Captain R. Fitzroy, who ultimately succeeded to the vacancy occasioned by
the lamented death of Captain Stokes, and who subsequently commanded the
Beagle during her second solitary, but most interesting expedition--has
added to the well-earned reputation of the seaman, the more enduring
laurels which literature and science can alone supply.

(*Footnote. Not related to the author.)

DEATH OF CAPTAIN STOKES.

Though painful recollections surround the subject, it would be hardly
possible to offer an account of the earlier history of the Beagle, and
yet make no allusion to the fate of her first commander, in whom the
service lost, upon the testimony of one well qualified to judge, "an
active, intelligent, and most energetic officer:" and well has it been
remarked by the same high authority, "that those who have been exposed to
one of such trials as his, upon an unknown lee shore, during the worst
description of weather, will understand and appreciate some of those
feelings which wrought too powerfully upon his excitable mind." The
constant and pressing cares connected with his responsible commanded--the
hardships and the dangers to which his crew were of necessity exposed
during the survey of Tierra del Fuego--and in some degree the awful gloom
which rests forever on that storm-swept coast--finally destroyed the
equilibrium of a mind distracted with anxiety and shattered by disease.

Perhaps no circumstance could prove more strongly the peculiar
difficulties connected with a service of this nature, nor could any more
clearly testify that in this melancholy instance every thought of
self-preservation was absorbed by a zeal to promote the objects of the
expedition, which neither danger, disappointment, anxiety, nor disease