Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle. Richard Keynes
a Whig and decidedly liberal in outlook. FitzRoy had just replied in a letter which Charles felt was ‘most straightforward & gentlemanlike, but so much against my going, that I immediately gave up the scheme’. However, Henslow firmly urged him not to make up his mind until he had had serious consultations with Beaufort and FitzRoy, so on Monday morning he took the coach to London, and had his first encounter with his sometimes erratic ‘beau ideal of a captain’.
The two young men, FitzRoy being then only twenty-six years old, and Charles four years younger, at once put themselves out to be agreeable. Charles wrote to his sister Susan, ‘Cap. Fitzroy is in town & I have seen him; it is no use attempting to praise him as much as I feel inclined to do, for you would not believe me.’ FitzRoy proposed that they would mess together, with no wine and the plainest dinners, fully sharing such limited working space as was available in so small a vessel. The trip would inevitably be stormy and uncomfortable, though if Charles found it too much for him he would always be at liberty to withdraw, and during the worst weather he might spend two months ashore in some healthy, safe and nice country. Such openness quickly restored all Charles’s enthusiasm for the voyage, leaving only a slight doubt – soon laid to rest by Beaufort – as to whether the Beagle would indeed sail back across the Pacific and thus circumnavigate the world. Charles wrote later that:
On becoming very intimate with FitzRoy I heard that I had run a very narrow risk of being rejected, on account of the shape of my nose! He was an ardent disciple of Lavater,* and was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage. But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely.
To his sister Charles concluded, ‘There is indeed a tide in the affairs of men, & I have experienced it, & I had entirely given it up until 1 to day.’
There ensued some frenzied activity in London, while Charles followed up introductions given him by Henslow to experts for advice of all kinds, from naturalists knowledgeable on what to collect and how best to preserve the specimens, to suppliers of instruments, glassware, paper, books and guns. His sisters looked after his wardrobe, buying him strong new pairs of shoes and shirts marked with his name for the ship’s laundry. His friend John Coldstream advised him to use an oyster-trawl of the ordinary size for collecting marine animals, to provide himself with a few lobster pots, and when at anchor to ‘shoot’ some deep-sea fishing lines baited with small pieces of worm-eaten wood and hooks. He met Captain P.P. King, FitzRoy’s senior officer on the previous expedition, and, unasked, King said that FitzRoy’s temper was perfect, and that he was sending his own son Philip Gidley King on the Beagle as a midshipman. Charles lashed out and bought an expensive portable dissecting microscope made by Bancks, of the type recommended to him by the eminent botanist and microscopist Robert Brown. With the help of the bookseller and ornithologist William Yarrell he ordered a rifle and a brace of pistols for £50, flattering himself with the thought that FitzRoy would have spent £400. They might be needed, he told a friend, ‘for we shall have plenty of fighting those d— Cannibals’. On 8 September, when all the shops were closed, he found an excellent seat from which to watch the procession at the coronation of King William IV, who ‘looked very well, & seemed popular: but there was very little enthusiasm, so little that I can hardly think there will be a coronation this time 50 years’. In other spare moments he worked at astronomy, ‘as I suppose it would astound a sailor if one did not know how to find Lat & Long’.
On 11 September Charles embarked with FitzRoy on the three-day passage in a steam packet along the south coast to Plymouth, where his first view of the Beagle in the dockyard at Devonport was an unflattering one, ‘without her masts or bulkheads, & looking more like a wreck than a vessel commissioned to go round the world’. The trip gave FitzRoy an initial chance to evaluate Charles’s sea legs, and to indoctrinate him more fully in the Admiralty’s plans for the Beagle and what had been achieved during her previous voyage. The ship was disconcertingly small, ninety feet long and twenty-four-and-a-half feet wide amidships, with a displacement of 235 tons. Inside the poop cabin, measuring ten feet by eleven, and filled mainly by a large chart table and three chairs, Charles would work with Midshipman Philip Gidley King and the Assistant Surveyor John Lort Stokes (no relative of the Beagle’s former Captain), and sleep in a hammock slung above the table. Stokes’s bed was in a cubicle outside the door, and King’s was on a lower deck. They would eat in the gunroom, but Charles would have the run of the Captain’s cabin on the deck below, where they would take their meals together. Sixty years later, King drew from memory for an edition of Charles’s Journal of Researches a picture of the internal layout of the ship.
Charles sped back to London by coach, ‘wonderful quick travelling, 250 miles in 24 hours’. Here he had a useful talk to Beaufort, who told him that the normal naval practice was for any collections made by the ship’s surgeon automatically to become the property of the government. But as Charles’s appointment was not an official one, he would be best advised to retain for himself the disposal of his collection amongst the different bodies in London. Which of those bodies would be the most suitable ones was an issue that greatly concerned him in subsequent correspondence with Henslow. But the first step was to spend a couple of days in Cambridge, making detailed arrangements for Henslow and a brother of his in London to receive, and keep safely in store until the return of the Beagle, consignments of specimens that in due course would be shipped from South America. Henslow’s parting gift to Charles was a copy of an English translation of the first two volumes of Humboldt’s Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of the new continent, inscribed ‘J.S. Henslow to his friend C. Darwin on his departure from England upon a voyage round the world. 21 Sept. 1831.’
Back at home in Shrewsbury for his last ten days, Charles packed up his clothes and books, and settled his complicated and sometimes overstrained financial affairs. He wrote to Henslow that his father was much more reconciled to the idea of the voyage now that he had become accustomed to it, and was in fact treating him with a generosity wholly belying the reputation he once had for being an extremely severe parent. Earlier in the summer ‘the Governor’ had handed over a £200 note, no less, to meet Charles’s debts at Cambridge. The cost of equipping him for the voyage amounted to some £600, not far from that of two years’ support at Cambridge, while the Admiralty was exacting £50 per annum for his board and lodging. Charles tried to console his father by saying that he would have to be ‘deuced clever to spend more than my allowance whilst on board the Beagle’, to be answered with a smile, ‘But they all tell me you are very clever.’
On 2 October, Charles said goodbye to his father and sisters. But his best-loved neighbour Fanny Owen, ‘the prettiest, plumpest, Charming personage that Shropshire possesses’, to whom in their correspondence he was ‘Dr Postillion’ and she was ‘the Housemaid’, was away from home in Exeter, and could only write two long letters expressing her grief that she would not see him for two years or more, ‘when we must be grown old & steady’. Charles went to London, and thanks to further delays in the Beagle’s readiness to sail imposed by the dockyard, remained there for three weeks. During this period he wrote to FitzRoy to apologise for the bulkiness of the luggage that he had dispatched to Devonport, and was assured that it was acceptable. In a second letter accompanying yet another parcel containing some talc, which Charles may have required for taxidermy, he enquired whether FitzRoy had a good set of mountain barometers, for ‘Several great guns in the Scientific World have told me some points in geology to ascertain, which entirely depend on their relative height.’ FitzRoy’s reply is not recorded, but Charles did obtain a set of aneroid barometers, of which he made extensive use during the voyage in his investigations of the rise and fall of the land on either side of the Andes. His copy of Jones’s companion to the mountain barometer & tables survives among his papers in the Cambridge University Library.
After a pleasant drive from London, Charles arrived in Devonport on 24 October, and next day found the Beagle ‘moored to the Active hulk & in a state of bustle & confusion’. The carpenters were busy fitting up the drawers in the poop cabin, and ‘My own private corner looks