Robert FitzRoy

Robert FitzRoy in his time as Governor of New Zealand (1843–1845)

Robert FitzRoy (born  July 5, 1805 at Ampton Hall near Bury St Edmunds , Suffolk , England , †  April 30, 1865 in Lyndhurst House, Upper Norwood, Surrey , England) was a British naval officer, meteorologist and Governor of New Zealand from 1843 to 1846 . In the 1830s he was the captain of the research vessel HMS Beagle , on which the young Charles Darwin gained valuable knowledge. The depressed officer took his own life when he was almost 60 years old .

Life

Personal

Robert FitzRoy came from a noble family. He was the youngest son of General Lord Charles FitzRoy (1764-1829) from his second marriage to Lady Frances Anne Stewart, daughter of Robert Stewart, 1st Marquess of Londonderry . His grandfather Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd Duke of Grafton , was British Prime Minister from 1768 to 1770. From 1809 the family lived at Wakefield Lodge, Northamptonshire , where FitzRoy spent his childhood.

He was married twice. His first wife Mary Henrietta O'Brien (* 1812 - April 5, 1852), daughter of Major General Edward James O'Brian, he married in 1836. Their son was the future Vice-Admiral Sir Robert O'Brian Fitzroy (* 2 April 1839 - May 7, 1896). With his second wife Maria Isabella Smyth († December 29, 1889), whom he married in 1854, he had a daughter named Laura Maria Elizabeth Fitzroy (* January 24, 1858; † December 6, 1943).

Darwin found his temporary superiors, travel companions, and academic colleagues to be unusually contradicting people. FitzRoy is often "noble", but also easily offended and quick-tempered. Throughout his life he fell into gloom again and again. When he became deaf, was ridiculed for his “weather forecasts” and in 1865 again felt ignored by the Ministry of the Navy, the noble man fell victim to “his own frenzy” and cut his throat with his razor “in a fit of desperation”.

Royal Navy

From February 1818 FitzRoy attended the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth . As early as 1819 he was hired on a ship, the following year he joined the Royal Navy . On September 7, 1824, he finished his training as a lieutenant with the best result that had been achieved by a candidate officer. Shortly after his promotion, he began his service on HMS Thetis . In 1828 he was ordered to South America, where he served on board the HMS Ganges under the command of Admiral Sir Robert Waller Otway. As early as December 15 of the same year in Rio de Janeiro he was appointed deputy captain of the HMS Beagle by Otway , which at that time accompanied the HMS Adventure on a surveying expedition to Tierra del Fuego after the captain of the Beagle , Pringle Stokes, met during the journey had taken life. FitzRoy led the Beagle safely back to Plymouth , where she docked on October 14, 1830. The young captain brought four Tierra del Fuego with him from the voyage, which he and his crew kidnapped in the vicinity of the Bay of Wulaia in order to convert them to Christianity and later bring them back to their homeland as missionaries . The Tierra del Fuego were given their own names by the crew, such as York Minster, Jemmy Button , Fuegia Basket and Boat Memory. The original names of the first three were el'leparu , o'run-del'lico, and yok'cushly, respectively . Boat Memory died of smallpox shortly after arriving in England, and its Yahgan name remains undetermined.

The second trip with HMS Beagle

The itinerary of the HMS Beagle

After FitzRoy failed in May 1831 as the Tories candidate for a seat in the House of Commons in the constituency of Ipswich , he planned to equip a research expedition to South America at his own expense. However, through the intercession of a benefactor at the Admiralty, he was again given command of the HMS Beagle , which he assumed on June 25, 1831. He had the ship thoroughly modernized and renovated again, partly at his own expense, before it set sail again from Devonport on December 27, 1831 .

On board was - in addition to the three surviving converted Tierra del Fuego who had been baptized Jemmy Button , York Minster and Fuegia Basket - on the recommendation of the botanist Henslow, the 22-year-old theologian and natural scientist Charles Darwin, who gained the knowledge from which on this voyage he later developed his important theory of evolution . FitzRoy had searched through the Admiralty and his friend Francis Beaufort for a civilian, science-savvy travel companion, not an uncommon occurrence at the time on naval-backed research and survey expeditions. FitzRoy led the HMS Beagle along the South American coast, through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific to the Galapagos Islands , where Darwin made the essential discoveries for his theory. The journey led via New Zealand back to Falmouth , where it ended on October 2, 1836.

FitzRoy had spent nearly five years with Darwin, even sharing his cabin with him. Nonetheless, he later condemned Darwin's theories as false doctrines and publicly rejected them with reference to the Bible. Three volumes emerged from the trip. The first volume contains a comprehensive chronicle of the trip, the second, among other things, the weather journal, in which the wind speeds according to the Beaufort scale were recorded for the first time . Darwin's observations make up the last volume of the travelogue.

Governor of New Zealand

FitzRoy was governor of New Zealand from 1843 to 1845 . In 1850 he retired from active naval service and devoted himself to his scientific interests.

meteorologist

FitzRoy's grave in Upper Norwood, London

In 1854 FitzRoy was appointed Meteorological Statist of the Board of Trade , which later became the British Weather Service . FitzRoy introduced the barometer and storm glass on British ships. In response to a serious accident, he issued storm warnings and simple weather forecasts from 1861 onwards , but these were mostly false and earned him a lot of ridicule. FitzRoy's telegraph network was mostly in the British Isles and the continent of Europe, so he knew little about the weather coming across the Atlantic. Occasionally FitzRoy is referred to as the "First Meteorologist"; the term "weather forecast" ( forecasting the weather ) goes back to him. For his services he was promoted to admiral .

Memberships

In 1851 he was elected a Fellow (member) of the Royal Society . In 1863 he became a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris.

Honors

For his services to science, Robert FitzRoy received the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1837 . The 3406 meter high mountain Fitz Roy on the border between Chile and Argentina was named after him. The connection between Seno Otway and Seno Skyring in Patagonia near Punta Arenas is named after him (Canal FitzRoy). In Australia, the Fitzroy River also bears his name. The same applies to the headland of Fitzroy Point on the coast of the Antarctic Joinville Island. FitzRoy has also been immortalized in the flora: The Patagonian cypress , a huge conifer in South America (40–60 m high), bears the name Fitzroya cupressoides . The settlement of Fitzroy on the Falkland Islands is named after him.

Fonts (selection)

• Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe .
  • Proceedings of the second expedition, 1831-36 . Henry Colburn, London 1839, (online) .
  • Appendix . Henry Colburn, London 1839, (online) .
• Remarks on New Zealand . W. And H. White, London 1846.
• Notes on Meteorology . Board Of Trade, 1859, (online) .
• Barometer manual . Board of Trade, 1860, (online) .
• The Weather Book: A Manual Of Practical Meteorology . Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, London 1863, (online) .

literature

• John R. Gribbin, Mary Gribbin: FitzRoy. The Remarkable Story of Darwin's Captain and the Invention of the Weather Forecast . Yale University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-300-10361-1 .
• Harold Edward Leslie Mellersh: FitzRoy of the Beagle . Hart-Davis, 1968, ISBN 0246974524 .
• Paul Moon: Fitzroy: Governor in Crisis 1843–1845 . David Ling Publishing Limited, 2000, ISBN 0908990707 .
• Peter Nichols: Darwin's Captain. The tragic story of the man who broke up over Darwin's discoveries . Europa Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 2004, ISBN 3-203-80526-X .

Web links

Commons : Robert FitzRoy  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Robert FitzRoy in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted from: Adrian Desmond / James Moore: Darwin , Hamburg edition 1994, especially page 599
2. ↑ Nick Hazlewood: The Man Who Was Sold For A Button. The incredible story of the Jemmy Button ("Savage, the Life and Times of Jemmy Button"). Lübbe Taschenbuch-Verlag, Bergisch Gladbach 2005, ISBN 978-3-404-64207-6 .
3. ^ Entry on FitzRoy, Robert (1805 - 1865) in the archives of the Royal Society , London
4. ^ List of members since 1666: Letter F. Académie des sciences, accessed on February 10, 2020 (French). 

predecessor	Office	successor
William Hobson	Governor of New Zealand 1843–1845	George Edward Gray