Fossils, Finches and Fuegians: Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle. Richard Keynes
in Tierra del F. The Beagle Channel is here very striking, the view both ways is not intercepted, & to the West extends to the Pacific. So narrow and straight a channell & in length nearly 120 miles, must be a rare phenomenon. We were reminded that it was an arm of the sea by the number of Whales, which were spouting in different directions: the water is so deep that one morning two monstrous whales were swimming within stone throw of the shore.59
Charles at once set about organising an expedition on horseback to the Rio Macaé, some one hundred miles to the north-east of Rio. His ‘extraordinary & quixotic set of adventurers’ consisted firstly of an Irish businessman, Patrick Lennon, who had lived in Rio for twenty years and owned an estate near the mouth of the Macaé that he had not previously visited; he was accompanied by a nephew. Then there was Mr Lawrie, ‘a well informed clever Scotchman, selfish unprincipled man, by trade partly slave merchant partly Swindler’, with a friend who was apprentice to a druggist, and whose elder brother’s Brazilian father-in-law Senhor Manuel Figuireda owned a large estate on the Macaé at Socégo. As a guide for the party Charles took along a black boy. The first obstacle was to obtain passports for an excursion to the interior. The local officials were somewhat less than helpful, ‘but the prospect of wild forests tenanted by beautiful birds, Monkeys & Sloths, & Lakes by Cavies & Alligators, will make any naturalist lick the dust even from the foot of a Brazilian’.
The exotic cavalcade set out on 8 April, and Charles was entranced by the stillness of the woods – except for the large and brilliant butterflies which lazily fluttered about, with blue the prevailing tint – and by the infinite numbers of lianas and parasitical plants, whose beautiful flowers struck him as the most novel object to be seen in a tropical forest. In the evening the scene by the dimmed light of the moon was most desolate, with fireflies flitting by and the solitary snipe uttering its plaintive cry while the distant and sullen roar of the sea scarcely broke the quiet of the night. The inn at which they spent their first night sleeping on straw mats was a miserable one, though at others they fared sumptuously with wine and spirits at dinner, coffee in the evening, and fish for breakfast. The five days needed for the journey to the mouth of the Macaé were often strenuous, and the amount of labour that their horses could perform was impressive, even on the occasion when the riders had to swim alongside them to cross the Barro de St João.
On 13 April they rested at Senhor Figuireda’s luxurious fazenda at Socégo, where Charles was relieved to see how kindly the slaves were treated, and how happy they seemed. Two days later he had a very different impression of slavery when Mr Lennon threatened to sell at a public auction an illegitimate mulatto child to whom his agent was much attached, and even to take all the women and children from their husbands to sell them separately at the market in Rio. Despite his feeling that Mr Lennon was not at heart an inhumane person, Charles reflected ruefully on the strange and inexplicable effect that prevailing custom and self-interest might have on a man’s behaviour. It was agreed that Senhor Manuel should be asked to arbitrate in the quarrel, which he presumably did in favour of the slaves, although Charles did not report on the outcome. Charles returned to Socégo, where he spent the most enjoyable part of the whole expedition collecting insects and reptiles in the woods, and admiring the trees:
The forests here are ornamented by one of the most elegant, the Cabbage-Palm, with a stem so narrow that with the two hands it may be clasped, it waves its most elegant head from 30 to 50 feet above the ground. The soft part, from which the leaves spring, affords a most excellent vegetable. The woody creepers, themselves covered by creepers, are of great thickness, varying from 1 to nearly 2 feet in circumference. Many of the older trees present a most curious spectacle, being covered with tresses of a liana, which much resembles bundles of hay. If the eye is turned from the world of foliage above, to the ground, it is attracted by the extreme elegance of the leaves of numberless species of Ferns & Mimosas. Thus it is easy to specify individual objects of admiration; but it is nearly impossible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings which are excited; wonder, astonishment & sublime devotion fill & elevate the mind.
For the journey home, when Charles was accompanied only by Mr Lennon, the same route was followed, though back in Rio, having carelessly lost their passports, they had some difficulty in proving that their horses were not stolen. Charles returned to the Beagle, where he learnt that the surgeon Robert McCormick had been ‘invalided’, that is to say had quarrelled with the Captain and the First Lieutenant, and was about to go back to England on HMS Tyne. The news did not greatly distress Charles, for he had decided even before leaving Devonport that ‘my friend the Doctor is an ass … at present he is in great tribulation, whether his cabin shall be painted French Grey or a dead white – I hear little excepting this subject from him’. And at St Jago McCormick had revealed himself as ‘a philosopher of rather an antient date; at St Jago by his own account he made general remarks during the first fortnight & collected particular facts during the last’. Robert McCormick was an ambitious Scot, determined to make a career for himself as a naval surgeon, who had sailed to the Arctic in 1827 with William Edward Parry as assistant surgeon on the Hecla. His nose was put thoroughly out of joint on the Beagle by finding that Charles had been introduced by the Captain to look after natural history, one of the traditional responsibilities of the ship’s surgeon. He subsequently sailed to the Antarctic as surgeon on the Erebus, and took part in the search for Franklin in the Arctic in 1852–53. But when he finally retired in 1865, the professional recognition that he had sought for so long still eluded him. He was succeeded as acting surgeon on the Beagle by Benjamin Bynoe, with whom Charles remained on the best of terms for the rest of the voyage.
On 25 April Charles suffered on a small scale what he described as some of the horrors of a shipwreck, when two or three large waves swamped the boat from which he was landing his possessions to transfer them to Botafogo, though nothing was completely spoiled. The following day he wrote an account of the disaster to his sister Caroline, also reporting to her:
I send in a packet, my commonplace Journal. I have taken a fit of disgust with it & want to get it out of my sight. Any of you that like may read it, a great deal is absolutely childish. Remember however this, that it is written solely to make me remember this voyage, & that it is not a record of facts but of my thoughts, & in excuse recollect how tired I generally am when writing it … Be sure you mention the receiving of my journal, as anyhow to me it will be of considerable future interest as an exact record of all my first impressions, & such a set of vivid ones they have been must make this period of my life always one of interest to myself. If you will speak quite sincerely, I should be glad to have your criticisms. Only recollect the above mentioned apologies.60
During the next few days Charles was taken by FitzRoy to dine more than once with Mr Aston, representative of the English government, at meals which to his surprise ‘from the absence of all form almost resembled a Cambridge party’. He also dined with the Admiral, Sir Thomas Baker, no doubt with the greater formality of the Navy, and was taken to watch the impressive spectacle of an official inspection of the seventy-four-gun battleship Warspite.
A week later the Beagle sailed back to Bahia to find an explanation for the discrepancy of four miles in the meridian distance between the Abrolhos Islands and Rio de Janeiro shown in Baron Roussin’s chart as compared with the Beagle’s measurements. In a private letter to FitzRoy, Beaufort later commended his ‘daring’ for thus having turned back without prior instruction from the Admiralty.61 It turned out that Baron Roussin’s placing of the Abrolhos was correct, but not that of Rio, confirming that FitzRoy’s twenty-two chronometers and his dependence on a connected chain of meridian distances was the most reliable method of finding the precise longitude. This information was duly conveyed to the French commander-in-chief at Rio.
A less happy piece of news was that three members of a party who had sailed in the ship’s cutter to the river Macacu shortly before the Beagle’s departure – an extraordinarily powerful seaman called Morgan, Boy Jones who had just been promised promotion, and Charles’s young friend Midshipman Musters – had been stricken with fatal attacks of malaria a few days later,