The Darwin Conspiracy (21 page)

As Charles handed over a stack of pound notes, Lumb posed a question: “By the by, sir, I should have asked before it went, but I noticed that there were two of you fellows—what do you call yourselves?—
naturalists.
Yourself and that other one—what the devil’s his name?”

“Mr. McCormick. What of it?”

“Well, sir, the manifold asked for only a single name, so I put down yours. Is that all right, I’m wondering?”

Charles felt his breath catch. So the fossils went to Henslow under his name alone. He felt a rush of excitement, followed by a pang of guilt. He could not take credit for them alone, it must be shared. After all, McCormick was the one who first spotted the site, though Charles was quite sure he would have seen it himself at some point. Well, there was nothing for it—the questions of ownership and credit would have to be settled later. In the meantime, the fossils were headed to safekeeping in Cambridge—that was the important thing. And undoubtedly there would be many more fossils ahead.

“That’s fine,” he said to Lumb. “Pray do not exercise yourself about it. We’ll sort it all out back in England.”

10 April 1865

I have lately come upon something very curious. Papa has long had the habit
of leaving a stack of paper in the staircase-cupboard for the younger children
to draw on and, since he is exceedingly frugal, these are often the reverse
sides of drafts of his writing. Two days ago, when I fetched some paper for
Horace and Leonard, I began reading the pages, which were early versions of
his book
The Voyage of the Beagle.
I could not help but notice that there
were discrepancies. For some reason or other he had decided to make various
changes.

In the pages I read, I could see he had excised entire passages describing
events that transpired during the voyage. In particular, he eliminated several
conversations that occurred between himself and one Robert McCormick,
who, if memory serves, was on board in the capacity of ship’s surgeon. I compared the manuscript pages to those in the published journals and found that
much of what they said to each other, some of it argumentative, had never
appeared in print. In particular, I noted the elimination of sections that
showed Mr McCormick to be jealous of the many kindnesses proffered to
Papa by Captain FitzRoy. There is one episode in which Mr McCormick,
who is put out because the Captain brought Papa and not him to visit some
island or other, turns his back and walks away while Papa is speaking to
him. Why he should have deleted this material I have no idea, especially
since he is so thorough in recounting all other aspects of the voyage. Perhaps
he did so because the passages cast Mr McCormick in a bad light—indeed, he
appears to have been a most unpleasant, spleen-filled man.

Still, the omissions set me to thinking and I resolved to see if there were 
others. Surreptitiously, as my brothers were occupied drawing, and as Papa
was outside taking his constitutional on the Sandwalk, I slipped into his
study. There, on a shelf above his wooden desk, I found some of the notebooks
he kept on his voyage. They were numbered, so I could tell at a glance that
some were missing. There was no indication where they might have been put.

I glanced at some of the others, pulling them down carefully so that I might
replace them exactly as they were to avoid discovery, and I was surprised in
looking through them to find that Papa had changed some of the entries after
the fact. I could discern this because the ink was of a noticeably different
shade than that of the original entries and was also uniform throughout,
whereas the writing done during the trip varied from week to week. In some
instances, the jottings were fitted in awkwardly, sometimes scrawled along
the margins, making it obvious that they had been added subsequently. In
addition, some earlier entries had been crossed out altogether.

I wondered if these changes might be the sort that one might make upon
re-reading a draft and wanting to add some further reflection or elaboration.

But they did not appear to be of that nature, since it was clear from even a
cursory reading that they tended to alter the very narrative itself. Some of the
changes dealt with Captain FitzRoy and others were about Jemmy Button,
the infamous savage whose treachery knows no bounds. Still others concerned
the aforementioned Mr McCormick.

But I did not dare to linger too long to read them and, truth be told, I was
feeling sorely guilty, knowing that I was reading something that was not
intended for my eyes—or for that matter, the eyes of anyone. As soon as I
heard the tapping of Papa’s cane on the front step, I quickly replaced the
notebooks and closed the study door only seconds before he entered the hall.

As I write this, I think I may search for some opportunity tomorrow, perhaps
when Papa is once again out on the Sandwalk, to continue my investigation
into his writings.

11 April 1865

Somehow I must contrive to meet Captain FitzRoy. I must talk to him and
implore him to provide explanations, for all this is simply too much! There 
are too many mysteries that set my head spinning. I must find out what happened during the journey of the
Beagle.
From reading Papa’s journals—the
unexpurgated
journals, I hasten to point out—it is clear that certain events
transpired in the course of the voyage, events of great importance, which were
not properly recorded. I have no inkling of what they were, but that they were
crucial to the outcome of the trip, I have no doubt.

Something happened when the ship was in South America. What it was, I
do not know, but Papa writes about it in guarded but tantalising language.

He refers to it as a
nuit de feu.
What he means by that is not at all clear, but
the term suggests some sort of violent upheaval. Perhaps it occurred when the
Englishmen met the savage Indians, whose appearance was depicted as most
frightening; Papa has described it vividly, how they stood on shore slobbering
like wild animals, their long hair matted, their faces streaked in red and
white and their bodies greased and naked save for mantles of guanaco skin
about the shoulders.

Perhaps the
nuit de feu
was something that happened later in the voyage,
some horrible occurrence involving a member of the crew. Or perhaps it had
something to do with Jemmy Button, for we now know that, far from being a
person who opened his heart to Christian civilisation, he was capable of the
most harrowing barbarity.

Captain FitzRoy may prove to be my Rosetta Stone. But I do not know
how to approach him and, truth be told, I am apprehensive about the
prospect. I have heard enough about him in the whisperings at Down House
to know that many feel he is not right in the head. And of course he bears a
deep enmity towards Papa, whom he blames for trying to overturn all the
beliefs of Christendom, while no doubt blaming himself for commanding the
vessel that allowed him to do it.

I know this at first hand, for I was present at the now famous confrontation between Mr Huxley and Soapy Sam Wilberforce at the British Associa-tion for the Advancement of Science in Oxford, where Captain FitzRoy made
a spectacle of himself. The scene is still so vivid in my memory—even though I
was but twelve years old—I can scarcely believe it happened nearly five years
ago. Uncle Ras had sneaked me in and I took pains to make myself inconspicuous behind his chair as I watched the proceedings.

Some five hundred people were packed into the sweltering lecture-hall of
the new museum. The Bishop attacked Papa’s theory from every angle and
then uttered the famous mocking question: was Mr Huxley related to an ape 
on his grandfather’s side or his grandmother’s? Mr Huxley leapt up. He
defended Papa’s work with characteristic vigour and concluded with the
riposte that rapidly made the rounds: that if he had to choose between having
an ape for an ancestor or a man endowed by Nature with reason who yet
employs the faculty for the purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, ‘then I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape’. It let
loose pandemonium. People cheered and booed. Some tossed their programmes
into the air. I peered over Uncle Ras’ chair. Just in front of us a group of
raucous students chanted: ‘Mawnkey, mawnkey!’ A pregnant woman not two
rows away rose and suddenly fainted and fell to the floor.

At that moment I saw FitzRoy, dressed in an old rear admiral’s uniform
that was so tattered and worn he looked like an Old Testament prophet. He
wandered through the crowd like a man possessed, waving aloft a Bible with
a trembling hand, a bit of spittle in the corner of his mouth, his hair
unkempt. He pronounced Papa a ‘blasphemer’. He said he regretted the day
he agreed to take ‘that man’ on board ship and uttered that his ingratitude
was ‘sharper than a serpent’s tooth’. He called him ‘the Devil’s own Pied
Piper, leading the unsuspecting onto the downward path of hellfire and
damnation.’ At one point, looking wildly at the cheering gallery, he declared:

“But this is all wrong—the man’s a villain.’ He went on in this vein, muttering various oaths and damnations that I could scarce hear—except for one,
which he threw over his shoulder in my direction. It was: ‘So that’s how it is,
eh, Mr Darwin?’ He repeated this meaningless sentence several times, delivering it in a bitter-sounding singsong that made my blood run cold.

I could not help but notice that Mr Huxley, surveying the entire scene with
a certain satisfaction, like a general whose troops have routed the enemy,
spotted Captain FitzRoy, and as he did so, his complexion turned white as
candle-wax. He immediately said something in an aside to a young man who
moved through the crowd and confronted Captain FitzRoy, who by now had
slumped back into a seat in exhaustion. The young man quickly got the Captain to his feet and trundled him off the floor and out a side door, whether
out of exasperation or kindness I could not say.

For some time the Captain’s words echoed through my head—‘So that’s
how it is, eh, Mr Darwin?’ What could he have possibly meant? I suppose
the phrase could have been meaningless twaddle from a mind worn down by
grief and suffering to the point of lunacy. Indeed, with his countenance pale
and crazed, he did appear a most pathetic figure—sad but unsettling and, I
 
must admit, threatening. Nonetheless, I feel I absolutely must talk to him to
seek an explanation! One mystery piles up upon another, and I feel desperate
to get to the bottom of it all.

15 April 1865

I’m in luck! We were visited this weekend by the Hookers—Joseph, the
botanist at Kew, and his wife, Frances, who is also the daughter of dear old
Henslow, Papa’s beloved teacher, departed these four years. Frances, who is
most clever, suggested a strategy to reach Captain FitzRoy.

We went out for a walk in the garden, it being unseasonably warm, and
we opened our hearts to each other. She confessed to me how upset she had
been when Papa did not attend her father’s funeral, pointing out that the
berth on the
Beagle
had come about through her father’s intercession and
that he was the one who had received the crates of Papa’s famous specimens. I
was obliged to make his excuses, which of course revolved around his ill-health, and then suddenly I blurted out that I found it odd that Papa continually avoids funerals, even that of his own father. I remarked that it was
a grievous shortcoming and then found myself reciting various other shortcomings in him. It was a great relief to be able to confide in someone.

I did not talk about my investigation or my deepest suspicions but simply
said that I needed to talk to Captain FitzRoy. She said that would be difficult because he had lately moved from South Kensington to Upper Norwood,
south of London. I most assuredly would not be invited there, she noted. But
then she had an idea. She had it on good authority that FitzRoy, now in the
Meteorological Office, would shortly meet Matthew Maury, his counterpart
in the American navy. My Uncle Ras could surely discover the schedule and
arrange for an encounter that would appear accidental.

I thanked her and hugged her. She then cautioned me, saying that she had
heard that FitzRoy had become unhinged through grief and misfortune. She
recounted his woes, which did indeed seem legion. His ambitions have been
frustrated at every turn. His surveying work on the
Beagle
did not bring him
the recognition he expected and he turned to politics. He won a vacant seat in
Durham but got embroiled in a vicious rivalry with a fellow Tory candidate 
that led to a brawl outside his club in the Mall. The scandal dogged him in
office and so he accepted the governorship of New Zealand, only to fall prey
to a bitter land dispute between settlers and native Maoris. It proved his
undoing, leading to his recall, and after a horrible voyage home, his wife
Mary died, leaving him with four motherless children. Then his eldest
daughter died. Bit by bit, his fortune has dwindled to nothing.