As the Beagle rolled and pitched across the Bay of Biscay, and then turned south into the open Atlantic, Darwin discovered that he was one of those few and unlucky voyagers who suffer from a chronic seasickness that does not get better the longer one is at sea. It was to plague him for five years.
“The misery is excessive & far exceeds what a person would suppose who had never been at sea more than a few days,” he wrote in his diary on December 29, when the Beagle was 380 miles from Plymouth.
I found the only relief to be in a horizontal position…. I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking, little did I think with what fervour I should do so.—I can scarcely conceive any more miserable state, than when such dark & gloomy thoughts are haunting the mind as have to day pursued me.
There was something else sickening him. As he lay in his swinging hammock fighting nausea, Darwin could not avoid hearing the lash and screaming of four seamen being flogged for drunkenness and disobedience on Christmas Day. FitzRoy noted the punishment in his captain’s log of December 28, 1831:
John Bruce: 25 lashes for drunkenness, quarrelling and insolence.
David Russel: Carpenter’s crew, with 34 lashes for breaking his leave and disobedience of orders.
James Phipps: 44 lashes for breaking his leave, drunkenness and insolence.
Elias Davis: 31 lashes for reported neglect of duty.
Darwin was appalled. FitzRoy justified such punishment to him in the terms he would later write in his journal: “Hating, abhorring corporal punishment, I am nevertheless fully aware that there are too many coarse natures which cannot be restrained without it, (to the degree required on board a ship,) not to have a thorough conviction that it could only be dispensed with, by sacrificing a great deal of discipline and consequent efficiency.”
In a time and culture when men could not break the rigid barriers of rank and social class, when reasoning with a crew could be taken for weakness, this was the standard naval practice: discipline through the threat of severe punishment, a fundamental that was respected equally by officers and seamen. FitzRoy was no Bligh, but he was a strict martinet of the old school, which at times could seem like much the same thing.
Darwin’s sudden immediate proximity to FitzRoy—eating with him daily, often accompanying him ashore—revealed a character that fascinated him as much as any natural phenomenon he encountered on his voyage around the world. His diary jottings, letters home, and passages from his autobiography provide history with the clearest observations of the mercurial young captain. “FitzRoy’s character was a singular one,” Darwin wrote years later,
with many very noble features; he was devoted to his duty, generous to a fault, bold, determined and indomitably energetic, and an ardent friend to all under his sway. He would undertake any sort of trouble to assist those whom he thought deserved assistance. He was a handsome man, strikingly like a gentleman with highly courteous manners…. FitzRoy’s temper was a most unfortunate one, and was shown not only by passion, but by fits of long-continued moroseness against those who had offended him. His temper was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame. The Junior officers when they relieved each other in the forenoon used to ask “whether much hot coffee had been served out this morning?” which meant how was the captain’s temper?
In London, on the day he had first met FitzRoy, Darwin had written a letter to his sister Susan expressing his initial enthusiasm for his “beau ideal” of a captain. Writing home from Brazil, he had to qualify this.
And now for the Captain, as I daresay you feel some interest in him. As far as I can judge, he is a very extraordinary person. I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson. I should not call him clever, yet I feel convinced nothing is too great or too high for him. His ascendancy over everybody is quite curious; the extent to which every officer and man feels the slightest praise or rebuke would have been before seeing him incomprehensible…. His candour and sincerity are to me unparalleled; and using his own words his “vanity and petulance” are nearly so. I have felt the effects of the latter…. His great fault as a companion is his austere silence produced from excessive thinking. His many good qualities are numerous: altogether he is the strongest marked character I ever fell in with.
But FitzRoy was a very good friend, after his own fashion, to Darwin. He encouraged his naturalist activities, putting his crew and ship and the facilities of the Royal Navy at Darwin’s disposal. As the voyage wore on, Darwin’s mounting collection—boxes and barrels of plants and animals—were constantly shipped back to England, free of charge, by navy ships, under the direction of FitzRoy, with the blessing of the lords of the Admiralty.
More particularly, aboard the Beagle, FitzRoy and Darwin assumed the sort of respectful friendship Darwin had enjoyed with his peers at Cambridge. They called each other, in the manner of the English upper classes, by their surnames. They ate together, they found in each other a fellow scientist with whom to share findings and triumphs. FitzRoy was tireless in his efforts to make Darwin comfortable aboard the Beagle. With his own hands, the captain retied Darwin’s hammock during their first days at sea. When Darwin later mentioned this kindness in a letter home, his father wept at such solicitude. FitzRoy soon began referring to Darwin as the “ship’s philosopher”—since a naturalist was one who pursued the study of natural philosophy—and this quickly contracted to “Philos,” as Darwin was affectionately called by FitzRoy and the entire crew.
This friendship with the captain was vital for Darwin, a supernumerary on a voyage that, in the long view, would be all about Darwin. But his singular position as a putative friend, someone who had been invited to express his views to the autocratic spring-wound twenty-six-year-old captain as an equal, would test that friendship to its breaking point.
Darwin had hoped for respite from his seasickness at Tenerife, where the Beagle was supposed to make its first stop. After closely reading about von Humboldt’s travels around the island, he had dreamed of visiting Tenerife with his mentor Henslow. But “Oh misery, misery,” he wrote in his diary: the local fear of cholera and overzealous quarantine regulations forbade anyone to go ashore for twelve days. FitzRoy wouldn’t wait that long; he raised anchor immediately and sailed on. Darwin could only “gaze at this long-wished-for object of my ambition” from the deck. “Everything has a beautiful appearance: the colours are so rich and soft. The peak or sugar loaf has just shown itself above the clouds. It towers in the sky twice as high as I should have dreamed of looking for it”—and watch it fall below the horizon. On January 16th, three weeks out of England, the Beagle anchored in Porto Praya, on Saint Jago, one of the Cape Verde Islands. Darwin went ashore immediately and “strolled about the town, & feasted upon oranges.”
Before returning to the ship, he walked beyond the small shantytown into a deep, unspoiled valley.
Here I first saw the glory of tropical vegetation. Tamarinds, Bananas & Palms were flourishing at my feet.—I expected a good deal, for I had read Humboldts descriptions & I was afraid of disappointments: how utterly vain such fear is, none can tell but those who have experienced what I to day have.—It is not only the gracefulness of their forms or the novel richness of their colours, it is the numberless & confusing associations that rush together on the mind, & produce the effect.—I returned to the shore, treading on Volcanic rocks, hearing the notes of unknown birds, & seeing new insects fluttering about still newer flowers.—It has been for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.—he is overwhelmed with what he sees & cannot justly comprehend it.—Such are my feelings, & such may they remain.
So Darwin wrote in his diary aboard the Beagle that evening. That day he found his voice. The next day, accompanying FitzRoy in one of the ship’s boats to Quail Island, “a miserable, desolate” rock near Porto Praya, he found himself.
He had been reading Charles Lyell’s first volume of Principles of Geology and looking at the rocks and sea pools around Quail Island when it occurred to Darwin that he might someday write his own book, one worth reading. Fifty years later he remembered the impact of this thought at that moment.
It then first dawned on me that I might perhaps write a book on the geology of the various countries visited, and this made me thrill with delight. This was a memorable hour to me, and how distinctly I can call to mind the low cliff of lava beneath which I rested, with the sun glaring hot, a few strange desert plants growing near, and with living corals in the tidal pools at my feet.
While FitzRoy busied himself ashore with surveying and problems of magnetic variation, Darwin tramped around Saint Jago for almost three weeks, alone or with friends from the ship’s company, collecting everything that captured his fancy. He littered the Beagle’s deck and chart room with his specimens, causing First Lieutenant Wickham to complain, uselessly, about his mess. He examined, catalogued, and boxed everything for eventual shipment back to England, where Professor Henslow would oversee his growing collection.
The Beagle sailed from the Cape Verde Islands on February 8, heading for Bahia on the coast of Brazil, the first stop on FitzRoy’s mission to enlarge the earlier surveys of South American waters. The ship bowled along before the trade winds on seas of a deep vivid blue unknown in colder, darker Europe. The water was warm, the air warmer and moist, the sky dotted with puffy cumulonimbus clouds. Rain squalls overtook the ship periodically, the sudden winds heeling her under a press of too much sail for ten or fifteen minutes, too short a time for the men to reduce canvas, so that the Beagle suddenly accelerated and rolled and made noisy, frothing waves that coursed past her hull until the cloudburst moved away leaving the deck dark and cool underfoot from the rain.
In the calmer tropical seas, Darwin felt better. He constructed a net and towed it astern on a long line, trawling for plankton and tiny sea creatures. He was able to work on his collection—dissecting plants and animals, writing up his notes—and settle into a shipboard routine.
He and FitzRoy met at eight every morning for breakfast in the captain’s cabin, again at 1 P.M. for dinner, and at 5 P.M. for supper. The first two meals were spartan, though Darwin found them ample and satisfying: rice, peas, bread, antiscorbutics like pickles and dried apples, water and coffee. For supper there was meat—from the cans while those supplies lasted, or fresh meat or fowl—bread and cheese. They drank no alcohol, by FitzRoy’s preference. During these meals, the two men talked of their work when FitzRoy felt communicative, though often he did not, and ate in cogitative silence. They made a practice of leaving the table as soon as they were finished, without waiting for the other.
Twenty days from the Cape Verdes, the Beagle anchored in Bahia de Todos Santos (present-day Salvador). The town, “embosomed in a luxuriant wood,” sent Darwin into raptures: “It would be difficult [to] imagine, before seeing the view, anything so magnificent…if faithfully represented in a picture, a feeling of distrust would be raised in the mind.” He was soon spending his days wandering through the Brazilian forest, seeking each evening back aboard the Beagle adequate expression for what he had seen and felt.
29th (Feb) The day has passed delightfully: delight is however a weak term for such transports of pleasure…amongst the multitude it is hard to say what set of objects is most striking…a most paradoxical mixture of sound & silence pervades the shady parts of the wood.—the noise from the insects is so loud in the evening it can be heard even in a vessel anchored several hundred yards from the shore.—Yet within the recesses of the forest when in the midst of it a universal stillness appears to reign.—To a person fond of Natural history such a day as this brings with it pleasure more acute than he ever may again experience.—After wandering about for some hours, I returned to the landing place.—Before reaching it I was overtaken by a Tropical storm.—I tried to find shelter under a tree so thick that it would never have been penetrated by common English rain, yet here in a couple of minutes, a little torrent flowed down the trunk….
March 1st I can only add raptures to the former raptures…. Brazilian scenery is nothing more nor less than a view in the Arabian Nights….
But there was more than loveliness to contend with. At this time the slave trade was still legal in Brazil, and Darwin, whose ancestors had been strident abolitionists, was repelled by the stories told by Captain Paget of the Samarang, who came aboard the Beagle to dine with FitzRoy.
Facts about slavery so revolting, that if I had read them in England, I should have placed them to the credulous zeal of well-meaning people: The extent to which the trade is carried on; the ferocity with which it is defended; the respectable (!) people who are concerned in it are far from being exaggerated at home…. It is utterly false (as Cap Paget satisfactorily proved) that any, even the very best treated, do not wish to return to their countries.—“If I could but see my father & my two sisters once again, I should be happy. I can never forget them.” Such was the expression of one of these people.
But FitzRoy had different ideas. While he felt slavery was “an evil long forseen and now severely felt,” he believed the majority of Brazilians treated their slaves humanely. He felt the institution was not unlike the mutually useful master-servant, landowner-tenant relations in existence in England since feudal times, long enjoyed by his own family. He cited his own recent visit to a Brazilian plantation where the owner had brought a number of his slaves to meet the captain and asked them, in front of FitzRoy, if they would rather be free. All had answered no.
Darwin, unable to restrain himself, grew uncharacteristically angry and asked FitzRoy if he really thought the answers given by slaves in the presence of their master were believable.
To FitzRoy, such a questioning of his opinion was almost unknown; it was practically mutinous. He erupted furiously at Darwin, saying that as he doubted his word, they could no longer “live together.” The meal broke up instantly, and FitzRoy sent for Wickham to tell him that Darwin was no longer welcome at his table.
Darwin was convinced that his voyage was over, that he would have to leave the ship. But Wickham, perhaps more used to his captain’s blacker moods, invited Darwin to take his meals with the officers in the gun room. It wasn’t necessary: a few hours later FitzRoy sent an officer to him with an apology and a request that he “continue to live with” the captain. Darwin agreed, and they settled, without reference to the episode, back into their old routine. But the younger man was now aware of the terms of their friendship.
The Beagle weighed anchor and sailed from Bahia on March 15, her course southward.
The three Fuegians, who had sailed north along this same coast two years earlier, knew where they were headed.