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Stokes’s deputy, Lieutenant Skyring, shouted bad news from the Beagle ’s deck – the captain was ill and confined to his cabin. King went on board and found Stokes in a state of near mental collapse brought on by extreme fatigue and demoralisation. ‘He expressed himself much distressed by the hardships the officers and crew under him had suffered … I was alarmed at the desponding tone of his conversation.’ Hoping for explanations, King read Stokes’s journal and found the roots of his colleague’s melancholia spelled out in its description of the journey he had just completed:
    Nothing could be more dreary than the scene around us. The lofty, bleak and barren heights that surround the inhospitable shores of this inlet were covered, even low down their sides, with dense clouds, upon which the fierce squalls that assailed us beat, without causing any change: they seemed as immovable as the mountains where they rested.
    Around us, and some of them distant no more than two thirds of a cable’s length, were rocky islets, lashed by a tremendous surf; and as if to complete the dreariness and utter desolation of the scene, even birds seemed to shun its neighbourhood. The weather was that in which (as Thompson emphatically says) ‘the soul of man dies in him’.
    Over the next few days Stokes alternated between periods of delirium and clarity. King wrote, ‘Suspicions arose in my mind that all was not quite right with him…’ They were well founded. On 1 August a boat slipped across from the Beagle with the news that Stokes had fallen into a deep depression and, alone in his cabin, had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Efforts to save him were forlorn, and the surgeons found they could do little to save his life.
    During the delirium that ensued, and lasted four days, his mind wandered to many of the circumstances, and hairbreadth escapes of the Beagle ’s cruize. The following three days he recovered so much as to be able to see me frequently and hopes were entertained by himself, but by no-one else, that he would recover. He then became gradually worse, and after lingering in most intense pain, expired on the morning of the 12th.
    Thus it was that in November 1828, Robert FitzRoy, flag lieutenant on HMS Ganges, based on the Brazilian station, found himself appointed to the command of the Beagle, which had recently limped into Rio to report its sad news.
    It was a difficult commission for the young man. The continuing work of the survey was demanding, he had been promoted above Stokes’s expected successor, Skyring, and there was an air of gloom on the ship following the demise of the captain. One of FitzRoy’s first tasks would be to restore morale and mend fences. Nevertheless, despite his youth, he was well qualified for the task ahead. A gold-medal graduate of Portsmouth naval college, his career had thundered along a fast track, aided by influential relatives, hard work and his undoubted seamanship. It had taken just nine years to rise from lowly midshipman to the command of his own ship. But he was a man of stark contrasts. His background was aristocratic. Grandson of the third Duke of Grafton, he could trace a direct lineage back to Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers, as the name FitzRoy implies – the bastard son of a king. His politics were those of the highest, archest Tory: he was bigoted, morally confident, asserted the authority of the Church and the power of the landed interests. He was also convinced of the innate necessity of slavery.
    FitzRoy was a strict disciplinarian, who trusted in firm but fair justice. He believed that punishments should always be in proportion to the offence committed. Many men endured floggings during the course of the two Beagle voyages under his command, but he prided himself that all understood the purpose of the punishment and its equity. If he was not loved by the men around him, he was