Evolution's Captain (6 page)

But the search for the boat, the continuing attempt to second-guess its thieves, the constant confoundment of all his expectations of the Fuegians' behavior, had sown in FitzRoy a seed that would grow to a major preoccupation. For weeks, and then months, references to his surveying work—his sole purpose for being there—faded from his journal. Observations on harbors, weather, seafaring, diminished until they were almost entirely eclipsed by his mounting interest in the Fuegians:

In this practical observation, with its telling grammatical tense, lie all the imperial ambitions of England at the time when FitzRoy wrote it—not in February 1830 when he was looking for his lost whaleboat, although it is set down as a journal entry for that time, but seven or eight years later, when he was preparing his journals for publication. After Victoria had acceded to the throne in 1837, her love of India, as a prize, and of the concept of empire, was fueling British imperial expansion across the globe. When FitzRoy wrote, in 1837 or 1838, of uplifting the heathen savage while at the same time gaining knowledge of the interior of his country, he was tapping into the major preoccupation of the age to explain and justify the deepening of his own obsessive fascination for the Fuegians, and the turn this was about to take in 1830.

 

Late in February, the
Beagle
sailed on down the ragged southeastern
coast of Tierra del Fuego and anchored in Christmas Sound, “in the very spot where the
Adventure
lay when Cook was here,” FitzRoy wrote in his journal.

He was mistaken, confusing ships. The
Adventure
, under the command of Tobias Furneaux, had left England in company with Captain James Cook's
Resolution
in July 1772, on Cook's second great circumnavigation of exploration. The two ships cruised partly in company as far as New Zealand, but they lost touch with each other in 1773. In 1774, Cook reached Tierra del Fuego for the
second time, after an icy, high-latitude crossing of the South Pacific from New Zealand, searching for the mythical Terra Incognita, which he concluded did not exist. (He missed seeing Antarctica by only a few hundred miles.) In mid-December 1774,
Resolution
closed with Tierra del Fuego near the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan, passing a headland that Cook named Cape Gloucester. For two days,
Resolution
scudded on southeast before a westerly gale (along the same track followed by FitzRoy in the
Beagle
while surveying and looking for the lost whaleboat) until it neared a black 800-foot-high rocky promontory rising from the sea, which Cook named York Minster after the great cathedral in his home county of Yorkshire. Here a southeasterly breeze stopped him, and he turned his ship into a channel and found shelter.
Resolution
was anchored over Christmas while Cook surveyed and charted the surrounding coastline, naming the area Christmas Sound, and so it is still called today.

Into this spot, fifty-five years and two months later, came FitzRoy in the
Beagle
. “His [Cook's] sketch of the sound, and description of York Minster, are very good, and quite enough to guide a ship to the anchoring place.”

Just east of York Minster was a more protected anchorage, mentioned by Cook, but not examined or named by him, and into this sheltered cove FitzRoy worked the
Beagle
on March 1, naming it March Harbour. It seemed a good place to leave the ship for several weeks while he and Murray again set out in two different boats, no longer on a wild goose chase, but to continue their mission with surveying instruments. And here FitzRoy set carpenter May to building another whaleboat. Since there was no longer enough planking for this in the ship's stores, May cut up a spare spar, another ship's former topmast that was being saved as a replacement for the
Beagle's
main topmast. “With reluctance this fine spar…was condemned to the teeth of the saw; but I felt certain that the boat Mr May would produce from it, would be valuable in any part of the world, and that for our voyage it was indispensable.”

FitzRoy dispatched Murray in the cutter to survey the coast, channels, and islands to the west—back toward the area they had searched for their stolen whaleboat. He sent with him two of the three children remaining aboard the
Beagle
, to be left with any Fuegians he found.

The
Beagle
's crew, in a nod to the wicker-like craft built by Murray and his men that had first brought them news of the stolen whaleboat, had taken to calling this child Fuegia Basket.

F
itzRoy's instructions from the British Admiralty contained
no provisions about capturing or killing foreign nationals. He sailed a warship across a lawless world and what he did was up to him. His code of behavior was that of an English gentleman, which carried with it the assumption of moral, intellectual, and religious superiority. This gave him, he felt, the unquestioned right to attempt to retrieve his stolen property as he saw fit, to stop, question, capture, and even kill natives in the course of his inquiries, if this seemed necessary. He tried not to kill, he behaved as decently as he thought fit, but kidnapping people didn't faze him. He took to it without hesitation.

The acquisition of Fuegia Basket marked a turning point. It was by then surely clear to him that hostage-taking was unlikely to produce the ransom of his missing whaleboat. Fuegian mothers, pretending to lead the crew toward their missing boat, had run away, effectively abandoning their children held aboard the
Beagle
, rather than complying with the Englishmen's demands. No entreaty had come for Fuegia Basket, child of the “boat stealers' family.” She was unclaimed property.

Clothed in seaman's garb, the little girl had the run of the ship. Eight years old (young enough to lie below the sexual radar of most of the
Beagle
's crew), small, easily amused, no doubt
amusing, she had become, according to FitzRoy, “a pet on the lower deck.” From his earliest descriptions of her, FitzRoy was keenly aware of her as a personality; he saw the child rather than her use as a bargaining commodity. He was charmed by her. He wanted to keep her.

 

As carpenter May worked ashore in March Harbour on the new
whaleboat, FitzRoy and Murray tried to turn their attention once more to surveying, but Fuegians again got in the way. A group of them in a canoe approached the ship on March 3 wanting to come aboard. Impatient with the nuisance they represented, wary of their pilfering with May's carpentry shop set up on shore, FitzRoy sent Mr. Wilson, the mate, in one of the boats to chase them away, to fire pistol shots over their heads.

But almost immediately, his curiosity about the Fuegians, by now deepened nearly to obsession, made him change his mind. He set out himself in another boat. In his published journals, FitzRoy would later write: “Reflecting…that by getting one of these natives on board, there would be a chance of his learning enough English to be an interpreter, and that by this means we might recover our lost boat…I went after them, and hauling their canoe alongside of my boat, told a young man to come into it; he did so, quite unconcernedly, and sat down, apparently contented and at his ease.” The rest of the Fuegians “paddled out of the harbour as fast as they could.”

Back aboard the
Beagle
, the young man was christened York Minster, after the dominating topographical feature of the neighborhood. He was cleaned and fed, and introduced to Fuegia Basket. They talked and York Minster, sullen at first, grew “much more cheerful.”

Five days later, while on a hill taking angles for his survey of March Harbour, FitzRoy saw smoke coming from a cove near the harbor entrance. Unable to resist, he ran down to the shore and had two men row him to the cove to see if this group possessed
anything that might have come from the stolen whaleboat. But as the Englishmen approached, these natives became “very bold and threatening,” so FitzRoy returned to the
Beagle
, filled two boats with armed men, and set off after the Fuegians, who were now paddling away fast across the harbor. The Englishmen chased them to shore where a fight ensued, an exchange of rocks and gunfire, during which no one was injured except for a seaman hit by a rock. The natives escaped into the bush. FitzRoy's men found part of the lost boat's gear in the beached canoes, and he concluded that among this group must be the whaleboat's thieves. (Items from the stolen boat—oars, line, beer bottles—appeared to have been so widely disseminated throughout Tierra del Fuego that FitzRoy was able to see the thieves everywhere.) He destroyed their canoes.

The next morning he set out again with an armed party in the direction of smoke seen above nearby islands, hoping still to find his boat. Again he saw Fuegians paddling away in canoes and intercepted them. As the Englishmen's boat reached the first canoe, its occupants jumped overboard. The crew grabbed one of them, a young man, who was hauled into FitzRoy's boat after a fierce fifteen-minute struggle in the water. The Englishmen returned to the
Beagle
with this new captive, whom FitzRoy optimistically christened Boat Memory. Despite being frightened, the new Fuegian aboard “ate enormously, and soon fell fast asleep.”

FitzRoy now had three Fuegian captives aboard the
Beagle
. He was as happy with them as a big game hunter with a good bag of trophies.

Some design for them, not fully formed, was taking shape in FitzRoy's mind. The specimens were clothed in regulation seaman's dress, and instructed in English.

 

With the new whaleboat completed by carpenter May, the
Beagle
sailed from March Harbour on the last day of that month. The ship trended southeast along the ragged shore of Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy no longer chased native fires in search of his stolen boat and concentrated on his surveying work. His Fuegian specimens were, according to him, “becoming very cheerful, and apparently contented.”

In Orange Bay, on the Hardy Peninsula west of Cape Horn, a group of Fuegians approached the ship to barter. FitzRoy was surprised at the reaction of his captives to these visitors. They spoke a different dialect than Boat Memory and York Minster, who nevertheless recognized the newcomers and yelled at them, calling them, FitzRoy believed, “Yapoo.” They showed FitzRoy scars from wounds they'd received fighting the “Yapoos,” a distinct and different tribe, he concluded. FitzRoy also referred to them as “Yahoos”—he had undoubtedly read
Gulliver's Travels
(1726), whose protagonist refers to the brutish and imaginary race of that name as “those filthy Yahoos.”

Late in April, the
Beagle
anchored near Horn Island, the southernmost point of South America, the false cape, the infamous Ultima Thule to all seamen known as Cape Horn. FitzRoy and a party rowed ashore, climbed the island's height, and took the usual observations. Then they put aside their instruments and erected an 8-foot high pile of stones over a memorial to dead seamen, broke out the Union Jack, and toasted the health of King William IV. Like tourists everywhere, like the plundering Oxford scholars in Greece or the astronauts who visited the moon, when they rowed away from the island they took with them fragments of Cape Horn.

Early in May the
Beagle
anchored in a bay on the east coast
of Lennox Island, north of Cape Horn. Three boats headed off to survey the area around wide Nassau Bay. FitzRoy went in one of them with a group of seamen, heading west across Nassau Bay and then north toward a narrow channel discovered by Murray on a boat trip a few weeks earlier. Murray Narrows, as FitzRoy named it, led into what appeared to be a wide straight channel that ran east and west through the heart of Tierra del Fuego, which FitzRoy called Beagle Channel.

FitzRoy met Fuegians in canoes and ashore, the same Yapoos encountered earlier. Unlike the aggressive, boat-thieving Yamana Fuegians farther west, these natives were mainly interested in barter. They had clearly had contact with sealing vessels, whose voracious appetite for every kind of skin made the Yapoos now attempt to hide their guanaco hides at the sight of the Englishmen. They offered instead fish, which they traded for beads and buttons. With one group, FitzRoy traded a knife for a “very fine dog.”

On May 11, near the entrance to Murray Narrows, FitzRoy's boat was intercepted by three canoes eager for trade.

With orders to be in Rio de Janeiro by June 20, FitzRoy turned the
Beagle
eastward to survey what remained of the coast of Tierra del Fuego before turning north to Rio and, beyond that, England.

Four Fuegian captives still remained aboard. FitzRoy now had a plan for them.

According to FitzRoy, the Fuegians “understood clearly when we left the coast that they would return to their country at a future time, with iron, tools, clothes, and knowledge which they might spread among their countrymen.” The four natives could not possibly have comprehended such a scheme from a rudimentary exchange that might have communicated, at most, “You come with us, get tools, knives, we bring you back.” But, according to FitzRoy, the only chronicler-witness to what was said and understood, the Fuegians appeared content and interested in self-improvement and made no use of several opportunities to escape.

On June 7, the
Beagle
passed through the Strait of Le Maire, out of the waters of Tierra del Fuego, and sailed north into the warming Atlantic.