Jean Hawkes, Virago, 1982). Another contemporary perspective came from George Cruikshank (
Sunday in London,
Effingham Wilson, 1833). More general historical information came courtesy of contemporary issues of
The Ladies’ Magazine,
as well as Elizabeth Burton’s
The Early Victorians at Home
(Longman, 1972), A. N. Wilson’s
The Victorians
(Hutchinson, 2002), J. F. C. Harrison’s
Early Victorian Britain
(Fontana, 1988), G. M. Trevelyan’s
English Social History
(Longman, 1944), Christopher Hibbert’s
Social History of Victorian Britain
(Illustrated London News, 1975), Leith McGrandle’s
The Cost of Living in Britain
(Wayland,1973), D.J. Smith’s
Horse Drawn Carriages
(Shire Publications, 1974), Henny Harald Hansen’s
Costume Cavalcade
(Eyre Methuen, 1972), and Daniel Pool’s
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
(Simon & Schuster Inc., USA, 1994). Dickens himself was shamelessly plundered for much of the vocabulary, as were Thackeray, Hughes and Captain Marryat.

For the Durham scenes, I consulted
A Historical, Topographical and Descriptive View of the County Palatine of Durham
by E. Mackenzie and M. Ross (Mackenzie & Dent, 1834), The History
& Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham
by William Fordyce (Thomas Fordyce, 1855),
Cathedral City
by Thomas Sharp (The Architectural Press, 1945),
In and Around Durham
by Frank H. Rushford (Durham County Press, 1946) and
Durham
by Sir Timothy Eden (Robert Hale, 1952).

Among the various scientific books and articles consulted during the preparation of this novel, I should like to mention
Bones of Contention
by Paul Chambers (John Murray, 2003),
Return to the Wilberforce-
Huxley Debate by J. Vernon Jensen (British Journal for the History of Science, 21, pp. 161-79, 1988),
A Journey to a Birth - William Smith at the birth of Stratigraphy
by L.R. Cox (International Geological Congress, 1948),
The Pony Fish’s Glow, and Other Clues to Plan and Purpose in Nature
by George C. Williams (Basic Books, 1997),
Darwinism - A Crumbling Theory and Evidence for Creation by Outside Intervention
by Lloyd Pye (Nexus Magazine, volume 10, number 1, December 2002-january 2003 and volume 9, number 4, June-July 2002),
FitzRoy’s Foxes and Darwin’s Finches
by W. R.P.Bourne (Archives of Natural History, 1992, 19 (1))
, Noah’s Flood -
the
Genesis Story in
Western
Thought
by Norman Cohn (Yale University Press, 1996), The
Weather Prophets: Science and Reputation in Victorian Meteorology
by Katharine Anderson (
History of Science
, 37, June 1999),
Matthew Fontaine Maury - Scientist of the Sea
by Francis Leigh Williams (Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1963),
From Wind Stars to Weather Forecasts: The Last Voyage of Admiral Robert FitzRoy
by Derek Barlow (Weather London, 1994, volume 49, number 4),
Not in our Genes
by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and Richard C. Lewontin (Penguin, 1984),
The Biblical Flood - A Case Study of the Church’s Response to Extrabiblical Evidence
by Davis A. Young (Paternoster Press, 1995), and of course many, many fine articles by the inimitable Stephen Jay Gould. For their insights into the processes of manic depression, I am utterly indebted to the work of Andrew Solomon, Dr Irene Whitehill, Sally Brampton and John Morrish.