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NLA News - home March 2005 Volume XV Number 6

Beagle friends were shipmates for life

click to enlarge

Conrad Martens (1801–1878)
Valparaiso, 1834
watercolour; 53.7 x 75.7 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an2390750

Judy Cannon introduces Charles Darwin’s fellow Beagle shipmates and their stories before and after that thought-changing voyage

When Charles Darwin landed at Sydney Cove in January 1836, he was surprised to see such a prosperous settlement and commented, ‘It seems a man of business can hardly fail to make a large fortune’. In a letter to his sister, Susan, he wrote however, ‘I do not think the Colony ever can be like N. America: it can never be an agricultural country. The climate is so dry & the soil light’.

He was one of a number of early botanists and researchers attracted by the new Southern Land and the potential it might offer. Their reactions and findings can be found in their works, correspondence and illustrations held in the Library’s collections.. In addition to well-known nineteenth-century names such as Sir Joseph Banks and Ludwig Leichhardt, there are also holdings for or about Allan Cunningham (1791–1839), Aylmer Bourke Lambert (1761–1842), Daniel Solander (1733–82), Baron Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–96) and Robert David Fitzgerald (1830–92).

Darwin was 22 when he embarked in 1831 on HMS Beagle. Over the next five years, he maintained a detailed record in his journal, painstakingly describing landscapes, mountains, streams, vegetation, birds and fauna. The Beagle visited Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Lima, Tierra del Fuego, and the islands of Galapagos, Keeling and Falklands, Tahiti and New Zealand, as well as Australia.

click to enlarge

Augustus Earle (1793–1838)
[The head of a gentleman, a portrait][1825?]
watercolour; 14.0 x 13.0 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an2854213

His fellow seafarers include names we have come to know, and it is interesting to recognise them as part of the Beagle group rather than as individuals on whom history also placed a separate spotlight. For instance, on board at the outset was a ‘draughtsman’ by the name of Augustus Earle, an established artist in England, whose work continues to enjoy recognition. When he left the ship at Montevideo in 1832 because of ill health, he was replaced by another artist, ‘topographer’ Conrad Martens, whose work also still attracts significant attention.

On board, too, was a young fellow by the name of Philip Gidley King, of the Australian pioneer family, and Syms Covington, from Bedfordshire, who became Darwin’s servant. In different ways, they all became entangled in the evolving early history of European Australia. Others aboard included Lieutenant John Clement Wickham, a Scot, and Captain Robert FitzRoy, who created the opportunity for Darwin to sail as a naturalist.

An essay for an Augustus Earle exhibition at the Library in 1996 described Earle as ‘the first independent, professionally trained artist to visit each of the five continents and record his experiences. He was not only highly prolific but talented, gregarious and adventuresome as well’. Darwin liked him.

Earle worked primarily in watercolour. Born in London, the son of Royal Academy painter James Earle, he also exhibited at the academy and had travelled widely before setting sail in the Beagle. He had previously earned a living in Sydney for two years, painting portraits of leading colonists, as well as landscapes.

Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline on 25 April 1832 from Botofogo Bay, Rio de Janeiro:

Earl & myself are now living in this retired & beautiful spot. —I trust to spend a most delightful fortnight. —I have begun however with a bad omen. —whilst landing the boat was swamped; a heavy sea knocked me head over heels & filled the boat. —I never shall forget my agony, seeing all my useful books, papers, —instruments microscopes etc etc gun rifle floating in the Salt Water: every thing is a little injured, but not much: I must harden myself to many such calamities.

Depicting his immediate companions, he continued:

I believe King [Philip Gidley] is coming to live here: he is the most perfect, pleasant boy I ever met with & my chief companion. —Wickham [John] is a fine fellow. —& we are very good friends— … And now for the Captain [Robert FitzRoy] as I daresay you feel some interest in him. —As far as I can judge: he is a very extraordinary person. —I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson … It is very amusing to see all hands hauling at a rope they not supposing him on deck, & then observe the effect, when he utters a syllable: it is like a string of dray horses, when the waggoner gives one of his aweful smacks.

By 13 November 1833, however, Darwin wrote,

Poor Earl has never been well since leaving England & now his health is entirely broken up, that he leaves us. —a Mr Martens, a pupil of C. Fielding [Copley], & excellent landscape drawer has joined us. —He is a pleasant person, & like all birds of that class. —full to the mouth with enthusiasm.

click to enlarge

Charles Darwinc.1854
Reproduced from Charles Darwin, by Leonard Huxley (London: Watts & Co., 1921)

Conrad Martens joined the Beagle at Montevideo, but Darwin wrote later that there was ‘rather too much of the drawing master about him, he is very unlike Earle’s eccentric character’.

Concerned about his father’s opinions and the expense, Darwin had hesitated to take on a servant. But Syms Covington became a great help, taking part in land expeditions, and hauling and packing specimens for transport back to England.

FitzRoy, speaking much later, commented, ‘Not withstanding our smiles at the cargoes of apparent rubbish which he frequently brought on board, he [Darwin] and his servant used their pick axes in earnest and brought away what has since proved to be most interesting and valuable remains of extinct animals’ . Among Darwin’s finds were fossils of large South American mammals, including a Megatherium, a sloth the size of an elephant.

Covington also acted as assistant and secretary and continued to work for Darwin after their return to England when they were faced with a pile of specimens to sort. Covington migrated in 1840 to Sydney, taking with him a reference from Darwin (now in the Mitchell Library). Covington had suited his purposes but Darwin, in his Beagle correspondence, admitted that he did not like him very much.

Covington, who eventually became postmaster at Pambula, New South Wales, first worked for the Australian Agricultural Company (AAC). He married Eliza Twyford of Stroud, New South Wales, and the couple moved to Sydney, where he worked as a coal depot clerk.

The AAC had been established in 1824 to extend and improve Merino sheep in New South Wales and was also involved in farming and mining. (Earlier, John and Elizabeth Macarthur at Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta, had pioneered Merino flocks for which Elizabeth took prime responsibility during the years her husband was absent.) One of the AAC board members was Phillip Parker King, whose son, Philip Gidley King, was a Beagle midshipman, of whom Darwin wrote so kindly, and who was regarded by Covington as a shipmate.

Dr Pennie Pemberton, of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra, points out that Darwin subsequently visited Gidley King’s father at Dunheved, New South Wales. Parker King had been invited to become a member of the AAC’s Colonial Advisory Committee at its foundation but had elected instead to sail on the HMS Adventure in company with the Beagle on its first voyage of 1826–30. In 1839, Parker King moved to Tahlee on the company’s Port Stephen estate as AAC Commissioner.

click to enlarge

Edouard Jean Marie Hostein (1804–1886)
Hobart-Town, vue prise d’un ravin au nord, Van Diemen[1833]
hand-coloured lithograph print; 21.0 x 33.6 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an8368182

Son Philip Gidley King joined the AAC in the early 1840s and went on to become superintendent of stock. He had first learned stock handling in Gippsland and on the Limestone Plain, now a part of the Australian Capital Territory. He married his cousin, Elizabeth McArthur, and they lived at Stroud House. He was later to become general superintendent of the Peel River Land and Mineral Company (formed to take over AAC’s operations in 1854) at Goonoo Goonoo, Tamworth. The AAC is currently the second-largest beef cattle company in Australia, with headquarters in Milton, Brisbane.

Another correspondent of Darwin’s, Edward William Terrick Hamilton, was an AAC governor from 1857 to 1898, later a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and the first provost of Sydney University. He had earlier joined his cousin in managing ‘Collaroi’, near Cassilis, for a kinsman, Walter Stevenson Davidson, who was by the 1850s the largest individual AAC shareholder.

Philip Gidley King was also a grandson of his namesake, Governor Philip Gidley King, and therefore in a position to introduce artist Conrad Martens to many of the foremost colonists, whose grand mansions he subsequently painted. As writer Damaris Bairstow has detailed in his book A Million Pounds A Million Acres, these included Throsby House, Elizabeth Bay House, Camden Park, Regentville, Tempe Park and Lindesay.

Martens was born in London in 1801. On board the Beagle for two years, he enjoyed early success after settling in Sydney, but for some years afterwards led a rather precarious existence. In 1863, he became assistant parliamentary librarian. This helped family finances but left little time to paint.

For John Clement Wickham, the story is one of ultimate disappointment. His achievements included the discovery of Port Darwin, and he surveyed both the coastline of the Gulf of Carpentaria and North Queensland. He became police magistrate at Moreton Bay and worked to improve Newstead House, on the Brisbane River, where the family lived. From a plain two-storey cottage with stone foundations, plastered brick walls and a slate roof, he turned it into a focus of Brisbane’s social life and an unofficial government house.

click to enlarge

Conrad Martens (1801–1878)
Sydney Cove, 1842
oil on canvas painting;
31.0 x 80.0 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an2265452

His wife, Anna, died in 1851, and in 1857 he married Ellen Deering. First Government Resident, Wickham expected to be named governor when Queensland was separated from New South Wales in 1859. However, George Ferguson Bowen was appointed and a bitterly disappointed Wickham left Newstead and returned to Scotland with his family. Newstead House is now open to the public.

Robert FitzRoy, who gave his name to the FitzRoy barometer, underwent a troubled time as governor of New Zealand (1843–45) and was recalled. As head of an embryo Meteological Office, in 1860 he pioneered a system of scientific weather warnings, which were published daily in The Times. However, in 1865, plagued by illness, depression and disappointment over his career, he ended his own life.

Darwin and his wife and family settled at Down, Kent. As Darwin persistently suffered poor health, letter writing was one way of keeping in touch with peers, contacts and friends. Cambridge University, where many of Darwin’s specimens, papers and letters were sent, has undertaken the task of placing his huge correspondence online <www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin/>. Database entries indicate that letters between Darwin and ex-midshipman Gidley King were still continuing in 1869, 30 years after the Beagle voyage. Covington also remained in contact and, at Darwin’s request, he and his son gathered and sent off barnacle specimens from Twofold Bay, near Eden, New South Wales, in 1849. Darwin was elated when he received them.

Darwin’s son, Francis, wrote that his father had retained the most pleasant memories of the voyage and the friends he had made on board. ‘To his children their names were familiar, from his many stories of the voyage, and we caught his feeling of friendship for many who were to us nothing more than names. ’ Darwin’s nicknames included ‘the dear old Philosopher’ (he was still in his twenties) because of his kindness and even temper—and ‘the flycatcher’. Darwin apparently overheard a boatswain pointing out the Beagle’s officers to a visitor, saying, ‘That’s our first lieutenant; that’s our doctor; [of Darwin] that’s our fly-catcher’. The ‘flycatcher’ was to overturn contemporary thinking in favour of his theory of evolution.

JUDY CANNON, a freelance writer, is based at Brisbane. Her email address is tytherleighpress@primus.com.au

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