Late in 1863, two years before FitzRoy’s death, Reverend Whait Stirling, the new superintendent of the Falkland Islands mission, sailed in the mission’s ship Allen Gardiner to Tierra del Fuego. Since the massacre in 1859, relations had cooled between the missionaries and the natives, who remained fearful of some official action or punishment. But this never came, and the missionaries’ hopes remained intact. They went looking for a new crop of young Fuegians to convert.
Thomas Bridges, the adopted son of Reverend Despard, creator of the Yamana-English dictionary, accompanied Stirling on that trip, acting as his translator. He learned from the Fuegians that Jemmy Button had died that year in an epidemic that raged through Tierra del Fuego.
The missionaries and the natives reestablished a connection, and eventually much friendlier relations. Over the next few years, at least fifty Yamanas visited Keppel Island in the Falklands. Stirling took four of them, including one of Jemmy Button’s sons, Three boys, to England. There, two of them achieved the sort of independence unimagined by FitzRoy’s protégés, traveling around Britain by railway, sometimes alone, to speak at church meetings. They remained in England a year, a successful public relations visit for the missionary society, but Threeboys and another Fuegian boy, Uroopa, both died of illness on their return voyage home.
In 1867, Reverend Stirling and Thomas Bridges established, at last, a mission beachhead in Tierra del Fuego, at Ushuaia on the north shore of the Beagle Channel, opposite the Murray Narrows. There, among a group of visiting natives in 1873, Bridges met Fuegia Basket, then in her midfifties. Bridges (his son Lucas recorded in Uttermost Part of the Earth) found her “short, thickset and with many teeth missing from a mouth that was large even for a Fuegian.” She evidently retained some of her once considerable charm, for she was accompanied by her current husband, an eighteen-year-old boy. She remembered some English: “knife,” “fork,” “little boy, little gal,” but not enough for conversation. Bridges talked with her in Yamana and heard that her first husband, York Minster, had long ago been killed in retaliation for his murder of another man.
Ten years later, in February 1883, Bridges met her again, for the last time, in the western part of Tierra del Fuego. Fuegia was “nearing her end…in a very weak condition and an unhappy state of mind.” Her young husband was gone, but “she had two brothers with children of their own [and] would lack for nothing that their circumstances could provide.” Bridges tried to comfort her with “the beautiful Biblical promises in which he himself so firmly believed.”
Over the years, the mission settlement at Ushuaia grew steadily from a prefabricated hut into a number of buildings; but at the same time the Fuegians were being decimated by disease to near extinction. By 1888, epidemics of measles, pneumonia, and tuberculosis had wiped out every native within thirty miles of the mission. But the remote “civilization” at Ushuaia appealed to the Argentine government, which found its desolation a perfect site for a prison. (Today Ushuaia is a rapidly expanding tourist city at the edge of Argentina’s Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego, a base for trekkers and charter yachts.)
Thomas Bridges abandoned the mission and took up sheep ranching 40 miles east of the town. Other Europeans arrived, with more sheep. Vast farms spread across Tierra del Fuego, and the Fuegians inexorably went the way of Indians in North America: they became a nuisance, they were driven out, they were hunted down and killed. By 1910 there were fewer than 1,500 natives in all of Tierra del Fuego. Population numbers have only decreased since. Today, the Fuegians are virtually extinct.
Under new commanders, HMS Beagle made two more long surveying voyages to Australia and Southeast Asia. After returning to home waters, she was sold in 1845 to the coast guard, stripped of her name, and fitted out as a watch vessel to be moored on the Crouch and Roach rivers in Essex. Her upper masts were removed and an ugly “caboose” was built on her deck for watchkeepers on the lookout for smugglers who favored the maze of creeks and marshes of the low Essex coast. There she remained in ignominious service for twenty-five years.
In 1870, she was sold at public auction for £525, and at that point she disappeared from public record. Various accounts had her either broken up then or shortly after, or, most unlikely, bought by the Japanese navy and used as a training ship.
Possibly not so. In February of 2004, the Beagle Ship Research Group, using ground-penetrating radar, detected the outline of a Beagle-sized ship lying in the mud at the bottom of the Roach River, in the spot where the Beagle once lay moored. Newspapers excitedly reported plans for the ship to be raised and restored. “Who knows what remnants of Darwin’s trip may still lie down there?” Likely few. Beagle or not, rot would claim most of a wooden vessel that had settled into the bottom of a freshwater river. But even a few timbers, if somehow authenticated, would be treasured relics in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and marvelous to see. What ship, after Noah’s Ark, has carried so far-reaching a cargo?
Rear Admiral Robert FitzRoy was remembered and lamented by those who knew best what he had done. The naval hydrographer at the time of his death, Admiral George Henry Richards, was clear about FitzRoy’s contribution.
No naval officer ever did more for the practical benefit of navigation and commerce than he did, and did it too with a means and at an expense to the country which would now be deemed totally inadequate…. In a little vessel of scarcely over 200 tons, assisted by able and zealous officers under his command, many of whom were modelled under his hand and most of whom have since risen to eminence, he explored and surveyed the continent of South America….
The Strait of Magellan, until then almost a sealed book, has since, mainly through his exertions, become a great highway for the commerce of the world—the path of countless ships of all nations; and the practical result to navigation of these severe and trying labours, which told deeply on the mental as well as the physical constitution of more than one engaged, is shown in the publication to the world of nearly a hundred charts bearing the names of FitzRoy and his officers, as well as the most admirably compiled directions for the guidance of the seamen which perhaps was ever written, and which has passed through five editions….
His works…will be his most enduring monument, for they will be handed down to generations yet unborn.
Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, who had presented the returning captain of the Beagle with the society’s gold medal nearly thirty years before, told society members:
In deploring the loss of this eminent man who was truly esteemed by his former chief, the Prince of Naval Navigators, Sir Francis Beaufort, as by his successors, I may be allowed to suggest that if FitzRoy had not had thrown upon him the heavy and irritating responsibility of never being found at fault in any of his numerous forecasts of storms in our very changeful climate, his valuable life might have been preserved.
Apart from such appreciation, he was elsewhere quickly forgotten, remembered only, when remembered at all, for the name he gave to a most useful type of barometer, and by sailors for the rhymes in his Weather Book. He died in debt, his fortune exhausted. A collection was raised for Maria FitzRoy, to which Darwin contributed £100.
History—too often the reductive, diminishing view from the wrong end of a telescope—has known him, until recently, only as the facilitator, the lynchpin, for a far more famous man’s revolutionary idea, an idea FitzRoy thought an abomination.
Yet 137 years after his death, FitzRoy’s own work—his lonely, dogged, much ridiculed pursuit of an obsession with weather forecasting—was finally recognized by the British government’s Meteorological Office (which he created). At noon on Monday, February 4, 2002, sea area Finisterre off the northwest coast of Spain—one of the twenty-four sea areas first established by FitzRoy for his telegraphed weather reports—was renamed FitzRoy. The BBC now broadcasts radio weather forecasts, vital for shipping, for these sea areas three times every twenty-four hours.
Mariners listen for his name daily.