The Darwin Conspiracy (10 page)

At that I fell silent.

I know Mamma and Papa prefer Etty to me. They are always telling her
how pretty she is and how becoming such and such a dress is on her and what
a fine wife she will be one day and they never pay such compliments to me.

When I was a child they looked upon me as unladylike because I loved to run
fast and ride down the stairs standing up on the sliding-board and because I
was able to climb out the nursery-window on to the mulberry-tree. Mamma
said that was the way boys behaved. It was true that sometimes when we
opened the old trunk to play ‘dress-up’, Etty would don Mamma’s pearls and
long dresses and I would favour the costumes of buccaneers and explorers.

But I was not any less of a girl for all of that, and in any case I was not
offered the advantages that my brothers were, such as going to Clapham
School, but instead had to receive my schooling at home. So it is obvious to me
that I got the worse of both ways, though I don’t confess this to anyone for
fear of seeming to think too much about myself.

Close to the end of our walk, as we were nearing the river-bank, I spotted
a large beetle scurrying under a log, and for a moment I thought of pursuing
it and bringing it home to Papa. When I was young I was better at capturing
grubs and insects than Etty or even than any of my five brothers. As I think
about it now I could almost weep, recollecting the look in Papa’s eyes when I
would open my small dirty hand to present him with a special find and how
he would hug me and call me his huntress Diana. I think they were the happiest moments of my whole childhood.

On the day the
Beagle
finally set sail, Charles and Captain FitzRoy spent the afternoon at a tavern, gorging themselves on mutton and champagne. Afterward they rowed out past the breakwater to join the ship. As she rose up before them, they got a good view of her moving in stately fashion down the Channel, fully rigged, with her sails billowing in a hearty breeze. Charles was astounded at his feelings: the sight did not stir him. Where was the exhilaration he had expected? Here he was, after months of endless delays and abortive runs out of the harbor, finally launched on his great adventure, and he felt dread. He shivered with a premonition—somehow, he feared, it was all going to take an awful turn and end in catastrophe.

His foreboding soon took a human form. As he stepped from the boat and placed one foot on the rope ladder, he glanced up and saw a familiar face looking down at him with an air of distaste. He stiffened.

McCormick! The last person he wanted to see.

What cruel twist of fate had placed Robert McCormick on the very same vessel? He had heard that the
Beagle
was to carry a surgeon by that name but had hoped it was not the McCormick he had known at Edinburgh. The man had been a petty, ambitious little drudge. The two took the same geology course, which everyone in Charles’s circle detested for being as dry as the dust that was exhibited to the students in small glass bottles. But McCormick, the kind of man who mistook information for knowledge, actually enjoyed it and took voluminous notes. Charles had blackballed him from joining a learned society and McCormick had taken the rejection badly. The enmity was reciprocal.

By the time Charles clambered on board, McCormick was gone.

Charles walked unsteadily toward his cabin on the poop deck. He passed the seventeen-year-old midshipman he was to share it with, Philip Gidley King, whose father had captained the
Beagle
’s companion ship on her previous voyage.

“Finally we’re off,” said Charles.

“Aye, that we are,” replied the young man, doffing his cap. He was a pleasant enough lad—and proclaimed himself an ardent enthusiast of Lord Byron—but hardly scintillating company.

Across the deck Charles spied the second in command, Lieutenant John Wickham.

“That’s a damned mountain of gear you’ve brought aboard,” 
shouted Wickham, but he said it with a smile.

Charles did not feel as yet close to anyone on the ship, though he felt drawn to Augustus Earle, an artist hired by FitzRoy to record the voyage, and another supernumerary, George James Stebbing, whose job was to service the twenty-two chronometers kept in a cabin all their own, each suspended on gimbals inside a wooden box that was in turn embedded in a container of sawdust.

He did not take to the junior officers, a ragged and unruly bunch.

During a boisterous party on shore they had gone out of their way to make Charles feel uncomfortable, using seamen’s jargon to talk around him and spooking him with tales of the williwaws off Tierra del Fuego.

Afterward Wickham took Charles aside, puffing on his pipe, and explained: “They’re good lads, really. They’re uncertain as to where you fit in the overall scheme of things. You’re not an officer, you’re not exactly a passenger. And, if you don’t mind me saying so, it doesn’t help matters that you mess with the Captain three times a day—and then, of course, there’s the fact that you do speak a different brand of the King’s English.”

Charles entered his ten-foot-by-ten-foot cabin and looked around. In the center was the “great table,” which would be used by the surveyors once they reached South America. Above it, on either side, were the hooks for his hammock; the cabin was so snug that lying in it, he could touch the table’s top by simply dropping an arm. On the starboard side

were cases for the ship’s books, hundreds of them. Along the forward bulkhead were a washstand, an instrument cabinet, and a chest of drawers. Smack before it, piercing the cabin like a giant tree trunk fallen from the sky, was the thick oak mizzenmast.

There was a knock on the door. He opened it and was surprised to find McCormick there, a bottle of rum tucked under his arm.

“I say,” said McCormick. “I thought I’d extend the traditional welcome at sea.”

They shook hands, a touch awkwardly, and Charles brought out two glasses, which McCormick promptly filled. They sat down and toasted each other, and McCormick filled them again.

“So, here’s to a good voyage,” he said. “I see that the crew appears to be sober—that’s an unlooked-for blessing.”

“Yes. Capital.”

Three times over the previous five weeks the
Beagle
had set out, only to be forced back by wintry gales. On the one perfect morning for sailing—the day after Christmas—the crew had been too incapacitated from their drunkenness of the day before to stir.

Charles finished his rum, set his glass on the table, and looked at the man. He was about ten years older, bony and wiry, with an elongated skull. His face was given to a nervous smile that showed his sharp white teeth, offset by a black goatee. Charles wondered if FitzRoy had applied his phrenology test.

McCormick seemed to be trying to make conversation.

“I could not decide whether my cabin should be painted French Grey or a dead white. I eventually chose the white—more soothing, don’t you think?” He glanced around. “I see the Captain has made this very luxurious,” he said with a hint of petulance. “All done up in finest mahogany. He made a lot of changes in the ship, improved things considerably. He’s raised the deck and added skylights and bull’s-eyes.”

McCormick slapped the mizzenmast. “And this. He added this.”

“So I understand,” replied Charles, sipping his rum now. “She’s a compact little brig, isn’t she? Snug and well fitted.”

“Actually, she’s not a brig. The mizzenmast changes that. She’s a bark. A brig has two masts; both are square-rigged and the mainmast has a fore-and-aft sail. A bark has three masts and the mizzenmast carries the fore-and-aft sail.”

“I see.”

McCormick was as pedantic as ever.

“Yet I did hear one seaman make a certain reference to a ‘coffin brig,’ ” Charles persisted.

“Yes, well, the appellation is incorrect but the reputation is well deserved. They do tend to sink in rough seas. Very deep-waisted, you see, so that the waves swamp her, especially if the gunwales are closed.”

“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” said Charles. He was beginning to feel queasy from the rum.

“I dare say.”

McCormick topped up his glass though Charles tried to wave him off.

“I quite envy you these accommodations,” the surgeon said. “I say, you don’t look too well.”

Charles didn’t feel too well. He tasted a splash of digestive acid in the back of his throat, and his stomach seemed to rise and fall with the ship’s movement. A nausea took hold of his gut and spread out in waves through his whole system.

Abruptly, he leapt to his feet, overturning the chair and roughly pushing McCormick to one side. He leaned over the washbasin and retched and retched again, watching bits of mutton and other remnants of his last meal swilling in the bowl. Sweating profusely and groaning, he grabbed the mizzenmast for dear life, hugging it like a man adrift in a squall.

“Perhaps I’d better leave,” said McCormick. Charles saw him out of the corner of a teary eye, hurrying away, holding the half-empty bottle by the neck.

Somehow, Charles managed to hang his hammock, pulling out the top drawer of the chest to make room for his feet, as FitzRoy had advised.

With a sigh, he got in, again following the Captain’s instructions—first sitting on the center and then swiveling to one side to swing up his legs.

Lying horizontal, he could almost convince himself he felt somewhat better.

Five minutes later, King bounded in, all youthful enthusiasm. He recounted the day’s goings-on outside.

“By the by,” he said, sniffing the air and zeroing in on the washstand.

“Something in here smells horrid.”

King spied the two glasses, picked one up, and sniffed it.

“I say, you haven’t been drinking rum, have you? That’s the worst thing for you—at least until you get broke in. If that doesn’t put you under, nothing will. Only a fool or a villain drinks rum the first day out.”

King spotted the vomit in the washbasin and, good lad that he was, washed it out with a rag.

That evening, though still ill, Charles ventured out on deck. The air was cold and he felt so poorly he stayed for only a few minutes. The moon was out big and full, lighting the water in yellow ripples. He watched the luminous clouds racing by. Off in the distance he spotted the Eddystone Lighthouse and saw it slip away—the last remnant of his beloved England—before going to bed with a heavy heart.

The next morning, as the
Beagle
pitched and heaved toward the Bay of Biscay, Charles lay in his hammock and tried with brute willpower to quell his queasiness. He feared it was not a passing ailment. It was what had worried him all along—the scourge of seasickness—and now that it had befallen him, he couldn’t see how he would be rid of it.

The misery began in his stomach and fanned outward like some malevolent creature—an octopus, perhaps, unfurling its tentacles, or a microscopic organism sending its minute eggs through his bloodstream, invading his organs and needling his brain.

He knew the symptoms well. He had fretted about them endlessly during the wait for the ship to come out of dry-dock at Plymouth, so much so that his mouth had broken out in sores and he had experienced such strong palpitations that he was convinced he was having a heart attack.

It was hardly the glorious departure he had envisioned.

He gave himself a bolstering talk. True, things had gotten off to an inauspicious start, but they would undoubtedly improve. He would have the opportunity to catch some specimens and throw himself into his work—that was what he had come for, after all. Beyond that, the ship would be docking at exotic tropical ports, where he would examine
plants and animals the like of which were rarely seen. And come to think of it, Tenerife was to be the first port of call, the very place that he and Henslow had dreamt of exploring as they pored over von Humboldt’s book of adventures. Dear old Henslow—he told himself he must be sure to take exacting notes and write him all about it.

Suddenly Charles felt the ship rolling in a new, vertiginous way. The cabin seemed to drop a full ten feet before it was caught in a sling and swung back upward. He felt like a bowler’s ball rounding in the arc of delivery. At the top of the arc the ship struck another wave and he felt a body-wracking thud—the ball landing on the green. He vomited again and lay on the floor beneath the washstand for a full ten minutes.

Finally he rose and steadied the hammock with one hand and lay down again. No sooner had he settled back than he heard a commotion from the deck outside, a scuffling and then an ungodly sound. It was a rippling crack the likes of which he had never before heard, followed by a full-throated shriek. Five seconds later came another crack and another yell and then again another, until the yells became sobs trailing off into a miserable childlike whimpering. Then it started all over again.

At that moment the door opened and King walked in. Charles struggled to sit up.

“What in Heaven’s name is going on?” he demanded.

“Flogging,” said the young man. “Four of the crew, punished for their Christmas revelries. The old cat-o’-nine-tails. Captain’s orders.”

Charles was aghast. “How many lashes have been ordered?” he asked.

“All different. Most get twenty-five for drunkenness and quarreling.

The carpenter’s man gets thirty-four for breaking his leave. Davis, he gets thirty-one for neglect of duty. And old Phipps, he’s really begging for it—forty-four for breaking leave, drunkenness, and insolence. Better hurry if you want to watch.”

Charles sunk back in his hammock, his head reeling and his stomach trembling. Despondency seized him. What kind of a rolling torment was this ship? What kind of world had he signed on for?

Away from his beloved Shropshire, the flower-filled paradise of meadows and birds, he had toppled into a nightmarish realm of blood and violence, like one of Milton’s angels who has been cast out of Heaven and, circling ever downward, follows Lucifer in the terrible fall.