This Thing Of Darkness
HARRY THOMPSON
headline
www.headline.co.uk
Copyright © 2005 Harry Thompson
The right of Harry Thompson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010
eISBN : 978 0 7553 7605 6
This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.headline.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Part One
Chapter One - Rio de Janeiro, 13 November 1828
Chapter Two - Rio de Janeiro, 15 December 1828
Chapter Three - Maldonado Bay, Uruguay, 30 January 1829
Chapter Four - Dungeness Point, Patagonia, 1 April 1829
Chapter Five - Desolate Bay, Tierra del Fuego, 4 February 1830
Chapter Six - York Minster, Tierra del Fuego, 3 March 1830
Chapter Seven - Rio de Janeiro, 1 August 1830
Chapter Eight - Plymouth Sound, 13 October 1830
Part Two
Chapter Nine - The Mount, Shrewsbury, 29 August 1831
Chapter Ten - St Mary’s Infants’ School, Walthamstow, 17 September 1831
Chapter Eleven - Plymouth, 25 October 1831
Chapter Twelve - Barnet Pool, Devonport, 24 December 1831
Part Three
Chapter Thirteen - Rio de Janeiro, 3 April 1832
Chapter Fourteen - Punta Alta, Bahia Blanca, 22 September 1832
Chapter Fifteen - Good Success Bay, Tierra del Fuego, 17 December 1832
Chapter Sixteen - The Beagle Channel, Tierra del Fuego, 6 February 1833
Chapter Seventeen - The Falkland Islands, 1 March 1833
Chapter Eighteen - Patagones, Patagonia, 6 August 1833
Chapter Nineteen - Woollya Cove, Tierra del Fuego, 5 March 1834
Part Four
Chapter Twenty - Valparayso, Chili, 2 November 1834
Chapter Twenty-one - Valparayso. Harbour, 11, january 1835
Chapter Twenty-two - Concepción, Chili, 20 February 1835
Chapter Twenty-three - Valparayso, Chili, 16 June 1835
Chapter Twenty-four - Chatham Island, Galapagos,16 September 1835
Chapter Twenty-five - Point Venus, Tahiti, 16 November 1835
Chapter Twenty-six - The Bay of Islands, New Zealand, 21 December 1835
Chapter Twenty-seven - The English Channel, 1 October 1836
Chapter Twenty-eight - 31 Chester Street, London, 8 October 1837
Part Five
Chapter Twenty-nine - Durham, 13 April 1841
Chapter Thirty - Auckland, New Zealand, 23 December 1843
Chapter Thirty-one - Auckland, New Zealand, 11 January 1845
Chapter Thirty-two - Down House, Downe, Kent, 27 February 1851
Part Six
Chapter Thirty-three - Woollya Cove, Tierra del Fuego, 9 November 1855
Chapter Thirty-four - 140 Church Road, Upper Norwood, 13 December 1856
Chapter Thirty-five - Stanley, Falkland Islands, 12 October 1857
Chapter Thirty-six - The University Museum, Oxford, 29 June 1860
Chapter Thirty-seven - 140 Church Road, Upper Norwood, 26 March 1865
Chapter Thirty-eight - 140 Church Road, Upper Norwood, 30 April 1865
Author’s Postscript
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Harry Thompson made his name as a television producer. He also wrote a number of highly acclaimed non-fiction books. This Thing of Darkness is his first and only novel. After a brave fight against illness, Harry Thompson died in November 2005.
‘This Thing of Darkness is completely brilliant. It’s not just quite good - it’s stunning. It utilises all Harry’s gifts for travel writing and observation. As a single legacy, it would be pretty impressive, but look what else he accomplished as well. You look at his age and you see 45 and you can’t believe how much he acheived’ Ian Hislop
‘Thompson proves a master storyteller, whose vigorous command of character, period detail, weather conditions and fleeting emotions lifts the reader straight from his chair into the middle of a sudden storm, an intense argument, a mood of exhilaration or despair, a squalid street in New Zealand or a desolate landscape in Tierra del Fuego. What sensible reader wants a novel as engrossing as this one to stop?’ John Spurling, The Sunday Times
‘Beautifully managed, pacy, gripping and vivid’ Independent on Sunday
‘This is a fascinating read’ The Times
‘As a devotee of that master of the sea story Patrick O’Brian, I can say this is definitely in the same league’ David Shukman, Daily Mail
‘Harry Thompson catches the atmosphere, and the language, of Victorian Britain with much skill, and paints a vivid picture of the grim existence aboard’ Daily Telegraph
‘The meticulous research enriches this fascinating tale’ Sunday Telegraph
‘The spirit of Patrick O’Brian is not far away ... a superior adventure story’ Independent
TO MY FATHER
without whose help this
book could never have been written
‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’
The Tempest,
Act V, Scene 1
This novel is closely based upon real events that took place between 1828 and 1865.
Preface
Port Famine, Patagonia, 1 August 1828
An icy wind shouldered its way into the Straits of Magellan from the west, pummelling the cliff walls and scouring the rocks as it passed. Its thirteen-thousand-mile journey across open ocean completed, it sought out the ancient glaciers of its birth in anger. As a grimy late-morning light ahead signalled the dawning of the brief southern day, it funnelled at speed through the narrows at York Road, before sweeping left into the bay of Port Famine. Darting and jinking as it hunted for a target, it picked out the solitary figure of Captain Pringle Stokes where he knelt. It buffeted him and tore at his clothes. It tugged at his thinning forelock in mock deference. It cut through the sodden wool of his coat, turning his skin to gooseflesh and congealing the blood in his veins.
Stokes shivered. I am so emaciated, he thought bitterly, I can feel my shoulder-blades almost touching each other. He shifted his weight as another furious gust did its best to hurl him to the ground. His knees jostled together in the cold gravel. His ceremonial scabbard, the badge of his rank, scratched uselessly at the smooth stones. He plastered the damp strands of hair back into place - a tiny, futile act of vanity - but the wind merely caught them again and flung them aside dismissively. This place, he thought. This place constitutes the sum total of my achievement. This place is all that I amount to. This place is all that I am.
Further down the beach, Bennet and his ratings, all drenched from the waist down, were still struggling to pull the cutter ashore; ants, going about their irrelevant business in the service of an unheeding monarch half a world away. A curse on His Majesty, thought Stokes, and a curse on His Majesty’s government, in whose service they found the
mselves marooned in this wretched place. As he inspected them, the bent, sullen figures seemed to be winning their little war. They were probably wondering where he’d gone. Curiosity, he had learned, is one of the few feelings that boredom cannot kill. As soon as Bennet had the boat secured, they would follow him up the shingle. He did not have much time.
He had conceived his plan weeks ago, but today he would put it into practice. Why today? Nothing marked out this shoreline as different from any other. It was as wretched as the rest. Which was precisely why today was so apt. He had realized it, suddenly, when he had stepped out of the boat. Today was the day.
Stokes lifted his head heavenwards, as if seeking reassurance. As always, an obdurate black wall of rock met his gaze, shrouded in lifeless grey. Somewhere above him, hidden from view, was the snow-capped spur of Point St Ann, christened by one of his predecessors - Carteret, or Byron perhaps - in an attempt to imbue this place with spiritual familiarity, a sense of the proximity of God. Yet if ever God had abandoned a place, this was it. The ragged beech forest above the shoreline lay silent. There were no animals to start before a sudden footstep, no birds to soar and swoop, no insects even. Here was a scene of profound desolation. He and the men under his command were alone.
The only man with whom naval etiquette would allow him to converse, that damned fool Captain King, was a couple of miles away at least, another stupid speck in the wilderness. King had spent the winter beating up and down the east coast in the Adventure. At least the sun sometimes shone upon the east coast. This was truly a place where ‘the soul of a man dies in him’. For if the sharp point of St Ann herself was unable to tear a hole in the suffocating blanket of cloud, then what chance did human beings have of living and breathing in such confines? A curse on King, and a curse on that fat buffoon Otway as well.
The time had come. His frail, icy fingers, lean from long months of low rations, reached down and grasped one of two pistols that hung from his belt. They were pre-loaded on board, of course, prior to any shore excursion, as per Admiralty orders. He couldn’t even shit without following Admiralty orders. Would the lords care, he wondered, would they be secretly impressed by his gesture, or would they take offence? Or had he already been forgotten, he and his men, their futile labours destined to be mislaid for ever in the ledger of some consumptive little Admiralty clerk?
The pistol weighed heavy in his hand, and for the first time that day he felt nervous. For one tremulous instant he sought a friendly reflection in the gunmetal, but its dull gleam refused him even that consolation. Instead it offered only a reflection in time, of a sunlit September afternoon eight thousand miles ago, of himself in the doorway of Forsyth’s gunshop at number eight Leicester Street. A day when the piece in his hand had shone handsomely, speaking to him of foreign travel, of exciting times ahead, before his life’s path had narrowed and hemmed him in. The assistant had stepped out into the street to demonstrate the revolutionary copper-cap percussion system. Mock-aiming the weapon with (he had to admit) a dash of theatricality, the smartly attired young captain had attracted admiring glances from passers-by, or at least he had imagined so. What price those attentions now? It was half as reliable again as a flintlock, the assistant had said. Well, he would be needing that reliability today.
With a deep intake of breath, Stokes rested the barrel carefully against his front teeth, and curled a tapering finger round the trigger. His lips, suddenly dry, closed painfully around the freezing metal. A warm gush of fear welled in his bowels. Another gust plucked mockingly at his hair, daring him to go ahead. He had to do it, really, if he was any sort of man. To pull back now would be the ultimate, the crowning failure. So do it then. Do it now. His hand shook. Three. Two. One. Now.
Whether it was a last-second change of mind that caused his hand to jerk sideways, or a surge of fear, Stokes never knew. At the exact moment that the powder flashed and the iron ball smashed upward through the roof of his mouth, his hand dragged the barrel round to one side.
And suddenly, the wind was stilled. The crash of water on stone ceased. The clouds receded, and all the brutal discord of the Patagonian winter was gone, replaced by the purest, blinding agony. And then a tiny thought within made itself known: that if he could go through pain of such dazzling clarity and be conscious of it, he must still be alive.
Part One
Chapter One
Rio de Janeiro, 13 November 1828
‘It took Stokes twelve days to die.’
Captain King’s voice carried the faintest hint of accusation. He sat forward, his eyes fixed upon the admiral.
‘The powder explosion blew away half of his brain. Never have I seen a man suffer so much. Such great agonies ... and yet he bore his fate with fortitude. He had’ - King paused, remembering the pitiful, mutilated creature brought squealing and snuffling back to the Beagle - ‘He had no eyes. He made little sense; he merely cried out. He became lucid again on the fifth and sixth days, even philosophical as regards his fate, in spite of the pain. Thereafter he lapsed into incoherence once more. He died on the morning of the twelfth.’
Admiral Otway exhaled at last. ‘Poor Pringle,’ he murmured to himself, and sat back heavily. The manner of Stokes’s death disturbed him, rather than the fact of it.
Sensing an advantage, King persisted. ‘It had become clear to me, from reports in the days preceding his death, that the balance of his mind had become disturbed. For instance, he stopped for four days to survey the gulf of Estevan, when the Beagle’s supplies were very nearly exhausted, a survey that I had most emphatically not commissioned.’
‘The south has the strangest effect on a man,’ offered Otway apologetically.
King held his ground. ‘I do not honestly believe, sir, that any of us had ever previously experienced such conditions. The weather was atrocious. The crew were incessantly employed. At Cape Upright, for instance, the Beagle was under way all night for four nights. Most of the crew were sick with rheumatic complaints. Four men drowned. Three died of scurvy. Conditions were little better aboard the Adventure.’
The accusatory tone of his remarks, King knew, served no purpose other than to provoke Admiral Otway to mild discomfiture. It was mere sport on his part, his meagre reward for months of back-breaking toil. He had no reason to fear Otway, no need to seek the admiral’s influence: this was his last commission, indivisible, unalterable, fashioned in Whitehall. His future was already out of Otway’s hands. Both men were aware, too, that King had given Stokes the tougher task, ordering him west into the teeth of the gales that howled up the Straits of Magellan. The sad fact was that Stokes had been a bad appointment, a mediocre captain crushed by the pressure of his responsibilities. Goading his superior now, King realized, helped only to ease his own frustrations.
The close tropical atmosphere bore down stickily on both men, as Otway pondered how to put into words what he was going to say next.
King monitored a bead of sweat as it made its way down the admiral’s neck, then dissipated suddenly into the stiff, high-necked woollen collar of his frock-coat. The contrast between Otway’s immaculate, starched uniform and his own, battered and salt-bleached, struck him briefly as absurd. Instinctively he raised his fingers to the thick, grey-streaked beard that had kept him warm in the south. He had not shaved now for over six months.
Otway closed the book on King’s accusations with an expansive gesture, as if to sweep aside the accumulated disasters of the preceding six months. His action prompted King to refocus, to widen his angle of vision. Rio de Janeiro harbour spread itself gloriously behind the admiral, filling the sternlights of the Ganges: white sails dotted everywhere like a field of cotton in the sun, cormorants skimming home sleek with their day’s catch, the bright terracotta roofs of the new merchants’ mansions climbing the steep hillsides alongside their crumbling, mildewed predecessors. Otway had the air of a circus impresario, thought King, installed before this magnificent panorama in his shiny coat, looking for all the world as if he was about to pr
oduce a dove from a handkerchief. Abruptly, he realized that this was no idle simile. Otway was indeed on the verge of making a big announcement. The admiral’s fingertips met.
‘Clearly the Beagle requires a commander of considerable qualities. Someone whose powers of leadership are, er, commensurate with your own.
Don’t bother flattering me, thought King. We both know I’m going back because I have to.
‘She needs someone who can inspire the men to hitherto unsurpassed levels of courage, fortitude and determination. Were the Service blessed with two Phillip Parker Kings’ - Otway squeezed out as much counterfeit sincerity as he dared - ‘I should have no dilemma. You have taken so much upon your shoulders, with so little support, that my gratitude to you knows no bounds.’
King realized, uncomfortably, where the conversation was headed and decided to interject, although he knew as he did so that it would be futile. ‘Lieutenant Skyring has commanded the Beagle these last four months, sir. Considering the morale of the men and the state of the ship when Captain Stokes met his end, the transformation that Skyring has wrought is little short of remarkable. I can think of no one better suited to this commission than Lieutenant Skyring.’ Who should have had the job in the first place, he added to himself.
‘Indeed, indeed.’ Otway grimaced. ‘I have no doubt that Skyring is an extremely capable officer, and I am delighted to hear that he has made such splendid headway. However, the candidate I have in mind is a man of considerable capabilities. He’s my flag lieutenant here in the Ganges. Only twenty-three, but the most — ’
‘Twenty-three?’ King blurted out. ‘Forgive my interrupting, sir, but Lieutenant Skyring is one of my most experienced officers. He has knowledge of the area and the complete confidence of the men. I simply cannot recommend — ’
A little wave of the hand from Otway silenced the captain. ‘I have already made the appointment,’ he stated flatly, picking up a handbell and ringing it to attract his steward’s attention. The man entered. ‘Would you kindly request Flag Lieutenant FitzRoy to present himself forthwith?’