Mr Darwin's Shooter Read Free

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 ’.
    The South American, Galapagos, Australian and sea-borne colour and high adventure of that voyage was a period of adventure and travel ‘far more thrilling’ (as Stephen Jay Gould has observed) than such a voyage might otherwise have been in itself, thanks to ‘the impact upon human history’ of the religious and scientific conclusions reached by Darwin incrementally, culminating in The Origin of Species . Covington was there with Darwin every inch of the way in the preparation phase, not just in the evidence-gathering part of the process, but—back in London, and crucial to the plot—when Darwin first put pen to paper (privately) expressing his theory.
    If a convention of the novel is a character from the sidelines, overlooked, underestimated, but a very present actor, sufferer, and eavesdropper, then I could hardly have found a better one to imagine myself into than Syms Covington.
    Roger McDonald
Braidwood, NSW
September 2008
    Footnote : I am grateful to Professor John Ludbrook for a generous letter drawing my attention to an error of fact relating to Covington’s operation for his illness when I have him arriving in Sydney in the early pages of the novel, suffering from what is evidently a burst appendix. I am pleased that I have the opportunity to make the correction with this printing, ten years after first publication, still having the fictional Dr MacCracken at an advanced point of his profession in 1860, but not so far forward that he would have been (by about twenty years) a world pioneer if his operation had been done the way I described it.

 

The day was hot and dusty with scattered leaves of poplars lining a towpath. A boy went swimming in green canal water, rolling himself belly-over, gulping and thrashing in pleasure. He beat the slowly moving water with the flat of his hand and floating face-down blew noisy bubbles.
    Syms Covington was naked as a bulb, white and hairless except for a slicked-down tuft of red curls across the dome of his conspicuous head. At twelve years of age he was sturdy as a man and soon would become one, stretching in his bones until he reached a height of just six feet, and getting a strength across his shoulders and in his arms like a house beam squared from timber. Yet when Covington floated on his back between corridors of puffy summer clouds he felt small as a flea, and imagined he looked down on the earth. It