Voyages without maps
John de Falbe
FITZROY: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF DARWIN'S CAPTAIN AND THE INVENTION OF THE WEATHER FORECAST by John and Mary Gribbin Headline, £18.99, pp. 336 ISBN 0755311817 EVOLUTION'S CAPTAIN: THE TRAGIC FATE OF ROBERT FITZROY, THE MAN WHO SAILED CHARLES DARWIN AROUND THE WORLD by Peter Nichols Profile, £16.99. pp. 336 ISBN 1861974515 As new markets opened up after the Napoleonic wars, detailed charts of the passage via Cape Horn were urgently required by the Admiralty. In November 1828, Robert FitzRoy was in Rio de Janeiro as flag lieutenant of the Thetis when Captain Phillip Parker King arrived on the Adventure with his escort the Beagle; the Beagle's captain, Pringle Stokes, had lately shot himself. King was already two years into a survey of the South American coast, most particularly of Tierra del Fuego. After five years surveying the coasts of Australia. King was highly experienced in this kind of work. FitzRoy, appointed in place of Stokes, proved an able colleague.
In the dangerous and tense daily conditions, initiative was of the utmost importance. One of FitzRoy's conspicuous initiatives was to take on board four Fuegians. The first two were taken as hostages for a vital whaleboat that had been stolen. The whaleboat was not recovered, but FitzRoy kept the Fuegians aboard with the idea that he would take them back to England where they might learn some of the values of Christian civilisation, which they could impart to their countrymen on their return. (There was precedent for this kind of action — most famously Omai, the Tahitian brought back by Cook.) FitzRoy anticipated that the Fuegians would be returned because the survey was not finished; and he noted that it would be a good idea to bring a geologist on a subsequent expedition. The Admiralty supported FitzRoy and when, little more than a year later, the Beagle was sent on its second surveying expedition, FitzRoy was appointed to command it. He took with him the Fuegians and an unknown natural scientist named Darwin. The five-year voyage led in due course to some important scientific results, but it was primarily a surveying voyage — and a highly successful one.
FitzRoy went into Parliament a few years after his return, and in July 1843 he arrived in New Zealand as the second governor. He was not provided with the resources to resolve an impossible situation and he was recalled after two years. For a short time he commanded the first screw-driven ship commissioned by the Royal Navy, before settling down to pioneer systematic weather forecasting. As a devout Christian who interpreted Genesis literally, he was appalled by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, and he denounced Darwin and his own indirect contribution to Darwin's theory at the famous Oxford debate between 'Soapy' Sam Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley in 1860. In 1864 he cut his own throat, like his uncle Lord Castlereagh.
The Gribbins tell us in their introduction that they hope to bring FitzRoy out from Darwin's shadow. Because of a 30-page biographical digression about Darwin quite early in the book, it is an empty hope: we never escape the impression that the Beagle's second voyage was contrived by fate for Darwin's exclusive benefit. Had the Gribbins paid more attention to King and the tradition in which FitzRoy was following, they might have conveyed a fuller sense of FitzRoy's achievement. (They even spell King's name incorrectly: he was called Philip, after Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales; his father and son were called Philip. And both the Gribbins and Nichols seem unaware that King's son was on both the Beagle voyages.) FitzRoy's appointment as governor of New Zealand also puzzles the Gribbins, but there is nothing mystifying about it in the light of the naval tradition, exemplified by King, to which he belonged. The first four governors of New South Wales had been naval men: the third was King's father, the fourth another great and difficult navigator, Bligh. FitzRoy would have had more respect for such men than for the members of Parliament with whom the Gribbins think he ought to have associated. Even Darwin had his precursor on King's survey of the Australian coast in the distinguished botanist, Allan Cunningham. It is extraordinary that King's influence is totally ignored.
In retrospect, one would say that FitzRoy suffered all his life from a severe depressive illness. The Gribbins are sympathetic to his moods but they make no attempt to understand this crucial element of his character. Nichols, however, thinks that the benefit of hindsight entitles him to sneer, which is despicable and means that he misses much of what makes the man interesting. He is preoccupied instead by FitzRoy's aristocratic background, which anyway he does not understand. He presents a ludicrous theory that the second Beagle voyage was engineered by FitzRoy's uncle to extricate FitzRoy from embarrassment over the Fuegians. Contemptuous of FitzRoy's breakdown at Valparaiso in 1834, Nichols then ignores his heroic rescue of the crew of the wrecked Challenger south of Concepcion some months later, which shows FitzRoy in a very different light. He utterly misunderstands FitzRoy's appointment in New Zealand and its results, and is patronising about his ground-breaking meteorological work. Altogether, the book is so stuffed with politically correct received opinions masquerading as arguments that this reader, at least, found it repellent. This trashy sentence is typical: By mid-century, God had suffered a decline in prestige exactly like the British royal family in the present era.' (Had he? Have they? 'Exactly'?) Clichés jump out of both books like bluebottles and both, absurdly, are without maps. Of the two, the Gribbins' is much the better, but as far as FitzRoy and the Beagle is concerned, the best book remains Richard Keynes's Fossils, Finches and Fuegians. For a superb account of a surveying voyage, however, and a taste of how things might have been aboard the Beagle, read King of the Australian Coast by Marsden Hordern.
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