Savage (13 page)

Darwin, too, became a friend. In one revealing passage of his
Journal,
he painted a very human picture of his Fuegian shipmate: though Jemmy could be passionate, he noted, ‘the expression of his face at once showed his nice disposition. He was merry and often laughed, and was remarkably sympathetic with anyone in pain…' The naturalist had first-hand experience of this compassion. As a landlubber, he had suffered terribly almost from the moment the
Beagle
weighed anchor: ‘When the water was rough, I was often a little sea-sick,' he wrote, ‘[Jemmy] used to come to me and say in a plaintive voice, “Poor, poor fellow!” but the notion, after his aquatic life, of a man being sea-sick was too ludicrous, and he was generally obliged to turn on one side to hide a smile or laugh, and then he would repeat his “Poor, poor fellow!”'

Darwin's records are a useful marker of the Fuegians' progress. Though he had never met them before and could not, therefore, provide a comparison with their former selves, he nevertheless came to them with the fresh, interested perspective of a naturalist. In the hours that he spent with them, both on the ship and ashore, he had time to pin down and note their important characteristics with brevity, clarity and humanity. To him York ‘was a full-grown, thick, powerful man … reserved, taciturn, morose, and when excited violently passionate; his affections were very strong towards a few friends on board…' and despite everything that others wrote of him, Darwin added that his intellect was good. Of Fuegia Basket, he said she was ‘a nice, modest, reserved young girl, with a rather pleasing but sometimes sullen expression, and very quick in learning anything, especially languages'.

On the last issue Darwin's observations are especially important. The Fuegians' understanding of English was a crucial benchmark in their progress from ‘savage'. Darwin was complimentary of their abilities, but found that although the three ‘could both speak and understand a good deal of English, it was singularly difficult to obtain much information from them concerning the habits of their countrymen…' This, he felt, came because they did not understand the concept of alternative answers: for example, when a toddler is asked if an object is black or white, the possibility of two answers might overwhelm him. Notwithstanding this, the fact that the Fuegians had a good grasp of English, and that they had the capability to acquire new languages, was demonstrated several times on the voyage south, most notably by Fuegia Basket. Shortly after the
Beagle
docked in Rio de Janeiro, on 4 April 1832, FitzRoy discovered a problem in the readings for longitude and had to return north to Bahia to check his chronometers. While Jemmy and York remained on the ship, Fuegia was placed in the care of an expatriate English family, with whom she spent the majority of the next three months, acting as a nanny to the children of the household. Between April and July 1832, she not only taught them English – they had been away from Britain so long that they had forgotten their mother tongue – she also learned Portuguese well enough to converse in it freely and fluently. More remarkable still was that when the
Beagle
later pulled into Monte Video she learned Spanish with equal success.

*   *   *

The journey to Tierra del Fuego, with all its longueurs, gave the officers time to continue their informal study of the beliefs and customs of the Fuegians. One morning Jemmy told Bynoe that he had been visited in the night by a man who had come to his hammock and whispered in his ear that his father was dead. It had disturbed him, and when Bynoe tried to laugh the story off, Jemmy shook his head saying it was ‘bad – very bad'.

Ghosts were nothing new on the
Beagle:
the crew had long been afraid that the ship was haunted. Stories circulated that the late captain, Pringle Stokes, stalked the decks at midnight. Jemmy's story was particularly significant, though, for it suggested to his overseers the possibility of a belief in the afterlife, of some form of hitherto unexpressed spirituality, and as the journey proceeded, it became clear that the three were indeed superstitious and that ‘their ideas were not limited by the visible world'. Bad actions resulted in bad weather, brought about by a great black man who lived in the woods and who knew everything that was done, asserted York. When he witnessed Bynoe shooting ducks too young to fly, he chastised the surgeon: ‘Oh, Mr Bynoe, very bad to shoot little duck – come wind – come rain – blow – very much blow.' York also told a story about his brother, who, he said, had murdered a man for stealing birds. He had immediately regretted it because

‘rain come down – snow come down – hail come down – wind blow – blow – very much blow. Very bad to kill man. Big man in woods no like it, he angry.' At the word ‘blow' York imitated the sound of a strong wind; and he told the whole story in a very low tone of voice and with a mysterious manner; considering it an extremely serious affair.

In tandem with these conversations, there were the frequent and inevitable questions on cannibalism. Mr Low, a sealer who came aboard the
Beagle
in Tierra del Fuego, told them that when hunger set in during the winter months, the Indians would kill the old women of their tribe and eat them. He had interviewed a Fuegian boy who had said that the women were suffocated in the smoke of a campfire. When asked why they did not eat their dogs, the boy had replied, ‘Doggies catch otters, old women good for nothing: man very hungry.' As a joke the boy had imitated the sounds of a woman screaming. Jemmy had confirmed the truth of this story, and an appalled Darwin wrote in his
Journal,
‘Horrid as such a death by the hands of their friends and relatives must be, the fears of the old women, when hunger begins to press, are more painful to think of; we were told that they then often run away into the mountains, but that they are pursued by the men and brought back to the slaughter-house at their own fire-sides!'

However, the three Fuegians were uncomfortable talking about the subject, and when they did there were inconsistencies in their stories: they would not eat vultures because the birds might have fed on a human; they would not dump their dead in the sea because they might be eaten by fish, which might in turn be eaten by them. When cannibalism was talked about, Jemmy would refer to his people with shame and deny that he had ever eaten a human. He would prefer, he claimed, to ‘eat his own hands…'

Chapter 11

On 4 December 1832 Robert FitzRoy wrote to his sister from Monte Video: ‘I am again quitting the demi-civilised world and am returning to the barbarous regions of the south…' Less than two weeks later the
Beagle
entered Good Success Bay on the eastern coast of Tierra del Fuego. Along the way sightings of Indians had confirmed the captain's words, and underlined a change in the returning Fuegians. At Cape Penas a group of ‘tall men' had been spotted with their dogs; both Jemmy and York called them ‘Oens-men' and said they were very bad. They demanded, without success, that the ship open fire on them.

At the same time they were, as FitzRoy wrote, ‘very much elated at the certainty of being so near their own country; and the boy was never tired of telling us how excellent his land was – how glad his friends would be to see him – and how well they would treat us in return for our kindness to him'.

As the
Beagle
approached Good Success Bay, a band of local inhabitants who had been hiding on the forested heights that surround it leaped up, waved skins and lit a fire. This was Charles Darwin's first sighting of the natives of Tierra del Fuego in their natural state, and he later wrote to his old mentor John Stevens Henslow:

The Fuegians are in a more miserable state of barbarism, than I had expected ever to have seen a human being … I shall never forget … the yell with which a party received us. They were seated on a rocky point, surrounded by the dark forest of beech; as they threw their arms wildly round their heads and their long hair streaming they seemed the troubled spirits of another world.

After anchoring on 18 December, FitzRoy went ashore with a party that included Jemmy, Darwin and a new addition to the ship's company, Robert Hamond, who had joined the voyage in Monte Video and who would soon leave the Royal Navy because of an uncontrollable stammer. On the shore they found a small group of men decorated with red ochre, black charcoal and oil, the eldest with a splendid display of white feathers in his hair and two thick bars of white and red paint across his face. They wore shabby guanaco skins across their shoulders and all looked miserable, bearing little resemblance to the Fuegians on the ship ‘except in colour and “class of feature”' – one of the four was even six foot tall. Hamond, for whom this was also the first sight of a native people, said, ‘What a pity such fine fellows should be left in such a barbarous state!' They talked with a rapid nervous stutter, which suggested that they were afraid.

The ship's company responded by handing out strips of red cloth, which the Indians tied around their necks. The tension was broken; the Fuegians administered pats of welcome to their new friends. Darwin took a short stroll with an old man, who slapped him three times front and back simultaneously before offering his own chest for reciprocation. Darwin obliged and there were frenzied grunts of approval that sounded like the clucking of a chicken.

The Fuegians were quick to spot a difference between the ship's crew and Jemmy Button. The old man took him aside and assailed him with a long, loud harangue. Jemmy turned to his
Beagle
colleagues in shame: he had not understood a word and was embarrassed at the appearance of these poor creatures, whom Darwin would later describe as like ‘the devils which come on the stage in such plays as
Der Freischutz
'. Be that as it may, both groups found an affinity with one another. The natives mimicked their new friends' every move: the sailors pulled faces, the natives pulled faces, the sailors squinted, the natives squinted, the sailors spoke, the natives repeated word for word. When the party began to sing sea shanties, the locals tried to join in. The tallest Indian, anxious to show off his height and good looks, stood back to back with the tallest crew member, then stood on tiptoe and shuffled up the sand to higher ground. He bared his teeth for examination and presented his face in profile for all to admire.

Later in the day, FitzRoy returned with another party. This time both Jemmy and York were present and, emboldened by each other's company, they ridiculed the natives, laughing at their appearance and their voices. The Indians responded by scolding York as they had earlier scolded Jemmy. They compared the colour of his skin with that of the sailors and told him he ought to shave, yet, commented Darwin in the
Narratives,
‘he had not 20 dwarf hairs on his face, whilst we all wore our untrimmed beards'. York burst out in uncontrollable laughter and, although both he and Jemmy claimed to be unable to understand the Indians, he reported to FitzRoy that the old man had said that he was dirty and should pull out his beard.

There was little unease this time. The native men had brought children with them, and the mood of playfulness soon returned. Despite the sailors' long, ragged beards, the Indians apparently believed that some of the shorter men were English women – one waltzed with an officer, as the ship's party gave an impromptu display of ballroom dancing. They joked and laughed with the younger members of the crew, and only when wrestling broke out did FitzRoy put an end to the fun. It would have been inappropriate, he felt, for one of his crew to lose a bout to an Indian. A note in Darwin's diary records, ‘In the evening we parted very good friends, which I think was fortunate, for the dancing and “sky-larking” had occasionally bordered on a trial of strength.'

This first encounter with the Indians made a deep and lasting impression on the ‘fly-catcher', or ‘stone pounder', as Darwin was known. As he wrote to his sister Caroline,

An untamed savage is I really think one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the world. The difference between a domesticated and a wild animal is far more strikingly marked in Man: in the naked barbarian with his body coated with paint, whose very gestures, whether they may be peaceable or hostile are unintelligible, with difficulty we see a fellow creature. No drawing or description will at all explain the extreme interest which is created by the first sight of savages. It is an interest which almost repays one for a cruize in these latitudes and this I assure you is saying a good deal.

The
Beagle
pulled out of Good Success Bay at four in the morning of 21 December. The crew's new friends had disappeared after their first evening together, but had returned two days later in large numbers to beg for
cuchillas
– the Spanish for knives – and though relations had remained cordial, it was time for the ship to move on.

What followed was a nightmare journey of horrific seas, near escapes and negligible progress. The
Beagle
doubled Cape Horn in fine weather, but it was the last they saw for over three weeks. The little ship was battered from all sides by gigantic waves and terrifying gales. On 13 January 1833, despite all their best efforts to get to York and Fuegia's land, they had made only twenty miles from the Cape. That day the sea boiled over in one stunning final onslaught. At noon the
Beagle
was hit by three gargantuan rollers in quick succession. She shipped a sea that filled the decks and smashed one of the precious whale-boats. Another breaker would have sunk her. Confusion reigned. The shattered boat was cut free with an axe and, with the ship looking certain to go down, the ports were bashed open. The floodwater poured out and the
Beagle
bobbed up again. As the ship turned tail and headed back east, a shaken FitzRoy told Darwin that it was the worst storm he had ever weathered.