Robert FitzRoy

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

Life

Personal

Robert FitzRoy was born into a noble family. A direct ancestor of his father was King Charles II. His grandfather Augustus FitzRoy, 3rd Duke of Grafton, had been British Prime Minister from 1768 to 1770. His maternal uncle was the politician Viscount Castlereagh. FitzRoy's mother was the daughter of the 1st Marquess of Londonderry. 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 later Vice - Admiral Sir Robert Fitzroy O'Brian (* 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 saw its temporary supervisor, traveling companions and fellow scientists as unusually contradictory man. FitzRoy was often " classy ", but also easy to offend and thereby been tempered. All his life he fell from time to time the gloom. When he became deaf, was ridiculed for his " weather forecast " and in 1865 felt ignored by the Navy Department again, the noble man "of his own rage victim " had fallen and had cut through " in a fit of despair " with its razor throat.

Royal Navy

As of February 1818 FitzRoy visited the Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth. Already in 1819 he hired on a ship, in the following year, he joined the Royal Navy. On September 7, 1824, he finished his training as a Lieutenant with the best result, which until then had been reached by an officer candidate. Shortly after his promotion, he began his service on HMS Thetis. In 1828 he was ordered to South America where he under the command of Admiral Sir Robert Waller Otway was serving aboard HMS Ganges. Already on 15 December of the same year he was appointed in Rio de Janeiro by Otway deputy captain of the HMS Beagle, the HMS Adventure accompanied at this time on a surveying expedition to Tierra del Fuego, after the captain of the Beagle, Pringle Stokes, while driving life had taken. FitzRoy led the Beagle returned safely to Plymouth, where she put on 14 October 1830. From the journey of the young captain brought with him four Fuegians, he wanted to convert to Christianity and return later as missionaries to their homeland.

The second journey with the HMS Beagle

After FitzRoy had failed in May 1831 Tory candidate for a seat in the lower house in the constituency Ipswich, he planned, at his own expense a research expedition to South America to equip. Through the intercession of a patron at the Admiralty, however, he again received the command of the HMS Beagle, which he took up on June 25, 1831. He left the ship again thoroughly modernize and renovate, partly at his own expense, before it stood on December 27, 1831 by Devonport to sea again.

Also on board was - in addition to the three surviving converted Fuegians the Jemmy Button, York Minster, and Fuegia Basket had been baptized - the 22 -year-old theologian and natural scientist Charles Darwin, the insights gained on this journey, from which he developed his major evolutionary theory later. FitzRoy had been looking over the Admiralty and his friend Francis Beaufort to a civilian, scientific savvy Reisebegeleiter, at that time not an unusual operation in research and survey expeditions, which were supported by the Navy. FitzRoy led the HMS Beagle in the South American coastline, through the Strait of Magellan into the Pacific to the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin made ​​the crucial discoveries for his theory. The trip took about New Zealand on back to Falmouth, where they ended on October 2, 1836.

FitzRoy had spent almost five years together with Darwin and even shared his cabin with him. Nevertheless, he condemned Darwin's theories later than heresies and rejected them with appeal from the Bible in public. From the trip three volumes emerged. The first volume contains a comprehensive chronicle of the journey, the second including the weather journal in which the wind speeds have been recorded on the Beaufort scale for the first time. Darwin's observations form the last volume of the travelogue.

Governor of New Zealand

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

Meteorologist

1854 FitzRoy was appointed Meteorological Statisticians ( Meteorological Statist ) of the Board of Trade appointed, which later became the British weather service was created. FitzRoy introduced the barometer and the storm glass on British ships. In response to a serious accident, he published in 1861, storm warnings and simple weather forecasts, but were mostly false and earned him much ridicule. FitzRoy's telegraph network was located in the main to the British Isles and the European continent, so he hardly knew anything about the weather, the heranzog 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.

Honors

For his contributions to the science Robert FitzRoy was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1837. According to him also the 3,406 m high Mount Fitz Roy was named on the border between Chile and Argentina, this is about 50 km east of the National Park Torres del Paine. Next is the connection between Seno Otway and Seno Skyring in Patagonia near Punta Arenas named after him (Canal FitzRoy ). Also in the plant world FitzRoy was immortalized: The Patagonian cypress, a huge conifer South America (40-60 m high), bears the name Fitzroya cupressoides. A settlement on the Falkland Islands, Fitzroy is named after him.

Writings (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).