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sketcher, explorer and naval officer, was born at Ampton Hall, Suffolk, on 5 July 1805, son of General Lord Charles FitzRoy, second son of the third Duke of Grafton, and his second wife, Frances Anne, daughter of Robert, first Marquess of Londonderry. Robert was a nephew of Viscount Castlereagh and a half-brother of Charles Augustus FitzRoy, subsequently governor of New South Wales. He entered the Royal Naval College in 1819, when J.C. Schetky was drawing master.

FitzRoy accompanied Phillip Parker King on a hydrographic exploratory voyage along the coast of South America in 1826-30, replacing Captain Pringle Stokes as captain of the Beagle in 1828 when Stokes committed suicide. In 1831 he was instructed to complete earlier charts of the coastlines of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia and explore the coasts of Chile, Peru and several Pacific islands. The naturalist on board was Charles Darwin, who later said: 'The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined the whole of my existence’.

Three Tierra del Fuegian passengers were being returned home, FitzRoy having taken them to England and educated them at his own expense three years earlier. They were sketched by FitzRoy during the voyage, along with several other Fuegian inhabitants (Musée de la Marine, Vincennes), his most notable subject being 'before and after’ views of the 17-year-old Jemmy Button, an elegant dandy in 1833 and a 'thin haggard savage’ when re-encountered a year later. Mellersh quotes FitzRoy on his efforts to sketch an old Fuegian woman: 'She took out her red paint, and put some on her own cheeks as drawn on the paper, and then quite satisfied, sitting as still as a mouse, while I made another sketch. In return for the compliment paid to her countenance, she daubed my face, as well as my coxswain’s, with the same red mixture’. FitzRoy’s sketches of Jemmy Button, engraved by T. Landseer, were reproduced in FitzRoy’s published Narrative (London 1839) together with other portraits and views after his drawings, such as Fuegians Going to Trade in Zapollos with the Patagonians , Woollya (showing the construction of the missionary station there) and a view of Valdivia.

At Montevideo Conrad Martens joined the Beagle as official artist, replacing Augustus Earle . FitzRoy’s South American watercolours appear to have been strongly influenced by Martens in both subject and technique (e.g. Coquimbo , 25 May 1835, Royal Naval Archives). Martens, in return, may have benefited from FitzRoy’s weather studies. Once Martens was signed off at Rio there was no official artist for the remainder of the voyage. Hence the Beagle 's eight days at King George Sound (WA), from 6 March 1836, were commemorated in FitzRoy’s Narrative only by a small portrait engraving of a Native of King George Sound , despite encounters with the local people of the Sound and the more exotic 'White Cockatoo Men’. However, two competent watercolours – a West Australian Aboriginal hunter with a plume of red feathers in his hair and a woman with a child on her back – attributed only to 'a British sea captain’ (c.1835, University of Sydney) appear to be FitzRoy’s work.

The Beagle returned to England on 2 October 1836. Captain FitzRoy, who had been promoted during the voyage, remained in London while the ship continued under the command of John Lort Stokes , son of his predecessor. FitzRoy and Phillip Parker King’s two-volume Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure and Beagle between the Years 1826 and 1838 Describing their Examination of the Southern Shores of South America and the Beagle’s Circumnavigation of the Globe , published in 1839, was, unfortunately, eclipsed by Darwin’s third volume and subsequent publications. The Hydrographic Department of the Ministry of Defence at Taunton holds coastal profiles drawn on the voyage by FitzRoy, Martens, Earle, King and Captain John Clements Wickham.

FitzRoy married Mary Henrietta O’Brien on 8 December 1836. Elected a member of the British Parliament in 1841, he resigned to take up the appointment of governor of New Zealand in 1843. This was not a success and he served only a few months before being recalled. Promoted rear admiral in 1857, FitzRoy published a well-received treatise on meteorology in 1861. Always of a volatile temperament, he became increasingly embittered and mentally unstable, and at Norwold, Surrey, on 30 April 1865 he committed suicide by cutting his throat.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011