Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [43]
There’s no way to go on
And there’s no turning back
Nowhere to run
Nowhere to hide
I’m torn inside.
In fact, Darwin did complain frequently about his insides in Tierra del Fuego—with the bad weather and choppy seas, he was constantly seasick.
I knew that the play’s take wasn’t particularly historically accurate and wasn’t particularly surprised, since these are fairly easy assumptions about Darwin and the Beagle voyage. In fact, it’s probably easier to present this material —see point 3, above, “gringo tourists do not understand much about Darwin”—than to risk audience cognitive dissonance by trying to tell what actually happened.
Probably more exciting, too. Because in real life, the drama-worthy conflict on the Beagle was man versus the elements, which is hard to render in musical format. (Although if you’ve got twenty-foot-tall sloth bones singing, why not the snow gods?) Far from being a biblical literalist, the real FitzRoy wanted Darwin to study science. “Anxious that no opportunity of collecting useful information, during the voyage, should be lost; I proposed to the hydrographer that some well-educated and scientific person should be sought,” FitzRoy wrote in his Narrative. He had outfitted the ship with the very latest in scientific equipment and took a strong interest in Darwin’s discoveries. Although FitzRoy later became a staunch critic of The Origin of Species, standing up at one meeting with Bible in hand to say that he “regretted the publication of Mr. Darwin’s book,” there is little evidence to suggest he was particularly religious while on board. Darwin remembered that FitzRoy “became very religious” after the voyage and that in his own case, “I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers . . . for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.”
FitzRoy might have made the voyage even without the Admiralty’s backing—he had outfitted a ship and was ready to do so when they stepped in—because he had another important task: to return three captured indigenous people from Tierra del Fuego to their homeland.
Darwin’s was the second voyage of the Beagle to South America. The first trip departed England in 1825 under the command of Captain Pringle Stokes. Like many other travelers, Stokes found Patagonia dreadfully dull. Faced with the idea of more time there, he shot himself. FitzRoy was his flag lieutenant, and he took over the Beagle and set off to survey Tierra del Fuego. Almost immediately, a group of Fuegians stole one of his whale-boats. FitzRoy gave chase but never recovered the whale-boat and instead took hostages, hoping that this would force its return. Much to his surprise, however, the Fuegians appeared satisfied with that bargain. He later traded another family some beads and buttons for a boy, and, with four indigenous people on board, FitzRoy seized on the idea that he would take them back to London with him, have them educated, and return them a few years later. He gave the three men and one woman the names York Minster, Boat Memory, James Button, and Fuegia Basket, and soon they were meeting the queen, ice-skating, and learning to eat with utensils.
Although Boat Memory died of an illness shortly after arriving in England in 1830, the others boarded the Beagle with Darwin a year later and set off for South America, along with a missionary, to convert their friends back home. “Jemmy” Button was the “universal favourite,” according to Darwin, and he remembered Jemmy sympathizing with his seasickness. “He used to come to me and say in a plaintive voice, ‘Poor, poor fellow!’” Darwin wrote. “But the notion, after his aquatic life, of a man being sea-sick, was too ludicrous, and he was generally obliged to turn on one side to hide a smile or laugh.” York Minster, the oldest of the group, was mostly quiet and reserved; Darwin described him as “taciturn” but “violently