Robert Fitzroy
Books
Our first great wretch
by Steve Braunias
Two new biographies draw completely different portraits of Robert FitzRoy – captain of the Beagle on Darwin’s famous voyage, and Governor of New Zealand immediately after the Treaty of Waitangi signing, who committed suicide at the end of a career marked by failure, depression and good intentions.
FITZROY: The remarkable story of Darwin’s captain and the invention of the weather forecast, by John and Mary Gribbin (Review, $59.99); EVOLUTION’S CAPTAIN: The dark fate of the man who sailed Charles Darwin around the world, by Peter Nichols (Harper Collins, $34.99).
In the last few days of his life, Robert FitzRoy slept badly, played a few hands of whist with his wife, fretted at the growing pile of unanswered letters, took his daughters for a walk, babbled incoherently, said that he felt weak, and read his prayer book. He was exhausted. He had had enough. Finally, on a Sunday morning – April 30, 1865 – he got out of bed, bolted the door of his dressing room, and, without any particular warning, although clearly he had badly suffered from manic depression since childhood, slit his throat with a razor. He was 59.
His portrait hangs in a hallway of Wellington’s Government House. He looks like a nice man. The eyes are sad, the smile is gentle. He also looks like a soft touch. A pushover, but the kind who is more likely to be toppled by himself than anyone else; and there is something not merely due to the fact of his suicide that instantly hints at lunacy. It’s a face that might fall apart at any moment. Look again. Knowing, this time, the fact of his suicide, and also the facts of his long, awful collapse – the nervous breakdowns, the sackings, the humiliations, the disappointments, the uselessness, rather than practical assistance, of his religious mania – and FitzRoy comes into view as an important character in New Zealand history: our first great wretch.
FitzRoy was Governor of New Zealand from December 1843 to January 1846. Only two years; but at a crucial time in our early colonial history, in the immediate aftermath of the Treaty of Waitangi, when Wakefield’s New Zealand Company settlers were anxious for land, and when some of the greatest of all Maori chiefs – Te Rauparaha, Te Rangihaeata, Heke, Kawiti – took up arms in resistance. At a time, too, when Bishop Williams and the early missionaries had vast influence on the philosophy of how to build New Zealand, of how to treat the “natives”. FitzRoy was on their side. He was their man. He stood up for Maori, said that settlers were “bad men”.
Keith Sinclair, in his 1960 History of New Zealand: “FitzRoy found himself in an impossible situation and succeeded in making it worse.” He was removed from his post, sent back home – in his own words, “deeply and irreparably injured”. There had been fools, vagabonds, rogues, complete bastards and a great many English twits running around New Zealand before FitzRoy arrived. But none held such power or authority. He was our first failure of any importance.
New Zealand was not the ruining of FitzRoy. He did that to himself. But he was never really allowed to recover after his unfortunate experiment of running the country; the British Navy, his former employer, washed their hands of him, and although he ended up in what could have been a quiet, nicely salaried position as the first director of the meteorological service, he faced ridicule and was driven to a final and terrible crisis.
Most famously, FitzRoy had been the captain of the Beagle on Charles Darwin’s five-year voyage. Once again, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time for a person of his convictions. Darwin came back from the voyage and began to tinker away at the theory of evolution; FitzRoy came back and almost immediately became a fundamentalist Christian, desperate to tell the world that all he had seen confirmed the biblical myth of a young Earth shaped by the Flood. Darwin’s response: “It is a pity that he did not add his theory to the extinction of the Mastodon from the door of the Ark being made too small.” More ridicule; and more failure – Darwin’s journal of his Beagle voyage was a huge bestseller, while FitzRoy’s account sank with, as they say, barely a murmur.
FitzRoy lived to become a has-been and not a hell of a lot more than a nobody. History, too, has relegated him to a bit-part – a supporting role in Darwin’s drama, a cameo appearance in the story of New Zealand. Keith Sinclair rests his short case against FitzRoy by quoting W P Morrell: “He was totally lacking in the essential qualities of cool judgment, resolution, and consistency of purpose.” “Scrupulous but not brilliant” is how James Belich gets rid of him in Making Peoples (and adds of FitzRoy’s successor, Governor George Grey: “brilliant but not scrupulous”); Michael King’s recent Penguin History of New Zealand features a careful analysis of Grey, and only refers to FitzRoy personally as Grey’s “ineffectual predecessor”. By strange coincidence, two new biographies appear at the same time, and drag him out for fresh and closer inspection.
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