ABSTRACT
Syms Covington was a teenager when he signed on as HMS Beagle’s fiddler and odd-job man in 1832. Eight years later he emigrated to New South Wales at the age of around 24 and became postmaster in the settlement of Pambula. For just over six years he also served as Charles Darwin’s manservant. Alongside the fledging naturalist, Covington performed the role of collector, hunter and taxidermist. The “unacknowledged shadow behind every triumph” – according to Janet Browne 1 – and the ever-present accessory to his geographical and scientific travels, it is hardly surprising that this virtually invisible Darwinian adjunct would sooner or later catch the novelist’s imagination. At the tail end of Roger McDonald’s novel, Mr Darwin’s Shooter, Syms Covington is given the last word. It’s staged in 1860, just shortly before his death, and just after he’d read Darwin’s new book, The Origin of Species. His thoughts wander back to his Beagle adventures and in his mind’s eye he catches a glimpse of his former master on a chilly, sunlit December morning: “He saw Darwin on his knees, and there was no difference between prayer and pulling a worm from the grass.” 2
