The Darwin Conspiracy (20 page)

He read over the page, frowned, ripped it from the book, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. Instead, he composed a letter to his sister Catherine, informing her, among an avalanche of other news, of McCormick’s departure, saying simply: “He’s no loss.”

That same night, McCormick sat in the bar of the Hotel Lapa drinking with Sulivan, the sole shipmate who hadn’t deserted him. The ex–ship’s surgeon was the worse for wear—four king-sized jugs lay empty before him—and he wasn’t sure the innkeeper would honor his demand for a room for the night. The parrot was on a nearby table, pecking at crumbs.

They had been speaking for some time and now McCormick’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial purr.

“The trick for you, mind, is to get your own command. Only way to survive in this God-forsaken navy—otherwise the captains grind you up like a millstone and . . . toss you to the wind.”

Sulivan nodded through the smoky haze. The words “your own command” had perked up his interest.

“But how is that to be done?” he inquired. “The ranks are filled with lieutenants and the wait is interminable.”

“Why, simply follow Captain FitzRoy’s example.”

“What? So arrange the world that the commanding officer blows his bloody brains out?”

“No, no, no. Prove your worth. Show your mettle.”

“Yes, but how?”

“The way Captain FitzRoy did—by impressing his commanding officer. Get hold of a sister ship. Show you can command her. Move into a position of authority and then acquit yourself so well that everyone applauds you. Wear your command like an admiral’s jacket.”

“All well and good, but we don’t have a sister ship.”

“Ah, that’s where you connive. You’re well acquainted with FitzRoy—

make him buy one, work on him, tell him how necessary it is for the success of the survey. Tell him we can’t begin to finish the soundings without it. He’s got the purse for it and he’s got the desire to do it. You’ll be shouldering against an open door.”

Sulivan was silent for a moment. The ploy might work, and in any case it couldn’t hurt. Should his pleadings fall upon deaf ears, at least they could be ascribed to enthusiasm for the mission.

“And, of course, there is an additional consideration,” McCormick said darkly.

“And what might that be?” asked Sulivan.

“You yourself alluded to it but a moment ago. I’m sure we would all agree that Captain FitzRoy is hardly the finest specimen of mental health. You’ve seen his moods—he sinks into a slough of despond at the slightest provocation. Should anything happen to him—well, let’s just say that would reshuffle all the cards in the deck.”

Sulivan stared across the table. “And what’s in it for you, pray tell?

You’re not even on board anymore.”

“Ah, but I could be persuaded to return. Especially if there were the prospect of another ship on the horizon. Another ship means another berth for a surgeon.”

“You’ll still have Philos to contend with.”

“But it would be so much easier with some seawater between us.”

“Perhaps Wickham would get to command the sister ship—he’s number two.”

“Then at the very least you ascend to number two on the
Beagle.

Hardly a downward move.”

Sulivan conceded: the man had a point.

“Buy me another ale and I’ll take your proposition to heart,” he said.

“One more consideration,” put in McCormick.

“Yes.”

“Should you become Captain, I would expect you to extend me all the traditional courtesies befitting a surgeon. That includes sole responsibility for specimen collections, which are to be sent home at Government expense.”

They said no more but touched their glasses in a silent toast that spilled not a drop.

It was weeks later when the
Beagle
returned from her local surveying to continue the southward journey. The crew was in mourning because three sailors had perished of illness during a snipe-shooting trip upriver.

Charles had his own reason for despair, but it was so petty by comparison that he could scarcely confess it: as he was waiting on the quay, he’d spotted McCormick’s luggage, piled for boarding, complete with parrot cage.

Blast it,
he said to himself.
I had thought I was done with that infernal man.

Minutes later the surgeon himself appeared, a congenial smile on his face, acting as if nothing had been amiss.

“I see you brought all your belongings,” said Charles. “Were you expecting a long shore leave?”

“Quite,” came the reply. “One never knows the duration of these charting expeditions, does one?”

Charles could think of no riposte.

That evening, with the ship underway and his stomach once again in distress, he supped with FitzRoy and raised the subject of McCormick’s departure and reappearance. At first the Captain seemed too preoccupied to answer, but then he frowned, waved his hand vaguely, and suddenly brightened, saying: “Ha, yes, he asked to come back, pleaded 
with me, actually, and I thought: why not, what’s the harm in it? And so by Jupiter, you see, here he is.”

Charles could not help looking crestfallen, so much so that FitzRoy leaned over to pat him on the arm.

“Don’t worry so, Philos—you’re still the
Beagle
’s naturalist. Your collections are swamping my decks and are being sent home at His Majesty’s expense. Am I not a man of my word—what? Do I not deserve some little mention years hence when you are a famed lecturer?”

Charles had to concede that FitzRoy had a valid point.

Some weeks later they entered the waters of Argentina, and they soon learned firsthand that the land was far more rugged and wild than any they had seen before. As the
Beagle
approached the harbor of Buenos Aires, an Argentinean guard ship fired a shot across her bow, enforcing, in a most unfriendly way, a quarantine. FitzRoy was beside himself with anger; he sailed past the vessel, threatening to blast it to kingdom come, and then moved on up to Montevideo, where he convinced a British man-of-war to head back to Buenos Aires to rectify the insult to the Union Jack.

No sooner had the warship left than the local chief of police, rowing frantically to the ship, clambered aboard to ask FitzRoy for help.

Negro soldiers had seized the town’s arsenal and were in full rebellion.

Charles, standing next to the Captain, felt his blood rise: at long last, a chance for action!

FitzRoy dispatched some fifty crewmen armed to the teeth, and Charles jumped in a boat to join them. Jamming his pistols into his belt, he couldn’t wait to reach shore. They marched through the dusty streets as a hoard of merchants rushed to their doorways and leaned out of windows to cheer. Grinning ear to ear, Charles felt a warm camaraderie with his shipmates. Looking behind, he spotted McCormick and was surprised to find the feeling of kinship extended even to him.

The two men smiled at each other. Charles raised a pistol in the air and mimicked firing it.

But the rebellion, sadly, quickly fizzled. The insurgents promptly gave up, and when the crew arrived at the arsenal, there was little to do but round up the prisoners and sniff around the fort for holdouts.

Come evening, they were cooking beefsteak over roaring fires in the courtyard. Still, wolfing down the sizzling red meat, Charles appreciated the few moments of exhilaration.

“If only they hadn’t given in,” he said ruefully to McCormick, who, with a cutlass slung from his belt, looked more dashing than Charles had thought possible. They shared a spot of rum.

For all its comic opera overtones, the adventure stirred Darwin’s spirit.

As the ship moved four hundred miles south to Bahia Blanc and began to survey the coastline in earnest, he spent his days on land. The pas-times of his youth played to his advantage. On horseback he roamed the windswept plains of the Pampas, shooting ostrich, deer, cavia, and guanaco. He brought fresh meat back to the Captain’s table and a grateful crew—no more dried beef and biscuit but instead armadillo roasted in its shell. He took to the outdoor life with passion, even venturing deep into territory where wild Indians were known to torture and kill foreign wayfarers.

He rode with the rugged
gauchos,
who admired his marksmanship, and tried to learn to sling
bolas,
the three rocks connected by strands of rawhide. One day he tripped up his own horse with the infernal weapon; that night, smoking a
cigarrito,
he wrote to his sister: “The
gauchos
roared with laughter; they cried they had seen every sort of animal caught, but had never before seen a man caught by himself.”

He hired a cabin boy, Syms Covington, to help with his shooting and skin his specimens. Now that he had a companion to witness his exploits, there was no stopping him. His blood was up and he was filled with a twenty-four-year-old’s conviction that great exploits and great discoveries awaited him.

And sure enough, one fine September day, when Charles, FitzRoy, McCormick (still unaccountably amiable), and two others were in a launch exploring the mudbanks of the coast, they made a significant find. They were rounding a headland, Punta Alta, when McCormick, alone facing the shore, yelled out: “I say, what’s that over there?” The others rushed to his side. He pointed to a mudbank some twenty feet high, in which curious white objects were embedded, rising up behind a forest of reeds. At first it looked like a quarry of purest marble, collaps
ing in on itself, gleaming in the sunlight. But when the launch pulled closer, they saw that it was something much more interesting—bones packed firmly inside the solidified silt.

Darwin leapt from the craft and waded to shore, parting the reeds with his cosh and sending crabs scurrying out of his path. By the time the others caught up with him, he was already deep into the embankment, which contained a soft sedimentary deposit of gravel and clay.

Forking out handfuls, he dug up to his elbows until finally, with a burst of energy, he pried loose a massive three-foot-long bone and held it up like a prize.

“By the lord Harry, what do you suppose it is?” he cried out. “A massive thigh bone of some sort? Do you think it possible—could it be a fossil?”

They looked around. Gigantic bones surrounded them, tusks and femurs and a rounded carapace, sticking out from the earth as if trapped there by a landslide. They were in a natural ossuary, and the fossilized bones were more than likely from an earlier era—they were much bigger than those of beasts walking the earth today. All afternoon they worked the graveyard, unearthing immense relics, which they left on the narrow beach before returning to the ship.

That evening Charles could talk of nothing else, speculating on what the bones might be, poring through books on zoology, biology, and paleontology, coming up with one theory, abandoning it for another, then circling back to it. Finally, after dinner, FitzRoy, amused at the mania that had seized his friend, pushed him out the cabin door, saying:

“You have the look of a man possessed who is likely to pace about ruminating all the night long. I require a respite. Wake me only if the bones come to life.”

The next morning, Charles returned with McCormick, who almost matched him in enthusiasm. Covington and a band of crewmen carried pickaxes. They labored through the day, stopping only for a meal of salt beef and biscuit, which Charles would have gladly forgone if the others could have. By dusk the two scientists conferred over an array of twenty bones laid out upon the sand. The two were in agreement: they were prehistoric and extinct. Though some bore a resemblance to living animals, like the common guanaco, they were two and three times their size. Charles thought one, a skull that took hours to dislodge, belonged
to a
Megatherium,
which he had once heard described in a lecture.

McCormick thought it might be a
Megalonyx
instead. Together, they tried to drum up the snatches of learning they retained from Edinburgh. Sitting there exhausted on the beach, their faces streaked with dirt and their beards caked with mud, they began smiling, then laughing. Charles loped up and down imitating a giant sloth. McCormick picked up a skull and drew it over his head, staggering around under the weight. The crew howled with laughter. On the ride back, Charles looked over at his companion and thought: He’s not such a bad bloke.

After a week, the main deck of the
Beagle
was so strewn about with fossils that it was difficult to walk from one end to the other. First Lieutenant Wickham grumbled about “the bedevilment” of his ship—

“turned as it is into some sort of museum”—but his consternation was feigned. Much of the crew was swept up by the enterprise. They listened attentively as Charles endlessly theorized as to what had driven the animals to extinction. He talked of changing habitats and mountains rising up and of an emerging landbridge in the isthmus between North and South America. FitzRoy roundly disagreed: they died out, he insisted during one of his on-board Sunday sermons, because they did not make it to Noah’s Ark.

Jemmy Button was for some reason especially excited by the bones.

He walked around touching them at every opportunity, and was heard to remark that he had seen such things before, close to his home village.

Charles marveled at how cleverly the savage succeeded in thrusting himself into the limelight.

After two weeks, FitzRoy put a stop to the excavation. It was time for the
Beagle
to move on. He was eager to resume his surveying and, not incidentally, to get on with his own project—transporting the Yamana Indians back to their native land and planting the seeds of Christianity in that forlorn part of the world.

The departure from Buenos Aires was rushed and complicated. Charles was eager to send the entire consignment of bones on a ship that was to leave for England the same day as the
Beagle
was to travel across the river to pick up supplies, including bottles and preserving spirits and walking boots that he himself had ordered. So he arranged for Edward

Lumb, an Englishman long in residence, to handle the transfer. Charles returned two days later to pay him and was relieved to learn that the shipment had left on schedule.