Evolution’s Captain : The Tragic Fate of Robert Fitzroy, the Man Who Sailed Charles Darwin Around the World

When HMS Beagle’s first captain committed suicide in the bleak waters of Tierra del Fuego in 1828, he was replaced by a young naval officer of a new mould. Robert FitzRoy was the most brilliant and scientific sea captain of his age. He used the Beagle, a survey vessel, as a laboratory for the new field of the natural sciences. But his plan to bring four ‘savages’ home to England to civilize them as Christian gentlefolk backfired when scandal loomed over their sexual misbehaviour at the Walthamstow Infants School. FitzRoy needed to get them out of England fast, and thus was born the second, and most famous voyage of the Beagle.FitzRoy feared the loneliness of another long voyage – with madness in his own family, he was haunted by the fate of his predecessor – so for company he took with him a young amateur naturalist, Charles Darwin. Like FitzRoy, Darwin believed, at the beginning of the voyage, in the absolute word of the Bible. The two men spent five years circling the globe together, but by the end of their voyage, they had reached startlingly different conclusions about the origins of the natural world.In naval terms, the voyage was a stunning scientific success. But FitzRoy, a passionate Christian, was horrified by Darwin’s heretical theories. As these began to influence the profoundest levels of religious and scientific thinking in the nineteenth century, FitzRoy’s knowledge that he had provided the young naturalist with the vehicle for his sacrilegious ideas propelled him down an irrevocable path to suicide.