The Darwin Conspiracy (37 page)

He thought of Beth, how she was his guide through all of this, in dealing with the revelations both about Cal and about Darwin. In his mind, the two searches were coming together, weaving into a single strand. He smiled as he recalled how excited she had been when she returned from Nuneaton with copies of George Eliot’s letters. She had prepared a picnic in Parker’s Piece and there read them to him with dramatic inflection, between sips of wine, from time to time combing her hair with her fingers. The final letter, she said, was unspeakably sad, and she had given it to him to take home and read later.

Back in his room, Hugh again felt a rush of admiration for Darwin, 
the admiration that had sustained him during those horrible months in the Galápagos, before he had read Lizzie’s diary. Neville was right. Darwin’s gift—his genius—was more than doggedness; it was that uncanny ability to step back, take the broadest possible view, and make connections that others could not, so that a
pattern
appeared. He
deduced
things: how mountains formed, how creatures evolved, how the world as he knew it came into being over immeasurable eons. He was able to immerse himself in deep time. How did that pattern spring into place, appearing before him like some fully formed retinal image, the connections suddenly made? How had he done it?

Perhaps the genius lay elsewhere; perhaps it emanated from the work itself, the obsession with detail. How else could a man be riveted by barnacles for eight years when a world-shaking theory was bubbling up within him? And the work told him something. Roland had been right: the barnacles Darwin examined so assiduously had been hermaphroditic; the very first had two little orange penises. Darwin, intrigued—and perhaps horrified—realized that sexual identity had evolved slowly and was not fixed, as the Church would have us believe. Would God work from such a plan? The microcosm and the macrocosm. That’s how the pattern is formed. Not just by connecting the dots, as the saying has it, but by being able to
see
the dots.

Hugh opened a desk drawer and pulled out some sketches from the
Beagle
that he had printed off the Internet. There were drawings of the crew, people he had come to know: Captain FitzRoy, brave and haunted; Lieutenant Wickham, jaunty in a naval cap; Philip Gidley King, striking a Byronic pose; Jemmy Button, round-faced and inscru-table; the teenage missionary Matthews, with a moonlike face and long stringy hair.

He stared at a pair of watercolors of the ship by Conrad Martens.

One showed the
Beagle
anchored at Papeete in Tahiti, a tiny gash of brown in a peaceful harbor surrounded by palms. The other was of a cluster of ships at rest in Dawes Point, Sydney, some with their sails unfurled, ready to catch the wind.

And then it struck him. He thought back to the sketch of Darwin and McCormick standing on either side of the tree. In an instant he understood its significance. Of course! That was its secret. That was what Lizzie had grasped right away.
How stupid not to have thought of it.

He reached into the drawer and pulled out the drawing. The key

wasn’t
where
the sketch had been made; it was
who
had made it. The artist was Conrad Martens, not Augustus Earle, and Martens had joined the voyage only halfway through, in Montevideo.

So there it was! Proof positive that McCormick didn’t abandon ship in Rio, after all. He had remained on board, Darwin’s rival to the end—
jealous, ambitious, unscrupulous. And Darwin had lied about it. Lizzie was right: her father, for some unknown reason, had engaged in a monstrous deception. But why?

The last day in the Galápagos was to prove, for Charles and FitzRoy, the tragic centerpiece of the
Beagle
’s entire voyage. But no one among the crew was to know what really transpired, or could have guessed how crucial the day would become to the futures of those concerned.

That morning Charles, FitzRoy, and McCormick took a boat to Albemarle, the largest island, to explore volcanoes. They had been watching them from a distance, fascinated by the line of smoke trailing high into the sky and the intermittent belches of fire.

Albemarle had five volcanoes, and the largest of them—Wolf—was active. For days it had been rumbling and trembling. That morning they had looked on in fascination as it sent up a roiling white cloud that rose to a height of some ten thousand yards and then spread across the sky like a vast collapsing tent. A breeze brought a dust of fine ash that settled over the
Beagle,
turning her white.

Charles was eager to get as close as possible to a crater to bring back rock samples more intriguing than the common tuff that littered the base of the cones. FitzRoy, still shaky after his nervous collapse, was keen for an exploit that would prove his mettle; and for his part, McCormick was not about to let Charles attain any glory without him.

Four crewmen rowed them to the island and beached the boat. They were under orders to remain there until the three returned, but it was clear they were anxious to leave. The fact that the bay’s surface was marked by thousands of ripples, as if the water itself were about to break into a boil, did little to soothe their nerves.

The moment Charles crossed the beach, he realized that something 
was odd, but it was not until he reached the treeline and turned to look back that he could pinpoint what it was: there were no sea lions on the sand—in fact, no sign of any animal life of any sort, not even birds. It was dead quiet except for the intermittent rumbling from deep within the volcano.

They searched for a path up the slope and finally decided to follow a dry riverbed. The jumble of rocks made it difficult to find footing, but at least there were no branches and vines to impede them. After an hour or so, the trail was covered with ferns and small bushes of lantana, whose white flowers had been seared brown by heat.

FitzRoy led the way, setting a vigorous pace. Charles came next, carrying his usual assortment of implements: a pocket microscope, a compass, a geological hammer, and his cosh, tucked inside his belt.

McCormick brought up the rear, carrying the lunch and breathing heavily.

Finally, they came to a clearing on the slope. Far below they could see a lagoon enclosed at the far end by black lava flow. Beyond that was the sea, and off in the distance, looking tiny, the
Beagle.
Charles claimed that the lagoon was itself once the cone of a volcano.

“I say,” he added. “Look at this.” He had extracted his compass and placed it on a rock. They could see the needle moving wildly, not turning to register true north, but trembling and spinning in all directions.

“The volcano is disturbing the magnetic field,” he said.

“Do you feel the vibrations?” asked McCormick, who was seated, his hands palms down on the ground. He sounded nervous.

Charles sat and instantly felt the tremors, though he soon realized they were not just coming from deep within the earth but seemed to exist in the very air around them. Atmospheric disturbance of this sort, he had once read, was a sign of volcanic eruption.

From McCormick’s bag FitzRoy pulled out a thick slab of salted beef, cut it into slices with his hunting knife, and passed them around, followed by a loaf of bread from which they tore off pieces.

“We may well require Dutch courage,” he added with a laugh, pouring generous glasses of red wine.

Tired, they were reluctant to resume the trek right away. FitzRoy kept pouring more wine until they had finished two bottles. Then he reclined, his head upon a log, his hat pulled down over his face.

After some time, Charles opened his eyes. FitzRoy and McCormick lay motionless, sleeping. He believed the tremors had grown stronger.

He noticed a smell of burning sulfur in the air. On the slope behind, he spotted a hardened flow of lava. He scrambled up, struck the lava with his hammer, and uncovered a vein of smooth, dark obsidian. He chipped off a piece and slipped it into his pocket.

Clambering back down, he saw that McCormick was awake. The two exchanged looks. With a nod of his head, Charles gestured to the summit. Without a word, McCormick stood and nodded yes. They traipsed off together, leaving FitzRoy asleep. All around them, the tremors increased.

After an hour, they reached the top of the crater. The heat rose in vibrating waves that reddened their faces and forced them to take short breaths. They peered down in amazement, past an outpouring of sulfurous smoke and ash, into the deep, dish-shaped basin. A shiny black crust undulated around the edge. In the center a miasmic lake of molten red and yellow lava bubbled, emitting a column of smoke and periodically a loud booming noise.

There was a ledge twenty feet below that contained rocks unlike any Charles had ever seen—deep, black andesite, the sort of rock the ancients must have found in Vesuvius. He saw it was possible to reach them. The inside of the crater wall was not sheer. One could walk down partway and below that were ample footholds. It could be done.

What explorer had ever dared to attempt such an adventure?

The sailors on the beach had lost their fright some time back, growing bored instead. They wandered up and down the beach, careful not to venture too far from the boat, then devised various games to pass the time, including a javelin throw with long pieces of driftwood. Finally, they just lay down in the shade and waited.

The first crack brought them up short. It sounded like a cannonball, only louder and closer. Nervously, they turned to search the horizon for the
Beagle.
She remained where she had been all along, anchored at the outer reaches of the bay.

They next felt the vibrations, an unsettling sense of the earth not quite solid underfoot. Then another resounding crack came from 
above, accompanied by a burst of smoke. The volcano sent a shower of pumice that landed on the beach like hailstones, followed by clouds of ash, floating down like snow.

The crew members debated what to do. They could hardly abandon the Captain, but they readied the boat for departure, pushing it out into the water. Three sailors sat inside it and the fourth remained on land, holding the rope. They waited there in that position for quite a while, not knowing what else to do.

At last they saw two figures careening down the slope, reaching the beach, running across the sand—the Captain and Philos. The sailors stared. There was no third.

The two made it to the boat just as another crack resounded in the sky, foreshadowing the next eruption. As they fell inside the craft, much agitated and out of breath, the Captain barked out an order: “Depart!

Depart at once!”

They were halfway to the
Beagle
when one of the sailors dared to ask, “But what of Mr. McCormick?” The others leaned forward to hear Charles’s answer, which was soft under any circumstances but especially so with the volcano rumbling above.

“Perished.”

That evening, when Charles and FitzRoy dined alone in the Captain’s cabin, both men were silent throughout most of the meal. Finally, Charles, who was still too agitated to eat, threw his napkin upon the table and spoke in a voice that was unconvincingly calm.

“I am not sure it would serve anyone’s purpose to recount what transpired here today. The man had a horrid death and his family would be most upset to read about it in detail—that is to say, when it comes time for us to write up the narratives of our voyage. Do you not agree?”

FitzRoy looked at him, carefully reading his face.

“In the general scheme of things, it is scarcely more than a footnote,” 
continued Charles. “As far as the Admiralty is concerned, you must of course inform them. But you could always do so . . . judiciously.”

FitzRoy remained silent. He had detected a new authority in his messmate.

“I presume you’ve told them he invalided back in Rio.”

“I did.”

“And that the order was countermanded.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was a ghastly way to end one’s life. I’m afraid I cannot help but feel responsible.”

“No, you must not blame yourself,” replied the Captain. “I am sure you did everything you were capable of.”

The
Beagle
set sail early the next morning, heading west at a speedy clip of 150 miles a day. The remainder of her circumnavigational voyage around the world was uneventful.

At long last, on a rainy Sunday, the ship sailed up the English Channel to Falmouth. FitzRoy ordered a final service on board to render thanks to God for a safe homecoming. He had to hold it belowdecks because of the inclement weather. The rain pounded down on the boards inches above the crew’s heads as the Captain read passages from Genesis, including one on Adam and Eve and God’s wrath when he discovered their sin:
What is this that thou hast done?

The date was 2 October 1836.

30 May 1878

My dear Mary Ann,

I have not written in the longest time, for which I apologise. I have no
excuse—certainly not that my life has been too busy. Far from it, I have little
to occupy my days. I have stopped giving my readings to the women at Highgate and stay close to Down House. Mamma, Papa and I have fallen into a
rhythm that never varies and that has the contradictory effect of both slowing
time down and speeding it up. We rise at seven in the morning and dine at
noon. At ten-thirty every night, after two games of Backgammon and a pinch
of snuff, Papa blows his nose—one could set one’s watch by it—then he slowly
mounts the stairs and we all retire. I find pleasure in little things and lose
myself for hours on end in my musings. I will provide you with an example.

Today at noon I accompanied Papa along the Sandwalk. It had been a
while since we took this tour together. As always, we walked through the
garden to the back of our property, turned left through the wooden door in
the high hedge and then began to traverse the path. For some reason I was in
a most nostalgic mood and began thinking back upon the distant past. Perhaps there was something in the play of sunlight that prompted my thoughts.