The Darwin Conspiracy (16 page)

Three days later, in a spirit of magnanimity, Charles put aside his antipathy for McCormick and invited him to accompany him on a trek into the interior. McCormick agreed, which was surprising, for he had barely been able to contain his jealousy as Charles took up more and more of the quarterdeck to air his specimens.

They had hardly set out when McCormick began complaining about the heat. To take his mind off it, Charles described a curious geological formation he had spotted on Quail Island, a horizontal band of white running through the rocky cliffside about thirty feet above ground; on closer inspection, it was revealed to be a compressed bed of shells and corals. Clearly it had once been part of the seabed. But what had happened to leave it in midair? He posed the question to McCormick.

The surgeon removed his hat and wiped his forehead. He said the answer was obvious. “At one time the seabed was there and so, self-evidently, the water has receded.”

Charles was skeptical. “The whole ocean?” he declared. “The volcanic islands themselves do not seem old enough to allow that as an explanation.”

“What other explanation is there?”

Charles presented his own theory, based on Lyell, that the cliffside had been propelled upward by violent activity beneath its base. The band was relatively stable, which suggested that the crustal movement causing it had been gradual and incremental, he said.

McCormick was horrified.

“The land moving up into the air? What—like a catapult? More clap-trap from you Cantabrigian heretics.”

He was silent a moment, then added a bitter afterthought: “And I must say it would have been much easier for me to provide an explanation if I had been privileged to view the island in question firsthand.”

Both men sulked. They were quiet for a full fifteen minutes, until 
they came upon a sprawling baobab tree whose trunk, sixteen feet across, was covered in carved initials. They sat under it to rest and drank water from a flagon Charles detached from a band across his shoulder.

“I suppose you know that Captain FitzRoy has taken your side,” said McCormick suddenly.

“My side? I beg to know to what you are referring.”

“Come, come. You dine with the man. You read in his cabin. You accompany him on expeditions. How can you possibly expect me to compete under such circumstances?”

“I had not realized we were in competition.”

“What’s more—as I’m certain you know—he’s upbraided me. He took me aside five days back and chastised me for upsetting you, for
presuming
—that was his exact word—that we were equals in our claims to exploration.” McCormick bit his lower lip, but whether it was from anger or sorrow, Charles could not tell.

“Can you, at the very least, do me some small favor?” he asked after a moment.

“Most assuredly.”

“Can you permit me to send out some specimens with your shipments? You are clearly going to be gathering such a multitude, I can hardly imagine you would begrudge me a tiny portion of the space.

Before signing on, I had thought this voyage would afford me the opportunity to make my name as a collector.”

Charles thought before answering. He did not want to commit himself to a course he might later regret. But McCormick’s lugubrious face moved his sense of Christian charity. He clapped the man upon the shoulder and said with a false joviality: “Of course! But mind you, within reason.”

“Within reason.”

At that, the two relaxed and fell into argument over the dimensions of the baobab tree, with Charles claiming that it was quite tall and McCormick asserting that it simply appeared so because its girth threw off the mind’s perception. They placed a bet upon the matter.

Several days later, an incident occurred that unsettled Charles more than anything that had happened so far. He and McCormick, still bound by their recent truce, went hiking. They walked across a plateau 
as flat as a tabletop and came to Flag Staff Hill, a promontory noted chiefly for the wild area surrounding it. North of the hill they found a narrow ravine that descended about two hundred feet. After searching for quite a while, they discovered a steep rocky path that led to the bottom, and they followed it.

The dell they penetrated was a world apart, filled with a profusion of vegetation. Vines ran the width of the ravine; trees grew from the rocky ledges, heavy with succulent creepers. Hawks and ravens, disturbed by the interlopers, darted unnervingly close to them, cawing and scolding.

At one point a bird of paradise flew up from a hidden nest, disappearing in the gap of blue sky now far above.

Charles felt unaccountably nervous as they descended into the gloom, as if they were blundering into the lair of some unknown beast.

He was not accustomed to such superstitious thoughts and tried in vain to shake off the feeling. Then he heard McCormick, reaching the bottom of the fissure, give out a yelp. He rushed to the spot and found him staring down at an assortment of bones, some with bits of meat still upon them.

“From goats, I warrant,” said McCormick. “There must be a large animal about.”

They resolved to explore. Charles, readying his gun, took one end of the ravine and McCormick the other. They were working their way toward the center when Charles heard a sound and turned in time to see McCormick no more than ten feet away, his rifle pointing straight at him. A look of cold calculation played upon his face.

“For God’s sake, man!” shouted Charles, looking into the gun barrel.

At that moment, the barrel swerved and Charles heard a rustling behind him and the crack of the gun. Turning, he saw something—
a flash of color, the hind leg of an animal bounding into the opening of a cave. He surmised that it was a large cat.

They hurried to climb the path, and when they reached the open air, Charles breathed a sigh of relief. He felt that he had narrowly escaped a brush with death, though from which quarter—man or animal—was hard to say.

The following day, an expedition made its way to the baobab tree.

FitzRoy measured the tree twice, using a pocket sextant and then climbing to the top to let down string. Both methods agreed on the conclusion: the tree was nowhere near as tall as it appeared. FitzRoy drew a rough sketch to prove the point, and McCormick, exulting in his victory over Charles, made a show of demanding his money on the spot.

As Charles fished in his trousers to hand over a coin, he again spied that cold look upon his antagonist’s face.

But he was even more troubled by what happened next. As they were walking back to the launch, McCormick sidled over to him and said, with superficial camaraderie: “By the by, I happened to visit Quail Island yesterday and I spotted that rock formation you mentioned.

Curious, isn’t it? I do expect your theory as to its formation is correct.”

Charles was surprised that he had come around so quickly.

“And did you notice,” McCormick continued, “that the shells in the band were the same as those to be found on the beach?”

Charles had not noticed. “What of it?” he replied, a bit defensively.

“To me that indicates that whatever geological activity may have caused it to rise—a quake, say, or some other shifting of the earth—must have occurred relatively recently.”

“Now it is my turn to salute you,” said Charles, touching his hat.

“Undoubtedly, you are correct.”

His words were gracious but his thoughts were less so. This man is no fool, he said to himself. He learns his lesson quickly and he expands upon it to an improvement. We must ensure that the student does not surpass the master.

After twenty-three days in Cape Verde, during which time FitzRoy fixed the position of the islands with exactitude, the
Beagle
hoisted sail again.

As they moved ever southward, the temperature rose by the day.

Charles, still nauseous most of the time, now also felt drugged by the torpor, remarking to King that the sensation was like being “stewed in melted butter.”

They stopped briefly at St. Paul’s Rocks off the coast of Brazil to stock up on fresh food. FitzRoy and Charles took a whaleboat to the island, where they had a grand time. The birds were so tame, the crewmen could walk right up and club them. They even grabbed some with their bare hands. A second launch, carrying McCormick, went to join in but was waved away. Instead, it plied the harbor for fish; the sailors
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threw out their lines and pulled in groupers, wielding their oars to fight off pillaging sharks.

Finally, the
Beagle
came to the Equator. As might be expected, Charles had heard various tales of the ancient ceremony, replete with schoolboy pranksterism, called “crossing the line.” But none of his shipmates would be specific; quite the contrary, they had delighted in teasing him by keeping their allusions vague yet threatening. Still, he was not prepared on February 16 when he and thirty-two other “griffins”—
novices—were confined to the lower deck with the hatchways battened down, leaving their prison dark and stiflingly hot. Charles had caught a glimpse of the forecastle and he was convinced they had all gone mad: FitzRoy, dressed as Father Neptune, complete with toga and trident, presided over a tribe of half-naked, painted men, dancing wildly to flutes and drums.

The hatchway opened and four of Neptune’s constables descended.

They made directly for Charles and grabbed him by the shoulders and legs. After stripping him to the waist, they blindfolded him and led him to the upper deck. The air resounded with chants and the boards shook with the thud of pounding feet. Buckets of water were tossed over him, so that he could scarcely breathe. He was led to a plank and forced to stand on it.

Then his face and mouth were lathered with pitch and paint, and he was “shaved” with a rusty piece of iron hoop. He felt bits of his beard pulled out. Then at a signal—from FitzRoy, no doubt—he felt himself twirled upside down, landing in a sail filled with seawater. There two men dunked him, one of them handling him roughly. He gasped for air, was dunked again, held under for what seemed like minutes, and just as he felt about to drown, was allowed to surface, sprouting from the water like a breaching whale. The initiation was over. It had been one of the most terrifying experiences of his life.

Charles was tossed a towel and he dried himself. The deck was awash in water, paint, and soapsuds, so slippery he had to grab the rigging. He stayed on to watch the others and thought that most of them were treated even more roughly than he had been, except for the final dunking, which in his case had been far worse. He then noticed that one of the two bullies standing knee-deep in the sail, his forearms glistening with sweat and seawater, was McCormick.

That night Charles felt he himself had crossed a Rubicon. He knew that the crew accepted him, that he was one of them. They had always admired his marksmanship when he brought down a bird with a single shot and now they laughed good-naturedly whenever he rushed on deck to catch sight of dolphins or some other sea creatures.

Standing near the bow and feeling the warm breeze in his face, Charles looked up at the sky and spotted the Southern Cross. Abruptly he realized that he had come to a decision without even realizing it. He had decided not to abandon the voyage but to remain on HMS
Beagle,
come what may. He was in it to the end. There was no place on earth he would rather be than on this ten-gun, ninety-foot vessel crammed with seventy-four souls whose seagoing valor he had come to appreciate and whose fellowship he had come to value—all, that is, save for one.

The more Hugh read Lizzie’s journal, the more enigmatic it became.

Why did Darwin act so strangely? Why did he hightail it away from the dinner table at the mere mention of that famous phrase “survival of the fittest”? And what to make of that conversation between Huxley and Lyell about Alfred Russel Wallace? This last—if true—was especially intriguing because it flew in the face of history: scholars all agreed that Wallace accepted his position as junior author of the theory of evolution with quiet deference, a tugging of the forelock; that he was “content to be moon to Darwin’s sun,” as one writer put it. But this new information suggested the opposite. Wallace seemed to be causing trouble, acting “high-handed” and posing some kind of threat. Lyell and Huxley had ganged up to oppose him. But
was
it true? A snippet of gossip overheard by a high-strung young woman was hardly a foundation on which to build a radically new analysis of the key people around Darwin.

That night, Hugh had fallen asleep without finishing the journal.

He awoke late, jumped in a cab to the station, caught a train to King’s Cross, and took the Underground to South Kensington. He walked to the Cromwell Road, passed through the wrought-iron gate, and strode up the curved walkway toward the Natural History Museum.

The majestic building with its fine, handcrafted bricks rose before him. He savored the irony: Richard Owen, the brilliant comparative anatomist, was so blinded by ambition that he could not open his eyes to the overpowering truth of what Darwin and Huxley were saying; he 
became their bitter foe, ridiculing their assertions, which after all could not be empirically tested. As superintendent of the Natural History departments of the British Museum, he drew up plans for this spectacular temple to the glory of science and raised money to see it through; yet his name was engraved nowhere on it. And then in 2002, within the facade arose a new seven-floor annex to house zoology specimens: the Darwin Centre.

Amazing how Darwin always got the last laugh, Hugh thought.

Inside the cavernous main hall half a dozen children stared wide-eyed at an animated
Tyrannosaurus rex.
The central staircase swept upward and spread onto the mezzanine like a fan. Arches picked up conversations and threw them fifty feet across the lobby. From the reception desk Hugh called administration, where a public affairs officer eventually put him in touch with an assistant curator who agreed to see him.

Her name was Elizabeth Fallows and she greeted Hugh warmly, rising from her desk of piled papers and cat skeletons to pump his hand.