HE HAS gone down as an obscure footnote in history: a failed Royal Navy captain who committed suicide in 1828 off the coast of Patagonia, taking 12 days to die from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
There is no known portrait of him. No record of his birth.
Yet the State Library of NSW has just paid $200,000 for the final, handwritten journal of Pringle Stokes, at auction in London against stiff competition.
Why? "Because it's one of those great 'what ifs' of history," explains the library's senior curator, Paul Brunton.
Stokes was the first captain of HMS Beagle. Had he not committed suicide, Charles Darwin would never have been invited to join the Beagle on its epic second voyage.
The history of scientific discovery - certainly Australia's role in it - would have taken a different course.
Arguably, there would be no The Origin Of Species.
After Stokes's death, Robert FitzRoy was appointed captain of the Beagle. "But he had a history of mental illness in his own family," Brunton says. "His uncle, Lord Castlereagh, had committed suicide in 1822. Remembering what had happened to Stokes, FitzRoy requested that a young gentleman should accompany him to keep his spirits up. That [man] was Charles Darwin."
Stokes's precise, scrupulously neat handwriting gives no indication of the depression that must have gripped him as the Beagle explored the Straits of Magellan. The pages are meticulously ruled off, the soundings dutifully logged.
But his words give him away: "the dreary sea" and "inhospitable shores", leading to a sense that "the soul of man dies in him".
"Stokes spent a lot of time locked in his cabin," Brunton says. His subordinates, including FitzRoy, had done the surveying work for him, though he had sworn them to secrecy.
His last entry, on July 12, 1828, is a single line: "Calm, fine, frosty weather. Shortly after daylight we had a visit from the natives."
On August 1, as he was about to rendezvous with his commanding officer Philip Parker King in the Adventure, Stokes shot himself.
"He was so ashamed he hadn't been able to do his work satisfactorily," Brunton says. "It was a slow, agonising death. He eventually died on August 12 from gangrene of the brain."
The Australian-raised Parker King - son of the third governor of NSW - covered up Stokes's suicide in his official report and kept Stokes's papers.
In 1977, a Parramatta book collector rescued those of Stokes's papers which hadn't been eaten by rats and had them bound into the current journal.
The journal goes on show at the library on July 3 as part of the library's Darwin Down Under exhibition.