We’re so used to Charles Darwin and so accepting of his conclusions — that the Old Testament, Noah and the ark, was all bunk and that life had developed by survival of the fittest individuals — we forget how utterly contrary his views first appeared.
Peter Nichols unearths that story in Evolution’s Captain: The Dark Fate of the Man Who Sailed Charles Darwin around the World (Harper Collins, $24.95, 352 pages), a careful and well-written account of Darwin’s best friend and fellow scientist, Capt. Robert FitzRoy. The aristocratic FitzRoy, related to Britain’s royal family and the originator of modern weather forecasting, was literally driven to madness and suicide by his repugnance at Darwin’s ideas.
An excellent seaman and captain, FitzRoy navigated the ship Beagle which carried the young Darwin on his five-year voyage of zoological discovery. The two men became fast friends, as Darwin had not yet begun to extrapolate his revolutionary theory about evolution — in fact he approved the highly religious FitzRoy’s frantic efforts to “civilize” and make God-fearing Christians of the Patagonian natives the Beagle met in Tierra Del Fuego.
Later the two drew apart as FitzRoy first disagreed with, and then actively opposed, Darwin’s doctrines.
That people could feel so strongly about opposing theories seems strange until we realize with a shock that there are thousands of men and women still willing to die for the sake of religious belief. Mr. Nichols is utterly convincing in his portrayal of FitzRoy’s mental disintegration under the assault of Darwin’s upending of accepted theology.
Admittedly the high-strung Fitzroy harbored a family history of mental illness (his uncle was a suicide), but when Darwin’s famed “Origin of Species” became a bestseller in Britain and the center of a fierce debate, with Darwin clearly the winner, FitzRoy sank into the depression that cost him his life at the age of 60.
Mr. Nichols’ skillful narration takes the reader through the lives of both men — one pre-eminent, the other forever in his shadow, and through the fascinating voyage itself, which was to shake religion to its core.
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In A Hanging Offense: The Strange Affair of the Warship Somers (The Free Press, $25, 320 pages), Buckner F. Melton Jr. tells the story of a bizarre chapter in American naval history: the attempted mutiny of the crew of the brig Somers in 1842 during a routine training cruise. The young mutineers were put down with great severity.
The Somers’ captain Alexander Mackenzie, fearing that the uprising would spread even with the three ringleaders in chains, decided to hang them on the high seas. He then made a complete report of the matter by letter and log book as the ship sailed near St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands.
But the hanging proves only the preamble to a tense tale: The leader of the mutineers was no simple tar but the son of the American secretary of war, John Canfield Spencer, who is infuriated to hear that his boy has been tried and condemned without a proper trial or recourse to a higher authority. Mackenzie, in turn, is accused of murder and his trial takes up a major portion of the drama.
Mr. Melton, whose excessively discursive prose sometimes drags, is at his best describing the highly intelligent, excitable and clearly self-destructive youth Philip Spencer.
Like many a wastrel of a wealthy family, he was a plague to his father, continually involved in scrapes only to be bailed out or excused because of his father’s influence. In the end the family — and the young man — decided that a long sea voyage would be just the thing to straighten Philip out. How wrong they were.
On board, Spencer soon became the center of attention, flaunting ship’s rules, bribing his fellow youths with tobacco and liquor, and spreading his fantastic ambition, which was to become a pirate and freebooter, roaming the seas of the world in search of adventure.
Eventually — and with a carelessness that speaks of mental illness — he hatches a scheme to take over the little ship and kill the officers.
Capt. Mackenzie, a buttoned-up member of New York society, acts by the book. After an apparent attempt to rush the officers is quelled at pistol point, he arrests the ringleaders. Because the ship is so small, he chains them, seven in all, in full view on the quarterdeck.
But instead of calming the crew, the open-air imprisonment elicits sympathy. The officers fear an uprising to free the captives, and the standoff spirals into a kind of madness. Mackenzie decides he must hang the three most active mutineers.
That act, hundreds of miles from land, ends the mutiny. But the trials that follow embroil Mackenzie in a moral morass, ruin his career and provide a startling ending to Mr. Melton’s story.
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In September 2001, a month and year made indelible by terrorist attacks, the Colombo Bay — one vessel in the anonymous fleet of container ships which carry 90 percent of the world’s trade — set out from Hong Kong with an observant passenger, Richard Pollak. The Colombo Bay (Simon & Schuster, $25, 272 pages) is his account of trade on the oceans.
It’s mind-boggling that ships have almost disappeared from the eyes of the world, while at the same time they have become more and more important as the dominant carrier of ever-expanding global commerce.
In earlier days of sail, when America was in the forefront of the merchant marine, ships were movie stars, glamorous creatures with fortune in their white wings. Now they have all but vanished in the public eye except when some disaster occurs.
The Colombo Bay and her sisters are the humble myrmidons of commerce, mere ocean freight cars, trundling across watery wastes piled high with steel containers.
The ocean road from Hong Kong to New York via the Suez Canal, far from fulfilling dreams of romance and beauty, is drearily boring aboard a modern ship.
With electronics calling the navigation and a huge reliable diesel engine rumbling in the bilge, air-conditioned living quarters and only a few hours in port, excitement comes only when something goes wrong or threatens to.
The mundane business of world shipping (when not enlivened by piracy, typhoon, war or shipwreck) is a product of man’s desire for efficiency, and there are few more persistent goads to that end than the desire for profits in a highly competitive market.
Aboard the Colombo Bay, nothing much happens. Perhaps that is the point; but Mr. Pollak skillfully makes the ship a platform for his accurate retelling of a great (and perhaps the last) American shipping saga, the story of North Carolina truck owner Malcolm McLean and his single-minded desire to use trailer truck bodies, or similar metal boxes, as the universal unit of transportation.
McLean’s simple idea was, Mr. Pollak says, the “greatest revolution in the international transport of goods since the coming of steam propulsion.” Three thousand containers crowded every available space on the Colombo Bay.
The pace of world trade dictates that there will be an increasing number of ships with many more containers moving across the seas. And, as Mr. Pollak points out, each one could contain a terrorist’s bomb.
Duncan Spencer is a Washington writer.
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