Gregory McNamee: Darwin and Robert Fitzroy (Captain of HMS Beagle & a Forgotten Pioneer of Science)
This year marks two great moments in the history of science: the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species. Throughout 2009, I will be posting here and there on Darwinian topics. It may seem counterintuitive, but the first of them is an appreciation of the man under whose command he sailed on the five-year voyage of HMS Beagle, Robert Fitzroy (also spelled FitzRoy), who has often figured as the villain of the piece.
Fitzroy had invited Darwin along as ship’s naturalist in a gesture of friendship, but also of self-interest: the ordinary sailors of the British Navy could hardly be expected to keep up their end of a conversation, and he needed someone to talk with. Over the course of those five years, the conversation was strained, for Darwin, impatient and preoccupied, was well on his way to declaring his iconoclastic theory of evolution, while Fitzroy was a religious fundamentalist who would sooner maroon Darwin on a guano island than admit that the Bible was not literally true.
That is how too many histories remember Fitzroy, an image both unfair and misleading. Darwin, a clergyman’s son, was as religiously inclined—or disinclined—as Fitzroy; meanwhile, Fitzroy was well versed in science and had had his own arguments against the fundamentalists of the day. Their views diverged long after they had returned to England from the voyages of the Beagle. Famously, in 1860, Fitzroy, turned up at a lecture on evolution at Oxford University and took the anti-evolutionary side in the grand debate that ensued—one that Fitzroy, Samuel Wilberforce, and company lost against the evolutionist side, championed by Thomas Henry Huxley and others.
Born in 1805, Fitzroy was intelligent and capable, earning a perfect score on the exam that allowed him to graduate from naval college. When given his choice of assignments, he asked to join a survey of Tierra del Fuego, the little-known land at the southern tip of South America. His reports on climate and geography were so thorough and well written that he was called to the Admiralty before the Royal Navy’s hydrographer, Francis Beaufort, who gave him another assignment: Fitzroy was to return to South America on Beagle to take measurements of the wind and other meteorological phenomena along the coast. When he was finished with South America, Beaufort instructed, Fitzroy was to do the same sort of surveying in the South Pacific, along the African coast, and anywhere else that English sailors might venture—and to take his time about it. Thus the five-year voyage.
In 1854, back at home, Fitzroy set about placing weather-observing equipment on ships in every port in England, eventually recruiting some eighty captains to make standardized measurements of the weather wherever their voyages took them. His nautical charts saved countless lives as they warned sailors of rough passages. He also devised the first truly scientific weather forecast, using the telegraph to transmit data from far-flung weather stations.
Fitzroy gathered the fruits of his long years of observation and experimentation in The Weather Book, published in 1862. Using his charts, the Times of London was the first publication to publish weather forecasts daily, though its editors were in the habit of blaming Fitzroy rather noisily when the forecasts were off. Indeed, Robert Fitzroy received little praise for his work in his own time, and he was obscured by the long shadow that Darwin cast. Melancholic, in poor health, and on the losing side of the evolutionary debate, he took his own life on April 30, 1865, at the age of 59. He was forgotten for years, but then happily rediscovered. Today the British government’s Meteorological Office and National Meteorological Library and Archive are located on Fitzroy Road in Exeter, England, and modern atmospheric scientists proudly acknowledge him as a pioneer of their discipline.
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This piece is adapted from a longer essay of mine on Robert Fitzroy in Weather: The Ultimate Book of Meteorological Events (Accord/Andrews McMeel, 2008).
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
Fitzroy had invited Darwin along as ship’s naturalist in a gesture of friendship, but also of self-interest: the ordinary sailors of the British Navy could hardly be expected to keep up their end of a conversation, and he needed someone to talk with. Over the course of those five years, the conversation was strained, for Darwin, impatient and preoccupied, was well on his way to declaring his iconoclastic theory of evolution, while Fitzroy was a religious fundamentalist who would sooner maroon Darwin on a guano island than admit that the Bible was not literally true.
That is how too many histories remember Fitzroy, an image both unfair and misleading. Darwin, a clergyman’s son, was as religiously inclined—or disinclined—as Fitzroy; meanwhile, Fitzroy was well versed in science and had had his own arguments against the fundamentalists of the day. Their views diverged long after they had returned to England from the voyages of the Beagle. Famously, in 1860, Fitzroy, turned up at a lecture on evolution at Oxford University and took the anti-evolutionary side in the grand debate that ensued—one that Fitzroy, Samuel Wilberforce, and company lost against the evolutionist side, championed by Thomas Henry Huxley and others.
Born in 1805, Fitzroy was intelligent and capable, earning a perfect score on the exam that allowed him to graduate from naval college. When given his choice of assignments, he asked to join a survey of Tierra del Fuego, the little-known land at the southern tip of South America. His reports on climate and geography were so thorough and well written that he was called to the Admiralty before the Royal Navy’s hydrographer, Francis Beaufort, who gave him another assignment: Fitzroy was to return to South America on Beagle to take measurements of the wind and other meteorological phenomena along the coast. When he was finished with South America, Beaufort instructed, Fitzroy was to do the same sort of surveying in the South Pacific, along the African coast, and anywhere else that English sailors might venture—and to take his time about it. Thus the five-year voyage.
In 1854, back at home, Fitzroy set about placing weather-observing equipment on ships in every port in England, eventually recruiting some eighty captains to make standardized measurements of the weather wherever their voyages took them. His nautical charts saved countless lives as they warned sailors of rough passages. He also devised the first truly scientific weather forecast, using the telegraph to transmit data from far-flung weather stations.
Fitzroy gathered the fruits of his long years of observation and experimentation in The Weather Book, published in 1862. Using his charts, the Times of London was the first publication to publish weather forecasts daily, though its editors were in the habit of blaming Fitzroy rather noisily when the forecasts were off. Indeed, Robert Fitzroy received little praise for his work in his own time, and he was obscured by the long shadow that Darwin cast. Melancholic, in poor health, and on the losing side of the evolutionary debate, he took his own life on April 30, 1865, at the age of 59. He was forgotten for years, but then happily rediscovered. Today the British government’s Meteorological Office and National Meteorological Library and Archive are located on Fitzroy Road in Exeter, England, and modern atmospheric scientists proudly acknowledge him as a pioneer of their discipline.
* * *
This piece is adapted from a longer essay of mine on Robert Fitzroy in Weather: The Ultimate Book of Meteorological Events (Accord/Andrews McMeel, 2008).