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Author | Harry Thompson |
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Language | English |
Subject | Robert FitzRoy |
Genre | Historical novel |
Set in | 1828–1865 |
Publisher | Headline Review |
Publication date | 6 June 2005 |
Pages | 640 |
ISBN | 978-0755302802 |
This Thing of Darkness (published in the United States as To the Edge of the World) was the debut novel of Harry Thompson, published in 2005 only months before his death in November of that year at the age of 45. [1] Set in the period from 1828 to 1865, it is a historically fictionalised biography of Robert FitzRoy, who was given command of HMS Beagle halfway through its first voyage. He subsequently captained the vessel over its famous second voyage, during which Charles Darwin travelled as his companion.
The novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. [2]
Born to an aristocratic family, Robert FitzRoy joined the Royal Naval College, Portsmouth aged 12 and entered the Royal Navy the following year, rising rapidly through the ranks. The novel begins in 1828 with the suicide of the commander of HMS Beagle, Pringle Stokes, and FitzRoy's subsequent appointment as the vessel's (temporary) captain at the age of twenty-three.
Whilst conducting Beagle's mission of surveying Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, during which he proved to be a meticulous surveyor, he captured four native Fuegians (Fuegia Basket, Jemmy Button, York Minster, and Boat Memory) and brought them back to England when Beagle returned in October 1830. FitzRoy's intention was that they should be educated and converted to Christianity before being returned to their homelands, where they would be able to act as interpreters – with the aim of establishing friendly relations between their fellow countrymen and the British – and also use their new knowledge to improve the lives of their compatriots. The captives became celebrities and were presented to King William IV; Boat Memory later died from smallpox.
FitzRoy undertook the second voyage of HMS Beagle to return the surviving three Fuegians, at considerable personal expense. He was accompanied by Charles Darwin, who by the end of the voyage had become famous in scientific circles as a result of the discoveries he made during it, and who also collected much of the material that was to underpin his evolutionary theories during these travels. By 1860, following the publication of On the Origin of Species , FitzRoy – a committed Christian – later regretted that he had facilitated Darwin's research.
On Beagle's return to England, FitzRoy was elected as the Tory Member of Parliament for Durham. He was appointed to several official posts, amongst them becoming the second Governor of New Zealand. His attempts to treat the indigenous Māori population equitably made him unpopular with the settlers and the New Zealand Company and he was subsequently recalled to England.
FitzRoy was a pioneer of developing charts to allow weather predictions to be made; weather forecasting is named after his attempts at what he called "forecasting the weather". He published the world's first daily weather forecasts in The Times in 1860 and also provided personal forecasts to Queen Victoria. [3]
He committed suicide in April 1865 as a result of depression and a combination of problems at the Meteorological Office, which he headed, and personal financial and health difficulties.
The title comes from Prospero's line "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine" in Act V, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare's The Tempest .
This Thing of Darkness includes a large cast of fictionalised historical persons. In addition to FitzRoy and Darwin, the characters include:
In The Independent on Sunday , Stephen Knight wrote: “A hybrid of novel-of-ideas and ripping yarn, This Thing of Darkness is more convincingly the latter. The crew's skirmishes with South American natives and a storm off the coast of Uruguay, presaged by wind-blown clouds of butterflies and moths, are beautifully managed set-pieces, pacy, gripping, and vividly chaotic”. He found the characterisation less effective, saying: “If Thompson's tendency to spell out his characters' thoughts saves us from imagining a subtext, it does not make his creations more rounded. For all their musings, many only register as stereotypes, and, as a consequence, few deaths properly haunt the reader.” [4]
In The Independent , Roz Kaveney found Thompson to be “writing as much about relationships as ideas. His account of the prickly friendship of the Tory prig Fitzroy and the cold-hearted Radical Darwin owes much to other novels of naval life and their forced intimacies; the spirit of Patrick O'Brian is often not far away”. Kaveney was unconvinced by aspects of the novel, saying: “Part of the trouble here is that Thompson is adapting the historical record for the purposes of fiction and is free to load the evidence. He can make Fitzroy's belief in biblical inerrancy a refusal to ditch religion in the face of inconclusive evidence from geology and zoology, while omitting the concurrent debates about the nature of the biblical text. The historical Fitzroy chose to ignore several sorts of evidence. Thompson also portrays Darwin as more racist in the modern sense than Fitzroy, again by shuffling his deck of facts.” She concluded that “This Thing of Darkness is two sorts of book: a superior adventure story and a polemic. One can enjoy the former considerably while noting that the manners of the latter are wanting.” [5]
Robert Colvile, writing in The Observer was more impressed, finding: “The bare facts of Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos, and his formulation of the theory of natural selection, are well known. It takes an expert author to make a new pattern from such familiar cloth, yet this is precisely what Harry Thompson has done. […] While rarely lyrical, Thompson's prose drives the reader through the 750 pages with the unstoppable force of an ocean current, fusing brisk action, challenging ideas and gut-wrenching emotion into an astonishingly assured debut - and memorial”. [6]
HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class 10-gun brig-sloop of the Royal Navy, one of more than 100 ships of this class. The vessel, constructed at a cost of £7,803, was launched on 11 May 1820 from the Woolwich Dockyard on the River Thames. Later reports say the ship took part in celebrations of the coronation of King George IV of the United Kingdom, passing under the old London Bridge, and was the first rigged man-of-war afloat upriver of the bridge. There was no immediate need for Beagle, so she "lay in ordinary", moored afloat but without masts or rigging. She was then adapted as a survey barque and took part in three survey expeditions.
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy was an English officer of the Royal Navy, politician and scientist who served as the second governor of New Zealand between 1843 and 1845. He achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, FitzRoy's second expedition to Tierra del Fuego and the Southern Cone.
The Voyage of the Beagle is the title most commonly given to the book written by Charles Darwin and published in 1839 as his Journal and Remarks, bringing him considerable fame and respect. This was the third volume of The Narrative of the Voyages of H.M. Ships Adventure and Beagle, the other volumes of which were written or edited by the commanders of the ships. Journal and Remarks covers Darwin's part in the second survey expedition of the ship HMS Beagle. Due to the popularity of Darwin's account, the publisher reissued it later in 1839 as Darwin's Journal of Researches, and the revised second edition published in 1845 used this title. A republication of the book in 1905 introduced the title The Voyage of the "Beagle", by which it is now best known.
Robert McCormick was a British Royal Navy ship's surgeon, explorer and naturalist.
Orundellico, known as "Jeremy Button" or "Jemmy Button" or "Jimmy Button", was a member of the Yaghan people from islands around Tierra del Fuego in modern Chile and Argentina. He was taken to England by Captain FitzRoy in HMS Beagle and became a celebrity there for a period.
Admiral John Lort Stokes was a Royal Navy officer who served onboard HMS Beagle for almost eighteen years.
The Yahgan are a group of indigenous peoples in the Southern Cone of South America. Their traditional territory includes the islands south of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, extending their presence into Cape Horn, making them the world's southernmost indigenous human population.
The Darwin Sound is an expanse of seawater which forms a westward continuation of the Beagle Channel and links it to the Pacific Ocean at Londonderry Island and Stewart Island, not far from the southern tip of South America. It thus forms a navigable link across Tierra del Fuego between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans as an alternative to going round the hazardous rocky headland of Cape Horn.
The second voyage of HMS Beagle, from 27 December 1831 to 2 October 1836, was the second survey expedition of HMS Beagle, made under her newest commander, Robert FitzRoy. FitzRoy had thought of the advantages of having someone onboard who could investigate geology, and sought a naturalist to accompany them as a supernumerary. At the age of 22, the graduate Charles Darwin hoped to see the tropics before becoming a parson, and accepted the opportunity. He was greatly influenced by reading Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology during the voyage. By the end of the expedition, Darwin had made his name as a geologist, and fossil collector, and the publication of his journal gave him wide renown as a writer.
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental scientific concept. In a joint presentation with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey.
Fitzroy is a settlement on East Falkland.
The Cherokee class was a class of brig-sloops of the Royal Navy, mounting ten guns. Brig-sloops were sloops-of-war with two masts rather than the three masts of ship sloops. Orders for 115 vessels were placed, including five which were cancelled and six for which the orders were replaced by ones for equivalent steam-powered paddle vessels.
Bahia Wulaia is a bay on the western shore of Isla Navarino along the Murray Channel in extreme southern Chile. The island and adjacent strait are part of the commune of Cabo de Hornos in the Antártica Chilena Province, which is part of the Magallanes and Antartica Chilena Region.
The 1835 Concepción earthquake was an earthquake that occurred near the neighboring cities of Concepción and Talcahuano in Chile on 20 February at 11:30 local time, and had an estimated magnitude of about 8.5 Mw. The earthquake triggered a tsunami which caused the destruction of Talcahuano. A total of at least 50 people died from the effects of the earthquake and the tsunami. The earthquake caused damage from San Fernando in the north to Osorno in the south. It was felt over a still wider area from Copiapó in the north to the island of Chiloe in the south and as far west as the Juan Fernández Islands.
A nautical chronometer made by Thomas Earnshaw (1749–1828), and once part of the equipment of HMS Beagle, the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his voyage around the world, is held in the British Museum. The chronometer was the subject of one episode of the BBC's series A History of the World in 100 Objects.
Geological Observations on South America is a book written by the English naturalist Charles Darwin. The book was published in 1846, and is based on his travels during the second voyage of HMS Beagle, commanded by captain Robert FitzRoy. HMS Beagle arrived in South America to map out the coastlines and islands of the region for the British Navy. On the journey, Darwin collected fossils and plants, and recorded the continent's geological features.
Pringle Stokes was a British naval officer who served in HMS Owen Glendower on a voyage around Cape Horn to the Pacific coast of South America, and on the West African coast fighting the African slave trade.
Peter Brayton Nichols is an American author. He is known for his bestsellers The Rocks ; A Voyage for Madmen, which was a finalist for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year; and Evolution's Captain,. His novel Voyage to the North Star was a Book Of The Month Club main selection and was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Yokcushlu was a Kawésqar woman from the western Tierra del Fuego. In 1830, at the age of nine, she was taken hostage by the crew of the British vessel HMS Beagle and renamed "Fuegia Basket". Robert FitzRoy, captain of the Beagle, initially intended to trade her for a stolen boat. He later decided to take her and three other Fuegians, "York Minster", "Boat Memory", and "Jemmy Button", to England where they could be educated and taught Christianity so that they might return to "civilise" their people and serve as interpreters for the British.