Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  A spectacular tale of 19th-century exploration and the conflict between science and religion, all based on Charles Darwin’s famous voyage of discovery aboard HMS Beagle. Skilfully juxtaposing parallel narratives set (at first) 30 years apart, Australian writer McDonald tells the story of the great scientist’s ‘servant’, amanuensis, and ‘shooter’ Simon (‘Syms’) Covington … The story of Syms’s intellectual and sexual maturing, complicated when he realizes his phlegmatic ‘gentleman’s’ theories challenge biblical truths, is expertly counterpointed against McDonald’s portrait of Covington in middle age, after he has settled in Australia … This is an impressively learned novel … But its learning is worn lightly, and the drama never flags. The triumphant characterization of the embattled Syms … is deepened as the story plays increasingly intriguing variations on the concepts of singularity and class both as scientific definition and a more clumsy way of clarifying human relations.

  Brilliant work: an Australian novel that merits comparison with Patrick White’s masterpiece, A Fringe of Leaves.

  KIRKUS REVIEWS

  It is rare in fiction to meet a boy realised as sweet and physical and wholesome—and to find him believable too … the young Covington is evoked with forthright grace … Apparently rough, nonchalant, and yet close-honed, McDonald’s language pitches us into Covington’s sensations. We experience the judder of the boat, the sift of owl’s feathers, England sinking ‘like a plate in the suds’. The reader is grappled close to a man who outgrows the role of servant assigned him by historical records and by the custom of the time in which he lived. In this fierce and fascinating novel Darwin is obscured, Covington revealed. McDonald thus pays tribute to unknown makers of modern Australia and, through fiction, seeks to contribute to its history.

  Gillian Beer THE GUARDIAN

  Charles Darwin dramatically changed the course of human history, but the drama of his life story pales next to this vividly imagined rendering of big-hearted Syms Covington … who spent seven years at Darwin’s side collecting the specimens on which the theory of evolution was based … McDonald fashions a captivating seafarer’s tale rich in period details and insight into relations among men. While the real, historical Covington may have been lost in the margins, McDonald’s vigorous incarnation will be difficult to forget.

  PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

  In sinewy, poetic prose, McDonald follows his protagonist from pious boyhood in Bedfordshire, through formative years at sea, to prosperous maturity in Australia. Places are vivid, and even marginal figures are strikingly well drawn, so that Darwin’s research into the natural order is set within a richly detailed social order. Covington himself is a vital, convincing creation: coarse, proud, fierce, yet always more astute than others think.

  Mr Darwin’s Shooter is a persuasive argument for history with a (fictional) human face. The challenge posed by Darwin’s theory of evolution to the spiritual values of his day could hardly be more tellingly evoked than it is in its impact on the far from cerebral Covington. McDonald’s novel … is a stirring reminder that the Beagle sailed on a voyage into the unknown, and that beliefs now central to the way we see the world were once almost beyond imagination.

  Ian Brunskill THE TIMES

  A sustained piece of imagining … The scenes of discomfort on both [Darwin’s and Covington’s] sides are beautifully observed … This is a lavish, rich novel in an idiosyncratic countryman’s voice, thickened with metaphor.

  Francis Spofford THE INDEPENDENT

  The adventures on board the Beagle are vividly described, generating a sense of the excitement that must have greeted each new find … McDonald’s research into nineteenth-century natural history has resulted in a richly detailed narrative … Covington … is wholly engaging, as are his later philosophical torments in the face of Darwin’s theory. That his part in the most momentous theory of the Victorian age should have been so overlooked seems a shame. With Mr Darwin’s Shooter, Roger McDonald has done both him and us a valuable service …

  Nicola Walker LITERARY REVIEW

  An innovative, powerfully poetic imagination … an unerring touch and a witty, ebullient prose effortlessly carry a great density of idea and implication.

  Brian Mathews THE AUSTRALIAN

  It is through a poet’s eye … that his characters and environments evolve, detail by detail; brought to life skilfully as if by nature itself.

  WHO MAGAZINE

  Roger McDonald is the author of seven novels and two works of non-fiction.

  His first novel, 1915, won the Age Book of the Year and the South Australian Government Biennial Prize for Literature; his autobiographical Shearers’ Motel won the 1993 National Book Council Banjo Award for Non-Fiction; and The Ballad of Desmond Kale won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2006 and the 2008 South Australian Festival Prize for Fiction.

  Mr Darwin’s Shooter won the 1999 NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction, the 1999 Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction, the 2000 National Fiction Award and the 2000 South Australian Premier’s Literary Award.

  Also by Roger McDonald

  FICTION:

  1915

  Slipstream

  Rough Wallaby

  Water Man

  The Slap

  The Ballad of Desmond Kale

  NON-FICTION:

  Shearers’ Motel

  The Tree in Changing Light

  AS EDITOR:

  Gone Bush

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Mr Darwin’s Shooter

  9781742754697

  The writing of this work was assisted by an Earnback Fellowship from the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and advisory body.

  The epigraph from Bashõ is taken from On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashõ, translated and introduced by Lucien Stryk, published by Penguin Classics, 1995.

  A Vintage book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Random House Australia in 1998

  Published by Vintage in 1999

  This edition published in 2009

  Copyright © Roger McDonald 1998, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  McDonald, Roger, 1941–.

  Mr Darwin’s shooter.

  ISBN 978 1 74166 658 8 (pbk).

  Covington, Syms, 1813–1861 – Fiction.

  Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882 – Fiction.

  Literary prizes – Australia – Fiction.

  Voyag
es around the world – Fiction.

  Scientific expeditions – History – 19th century – Fiction.

  A823.3

  Cover design and image by Sandy Cull, gogoGinko

  To Elinor, Anna and Stella

  with love

  and to Susie with your spirit

  shining

  ‘Now darkness falls,’

  quail chirps,

  ‘what use hawk-eyes?’

  BASHO

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise

  About the Author

  Also by Roger McDonald

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  AN ADDITIONAL NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ON THE WRITING OF MR DA RWIN’S SHOOTER

  PROLOGUE

  On a Dish of Milk Well-Crumbed

  BOOK

  1

  On an Art of Bumpology

  BOOK

  2

  On a Thousand Gallons of Blood

  BOOK

  3

  On Some Useless Afghans

  BOOK

  4

  On an Ark of Creation

  BOOK

  5

  On a Journey South

  EPILOGUE

  On an Origin of Species

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Novel-writing never follows a path of logical intention. Once on the move, character, plot, and underlying meaning take their own course, following imperatives that come from the page itself. When the writing goes well it can feel like a dream, unrolling to the end through a series of lucky flukes and narrowly avoided blockages.

  As in the origin of life, so in the origin of a piece of fiction: the beginning point is a mystery. A bubble appears from nowhere, it seems, like fizz in a glass of beer. Something that was nothing comes into existence—an idea that won’t let go. Sometimes an annoyance (a bad idea still having to be served), sometimes a blessing (a piece of luck that chimes). In time, with work, the first image shifts into action, into character, into plot, and becomes a story looking for an ending, unwinding its trail of words.

  Afterwards it becomes almost impossible to remember the wrong turns and abandonments of intention. The ordeals of childbirth and the individual’s path of life come to mind. Something has pushed from underneath, through intuition or instinct, with a wilful life of its own. The writer can wonder, ‘Did I write this or did it write itself?’ On the page life pushes up non-physical impulses, living shadows. There is some sort of equivalence to the processes of nature.

  ‘Everything in the world must excel itself to be itself,’ wrote Boris Pasternak in a wonderful line which never goes out of my head, offering an insight and a lesson in life and applicable to the writer’s daily word-count. Language, thought, and materials make a transcendent mix.

  Around the middle of writing Mr Darwin’s Shooter my daily routine shuddered to a stop, I can’t remember why. But I gave up and couldn’t go on. If the phrase writer’s block means anything more than a popular misconception of how writing proceeds, then it applies either to problem-solving questions or a lack of proper attention on the part of the writer to where the writing is asking the writer to go (the writer mulishly refusing to go there). In memory the impasse lasted for weeks, no doubt it was shorter. Obviously I did go on, I am not sure how; just by waiting for the desperation to crumble, I suppose, allowing me to step through to the next page, turn of events, answer to a question, or whatever.

  Later, near the very end of the writing, I recall laying pages out on the floor and trying two different chronological structures, each of them less than perfect. My final, almost random, choice now seems, somehow, like the way it was meant to be—a structure of two key moments widely separated in time but sandwiched against each other in the feelings, as they so often are in life when some old damage won’t let go, and the past shapes and reveals the present.

  This split in time belongs to the essence of the story, a conflict between science and religion: an old way and a new way of accounting for creation, both coming under the heading of revelation but with the old as an assertion (Genesis), and the new as a discovery (natural selection).

  These days, when most of us consider the idea of evolution through natural selection, our greatest difficulty is not in accepting some (usually half-understood) version of it, but the opposite: we find extreme difficulty in thinking our way back to a world-paradigm where Creationism ruled the intellectual scene from top to bottom.

  How hard it is to credit that Charles Darwin was a Creationist through every one of the six years of the voyage of the Beagle, and only started to loosen that thinking in the last months coming up the Atlantic to England. In two of the most significant papers published in Darwin studies, Frank J. Sulloway argued just that: Darwin came late to the point where he (still only privately) saw that natural selection was commensurate with Creationism as an explanation of the way life operates.

  In the mid-1990s, before starting this book, I had no intention of writing a novel about Darwin or anyone connected to him, but then one day doing some idle reading realised, with a mention of Syms Covington, that I had stumbled across a novel in embryo thanks to a few lines in Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s joint biography, Darwin (1991). Later, when I’d finished my first draft, I read, in Janet Brown’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995), her opinion that Covington was ‘the unacknowledged shadow behind Darwin’s every triumph’.

  I’d asked myself: What if Covington had been religious, and remained so to the end of his days? Considering the times he lived in, it’s more than probable that he was.

  Covington was a character from the sidelines in the huge story of Darwin, a sailor, ship’s fiddler, odd-job man and boy to poop cabin on HMS Beagle, sixteen years old, possibly younger, when he was given over into Darwin’s employment off the coast of South America in 1834 (by favour of the captain, Robert FitzRoy). Darwin was the gentleman naturalist on board and trained Covington as his zoological collector (the word Darwin used was servant). Covington worked for Darwin 1834–39, supplying him with his specimens, shooting innumerable birds and small animals, preserving them, sorting them, taking dictation, living aboard the same ship and afterwards in the same house in London until he emigrated to Australia where he eventually became postmaster at Pambula in southern New South Wales (dying in 1861). In his last years he corresponded with Darwin and collected barnacles for him, packed and shipped them off, was obviously proud of the prominence of his old employer (not quite yet as dizzily prominent as he was to become). Darwin wrote letters wistfully envious of his old servant’s success in the colonies, distantly affectionate towards him, as befitted their widely differing stations of life. Covington kept Darwin’s letters. Covington’s letters to Darwin are lost.

  This summary of Covington’s life and his relationship to Darwin covers many of the few bare facts known about him, except that he had a large family (the same size as Darwin’s) and left many descendants in Australia.

  In contrast to Covington’s, the detail in Darwin’s story is vast. Every turn of Darwin’s thinking throughout his life, almost minute by minute, is accounted for by science historians working on his papers over several generations. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (now up to volume 13) is one of the great publishing projects of all time. Darwin’s letters were an invaluable source to me in every way in the construction of Mr Darwin’s Shooter. Every fictional exchange between Darwin and Covington is derived in some fashion (inverted, mirrored, occasionally pasted) from something in Darwin’s letters or from an observation made either in the Journal of Researches or The Origin of Species. The Darwin biographical project at Cambridge gives us his diaries, letters, notes, and much else in book form, all of which and more is now being made available online.

  In relation to Covington (my fictional version of him), I cast him as a natural-born religious man right through. I have him exulting in this state, which I per
sonally regard as a gift in some people, while not having it myself. I grant Covington the blessing of being blessed, along with his qualities of cheerfulness, willingness, physical strength and capacity for hard physical work, sexual desire, and humility. To which should be added, in relation to Darwin, loyalty, even love. And on top of that (because good intelligence always requires the holding of contradictory ideas) a good intelligence.

  Towards the end of his life I have Covington look back and ask: Had Darwin, on their voyage, found proof of natural selection thus doing away with God? Had Covington himself, as a believer through and through, handed over to Darwin the proof he needed (specimens by the barrel-full)? Had Covington thus committed, as he puts it to himself, a crime against God and his own good nature?

  I have something like this suspicion—and the hope it is otherwise—linger in Covington’s mind for the more than twenty years following the Beagle voyage until the publication of The Origin of Species (1859).

  What was Covington’s reaction to the arrival of the first copies of The Origin of Species in Australia (in 1860)? There is no record of it. Through the blanks in the record I was drawn to imagine it, enlarge upon it, allowing a mixture of admiration, resentment, slavishness, rivalry, incomprehension, and, as I say, love, to enter Covington’s relationship with Darwin. I seemed to be given latitude for this by Darwin himself, who without any further explanation (then or later) wrote to his sister in 1834: ‘My servant is an odd sort of person; I do not very much like him; but he is, perhaps from his very oddity, very well adapted to all my purposes.’

  The local colour and high adventure of the voyage of the Beagle is a great story in itself, nowhere better told than in Darwin’s own account of it, his 1839 best-seller: The Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. ‘Beagle’.