Review: Mr. Darwin's Shooter

So I’m sickish this week and because coughing would make a vlog more or less unpleasant, I’m going to review a book using words.

I just finished Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter and in spite of the title turning out to be enormously misleading, really enjoyed it.

It sounds like the book’s about a person who shot Charles Darwin. It’s actually about a person who shot for Charles Darwin; specifically, animals that Darwin subsequently used to formulate his theory of natural selection.

Syms Covington was a scion of a lower-class family that ran a tannery in Bedfordshire, England, in the early 19th Century. Religious by nature, he gets recruited by a traveling Congregational evangelist named Phipps, who makes his living as a sailor.

Leaving his family -- including a very loving stepmother -- at the age of twelve (his father allows this because competition from South America has depressed the local market for animal skins sufficiently that he can no longer afford to feed a growing boy), he joins Phipps on several voyages around the world.

The pair stick together for several years, but Phipps and Covington drift apart as Covington discovers the joys of being a globetrotting young man. Still, their relationship remains close, and they continue to work together, even after tragedy strikes both men.

By chance, this tragedy occurs just as their latest voyage is ready to leave harbor, aboard the good ship Beagle, which is setting off on a surveying mission under the direction of a gentleman naturalist named Charles Darwin.

Covington, being naturally curious and rather ambitious, immediately begins to jockey for the opportunity to serve Darwin in any capacity possible, and is ultimately successful. He starts out as a scribe for Darwin’s notes, translating the gent’s chicken-scratch into a very nice copperplate, and eventually begins to collect strange specimens from the New World and the Pacific Islands for himself. Over the course of the five-year voyage, he begins to lose his hearing and returns to England completely deaf.

Covington’s personal collection turns out to be a boon when the specimens collected by Darwin himself are damaged in transit to England; Covington’s set of finches is co-opted for study, which he not-so-graciously agrees to, and eventually, On the Origin of Species is published.

One problem: Covington is not mentioned anywhere in the book for his help in bringing in wild animals for study or even for the “donation” of his personal collection.

This is important because the book takes the form of a series of flashbacks coming to Covington as an old man in 1859. He’s grown old and wealthy, holding vast lands in Australia’s interior, with children and a wife. He serendipitously meets a young doctor in a small village near Sydney who saves his life and eventually …

Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

In any case, it’s a fascinating look at not only a woefully-underexamined side of Darwin’s story, but also life in a great era of discovery. Although the official Age of Discovery had passed by the end of the 18th Century, the New World and Pacific Islands had only just begun to yield their biological wonders. Much of the Amazon had still not been mapped, and Australia alone still held many surprises.

You also get a very good idea of what it was like in those days of sailing, when you spent months at sea on a rickety wooden tub that was vulnerable to just about everything out there. There was no GPS, no radar or sonar, no radio, no entertainment or Internet or anything. Just long, hard work, questionable maps, and the stars.

I especially appreciated the way the story unfolded, switching between the life of the younger Covington and that of the same man long after his voyaging had ended. The evolution of his personality -- from brash young man to curmudgeonly geezer who can still outclimb most younger man -- is a lot of fun to watch.

Nevertheless, his bitterness and disappointment -- poor old guy -- at being underappreciated by Darwin and not being given credit for all the work he did despite an intense professional relationship that lasts for decades is hard to take, but adds a great deal of depth to his character. On the Origin of Species doesn’t arrive at his house until about halfway through the book, so the chapters about old Covington before that point include little details that betray his anxiety and anticipation; the chapters after that point really come down hard on his sense of betrayal and loss.

The language is also wonderful; it gets a little flowery at times, and the author slips into a kind of annoying habit of using sentence fragments to convey elements of the scene, but for the most part, it does a great job of getting the setting across. My favorite passage explains why the young doctor doesn’t think it odd that Covington collects small animals left and right in the wilds around Sydney:

There was a special pride among the takers of the place, because the plants and animals were so strange. Everything so queer and opposite. There must have been a separate act of Creation, it was maintained, and as Darwin had said on visiting there, to bring them into being. Swans were black. A mammal, the platypus, laid eggs, although nobody had ever seen one do it …

The fact that Covington goes deaf as an adult adds an interesting twist to how his particular personality copes with the world around him. He never learns to sign, of course, but lip-reads so well that the young doctor has no idea he’s understood every time he says something insulting Covington without making an effort to speak clearly.

In general, fantastic book. It’s a nice piece of historical fiction that reveals much about a relatively-simple theory that nevertheless completely transformed how we understand life itself. Strongly recommended.