Richard Keynes - Fossils, Finches and Fuegians - Charles Darwin’s Adventures and Discoveries on the Beagle

At the end of June the Beagle sailed back to the Rio Plata. While in Monte Video, FitzRoy tried to have the Fuegians vaccinated against smallpox, whose ravages were all too often fatal to unprotected natives, but the vaccination did not take. At the beginning of August the Beagle rejoined the Adventure in Rio de Janeiro, and together they made a ‘most tedious’ passage to Plymouth, where they anchored on 14 October.

FitzRoy’s first thought was for the Fuegians. Landing after dark, they were taken to lodgings where next day they were vaccinated for the second time. With the Beagle ’s coxswain James Bennett to look after them, they were then transferred to a farmhouse in the country near Plymstock, where they could enjoy the fresh air and hopefully avoid infection by other virus diseases, without attracting public attention. Meanwhile the Beagle was stripped and cleared out, and on 27 October her pendant was hauled down.

During the voyage home, FitzRoy had addressed through Captain King to John Barrow, 37 Second Secretary of the Admiralty, a long account of the manner in which he had taken the four Fuegians on board the Beagle,38 and of his proposal to return them to their country after they had received some education. Mr Barrow’s response, although it was negatively worded and predictably lacking in enthusiasm, said that their Lordships would not interfere with FitzRoy’s benevolent intentions towards the Fuegians, would afford him facilities towards their maintenance and education, and would give them a passage home again. Their Lordships’ promise was duly kept when early in November Boat Memory was taken ill with smallpox, and instructions were at once given for the Fuegians to be admitted to the Royal Naval Hospital at Plymouth for vaccination and treatment. Unhappily Boat Memory, who was FitzRoy’s favourite among them, could not be saved, but the other three were successfully re-vaccinated. Fuegia Basket was in addition taken home by the doctor in charge of them in order to be exposed to measles with his own children. She duly had a favourable attack and quickly recovered with a strengthened immune system.

Through contacts with the Church Missionary Society, the Fuegians were next taken to Walthamstow just outside London for schooling in charge of the Revd William Wilson, and remained in his care until October 1831, still with James Bennett to keep an eye on them. Fuegia Basket and Jemmy Button were very receptive pupils, but the older man York Minster was not. He would reluctantly assist with practical activities like gardening, but firmly refused to learn to read. He also took what seemed to be an unhealthy interest in the ten-year-old Fuegia, following her everywhere, keeping her well away from other men, and treating her as if she was his personal possession. At this time there was no suggestion that anything sexual took place between them, though on board the Beagle later on she was deemed to be officially engaged to York in order to avoid embarrassment, and back in Tierra del Fuego she did become his wife. During that summer the Fuegians were taken to St James’s Palace at King William IV’s request, and Queen Adelaide honoured Fuegia Basket by placing one of her own bonnets on the girl’s head and a ring on her finger, and gave her some money to buy clothes for returning home.

FitzRoy had been led by Captain King to suppose that the Adventure and Beagle ’s surveys in South America would need to be continued by some other ship, giving him an opportunity to restore the Fuegians to their native land. But having in March 1831 completed his official obligations with respect to the Beagle ’s 1826–1830 cruise, for which he was officially commended, FitzRoy discovered that the Admiralty’s plans had for no stated reason been altered, and that their Lordships no longer intended to complete the survey. Feeling that he could not trust anyone but himself to return the Fuegians to the precise places from which they had been taken, he obtained twelve months’ leave of absence from the Navy. In June he made at his own expense an agreement with the owner of a small merchant ship to take him with five companions, the Fuegians, and a number of goats to Tierra del Fuego, where he proposed to stock some of the islands with goats and deposit his protégée and protégés. This agreement did not, however, have to be put into effect, for FitzRoy happened one day to mention his problem to one of his aristocratic and politically influential uncles, the fourth Duke of Grafton, and the former Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh’s half-brother Lord Londonderry. After some effective wire-pulling at the Admiralty, their Lordships were persuaded to appoint FitzRoy to command the Beagle once again for a second surveying cruise.

The greatest of hydrographers, Captain Francis Beaufort, who had taken charge of the Hydrographic Office in 1829, embraced with enthusiasm the opportunity of filling in some of the many blank spaces in the existing maps of the coast of Argentina and Tierra del Fuego, and extending the naval charts to cover not only Argentina and the Falkland Islands, but also more of the coasts of Chile and Peru as far north as Ecuador. FitzRoy would also be entrusted with the task of carrying a chain of meridian distances, which measured the difference in longitude between an established location and a new one, all the way round the world by sailing back across the Pacific. The Beagle was therefore instructed to return via the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia – calling at Port Jackson observatory in Sydney, Hobart, and King George Sound – the Cocos Keeling Islands, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, St Helena, Ascension, and so home. Beaufort’s long Memorandum to FitzRoy, 39 carefully explaining this plan, included a note forbidding senior officers whom he might encounter to take from him any of his instruments or chronometers; instructions for sedulous observations of the eclipses of Jupiter’s third and fourth satellites; and advice on the best way of handling natives. Lastly, the Beagle was the first ship in the Navy to be issued with Beaufort’s list of the Figures, still in popular use today, to denote the force of the wind, based at the lower end on the speeds at which a man-of-war with all sails set would be driven, and at the upper end on what set of sails could just be carried safely at full chase. A second list of letters was drawn up to describe the state of the weather, but this has now fallen out of use.

The Beaufort Scale

While the Beagle was being extensively refitted at Devonport in preparation for her long voyage, FitzRoy, remembering his resolution to recruit a geologist should he pay another visit to Tierra del Fuego, 30 set about finding ‘some well-educated and scientific person who would willingly share such accommodations as I had to offer, in order to profit by the opportunity of visiting distant countries yet little known’. 40 He began by consulting the most appropriate person at the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort, who being closely in touch with the scientific reformers at Cambridge and in the Royal Society was keen to modernise and bring more science into the Hydrographic Office, and was immediately sympathetic. Beaufort accordingly wrote to his mathematical friend George Peacock at Trinity College, Cambridge, telling him of the opening for ‘a savant’ on a surveying ship. Early in August, Peacock passed the news on to Henslow, although he had not perfectly interpreted the situation in speaking of a vacancy specifically for a naturalist, and in later correspondence placed greater emphasis on FitzRoy’s need for a companionable and gentlemanly scientist: