The Red Notebook

I was just re-watching an old BBC TV documentary about the hunt for the final resting place of HMS Beagle. At one point, they showed this remarkable photograph (apologies for the poor quality: it’s a frame-grab from a VHS tape showing a close-up from a book):

HMS Kangaroo, Paglesham Marshes, Essex

HMS Kangaroo was one of HMS Beagle‘s sister ships, and, by a pleasing co-incidence, finished her days just like Beagle, as a static customs and excise watch vessel in Paglesham Marshes, Essex. The documentary explained how researchers have now pinpointed the exact location in the marshes at which Beagle‘s remains lie buried.

HMS Kangaroo‘s figurehead

As far as I know, no photographs survive of Darwin’s Beagle—if, indeed, any were ever taken. So this could well be the closest we shall ever come to seeing the original Beagle in all her faded glory. Until they dig up her remains from the marshes, it is to be hoped. (Note to would-be Beagle excavators: I am a trained archaeologist, and have my own trowel.)

But there was something in particular that delighted me about this photograph of HMS Kangaroo. Previously, I have mused wistfully about whether Beagle had a figurehead in the shape of a beagle. Now, I am convinced she must have. For there, in plain view on this wonderful old photograph, is very clearly a figurehead in the shape of a kangaroo.

If Kangaroo had a kangaroo, then Beagle must have had a beagle. It stands to reason!

Postscript:

It would seem that HMS Kangaroo was not the only one of Beagle’s sister ships to end her days on the Essex marshes. More here.

Charles Darwin never comes across as a particularly red-blooded male with regards to his appreciation of the fairer sex. True, there was the brief relationship with Fanny Owen in his pre-Beagle days—a relationship which seems never to have got much further than some slightly flirty correspondence. And I remember, when visiting Down House, reading with delight on the page that happened to be open in his Beagle diary that day, some rather yearnful comments regarding the Spanish ladies of Buenos Ayres.

But then Darwin came home and married his cousin, having decided that a wife would be better than a dog, the hopeless romantic.

And that’s about it. Charles Darwin remained a happily married man for the rest of his days, casting never so much as a glance at any woman other than his beloved Emma.

Or so I thought…

Then, I came across the following in a letter Darwin wrote to his eldest son, William, and I began to see old Charlie in a new light:

Aunt Catherine comes here for fortnight next Monday.— Mammie & Lizzie are gone to lunch today with the Normans; as we declined a dinner invite, which the beautiful Miss Norman brought us.—

Charles, you old rogue! You’re old enough to be her father! Shame on you! But seriously, though, good on you, mate! I was starting to get a bit worried about you.

An editorial footnote to the letter explains: In a letter written shortly before this one, Emma Darwin told William: ‘… Papa admires Miss N[orman]. very much, which I do not she smiles too constantly & a smile is never a sweet one that is constant’.

Sour grapes, Emma?

See also: Books – The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, volume 7: 1858–1859

The geneticist Steve Jones has written a typically entertaining, albeit belated, review of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle in today’s Wall Street Journal:

The joy of the journey was that it had a point. Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux have each written great travel books about South America—but why, in the end, did they bother? The smell of the agent, the contract and the advance hangs around their pages, but for Darwin (who was in no need of money) every paragraph exudes instead the heady scent of discovery.

Exactamundo, Prof. J! And, with his trademark mix of science and humour, Jones notes:

On the island of James he [Darwin] “lived entirely on tortoise meat… the young tortoises make excellent soup.” In those lumbering creatures, Darwin saw, without realizing it at the time, his first hint of evolution, for animals from James were subtly distinct from those on Indefatigable and Albemarle nearby. In a rare conjunction of taxonomy with gastronomy, he noted that the James specimens were “rounder, blacker, and had a better taste when cooked”—which at the time seemed little more than a curiosity but was in fact his introduction to the biology of change.

The review is well worth reading in its entirety.

On 21st February, 1854, Charles Darwin wrote to his old HMS Beagle midshipman shipmate, Philip Gidley King, who was now living in Australia:

My dear King

I can hardly tell you how pleased I was, about a week ago, to receive your letter dated the 26^th. of October. I lead a rather solitary life, & in my walks very often think over old days in the Beagle, & no days rise pleasanter before me, than sitting with you on the Booms, running before the trade wind across the Atlantic.

Reminiscing two decades after the event about sitting with a friend high above the deck of a tall ship with a trade wind in your hair. What better reason could there possibly be for building a new Beagle?

The Beagle Project‘s Peter McGrath, FCD, has a great post about visiting the Woolwich Dockyard where HMS Beagle was built. He was accompanied by a couple of other Beagle groupies. Photos and a radio programme are to follow.

I am consumed with jealousy yet again.

Postscript: Peter’s photos are now online.

[For any non-Brits out there, the title of this post is a reference to a poem by William Blake, which was turned into a rather magnificent yet jingoistic hymn.]

On this date in 1833, whilst in the Falkland Islands, Capt. Robert FitzRoy bought a schooner to accompany HMS Beagle:

Captain FitzRoy’s Journal: 9th March, 1833

At this time I had become more fully convinced than ever that the Beagle could not execute her allotted task before she, and those in her, would be so much in need of repair and rest, that the most interesting part of her voyage—the carrying a chain of meridian distances around the globe—must eventually be sacrificed to the tedious, although not less useful, details of coast surveying…

I had often anxiously longed for a consort, adapted for carrying cargoes, rigged so as to be easily worked with few hands, and able to keep company with the Beagle; but when I saw the Unicorn, and heard how well she had behaved as a sea-boat, my wish to purchase her was unconquerable…

FitzRoy’s decision to buy Unicorn, which he promptly renamed Adventure, was to earn him a sharp, long-distance reprimand from the Admiralty. This reprimand was probably a factor in FitzRoy’s subsequent nervous breakdown later in the voyage.

But FitzRoy’s unapproved purchase of the schooner meant that he was indeed able to achieve far more surveying work during the Beagle voyage.

Darwin’s Beagle Diary, 8th September, 1832

… The Gauchos were very civil & took us to the only spot where there was any chance of water. — It was interesting seeing these hardy people fully equipped for an expedition. — They sleep on the bare ground at all times & as they travel get their food; already they had killed a Puma or Lion; the tongue of which was the only part they kept; also an Ostrich, these they catch by two heavy balls, fastened to the ends of a long thong. — They showed us the manner of throwing it; holding one ball in their hands, by degrees they whirl the other round & round, & then with great force send them both revolving in the air towards any object. — Of course the instant it strikes an animals legs it fairly ties them together.

Darwin later had a go at throwing bolas himself. He described his attempt in chapter 3 of The Voyage of the Beagle:

One day, as I was amusing myself by galloping and whirling the balls round my head, by accident the free one struck a bush, and its revolving motion being thus destroyed, it immediately fell to the ground, and, like magic, caught one hind leg of my horse; the other ball was then jerked out of my hand, and the horse fairly secured. Luckily he was an old practised animal, and knew what it meant; otherwise he would probably have kicked till he had thrown himself down. The Gauchos roared with laughter; they cried out that they had seen every sort of animal caught, but had never before seen a man caught by himself.

Darwin brought his bolas home with him. They can still be seen on display at Down House.

(via Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary weblog)

I’ve just finished reading HMS Beagle: Survey Ship Extraordinary by Karl Heinz Marquardt. It really is one for the nerdy Darwin completist, but magnificent nevertheless.

I had hoped the book might settle a question that I have wondered about for a number of years: did HMS Beagle have a figurehead? Sadly, Marquardt is unable to answer the question categorically:

The question of the figurehead is another unresolved matter. One school of thought asserts that the utilitarian character of those small brigs, without real embellishment anywhere, warrants only a scroll whilst the other suggests a carved figurehead. Both opinions have their merits and can be documented with surviving models of the 18-gun Cruizer class brig. While C Martens’ watercolours and pencil drawings are too sketchy to get a clear indication of a figurehead, the O Stanley watercolour of HMS Beagle in Sydney Harbour and P G King’s longitudinal sketch suggest an animal, probably a dog.

It’s strange that Marquardt doesn’t go on to point out that, if the suggested figurehead were indeed a dog, it would almost certainly be a beagle. Although I’m probably reading far too much into this omission, it makes me suspect that Marquardt really might think the feature shown in the pictures looks like a dog, and that he isn’t simply wishfully (and wistfully) imagining a dog, based on the ship’s name. If so, the fact that the ship’s name was Beagle would seem to corroborate Marquardt’s guess at a dog—and lend support to those who say the ship would have had a figurehead!

But that’s probably just wishful (and wistful) thinking on my behalf.

Charles Darwin to Frederick Watkins, 18-Aug-1832:

At Buenos Ayres, a shot came whistling over our heads; it is a noise I had never before heard, but I found I had an instinctive knowledge of what it meant. The other day we landed our men here [Montevideo] & took possession at the request of the inhabitants of the central fort. We Philosophers do not bargain for this sort of work and I hope there will be no more.

Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary describes the eventful day of 5th August, 1832 in more detail.

(via The Beagle Project Blog)

HMS “Beagle”: Survey Ship Extraordinary
Amazon UK|US
(Or, better still, order it from your local bookshop.)

My copy of HMS Beagle: Survey Ship Extraordinary by Karl Heinz Marquardt has just arrived through the post. Many thanks to Peter at the Beagle Project for the tip off.

The book is really aimed at model-makers, and might come in handy to that end when I retire, but it’s also packed with research and illustrations of great interest to us Darwin groupies. My partner Jen shook her head in resigned disbelief when she saw what I’d ordered, and went off to do a Sudoku.

Oh, and it could also come in extremely handy if you were—oh, I don’t know—planning to build a working replica of HMS Beagle, or something truly magnificent like that.

From Darwin’s Beagle Diary, 1st April, 1832:

April 1^st

All hands employed in making April fools. — at midnight almost nearly all the watch below was called up in their shirts; carpenters for a leak: quarter masters that a mast was sprung. — midshipmen to reef top-sails; All turned in to their hammocks again, some growling some laughing. — The hook was much too easily baited for me not to be caught: Sullivan cried out, “Darwin, did you ever see a Grampus: Bear a hand then”. I accordingly rushed out in a transport of Enthusiasm, & was received by a roar of laughter from the whole watch. —

They must have had a whale of a time aboard HMS Beagle.

The Beagle Project gets some great publicity in the Times.

This thing is really going to happen. I feel it in my water.

The Berberis dawinii in my garden this morning

The Darwin’s Barberry in my garden is in flower already. It’s supposed to flower from April to May. There’s global warming for you.

Berberis darwinii, to give it its scientific name, was named by William Hooker, after it was first collected in Chiloe, Chile in 1835 by Charles Darwin during the Beagle voyage. The plant later became of interest to Darwin, because it was believed to be self-fertilising (although Darwin correctly dismissed this idea). It is now a very popular garden shrub.

The Berberis darwinii in my garden was a gift from my father, who is a keen gardener. I had asked him for something named after Darwin. The week after my father presented me with the plant, my favourite science writer, Stephen Jay Gould died, so I planted the Berberis darwinii in his memory.

I fully approve of the modern secular practice of planting trees as living memorials to the deceased, but I like to think Gould would have preferred a Berberis darwinii: partly because it is named after his personal hero, but mainly because—thanks partly to my supreme laziness as a gardener—it should soon grow into his favourite evolutionary motif: a straggly bush.

I am sure Gould would have approved.

Charles Musters didn’t have much of a life. As a Volunteer First Class aboard HMS Beagle, and coming, as he did, from a wealthy, albeit broken, home, he might have gone far. The young lad—he was only about 12 when Beagle set sail from England—was a great favourite amongst the officers and crew, and with Charles Darwin, who, when the ship reached South America, took young Musters on a number of exploratory walks.

But then disaster struck. Captain Fitzroy takes up the story:

It was while the interior of the Beagle was being painted, and no duty going on except at the little observatory on Villegagnon Island, that those officers who could be spared made this excursion to various parts of the harbour [of Rio]. Among other places they were in the river Macacu, and passed a night there. No effect was visible at the time; the party returned in apparent health, and in high spirits; but two days had not elapsed when the seaman, named Morgan, complained of headache and fever.

The boy Jones and Mr. Musters were taken ill, soon afterwards, in a similar manner; but no serious consequences were then apprehended, and it was thought that a change of air would restore them to health. Vain idea! they gradually became worse; the boy died the day after our arrival in Bahia; and, on the 19th of May, my poor little friend Charles Musters, who had been entrusted by his father to my care, and was a favourite with every one, ended his short career.

Musters and his shipmates almost certainly died of malaria. Nowadays, we know that malaria is caused by the protozoan Plasmodium, which is carried by mosquitos, but, in those days, it was though to be caused by bad air—hence the French name: mal-aria—which is presumably why Fitzroy had believed that a change of air would restore them to health.

Darwin was equally distraught by Musters’ death:

1832

June 4^th

I also found King, who had arrived late the evening before in the Beagle. — He brought the calamitous news of the death of three of our ship-mates. — They were the three of the Macacu party who were ill with fever when the Beagle sailed from Rio. — 1^st Morgan, an extraordinary powerful man & excellent seaman; he was a very brave man & had performed some curious feats, he put a whole party of Portugeese to flight, who had molested the party; he pitched an armed sentinel into the sea at St Jago; & formerly he was one of the boarders in that most gallant action against the Slaver the Black Joke. — 2^d Boy Jones one of the most promising boys in the ship & had been promised but the day before his illness, promotion. — These were the only two of the sailors who were with the Cutter, & picked for their excellence. — And lastly, poor little Musters; who three days before his illness heard of his Mothers death.

Charles Musters was buried in Bahía. He had barely reached his teens. When some of his former shipmates visited his grave on Beagle‘s third and final voyage, they discovered that it didn’t even have a grave stone.

Poor little Musters indeed.

The stories Charles Musters might have told, had he survived the Beagle voyage: encounters with naked savages, earthquakes, Indian wars, scientific and geographical discoveries, jungles, mountains, the Falkland Island, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, the Galápagos. Can you just imagine how experiences like those would have totally transformed a young boy’s life?

Which is where you can help:

A new Beagle is about to be built. This new Beagle will be crewed by young scientists and sailors following in the wake of Darwin and Fitzroy. The sights these young first-class volunteers will see! The adventures they will have! The new Beagle will provide the sort of experiences that will transform young scientists’ and explorers’ lives.

So please go over to the Beagle Project website and make a donation to help make this dream into a reality. No donation is too small (or too big). Do it to make a difference. Do it for science. Do it for Darwin.

But, most of all, do it for poor little Musters!

Ooo! Oooooh!! Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary is Book of the Week next week on BBC Radio 4. Tune in 09:45–10:00 GMT Monday to Friday (repeated at 00:30—00:45 each night). Alternatively, listen to Radio 4 live on their website, or, for next week only, visit their Book of the Week website and use the listen again feature. I’ve just set my Sky+ box to record the whole series (I hope).

I repeat: Ooo! Oooooh!!

Voyage of the Beagle, Chapter 21:

On the 2nd of October [1836] we made the shore of England; and at Falmouth I left the Beagle, having lived on board the good little vessel nearly five years.

After which, Charles Darwin remained a landlubber to the end of his days.

One-hundred and fifty- seventy-five years ago today, on 24th August, 1831, Charles Darwin’s great friend and mentor, John Stevens Henslow sat down at his desk, took up his pen, and wrote what turned out to be one of the most important letters in the history of science:

My dear Darwin,

Before I enter the immediate business of this letter, let us condole together upon the loss of our inestimable friend poor Ramsay of whose death you have undoubtedly heard long before this. I will not now dwell upon this painful subject as I shall hope to see you shortly fully expecting that you will eagerly catch at the offer which is likely to be made to you of a trip to Terra del Fuego & home by the East Indies— I have been asked by Peacock who will read & forward this to you from London to recommend him a naturalist as companion to Capt Fitzroy employed by Government to survey the S. extremity of America— I have stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation— I state this not on the supposition of y^r being a finished Naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing, & noting any thing worthy to be noted in Natural History. Peacock has the appointment at his disposal & if he can not find a man willing to take the office, the opportunity will probably be lost— Capt F. wants a man (I understand) more as a companion than a mere collector & would not take any one however good a Naturalist who was not recommended to him likewise as a gentleman. Particulars of salary &c I know nothing. The Voyage is to last 2 y^rs & if you take plenty of Books with you, any thing you please may be done— You will have ample opportunities at command— In short I suppose that there never was a finer chance for a man of zeal & spirit . Capt F. is a young man. What I wish you to do is instantly to come to Town & consult with Peacock (at N^o 7 Suffolk Street Pall Mall East or else at the University Club) & learn further particulars. Don’t put on any modest doubts or fears about your disqualifications for I assure you I think you are the very man they are in search of—so conceive yourself to be tapped on the Shoulder by your Bum-Bailiff ^[*] & affect^e friend

J.S. Henslow

Many years later, toward the end of his life, Darwin recollected receiving Henslow’s letter:

On returning home from my short geological tour in North Wales, I found a letter from Henslow, informing me that Captain Fitz-Roy was willing to give up part of his own cabin to any young man who would volunteer to go with him without pay as naturalist to the Voyage of the ‘Beagle’. I have given, as I believe, in my MS. Journal an account of all the circumstances which then occurred; I will here only say that I was instantly eager to accept the offer, but my father strongly objected, adding the words, fortunate for me, “If you can find any man of common sense who advises you to go I will give my consent.” So I wrote that evening and refused the offer. On the next morning I went to Maer to be ready for September 1st, and, whilst out shooting, my uncle (Josiah Wedgwood.) sent for me, offering to drive me over to Shrewsbury and talk with my father, as my uncle thought it would be wise in me to accept the offer. My father always maintained that he was one of the most sensible men in the world, and he at once consented in the kindest manner. I had been rather extravagant at Cambridge, and to console my father, said, “that I should be deuced clever to spend more than my allowance whilst on board the ‘Beagle’;” but he answered with a smile, “But they tell me you are very clever.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

[*] Footnote: Being a bum-bailiff wasn’t quite as rude as it sounds: they were bailiffs notorious for following close at the heels (or, rather, bums!) of debtors.