Read an Excerpt
Evolution's Captain
The Story of the Kidnapping That Led to Charles Darwin's Voyage Aboard the Beagle
By Nicholls, Peter Perennial
ISBN: 0060088788
Chapter One
Port Famine, Strait of Magellan, August 2, 1828. It is mid-winter at the bottom of the world. Snow drives at gale force across the small vessel at anchor. Daylight comes as a few gloomy hours of crepuscular dimness, and the afternoon is already growing dark. Four years later in this same anchorage, in this same vessel even, a young man of unusually sunny temperament -- the twenty-four-year-old Charles Darwin -- will write in his journal: "I never saw a more cheerless prospect; the dusky woods, piebald with snow, were only indistinctly to be seen through an atmosphere composed of two thirds rain & one of fog; the rest, as an Irishman would say, was very cold unpleasant air."
Alone in his cabin beneath the poop, the vessel's commander, a man still in his twenties, is in the last stage of despair. For him time has lost its swift flow; it has flattened into an unending, intolerable stasis. He sees no relief. He has been in these desolate waters for two years: years more stretch ahead. Home -- England, a place as distant as Earth from this cold Pluto -- is beyond imagining, beyond regaining.
He raises to his head a small pocket pistol. He is certain of this now, eager for it, and his finger at last tugs with resolve on the trigger.
But there is still too much time: in the long second that stretches between the release of the hammer, the spark of flint, the flash of powder, and the explosion that sends the ball on its path, his hand wavers, crucially.
He was Captain Pringle Stokes;the vessel, HMS Beagle. It lay at anchor in Port Famine with a larger ship, HMS Adventure. The two ships, under the overall command of Captain Phillip Parker King, had been dispatched by the British Admiralty in May 1826 to survey the southern coasts of South America, from Montevideo on the Atlantic to Chiloé Island in the Pacific. They were particularly instructed to map what they could of the still largely unknown seacoast of Tierra del Fuego, the desolate, tortuously labyrinthine southernmost tip of the drowned Andes.
The first passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific had been discovered by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, in 1520. He was looking, as was Columbus, as were they all, for that still elusive western route to the spice islands of the Indies. Columbus died in 1506, never knowing he had not found them. It was the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa who, on September 26, 1513, scaled a hilltop on the isthmus of Darien, in what is now Panama, and first saw the South Sea stretching away in limitless distance beyond Columbus's mistaken Orient. This information expanded the known circumference of the world by more than a third. Seven years later, Magellan, seeking access to that South Sea, found a wide, navigable passage between the bottom of the Americas and, below that to the south, a bleak Terra Incognita. His chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with him, recorded the discovery with an exultant pride:
We found by a miracle, a strait which we call the strait of the Eleven Thousand Virgins; this strait is a hundred and ten leagues long which are four hundred and forty miles, and almost as wide as less than half a league, and it issues into another sea which is called the Peaceful Sea; it is surrounded by very great and high mountains covered with snow. I think there is not in the world a more beautiful country, or a better strait than this one.<
