The Darwin Conspiracy (15 page)

16 February 1865

I returned home to Down House today, in the middle of a downpour that
soaked my skirts as I ran from the carriage. But once inside, I was relieved to
find sunnier news: all is forgiven. Mamma brought me a cup of tea and afterwards Papa broke off playing billiards with Parslow and instead challenged
me to a game of Backgammon. I allowed him to win and he was so content I
think he failed to see through my trickery.

Still, I find it most difficult to rein in my curiosity. This afternoon, I decided
to look through the specimens that Papa sent back from the
Beagle.
He has
never explicitly forbidden us to examine them and they are scattered all over
the estate in the oddest of places. I found an entire cache in two deep drawers
in the greenhouse where Papa has been conducting experiments with those
horrid-smelling
Drosera
that eat insects (he has taught the plants to devour
raw meat and they are only too happy to oblige). I came across something
unusual. Many of the specimens are bones and fossils and such, labelled and
dated in Papa’s hand, but some of them bear another set of initials: ‘R.M.’ I
find that confounding but do not dare to ask Papa what the letters mean.

Jemmy Button sat next to Charles at the great table, leaning close to look at the pictures of leopards and snakes and other animals in the natural history textbook. Whenever he saw one he recognized, he would squirm with delight and reach out with his small pudgy brown finger to touch it.

“Me know that one. Me see that one in me own contree.” He giggled, taking the book in both hands and raising it to hold the painting of the ostrich so close to his face it was but three inches from his nose.

Charles laughed along with him. Was he trying to smell it? At times like this he found himself asking whether Jemmy’s love of learning was instinctual, something that he had utilized in a rudimentary way in his previous world (where it would have found scant application), or whether it was nurtured by the many marvels he had seen in the civilized world. Could one take any reasonably endowed savage by the hand and teach him like a child? And how far could he go? Doubtless he would never rise to the level of a twelve-year-old English lad.

Perhaps the scientist in Charles was frustrated by a lack of specimens to study, for the three Yamana Indians fascinated him. Sick as he was, he sought them out often in the week since he had met Jemmy, observing their responses to the shipboard world. They were not new to it—
they had spent eight months aboard on the
Beagle
’s homeward trip two years ago—but still they seemed mystified by its workings. They masked their bewilderment in a heavy-lidded lethargy and spent most of their time belowdecks, venturing up only during the calmest seas and 
at sunset, which appeared to hold some mystical meaning. They presented a bizarre threesome, dressed to the nines in layers of English clothes and staring wide-eyed at the orange disk sinking below the horizon, their black skins ablaze.

Charles could not suppress the thought that they wore the accouterments of civilization lightly and that they might revert to their savage origins at the first opportunity.

Except for Jemmy. He was different from the other two: Fuegia Basket, a merry but dim-witted eleven-year-old girl; and York Minster, a morose, surly man in his mid-twenties. All had been dubbed with Anglicized names when they were kidnapped. Jemmy Button’s came from the circumstance of his abduction: FitzRoy had taken him from a canoe piloted by an old man and, in a fit of angry fair-mindedness, had ripped a mother-of-pearl button from his own tunic and tossed it at the man’s feet to make it a trade.

Jemmy, as Charles had been informed, came from a different tribe than the other natives. His were upland Indians, smaller-boned and more advanced; they thought of themselves as an enlightened people.

To hear FitzRoy tell it, Jemmy’s first days on the
Beagle
had been miserable because he was ridiculed and persecuted by the other Fuegians, who called him
Yapoo,
which apparently meant “enemy.” FitzRoy, for all his interest in the Yamana, seemed strangely crass about them. He sometimes waggishly referred to them all as “Yahoos,” after the filthy primitives of
Gulliver’s Travels.

As Jemmy examined the animal pictures, Charles studied him. He was a dandy, all right, wearing white gloves and a dress coat, even on deck when a sou’wester would be in order. He paraded around and loved gazing at himself in a mirror; he insisted that the collars of his shirts be blindingly white, and if he so much as got a spot on his boots, he ran to his cabin in a tantrum to polish them. Teased about his fop-pishness, he would stick his nose in the air and answer: “Too much skylark.”

Charles did not know what to make of him. The man was smart but guarded, at times proud and at other times sycophantic. He peppered his English with quaint expressions, so that when a sailor asked after his health, he would reply, with a groveling grin, “Hearty, sir, never better.”

At other times, he pretended not to understand. He had a bullying
streak. He treated Fuegia Basket as if she belonged to a lower animal order, which upset York Minster, who regarded her as his wife. Jemmy’s sight was far better than an Englishman’s—even on deck, he could spot something on the horizon long before the sailors could—and once, angry that the cook would not give him a second helping of pudding, he threatened: “Me see Frenchie ship, me no tell.”

Charles used his scientific instruments to reel in Jemmy for study.

The Indian never tired of peering through the microscope, looking at bits of hair and lint. Once, when a bug found in the hold was placed under the instrument and moved a leg, he almost jumped out of his skin. He seemed to feel that he shared a special bond with Charles, much to the amusement of the Englishman, who thought it quaint that the savage entertained the notion that science could unite them.

Sigheenz,
Jemmy pronounced it, though whether he fully grasped the abstract concept was unclear.

Jemmy abruptly closed the book and looked Charles in the eye—
which was unusual. He seemed to have reached some kind of decision, to want to say something important.

“I go take you to my contree. You go meet my people. You talk much with wise man. Much sigheenz, much talk, much.”

Charles was touched and hid his amusement at the idea of sitting with a council of naked brown-skinned men to discuss higher realms of knowledge.

“Yes, I would enjoy that,” he said.

Then Jemmy said they must not allow York Minster or Fuegia Basket to accompany them. He rose from the table and walked to the door.

“York a bad man,” he said. “His tribe all bad.”

With gestures, he began to mimic an action, grinning wildly and making sawing motions across his joints and opening his mouth wide and touching his fingers to it. It took Charles several moments after his departure to realize what he was trying to communicate: York Minster’s tribe practiced cannibalism.

Propped up one afternoon on FitzRoy’s sofa, reading Humboldt, Charles overheard FitzRoy and Wickham talking quietly on the other side of the cabin door.

“I am compelled to tell you, sir,” said the lieutenant, “that I believe he will not last out the voyage. When we make landfall, we’ll see the last of him, I warrant.”

Charles strained to catch the Captain’s response but heard no more.

He knew that they were discussing him, and he had a complicated reaction. At first he vowed to make a liar of Wickham—he would stick out the voyage, for he wanted nothing so much as to secure the respect of FitzRoy. But then, the thought of a bountiful life upon solid land sinking in, he began to weaken, to feel that he might as well abandon the unendurable hardship of the journey, especially as the two already deemed it likely. They couldn’t think any worse of him than they already did.

And Charles had continued to harvest nothing but misery. For the last ten days he could keep no food down but raisins and biscuit; even his dinner with the Captain had been lost overboard. He was losing weight fast and felt he would soon be little more than sallow flesh hanging from bone. When the ship had passed within hailing distance of Madeira, the island where so many of his countrymen took vacation, he could not even rouse himself to look.

Just then FitzRoy entered the cabin and looked embarrassed to see him, confirming Charles’s suspicions that they had been gossiping about him. The Captain covered it with an announcement intended to lift his morale.

“By Jupiter, do you have any idea where we shall be at daybreak tomorrow? Santa Cruz, that’s where! And for my money, there’s no finer port city. Its steeples rise up before snow-capped mountains. All in all, it’s the doing of the Creator Himself.”

That night, swinging in his hammock, listening to King’s snoring and looking up through the skylight at the moon and stars turning in revolutions, Charles felt himself aimless and insignificant. He missed the green, gentle sloping hills of Shropshire with a longing he had not thought possible. He made a decision: he would leave the ship in Santa Cruz, let the Devil take the whole lot of them. He was not cut out for a life at sea—strength of will and fortitude had nothing to do with it. It was his damned stomach and there was nothing to be done about it.

The next morning, as the
Beagle
dropped anchor in the harbor, he went on deck and felt promise in the salt-flecked balmy air. Before him lay a grand vista. Volcanic mountains, splotched with green, loomed over the town. The houses were painted in brilliant whites, yellows, and 
reds. He could make out Spanish flags flying from the tops of civic buildings and horse-drawn carts trotting along the quay.

A boat pulled up with orders from the consul and there followed a brief conference. FitzRoy turned away looking disappointed—there was no way for him to break the news gently. If they wanted to touch land, he reported, they would have to spend twelve days in quarantine.

“Quarantine!” spluttered Charles without thinking. “But why?

What diseases are there here that we should fear them?”

“None here,” replied the Captain. “It’s England. They fear
we
may be carrying cholera.”

Jemmy Button, lurking not far away, heard the exchange and turned away, his face distorted in a grimace of delight. It was not lost on him that Englishmen could not bring themselves to think their country the lesser in anything.

They lifted anchor and set sail.

Life aboard the
Beagle
improved as she headed southward toward the Cape Verde Islands. The pitching motion eased as she entered the warm waters of the tropics. The morning sun seemed to shoot straight across the blue sky like a flaming arrow—and evenings it plunged into the ocean, a fiery red ball. The moon sent shivers upon the water.

Charles began to find a beauty in the ship’s rhythm. He admired the sight of the sailors climbing about the rigging, sometimes seen only as shadows through the canvas. At night he enjoyed the sounds of the waves lapping against the bow and the rustle of the sails flapping around the masts. His shipmates invented a nickname for him—“Philos,” 
short for “Philosopher,” in recognition of his love for the natural sciences. It quickly caught on, for it sidestepped a dilemma that had made for moments of social awkwardness: what honorific to employ for an upper-class civilian with no official rank.

As Charles felt better, he turned hopeful, even doing a little work. He constructed a plankton net, four feet deep and held open with a curving stick, to drag behind the vessel. When he pulled it up after only two hours and emptied it on deck, he had captured all manner of sea life, including a Medusa and a Portuguese Man-of-War, which stung his finger.

“You were foolish to touch it,” said McCormick, hovering about. He 
had wanted to help but Charles had declined the offer. Charles put his finger in his mouth and tried not to react to the pain the slime caused in the roof of his mouth.

He looked up at McCormick and thought: This soulless man can no more understand the glories of collecting than my hunting dog.

How could anyone possibly make him understand the allure of natural science?

“But look at all these creatures, so low in the scale of Nature and yet so exquisite in form and rich in color,” he said, his voice quivering with emotion. “Does it not create a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose?”

McCormick stared open-mouthed, then turned his back and walked away.

In less than a week the
Beagle
reached the west coast of St. Jago and anchored in the bay of Porto Praya. Charles felt his pulse racing as the rowboat approached shore—at last, to plant one’s feet on solid ground!

But curiously, once there he found that there was little difference in the physical sensation; being on land did not provide the relief he had long dreamed of. Perhaps he had found his sea legs after all.

With FitzRoy he made the social rounds, meeting the Portuguese governor and the American consul. Then he walked through town sightseeing, past black soldiers carrying wooden weapons, shirtless brown children, and corrals of goats and pigs. He came to a deep valley on the outskirts and here finally, at long last, he encountered Humboldt’s tropical paradise.

The hot, moist air struck him full in the face. Unknown insects buzzed around unknown flowers that were brilliant in color. The lushness of the vegetation, the chorus of unfamiliar birdcalls, the canopy of fruit trees and palms and the tangle of vines, shot through with shafts of steaming sunlight—the exotic tumult of it all overwhelmed him. This was what he had been longing for, like a blind man longing for sight.

The next morning he rowed with FitzRoy to Quail Island, a barren stretch of volcanic rock. He examined the geological formations and searched tidal pools that yielded a wealth of specimens, including an octopus that, to his intense delight, changed color. Returning to the ship, he handed up a basket of specimens to the first pair of
hands he saw, without realizing that they belonged to none other than McCormick. The man took the bundle and tossed it upon the deck, fixing him with a hard look. Charles was too content to pay it much mind and set about dissecting some of his trophies and bottling others in spirits to send back home.