Evolution's Captain Read Free Page B

streaming blood, his linen shirt and clothes drenched, blood slippery on the cabin sole, but Stokes was quite conscious and even apologetic for making himself a nuisance. The two doctors immediately did what they could for him, which wasn’t much: a head wound, no exit wound, the pistol’s ball lodged somewhere inside. They cleaned him up and laid him in his bunk.
    For the next three days, King spent hours aboard the Beagle with Stokes, who remained “perfectly collected.” As they talked, King went through Stokes’s papers, his journal and surveying observations, the ship’s daily memoranda, accounts, and orders. These “were in so confused and scattered a condition,” wrote King, “that I despaired of putting them into any order.”
    Stokes was overwhelmed with remorse. He told King that the main reason for his “unhappy malady” was his fear that he wasn’t up to the job, that his defects as a surveyor were bound to come to light. And they did, as King began to see that most of what had been accomplished on the Beagle ’s cruise—the charts, the harbor plans, the laborious azimuths and bearings and calculations made in the course of surveying—was the work of Lieutenant Skyring and the junior officers. The calculations written in Stokes’s hand were actually copies of what had been done by the others. This was never admitted in King’s subsequently published account of the cruises of the Beagle and the Adventure , in which he praised Captain Stokes for his work and stoicism. In his letter to the Admiralty, however, King shifted his praise to the ship’s master, Flinn, for extricating the Beagle from “situations of impending danger into which her Commander had unwarily and rashly rushed without any regard to the lives of so many people under his protection…. The state of Captain Stokes’smind drove him at times to such desperate acts, as regarded the conduct of the ship, in which he would be controlled by no one, but (when the case arrived at a pitch of extreme danger) by the Master Flinn.” Before returning to Port Famine, Stokes had extracted a pledge from his officers that they would never tell what had happened. But now, lying on his bunk, his deception revealed, he told King everything and praised Flinn with almost exactly the same self-recriminatory words.
    At moments, as he lay in his bloody berth, Stokes even talked of resuming command once he recovered, as he began to feel he would. But after three days of excited chatter and confession he worsened. Gangrene slowly made its way through his brain. It took him twelve days to die. The first entry in the Beagle ’s log for August 12, 1828, made just after midnight, reads: “Light breezes and cloudy. Departed this life Pringle Stokes, Esq., Commander.”
    After death, his body was examined. Despite his tremorous hand, the gunshot had done its job. The surgeons, duty bound to provide postmortem evidence, opened Stokes’s head and found the pistol’s small-bore ball lodged in the corrupted mess of his brain.
    They also found seven nearly healed knife wounds in Stokes’s chest: the inept captain had been trying to kill himself for weeks.
    Â 
    The two ships then sailed north for the winter. The crews of both vessels were weak from months of exposure and hard service on insufficient rations. They had caught fish and shot what game they could find, but it was never enough, and they were plagued by scurvy. At Montevideo they took aboard a supply of bitter Seville oranges and these alone had every man better in less than a week.
    The Beagle spent six weeks in Montevideo undergoing repairs to its hull, while King sailed north in the Adventure to Rio de Janeiro, where he was to report to Sir Robert Otway, the commander-in-chief of the South American fleet, aboard the fleet’s flagship, HMS Ganges . After two seasons in the remotesouth, much of the surveying