Captain Robert FitzRoy is in need of a dinner companion
Leadership can be a very lonely place – particularly so on board ship. Sea captains, unwilling to confide in or befriend subordinates lest it erode their authority, can find themselves horribly isolated. In the days of sail, when voyages could last months or even years, it could lead to mental breakdowns.
While preparing in the summer of 1831 for a voyage to survey the southern coastline of South America, Captain Robert FitzRoy advertised for a young man to join him as a companion. The successful candidate for the vacancy would take meals with him and in return provide conversation. FitzRoy had taken over his ship when the previous captain – two years into an expedition and aghast at the prospect of mapping the inhospitable coast around Tierra del Fuego – had fallen into a terrible depression, locked himself in his cabin for a fortnight and finally shot himself. Having cast around unsuccessfully for a friend to accompany him, FitzRoy threw the net out wider. The 26-year-old captain was keen to have a naturalist on board: someone who could study the land they encountered while he busied himself with surveying the sea. Therefore, he would only accept applications from gentlemen who were students of natural science. In the great tradition of internships – a tradition perhaps more ardently adhered to today than it has ever been – the position would be unpaid. The ship on which the two-year voyage would be taken was the HMS Beagle.
At the behest of his father – a doctor to the great and the good – Charles Darwin had started a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University in 1825. Unfortunately, he found he couldn’t stomach the dissections that were essential to his anatomy classes – he would literally run from the dissecting theatre to throw up outside. Thus his father reluctantly allowed him to switch to Plan B: a theology degree at Cambridge followed by a life as a parson. Without ever being inspired by his new subject, Darwin graduated in tenth place out of his class of over 150. More importantly, he fell in love at Cambridge: the object of his passion being insects, and particularly beetles. This brought him into the orbit of botany professor John Stevens Henslow. Having graduated, he had another two terms to spend at the university, and Henslow suggested he study geology under Professor Adam Sedgwick. This latter academic took Darwin on a geology field trip to Wales over the summer of 1831 and opened the 22-year-old’s eyes to the importance of scientific theory.
When Darwin returned home, there was a letter from Professor Henslow waiting for him. The missive informed him of FitzRoy’s need for a dining companion/naturalist and that he (Henslow) had recommended Darwin for the post. The reluctant parson was jubilant and immediately declared his enthusiasm for the project.
The only difficulty remained Darwin’s father, who was most displeased at the prospect of losing his son for two years on what he deemed ‘a wild scheme’ and ‘a useless undertaking’ that would prejudice his chances of becoming a clergyman and render him unlikely to want to ‘settle down to a steady life hereafter’. Darwin senior told his son he would only be won round if he ‘could find any man with common-sense who advises you to go’. Charles appealed to his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II (of the famous pottery family), whose opinion his father respected. Wedgwood answered his brother-in-law’s objections point by point and the paternal consent was duly acquired.
Even so, Charles Darwin still came close to missing out on the voyage, simply because Robert FitzRoy did not like the look of his face. The captain was a devotee of the renowned physiognomist Johann Lavater. In his autobiography, Darwin recalls that FitzRoy very nearly turned him down ‘on account of the shape of my nose! …[He] was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; & he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy & determination for the voyage.’ Thankfully, FitzRoy overcame his doubts and Darwin was recruited for the expedition.
The pair set sail from Plymouth in October. After two false starts, when bad weather forced her to return, the Beagle finally made it away across the Atlantic on 27 December 1831. In an unwelcome echo of his days in the dissecting theatre, Darwin was violently seasick for much of the time he was on the water. It was a relief to him, therefore, that FitzRoy was only too happy to allow him to carry out his researches on land while the Beagle sailed about surveying the coastline, returning from time to time to pick him up. This was just as well, because rather than the forecast two years, the voyage would end up lasting for nearly five.
The Beagle was a little ten-gun brig-sloop, one of about 100 Cherokee-class ships. The design had an unfortunate reputation for being difficult to manœuvre and predisposed to sink – neither of them ideal attributes for an ocean-going vessel. Despite this, FitzRoy successfully sailed her along vast tracts of South America’s coastline before heading home via New Zealand and Australia, arriving in the Cornish port of Falmouth on 2 October 1836.
Had FitzRoy preferred to dine alone, Darwin would not have travelled on the Beagle. As a result, it’s unlikely he would ever have visited the Galapagos Islands. Had that been the case, he would not have been able to study the Galapagos Island finches. He noticed that members of what appeared once to have been a single species of (what he called) finches differed from island to island in one major aspect: their bills seemed to have adapted themselves to take advantage of whatever food was available at each location. In the second edition of his book, The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1845 under the less snappy title Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the various countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle, etc., he noted:
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.
This was the seed that would grow into his theory of ‘natural selection’. It posited that organisms that enjoyed advantageous characteristics increased their chances of both surviving and reproducing. These characteristics would therefore have more chance of being passed on to future generations, and thus the species as a whole would evolve over time.
His master work, On the Origin of the Species, which he published in 1859, became one of the most important landmarks in scientific endeavour. Inevitably, it also caused a huge scandal for the way it appeared to take much of the work of creation out of the hands of God, and was thus condemned by many as blasphemous. It was for this reason that Darwin (who never became an atheist) had delayed making his theory public for well over a decade, the ideas behind it having crystallised in his mind way back in the 1840s. He was eventually rushed into publication when the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a paper in 1858 outlining his own thoughts. Wallace, quite separately, had reached the same conclusions as Darwin about natural selection.
When Darwin took the lessons he had learnt about evolution and applied them to Homo sapiens in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, the outcry became a howl. For good Bible-believing Christians, the possibility that humans had descended from apes was simply sacrilegious. It’s an irony that the Beagle’s own Captain FitzRoy was himself an ardent believer in the literal truth of the Scriptures and yet his voyage perhaps did more than anything before or since to undermine such a viewpoint.
By the time Charles Darwin died in 1882, his theories had established themselves in the mainstream of scientific life and had been widely accepted by the public. He was afforded a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey. And yet, if Captain FitzRoy had not been in need of a dinner companion, Darwin might well have seen out his years as an obscure country parson rather than becoming one of the most influential scientists who ever lived.