John Chancellor: that picture.
You can keep your enigmatic smile, Mona Lisa. For me, this is one of the great pictures, which makes us all the more delighted that Gordon Chancellor and his mother Rita have given The Beagle Project permission to use 'The Beagle off the Galapagos' to help us build the replica. For the details of John's life, his love of the sea and fascination with ships under sail click over to the Davidson Fine Art website about him here. I'm also a sailor and what strikes me every time I see that picture and the close-ups his son Gordon sent us was how beautifully he caught the sea in motion, the wind filled the sails and the postures of working men on a moving boat. I've seen and miserably failed to even photograph them all: John Chancellor painted them, freezing a moment in time with a beauty and imagined accuracy far better than any picture could have managed.
The Beagle off the Galapagos is a great moment: Charles Darwin was ashore coming to the end of a nine day collecting expedition, Commander FitzRoy was preparing to send a boat away to recover 'Philos' as FitzRoy called Darwin. You can see men up the mainmast reefing the maintopsail, and at the stern some of the crew are preparing to launch one of the ship's boats. On this return to the ship, Darwin's specimen bags would have contained finches which would later light the fuse for his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Speaking of originals, I spent today in the British Library reading 1839 originals of FitzRoy's account of the voyage of the Beagle. He is sometimes overshadowed in the Darwin/Voyage of the Beagle tale, but reading his journals, it is clear that he was a great seaman and in his own way no mean geologist and natural historian. However, what is clear from reading his writings at first hand and in first edition is that he was a great pioneering meteorologist and a superb commander of HMS Beagle: there is much good to be told about Robert FitzRoy in 2009, too.
Labels: Charles Darwin, HM Beagle, John Chancellor, Robert FitzRoy
8 Comments:
For info (although I assume you already know), there's an online edition of FitzRoy's 1839 narrative on the Darwin Online website.
In case you haven't seen it, there's someone posting daily entries (in order, obviously) from Darwin's Beagle Diary here. A good place to get a daily dose of Darwin.
I think you should probably be on each other's blogrolls.
Richard: thanks for that, but there was something special about having the 1839 books with their leather bindings, age-faded pages and and immaculately drawn maps in my hands.
Harry: damn right. I need to get round to making a blogroll first...
On Anne Chapman's 'Darwin in Tierra del Fuego' (2006).
Dear Peter,
I am pleased to send you following article and link concerning the mentioned book written by the outstanding ethnologist Anne Chapman (http://www.rism.org/chapman/).
I am sure that it would be really interesting adding it to The Beagle Project links.
Kindest regards from Chile,
Jorge Mery
http://www.der.org/anne-chapman/
'DARWIN IN TIERRA DEL FUEGO'
This text is for readers interested in young Darwin, in his great "adventure" in Tierra del Fuego, his most intense and prolonged contact with natives during the long Beagle voyage. I propose to highlight his experiences in Tierra del Fuego, especially his relations with Captain Robert Fitz-Roy and with the Fuegian natives. I offer answers to this question. Why did he write about these natives with such utter derision? Young Darwin emerges as charismatic, dynamic, congenial, and absorbed by the science of nature. He vividly recalled the Fuegians near the end of his life, in 1876, though he erroneously assumed that they were cannibals of the worst sort imaginable.
Jemmy Button, a younger man, presents the figure of a Fuegian very attached to his "countrymen" though at times furiously angry at them, very fond of his British friends, though unwilling to go back to England. He acquires the allure of a symbol for the present and the future: a person in love with his "country" who simultaneously welcomes the outside world, in his case England.
Tierra del Fuego is now divided between Argentina and Chile, but the natives here have "disappeared," though some of their descendants remain. It may inspire or disappoint: thick snow, refreshing wind, sunny days... may come at any season of the year; but the landscape is always glorious.
It inspired Jeremy Button also Darwin, though differently.
-O-
I think that also would be interesting following link, partially concerning Darwin's voyage in Tierra del Fuego:
http://www.der.org/films/homage-to-yahgans.html
'HOMAGE TO YAHGANS: THE LASTS INDIANS OF TIERRA DEL FUEGO AND CAPE HORN'
This video was filmed with 16mm cameras in Tierra del Fuego and the Cape Horn area (Chile and Argentina) during the summer of 1987 and the winter of 1988. It was first presented in the United States at the New York Academy of Sciences in early 1990.
The video's purpose is twofold. The first is to achieve an understanding of certain episodes of western expansion, beginning in the early seventeenth century, which finally led to the extinction of the Yahgan people. The second is to gain an appreciation of the courage and fortitude of a people who had survived for thousands of years in one of the most inhospitable regions of the planet, but who had been judged by many Europeans as the most degraded human beings in the entire world.
Homage to the Yahgans focuses on the personality and life of a Yahgan called "Jemmy Button" who was taken to England in 1831 by Captain Fitz-Roy and returned to his homeland two years later during Fitz-Roy's second expedition, in the company of Charles Darwin. Jemmy Button died in 1864, a victim of the first in a series of epidemics which decimated his people.
The video ends with scenes of the four women who still speak Yahgan (as well as Spanish) and who live on Navarino Island, on the south shore of Beagle Channel in Chile. One of the four Yahgan-speaking women vividly remembers witnessing the last enactment of the great initiation ceremony, the Chiexaus, held on Navarino Island circa 1932. Spanish version available.
"A flagship testament for anthropology is Anne Chapman's profoundly moving and brilliant film on the destruction of one of the earth's most interesting cultures, the Yahgan of the antipodes. Working with broken remnants of these people and with documents and engravings of the period, including those of Darwin's prejudiced views, but above all with magnificent shots of the unfamiliar landscape of Tierra del Fuego, Anne Chapman has made a melancholy tone poem which sets forth the tragic crime of civilization - the destruction of human cultures on this planet. This film should arouse all humanists and especially anthropologists to go and do likewise."
Alan Lomax
Film Festivals, Screenings, Awards
International Film and TV Festival of New York Finalist
(RECTIFIED)
Please let me remind that in Chile we are especially grateful to Robert FitzRoy's memory, for such an illustrious seaman, explorer, hydrographer and meteorologist, commanding H.M.S. Beagle, made a valuable contribution to the knowledge of our seas, coasts and interiors waters of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn Archipielago.
At the end of FitzRoy's Bicentenary year (2005), both three commemorative marble plaques have been presented by several Chilean maritime and heritage institutions in homage to Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, R.N., F.R.S. (further previously sent info in https://www2.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=32117479&postID=115495378126986929).
The first of them, the Cape Horn plaque, was inaugurated in Horn Island, September 2006, and says (*):
"CHILEAN INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL COMMEMORATION - CHILEAN SOCIETY OF HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY - VICEADMIRAL ROBERT FITZROY - 1805- 1865 - HONOURABLE BRITISH EXPLORER AND HYDROGRAPHER. - SAILED THESE SEAS AT THE COMMAND OF “H.M.S. BEAGLE”. - HE DISEMBARKED ON THIS ISLAND ON APRIL 19TH OF 1830, AND IN THE FOLLOWING DAY HE REACHED THE TOP OF THIS MYTHICAL ROCK. - HOMAGE IN THE BICENTENARY OF HIS BIRTH. - CHILEAN BROTHERHOOD OF CAPE HORN CAPTAINS - CHILEAN MARITIME HERITAGE - 2005"
(* Free translation of Spanish text published in 'Revista Nuestro Mar', November 2006, Chile. I hope to send you a photograph forthcoming weeks.)
The remaining both two commemorative plaques shall be, weather permitting, inaugurated forthcoming months in Puerto Williams (World's Southernst town, on Navarin Island) and in Wulaia Cove.
I invite H.M.S. Beagle replica to visit us in Cape Horn and in Navarin Island.
I saw "that picture" by John Chancellor of HMS Beagle in the Galapagos in the front window of a small art shop in London while on a visit in 1982. I bought the signed print there and then and carted it all around Europe and back to my house in Sydney, Australia where it still has pride of place in our lounge. Very sad indeed that Chancellor died so soon afterwards.
John Lea
Sydney, Australia
I invite H.M.S. Beagle replica to visit us in Quilmes and Buenos Aires coast.
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