Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  It was not for a naturalist to give so forthright an answer as Phipps did—though Darwin’s reply on the matter was still godly enough: he said the Biblical calendar was not so accurate as one wished, and warranted considerable stretching to fit such foldings of the earth’s coat to its ancient bones, that had, so interestingly, put a beach into the sky where mostly were rainbows. Things had lived on the earth much longer than anyone believed. God’s patience was supreme. A-men.

  On they had sailed to the weird Galapagos, the Encantadas or Enchanted Isles, so named because contrary currents bewitched shipmasters’ intentions—the cold seas lapping the equator’s burning hot sands, home of cactus, tortoise and lizard, where Covington shot Darwin’s birds, and kept his own from two of the islands they visited, Chatham and James. It was the fourth year of their voyage by then. They marked the birds according to disparity in their beaks as mockingbirds, gross-beaks, fringilla, orioles, meadowlarks, blackbirds and wrens—though many were true fringilla or finches as was later made clear, which was the beginning of the end of Covington’s calm, and the start of his shame.

  It was a gentle breeze and a gloomy sky. It was an island lowly shaped, uniform except for sundry paps and hillocks, and when Covington and Darwin stepped ashore, there was small leafless brushwood to knock their knees and low trees offering no shade. Black rocks pulsating heat upwards. The sky hammering it back down. An unpleasant sappy smell in the vegetation. Insignificant, ugly little flowers more arctic than tropic. Lizards of the insinuating, crawling, belly-dragging kind, arousing hostility in the naturalist, who called them ‘imps of darkness’, and an impatience in Covington over getting and gutting one, because he was there for the birds. Small tame birds came to within three or four feet of them, and Midshipman King, in a separate boat party—still a raw boy and increasingly a stranger to Covington—threw a stone.

  The stone whizzed past Covington’s ear. He didn’t see it—only the result. The birds were close together on the ground as a carpet sewn with lumps, and sheeny with the light of the vertical sun on their hundreds of backs. They had no predators and were so tame that the stone landed among them and Covington saw the dark birds ripple. None of them even flew up. Darwin prodded a hawk with his gun-barrel. Covington saw King toss his hat like a spinning disc and it landed on one. A mockingbird, it might be, though it could as easily prove to be a finch. King stood with his hands on his hips, laughing. A minute later he lifted the hat and found the bird dead. It was so easy to accomplish that he did it again. So did MacCracken years later and every visitor who came there. The birds were strangers to man and innocent, and so what was to be done with them? Covington spat with contempt. It was no place for a crafty birder.

  But how many birds of the same kind did he take, just so? All he could get.

  Birdskins were capital. Capital unemployed might be useless, but could never be worthless. Covington’s imagination stretched like mastic and at the end of the join was London—Leadbeater’s agency and a fine stack of guineas in a birdskin purse. So—what did the Galapagos offer him? Innumerable differently shaped beaks among birds of similar plumage! Rare takes! Common as dandelions in a spring field you may say! Well, all birds were common somewhere at some season and the point was, to Covington’s brain, common captures were rare captures if you were the main one shooting. He went potting and dunting through a landscape studded with black cones and ancient volcanic chimneys formed from subterranean melted fluids. He shot multiples of birds from island to island as his master’s needs dictated. The mockingbirds interested Darwin as differing between the islands, and these he instructed Covington to tag with their island names. The finches did not attract him this way. It did not seem important with the islands so close to each other, and the finches hard to tell apart. They were everywhere in the lowland thickets, milling around like flies. So Covington paid attention to the shipping tags of the birds he kept for his own, on which he marked, for his own sales’ prospects, their island names. So did Harry Fuller, Capt’s servant, mark what he shot, when Covington brought him into his game in a quiet way, and favoured him with a few directions on what he might back with his Capt’s old gun.

  They walked along in separate silences through truncated hillocks, black as the iron furnaces of Wolverhampton—a sea petrified in its worst moments, they likened it to—old craters a ring of cinders, subsided, collapsed. Darwin and Covington went on alone. Through these circular dips came the tortoises, creaking, shuffling, malodorous. They were billiard tables in extent and heavy as anchors. One was eating a cactus and quietly walked away. Another gave a deep loud hiss and drew back its head. Along came the boy-shooter now a man, and the man-boy naturalist— astounded, humbled, thrown back in time and both exactly startled in the same thought for almost the last time: that here they were surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs and large cacti, facing the most old-fashioned antediluvian animals, or rather the inhabitants of some other planet, proof that God’s hand sizzled here with one thing, there with another, and the chambers of his gallery were infinite in their on-going.

  The Beagle was done with her surveying by the end of the Galapagos, but still had another year’s sailing if you will believe it—Tahiti, the Bay of Islands, then across to Port Jackson, where they began their Australian visit, after which it would be the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic, the seas of Britain, the Scilly Light, England and home.

  No angels announced themselves with hosannas when Covington first came to Sydney, only a long, low cloud of bushfire smoke, rotund as a fat cigar, streaming northward and scenting the wind. Approaching the coast, instead of beholding a verdant country as Covington had foolishly expected, he saw a line of rusty cliffs and a solitary lighthouse on a bare headland. An easy air carried them towards the entrance and around the point of the South Head. Thunder and lightning drove away the smoke but made the nerves uneasy. First impression was of a place covered by woods of thin scrubby trees that bespoke useless sterility. Approaching farther onwards, patches of country improved, and everywhere beautiful villas and white cottages were scattered along the beaches, and windmills stood on the ridges. Within Sydney Cove, where they anchored, there was a mood of incessant trade, and a great feeling of British industriousness to please the English eye. Darwin compared it with South America, where several hundred years of Spanish enterprise fell short of what the British had achieved here in several score years. But a damp was soon thrown over the whole scene by the news that there was not a single letter for the Beagle. Nothing for Covington and nought for anyone else either. They were like a ghost ship forgotten by the world and they had the world’s secrets in their hold.

  Darwin rode inland to see if he could find himself a platypus and to look at the geology. Covington found a pony and stalked the harbour headlands carrying his box and fly-net, gun, rock-hammer, and spirit bottles for reptiles. His three pairs of bird-scissors, as inseparable from him as his own fingers, were in a guanaco-leather pouch on his belt. Coming along the clifftops below the South Head light, he whistled and believed it might be a better place than he first thought. Money could be made with ease—the whole population being intent on acquiring wealth. A little capital could be trebled there in no time, the incessant topic of conversation being wool and sheep grazing. So while Covington swept the bushes (achieving, with almost every whack of his net, finds unique to science), he planted a few ideas in his head. The best was that servants soon became masters.

  Then it was the home run after their time away—holds laden with pressed twigs and petrified wood, stuffed mammals, corals, reptiles and bottled fish. On the deck a live tortoise and Phipps’s Falkland Islands fox. Delays made the hungry soul more fervent. Patience applied to work and to God, but hardly applied to getting home to England. It could not come too soon for any of them.

  ‘If a man would live well,’ preached their Capt, ‘let him fetch his last day to him, and make it always his company-keeper. He that forgets a friend is ungrateful unto him; but he that forgets
his Saviour is unmerciful to himself. He that lives in sin, and looks for happiness hereafter, is like him that soweth cockle, and thinks to fill his barn with wheat or barley.’

  Gratitude was unbounded; the practice of gratitude expanded faith, right to this last leg; in faith and fellowship they moved about the bark on those scented, starry nights as they wallowed up through the tropic Atlantic, heads full of reunions with loved ones and English beer that would be theirs to guzzle in a few short weeks, and thoughts of maids to gentle—which did not exclude their Capt, who had a fiancée waiting for him but had never mentioned her once in their full five years afloat.

  One day a gun went off in Covington’s face and burned him, even though there was never any foolishness with weapons in his style of work. He had observed all the rules and never put a gun down loaded, or cocked, never pointed a loaded gun at anything unless he meant to fire, and never climbed through rigging with a loaded gun either. So he ensured he would never be taken by surprise.

  The piece that he loosed at a gull that day ripped apart, throwing fragments of hot steel back over his scalp, and setting the skin of his right cheek alight with searing powder. The surgeon smeared his face with linseed mash and put his jaw in a sling.

  In the poop cabin their work was barely disturbed. ‘I have had worse flayings, mark you,’ mumbled Covington in defiance. It was time for organising papers and sorting ideas on what the voyage meant. The question of Creation was strong in the air, for their cargo was the cream of it. They had a kind of vanity around the subject—having sailed farther, longer, and been more punctiliously observant than any great voyage, and done it in so gentlemanly and offhand a fashion, considering what they took into their hull. It was time for Covington to boast his copperplate once more and wonder to himself if Mrs FitzGerald had ever made her way to England after he’d made his demand in the stormy letter posted from Chile. He rather believed she had not received that squib, as there was no mail waiting when they reached Sydney. She’d be an old woman by now—at least twenty-nine.

  Coming up the Atlantic they stopped at St Helena and he learned his Hickory maid was dead. A burning pox had taken her. The glade where they had lain together was overrun with blackberry bushes. Although he shed a tear, so much of Covington’s past had happened in another age that it seemed his rough black sweetheart must have lived a full life, and a kind, if not such a good one since the last time he had shipped through. Because all had their time, all passed from their time. It was a rule true of the bones of ancient beasts as it was of men. God gave, and the species of life had their day. At twenty years of age Syms Covington felt one hundred years gone from England. When he spouted his Pilgrim’s Progress with Phipps it was like old John Bunyan was someone he knew as a boy. Parted away from himself he acquired a thick, defensive shyness. He wore a path around the vessel; loomed on people day or night. Main hatchway, fore hatchway, measure the spirits of wine, be sure none was filched, be sure the packing papers were dry, check the powder store, oil the guns, check for mould, seek rising damp, air the birds, make more space, think ahead. Was it just the vanity of rubbing shoulders with professors that made him sharper of mind? He was on the track of a suspicion. His outer parts were distracted, staring, vacant, inattentive except to his gent’s needs. Inwardly he burned. Thus did ‘What is life?’ become a question in the mind of an ordinary young man—Syms Covington of the Beagle, who perhaps from joy in life should not have been asking such questions at all, and whoever planted the seed of dismay in his heart should have been tried for a crime.

  Darwin went to Sunday service and bellowed all the hymns, sometimes with tears in his eyes. But when he was by himself he was like the robin in the parable who gobbled up spiders, drank iniquity and swallowed down sin like water. Which is to say he thought of other matters, changed his mind plenty, and so did his servant through matching his needs get a good hint of it.

  Soon it would be time to give a report and Darwin wasn’t sure he could give it without his expert friends in England making judgements on the collection. The mystery of mysteries was in determining how the world worked. How creation did. They would all have a hand in it, his Lyells, Henslows, Sedgwicks, Hookers and Goulds. With a great principle at stake, all the dryness of minute specific comparisons vanished in such men’s eyes. They either believed, or they did not. But on which side?

  Covington picked at his scabby cheek and wondered.

  He was nothing to the gentry, but all the same much came to him from the unseen. He didn’t need to have things explained to him out loud any more. There was plenty in his master’s notebooks of listing a fact and then probing and questioning around it. Deafness made a difference— positively, you might say. Covington, slow as he knew himself, moved in a different medium from the one he had inhabited with his hearing intact. Their voyage had a meaning that crept over him without his wanting it. It was like the switching of tide in the darkness while standing hip-deep in a dark estuary: how much more patently the current could be felt then, than in the distracting glare of day.

  He knew this: great questions were getting asked in Darwin’s head. How did it start? Where did their booty all come from? You could say God, but if that was the case, and God made us animal by animal and saw we were good, why did some die off? Why were extinct creatures the relatives of living ones? Why hadn’t God just started a clean slate each time?

  Covington had a good raw taste of it when he copied the zoological notes in those last weeks coming home. The poop cabin was a welter of papers and the two of them barely saw daylight except for going outside to stretch and sniff for land. Darwin made a note of the varieties of tortoises and birds from the Galapagos and how they radiated out from their centres of Creation into the several islands. The mockingbirds they had collected were singular from existing as distinct species in the different islands. They were allied to the Callandra of Buenos Ayres but set Darwin’s brain buzzing with the thought of how each one was constant in its own island. He puzzled over the mess his brain was in, and wasn’t blaming his servant so much, but would rather have liked to. They might have looked closer into those crowds of finches and likewise the tortoises, might they not?

  The governor of the Galapagos had told Darwin that Spaniards were able to tell which island a tortoise was from just by looking at its shell. Darwin thought at the time it was an interesting comment on varieties, but now he thought, What if they had been species instead? What would that say? But it was too late. When they left the Galapagos they had taken a good number of live tortoises aboard and ate them as they crossed the Pacific.

  Darwin addressed Covington through the hard plates of air that constructed deafness around a person:

  What did I say to you about them, the tortoises?

  ‘You said, “Anything saved?”’

  Why, didn’t I ask you to note what islands they were from, and have you make sketches of their shells, and dry and keep a few carapaces?

  ‘It was too late,’ snorted Covington, ‘if so I would have done it—they’s been tipped overboard after the steaks was gobbled and the soups all supped.’

  The same thing went for the finches that Covington had bagged for his master—hardly a one marked by island— and why should they have been? Jehovah himself would assume that the islands were so close together that no reason was possible for them harbouring different species. Although: If they weren’t just varieties (Darwin jotted, his mind circling back on him) then such facts undermine the stability of species.

  Covington was quick enough to ask if that meant a certain word. He’d heard Darwin say that transmutation was the catchcry of doubters.

  Darwin looked up from his papers. Covington repeated his question, fingers stained with ink that he wiped with a twist of rag. Transmutation?

  ‘Is that not the meaning of it, to undermine?’

  Darwin stared back at him straight, in one of those looks he threw from time to time, that had mighty cog-wheels turning under them. He spared Covington little
in the complications of his mind because what would Covington understand anyway? Besides, the shooter was conveniently deaf. And thirdly, if you must know, was a servant, and if a man could not be himself with a servant then he would lead a life of arch pretence.

  You know very well. To undermine is to make a gift to doubters. Remember the bone hunt of Punta Alta? It framed a similar puzzle, because if species can change— evolve—transmute—replace each other—where does that leave Creation? Either God’s handiwork is perfect through time, or it is not God’s handiwork at all.

  Covington felt a coldness in his stomach like a lump of suet pudding.

  Darwin leaned forward over Covington’s shoulder and made a nice addition to his jottings, adding the word would between ‘facts’ and ‘undermine’, and giving Covington a faint smile as if to say, Satisfied? So that now it read: If they weren’t just varieties then such facts would undermine the stability of species.

  So the upshot was good in Covington’s mind: the master was a Christian young man, to be certain. ‘Would’ did not mean ‘did’. Covington, who lived with him close as a wife, concluded so. John Phipps concluded so, too, and had his proof in a conversation they had about what could be shifted from one part of the world to the next by animals, apart from barnacles on the bottom of a ship and fleas on a skinny Falklands fox. They recalled a Captain Henry they’d met in Tahiti, whose father was a missionary. He was a curious young man with a fund of observations. His greatest disdain was for American whalers from New Bedford. He said they were full of watery Congregationalists, an opinion that made Phipps and Covington smile, for that was their own denomination when they had cause to declare what it was.

  Capt Henry said that a shark had followed him from the Friendly Isles to Port Jackson, that he’d caught it inside the Heads, and lo, there were things inside it that had been pitched overboard early on—a ladies’ purse made from purple silk clasped with iron, a ball of string, a crockery plate marked with the crest of the Henrys of East Anglia. Darwin said, ‘I must look in a shark more keenly.’ He wrote in his notebook that Dampier in New Holland opened a shark and found the head and bones of a hippopotamus, its maw was like a leather sack, so very thick and tough that a sharp knife could not cut it. The hairy lips were still sound and not petrified. The maw was full of jelly that stank extremely. She was hooked at Shark’s Bay, latitude twenty-five degrees. The nearest of the East Indian Islands, namely Java, was one thousand miles distant. So Darwin asked: ‘Where are hippopotami found in that archipelago? Such have never been observed in Australia. So there it is, with respect to sharks distributing fossil remains, I think it is likely they do, Phipps, soft tissue or hard plates, for how else could the tragedy of the Flood be spread so wide?’