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Jan. 13th, 2020 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsAbout this time last year, innerbrat and I went to go see a play about Darwin at the Natural History Museum in London. From this play we learned that a.) the good ship Beagle was just chock-full of complex emotional tension between Darwin and his captain and b.) there was a whole other story about kidnapped Tierra Fuegans returning home from England on the Beagle of which both of us had been entirely unaware.
Then last month I found Evolution's Captain in a thrift store, which was all about Captain Fitzroy and the kidnapped Fuegans, and I would guess probably served as a major source for the play we saw; most incidents in the Fitzroy-Darwin relationship appear to have been taken directly from history and were indeed fraught with a great deal of complex emotional tension!
More or less all the elements of the intense Fitzroy-Darwin relationship that happen in the play, and several that were not, turn out to have been documented directly in primary sources and lovingly recounted in this book:
- Fitzroy, concerned about getting lonely on a long voyage, asks the Admiralty to help him finda wife an intelligent and scientific companion for his scheduled trip around the world
- Fitzroy, a dedicated physiognomist, meets Darwin and immediately becomes deeply concerned about his nose
- Darwin and Fitzroy take all meals together in Fitzroy's cabin every day
- Darwin is fascinated and concerned by Fitzroy in a hilariously Austenian fashion: "As far as I can judge, he is a very extraordinary person. I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson [...] His candour and sincerity are to me unparalleled; and using his own words his 'vanity and petulance' are nearly so. I have felt the effects of the latter [...] His many good qualities are numerous; altogether he is the strongest marked character I ever fell in with."
- Fitzroy starts calling Darwin "Philos" (short for philosopher)
- Darwin and Fitzroy have their first fight:
DARWIN: I think slavery is unilaterally wrong and every slave probably wants to go home.
FITZROY: I think it's generally wrong, but some slaves live perfectly good lives; a Brazilian slaveowner once introduced me to some of his slaves and they said they were fine!
DARWIN: Do you really think you can believe any answers that were given with their owner right there ...?
FITZROY: IF YOU DOUBT MY WORD WE CAN NO LONGER LIVE TOGETHER!
- (Darwin and Fitzroy resume more or less living together)
- Darwin and Fitzroy have various friendly debates about what constitute different species
- Fitzroy writes Darwin some very cute letters while he's off the boat doing science things
- Everything goes down with the Fuegans, on which more below
- Fitzroy gets incredibly depressed
- Fitzroy almost quits the voyage
- Everyone else talks Fitzroy into not quitting the voyage
- Fitzroy names several pieces of scenery after Darwin
- After five years, Darwin and Fitzroy come home
- Fitzroy gets married and, relatedly, gets very religious
- Darwin and Fitzroy have another big fight, details unknown, theorized to be about evolution
- Twenty years go by and everything ends in evolution and tragedy and (eventually) Fitzroy's suicide
Peter Nichols is clearly a guy who's a big Age of Sail nerd (at one point, hilariously to me, he describes the Beagle as halfway between the size of Jack Aubrey's first ship and Jack Aubrey's second ship without providing any other referents) and fascinated by the relationships between people in the particular pressure-cooker of long sea voyages, and he tells this story well and compellingly.
Unfortunately I don't think he's nearly as good at handling the racism and colonialism that is also an integral part of this story: the narrative of the four Tierra Fuegans -- two adult men, one teenage boy, and one nine- or ten-year-old girl -- that Fitzroy kidnapped on his first trip to South America, brought to England for a year of "civilization", and then returned to Tierra Fuega along with a missionary on the Darwin voyage, in the hope that they would help to spread good English values among their people.
This story is also deeply fascinating, in its horrifying way -- and it's not that Nichols doesn't know that it's horrifying, but he's also trying to tell this adventure yarn about the Age of Sail, and the fascinating and troubled Captain Fitzroy, and he wants you to like and feel sympathetic to his protagonist, which not infrequently tips over into a degree of 'and how sad it was for Fitzroy that his vision and plans for the Fuegians were so misguided!'
So, you know, sometimes you do get some very clear-eyed statements that missionary projects in the British Empire were just the first step towards a genocidal colonialism, and other times I wanted to quietly take Peter Nichols aside and explain to him that just because you airquote "savages" the first time you use it does not mean you keep on getting to use it throughout your entire book and assume we'll know that you don't mean it. Also, I think it's fairly telling that Nichols never actually bothers to give us the Fuegian names of the kidnapped Fuegians, and only ever refers to them by the names Fitzroy bestowed upon them. Wikipedia knows their names! It's not difficult information to come by!
(He's also honestly not great about Fitzroy's depression; we don't get anything much more nuanced than a fairly glib "mental illness ran in the family.")
All of which is to say that I'm glad to have read the book and learned much more about the story -- and I will say that Nichols is fairly good most of the time at parsing out the actual facts from speculation, and pointing out when we only have a single source or point of view for the way a certain event went down -- but: caveats.
innerbrat and I went to go see a play about Darwin at the Natural History Museum in London. From this play we learned that a.) the good ship Beagle was just chock-full of complex emotional tension between Darwin and his captain and b.) there was a whole other story about kidnapped Tierra Fuegans returning home from England on the Beagle of which both of us had been entirely unaware. Then last month I found Evolution's Captain in a thrift store, which was all about Captain Fitzroy and the kidnapped Fuegans, and I would guess probably served as a major source for the play we saw; most incidents in the Fitzroy-Darwin relationship appear to have been taken directly from history and were indeed fraught with a great deal of complex emotional tension!
More or less all the elements of the intense Fitzroy-Darwin relationship that happen in the play, and several that were not, turn out to have been documented directly in primary sources and lovingly recounted in this book:
- Fitzroy, concerned about getting lonely on a long voyage, asks the Admiralty to help him find
- Fitzroy, a dedicated physiognomist, meets Darwin and immediately becomes deeply concerned about his nose
- Darwin and Fitzroy take all meals together in Fitzroy's cabin every day
- Darwin is fascinated and concerned by Fitzroy in a hilariously Austenian fashion: "As far as I can judge, he is a very extraordinary person. I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson [...] His candour and sincerity are to me unparalleled; and using his own words his 'vanity and petulance' are nearly so. I have felt the effects of the latter [...] His many good qualities are numerous; altogether he is the strongest marked character I ever fell in with."
- Fitzroy starts calling Darwin "Philos" (short for philosopher)
- Darwin and Fitzroy have their first fight:
DARWIN: I think slavery is unilaterally wrong and every slave probably wants to go home.
FITZROY: I think it's generally wrong, but some slaves live perfectly good lives; a Brazilian slaveowner once introduced me to some of his slaves and they said they were fine!
DARWIN: Do you really think you can believe any answers that were given with their owner right there ...?
FITZROY: IF YOU DOUBT MY WORD WE CAN NO LONGER LIVE TOGETHER!
- (Darwin and Fitzroy resume more or less living together)
- Darwin and Fitzroy have various friendly debates about what constitute different species
- Fitzroy writes Darwin some very cute letters while he's off the boat doing science things
- Everything goes down with the Fuegans, on which more below
- Fitzroy gets incredibly depressed
- Fitzroy almost quits the voyage
- Everyone else talks Fitzroy into not quitting the voyage
- Fitzroy names several pieces of scenery after Darwin
- After five years, Darwin and Fitzroy come home
- Fitzroy gets married and, relatedly, gets very religious
- Darwin and Fitzroy have another big fight, details unknown, theorized to be about evolution
- Twenty years go by and everything ends in evolution and tragedy and (eventually) Fitzroy's suicide
Peter Nichols is clearly a guy who's a big Age of Sail nerd (at one point, hilariously to me, he describes the Beagle as halfway between the size of Jack Aubrey's first ship and Jack Aubrey's second ship without providing any other referents) and fascinated by the relationships between people in the particular pressure-cooker of long sea voyages, and he tells this story well and compellingly.
Unfortunately I don't think he's nearly as good at handling the racism and colonialism that is also an integral part of this story: the narrative of the four Tierra Fuegans -- two adult men, one teenage boy, and one nine- or ten-year-old girl -- that Fitzroy kidnapped on his first trip to South America, brought to England for a year of "civilization", and then returned to Tierra Fuega along with a missionary on the Darwin voyage, in the hope that they would help to spread good English values among their people.
This story is also deeply fascinating, in its horrifying way -- and it's not that Nichols doesn't know that it's horrifying, but he's also trying to tell this adventure yarn about the Age of Sail, and the fascinating and troubled Captain Fitzroy, and he wants you to like and feel sympathetic to his protagonist, which not infrequently tips over into a degree of 'and how sad it was for Fitzroy that his vision and plans for the Fuegians were so misguided!'
So, you know, sometimes you do get some very clear-eyed statements that missionary projects in the British Empire were just the first step towards a genocidal colonialism, and other times I wanted to quietly take Peter Nichols aside and explain to him that just because you airquote "savages" the first time you use it does not mean you keep on getting to use it throughout your entire book and assume we'll know that you don't mean it. Also, I think it's fairly telling that Nichols never actually bothers to give us the Fuegian names of the kidnapped Fuegians, and only ever refers to them by the names Fitzroy bestowed upon them. Wikipedia knows their names! It's not difficult information to come by!
(He's also honestly not great about Fitzroy's depression; we don't get anything much more nuanced than a fairly glib "mental illness ran in the family.")
All of which is to say that I'm glad to have read the book and learned much more about the story -- and I will say that Nichols is fairly good most of the time at parsing out the actual facts from speculation, and pointing out when we only have a single source or point of view for the way a certain event went down -- but: caveats.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 02:06 am (UTC)Nah, that is objectively hilarious.
Also, I think it's fairly telling that Nichols never actually bothers to give us the Fuegian names of the kidnapped Fuegians, and only ever refers to them by the names Fitzroy bestowed upon them.
Okay, if their names are just out there on the internet, unless the availability of the names postdates the publication of Nichols' book, that's not cool.
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Date: 2020-01-14 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 03:15 am (UTC)Poop.
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Date: 2020-01-14 03:17 am (UTC)Not being previously familiar with this narrative, I assumed Fitzroy had given his captives European, but, you know, real names. Er.
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Date: 2020-01-14 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 03:44 am (UTC)This is a man who either knows his target audience well, or does not care about that at all.
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Date: 2020-01-14 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 04:33 am (UTC)Was it Horatio Hornblower, by any chance?
ETA: How did this even come up?? Were they referenced by characters as if they were real people? Was there fourth-wall breakage to be like “HEY, YOU KNOW JACK AUBREY’S SHIP? IT WAS THAT SIZE”?!
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Date: 2020-01-14 07:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 08:22 am (UTC)Jack Aubrey and co. are my only contact with Age of Sail fandom, and I still have no idea how big his first two ships are beyond 'quite small' and 'probably less small'.
...I had already formulated this comment in my head before I got to the caveats, and, oh. Oh dear. I think I'll start with the Wikipedia page.
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Date: 2020-01-14 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-01-15 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-17 12:29 pm (UTC)And it comes up direct in narration: "In size and armaments, the Cherokee was about halfway between the Sophie and the Polychrest, Captain Jack Aubrey's first two commands in Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series of naval adventure novels," he politely explains, like, just in case you didn't know who Jack Aubrey was he'll tell you, but why wouldn't you know?
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Date: 2020-01-17 12:34 pm (UTC)Okay, that makes sense! I was somehow under the impression that this was written as a novel rather than straight-up non-fiction, so I was very confused about how that particular analogy came around. >p