Savage (19 page)

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On 28 January 1855, after skirting round West Falkland in bad weather, the
Allen Gardiner
took shelter off Keppel Island, to the north of the small archipelago. An inspection the next day showed it to be an ideal location with good soil, water and a plentiful supply of wildlife. It looked like the north of Devon and Wales, wrote the surgeon, Ellis, in his journal, though there was ‘nothing picturesque about the land, all being monotonous and unvarying, but regarding it with the eye of a Missionary settler, rather than that of a tourist, I thought more of its capabilities than of its external beauty…' Snow and he agreed that this should be the place for the mission station.

After a few days' scouting the island and examining other locations, the mission party went ashore to claim the island for the Society. The ship was dressed in its full colours, the men instructed to wear their smartest kit and to stand attentively as Captain Snow declared,

We give to this place the name of ‘Cranmer', in honour of our martyred Archbishop, and zealous reformer of the Church of England, and to the house about to be erected here, we give the name of ‘Sulivan House', in honour of Captain B. Sulivan, RN, one of the Committee, and a most efficient helper in the Mission. The bay before us we call ‘Committee Bay', and this particular spot of ground ‘Despard Plains' for obvious reasons …

Snow declared a holiday, and within two hours somebody had set fire to the island. A blaze half a mile wide burned out of control. The newly declared mission station was saved only by hard work and a fortuitous change of wind. A few days later the inferno threatened once more. Flames cascaded down the hills, engulfing the
Allen Gardiner
in smoke. Again the wind swept back the fire. It smouldered in the hills for another month, growing to more than a mile wide, the glowing embers lighting up the night sky. Nevertheless the danger had passed, and the arduous work of unloading the ship and building temporary accommodation could begin. On 10 February foundations for a house were laid; a week later the building was habitable.

By 5 March Snow felt ready to go with Ellis to Port Stanley, the capital of the Falklands, 150 miles away. When he looked back on this period of his work, Snow did so with great bitterness. His sense of being undermined at every step by Garland Phillips had been exacerbated to breaking point. The fire, which he was convinced had been started deliberately, flabbergasted him. The pace at which his colleagues worked, and what he perceived as their unsuitability for both the task and the conditions ahead of them, startled him. As tensions mounted, tempers frayed. Just before Snow left for Stanley there was a major argument, resulting in mutual contempt between himself and those he left behind.

The Falkland Islands were one of the British Empire's most isolated and grim colonies. Over the course of three centuries, since their discovery by John Davis in 1592, there had been a succession of minor squabbles between countries claiming jurisdiction over them. England, France and Spain had at various times believed the islands belonged to them, but eventually all three had decided that the islands had no material value. In 1774 an English colony was withdrawn from Port Egmont, because it was felt that it was not worth defending. Spain kept a small garrison on East Falkland until 1809, and in the 1820s Argentina began to make its case for ownership. In 1833 HMS
Clio
rehoisted the flag and the Falklands became British, but not with any great enthusiasm. These were bleak windswept islands of no obvious virtue other than as a stopping-off point for ships rounding the Horn and for the sealers who trawled the area. One British officer described Port Stanley in less than encouraging terms:

The colonists are about 200 in number, living in wooden huts on one side of the harbour, in three long rows one above the other. This is one of the most dreary and miserable places I have set my foot in. A moorish land, it is one of the last spots in the world you could suppose any government in their senses would induce people to emigrate to … The majority of the settlers are pensioners and Irishmen, who were induced to come here by the promise of 100 acres of land for pasture, and 10 more with a house, besides a cow and a pig. They arrive here and to their dismay the 100 acres are found to be bog and heath, about eight miles from the settlement, with a cow and pig as wild as ‘March hares,' which no one dare approach, and a house of wood, through which the wind howls most piteously. Everything except beef, is 300% higher than in England. All seem dissatisfied with the place, and as soon as they collect a little money, go off to the old country again, or some more congenial clime.

Snow shared this opinion, saying that Port Stanley was ‘one of the dullest and most miserable places I can imagine in the world. A sort of mental miasma seems to hang over it…' His purpose in going there was to pay George Rennie, the governor, an embarrassing courtesy visit: he had to inform the Queen's representative that the Society had claimed land without first seeking his permission.

When he and Ellis arrived, Snow found that Rennie had been expecting them, and was waiting to pass on a few home truths. He said he was startled that the Society had seen fit to take possession of an island under his government. Nevertheless, though he thought they had been discourteous, and notwithstanding that he had severe reservations about their plans, which he called imprudent, he was not about to throw obstacles in their way – so long as they understood that he was the power in the land. He told them he had been forewarned by the colonial secretary in London, Sir George Grey, that a Society ship was on its way. Grey, too, had not been impressed with their proposals, but had instructed Rennie not to get in the missionaries' way. Rennie granted the Society the right of occupation, at a nominal rent of £1 a year. (This was changed soon after when he allowed the mission to buy 160 acres outright, and lease all of the island, except for a small government reserve, for twenty years at £10 a year.)

The meeting was cordial but cool and there were shocks in store for Snow and Ellis. Rennie told them they had a good deal of fence-mending to do. He read a letter that George Packenham Despard had written to Sir George Grey in which he said that the Society desired a location ‘away from the depraved, low, and immoral colonists of Stanley'. Local people had taken offence, Rennie said, and were not necessarily going to treat them with the charity that such an enterprise might normally expect.

The governor then explained a legal difficulty that the Society must overcome. When he had arrived at the Falklands in the winter of 1848, Rennie had found a number of starving South American gauchos in a terrible state of destitution. They had been brought to the islands in the summer by beef farmers to capture the wild cattle that roamed the island. When winter came the gauchos had been sacked, not given a passage home and left without employment, food or shelter. In a letter to
The Times
in 1859, Rennie wrote that he thought that some had died from cold and want before he could do anything. He had been obliged to open up colonial funds for the survivors, but had then pushed through the Falklands Legislative Council an Alien Ordinance which stated, ‘That no shipmaster or settler would be allowed to land or leave on the islands any alien without entering into a bond or security to the amount of 20
1,
that the alien should be re-exported or maintained free of charge on the colony.'

This ordinance would apply to Fuegian Indians brought to Keppel Island, Rennie pointed out, and if any harm came to them the master of the ship that transported them would be held responsible. Twenty-pound bonds would be required for Fuegians before they would be allowed onto the Falklands and, in the case of any deaths among them, the captain of the ship that brought them might be charged with manslaughter. Snow was horrified, but Rennie had not finished. How were they intending to obtain their natives? he asked. There was an awkward silence, before Ellis offered, ‘I suppose we must buy them from the chiefs.' It appeared to be the first time the question had crossed their minds, and Rennie warned that such actions might lead to charges of kidnapping. He would consider it his duty, ‘if they brought any of those miserable savages to the Falkland Islands, to make strict inquiry whether they had come voluntarily and with lawful contracts as far as could be intelligible to their limited intellects'. It also verged on slavery, he added, and that, he reminded them, was illegal in the British Empire.

If Snow had felt that the whole enterprise had been ill conceived and ill prepared so far, it must now have appeared to be coming apart at the seams: the tattered relationships, the governor's disapproval, the Alien Ordinance, the disgruntled locals. Could the situation get worse? Waiting for him in Stanley was proof that it could. As he killed time in the port, he found Ellis trying to buy 130 cattle at £3 a head and proposing ‘going shares with us in a different kind of speculation…'. Snow was outraged: here was something completely outside his remit, ‘so very different to what we were supposed to be engaged upon … that I determinedly opposed it, and wrote home to say so, and also to state that it was not a part of my agreement…'

In a gesture of goodwill, the governor had asked Snow whether he would deliver and collect the Falklands mail to and from Monte Video. It was a potentially valuable source of income for the Society – Rennie would pay Snow between £85 and £100 each time – it kept Snow away from his despised colleagues, and it gave him periodic opportunities to check whether the mission superintendent they were awaiting had arrived. He accepted the offer, and in the course of the next six months he flitted to and from mainland South America, stopping briefly at Keppel Island to pass on provisions and observe the health and progress of the land party.

On 19 August 1855 he arrived at Monte Video half expecting to find the sorely needed missionary waiting for him. Instead he received the mystifying news from a Liverpool skipper that the intended missionary had been arrested just days before he was due to leave England. Snow was astonished: where would all this end? He returned to the Falklands ill-humoured and impatient. They had been away almost a year but contact with the Fuegians appeared just as remote as it had on the day the ship slipped its mooring in Bristol. Snow decided it was time to break ranks. He wrote to Garland Phillips on Keppel Island inviting him to join a trip to Tierra del Fuego. After a short hesitation, the catechist accepted. Snow laid down the law: he was in charge on the ship, which must be subject to rules, discipline ‘and no more of that extraordinary hallucination of mind evinced on the passage out…'. Phillips accepted. On Sunday 14 October 1855 the
Allen Gardiner
left Committee Bay. On board were the antagonists, Mrs Snow and a troublesome crew.

Chapter 15

In early November 1855, the
Allen Gardiner
sailed through the Murray Narrows and into the Yahgashaga. Nearly twenty-two years had passed since Jemmy Button had last been seen and not a word had been heard of him. The evening sun was warm, the scenery stunning, and Snow was impressed by the immensity of the beauty he found there. ‘The whole neighbourhood strikingly reminded me of the high peaks of Greenland…' he wrote in his account of his time working for the Society.

Some of the steeple-like mountains directly in front of us, at the extreme limit of our view, seemed like so many cathedrals with their lofty spires; those on our right were in many places bare, like the denuded crown of a man's head, but with verdure above and below such spots. On our left were the Codrington Mountains of Navarin Island, dark and sometimes frowning, with four or five singular peaks like sugar-loaves appearing at the back between two other mountains, and over a level snowy ridge. Many of the brown summits of these mountains, free from snow, darted upwards, in several other places, not unlike whales' teeth, while the lower parts of the hills, down to the water's edge, were covered with a mantle of green.

Wulaia Cove was only five miles away, but he noticed the smoke and sparks of many fires on nearby Button Island. It was five o'clock in the afternoon and all the men, with the exception of the helmsman and a lookout, were down below taking tea. Acting on a hunch he unfurled a British Ensign and ran it up the flagstaff. As the breeze caught it, two canoes shot out from the shore. Snow cried out, ‘Jemmy Button? Jemmy Button?' Then, ‘To my amazement and joy – almost rendering me for a moment speechless – an answer came from one of the four men in the canoe, “Yes, yes; Jam-mes Button, Jam-mes Button!” at the same time pointing to the second canoe, which had nearly got alongside.'

He was overcome with surprise, and in a confused moment called for the sail to be shortened and all hands on deck. Mrs Snow, the catechist and the two mates rushed to the ship's side and watched as a portly ‘shaggy-looking man' stood up and shouted, ‘Jam-mes Button, me; where's the ladder?' A rope was found and thrown over the side, and the Fuegian was hauled aboard. There were handshakes and stutterings in broken English. The Fuegian touched his forehead in respect. ‘What is your name?' he asked Snow.

The crew could not believe it. Here was a fat little Indian, dirty and naked, speaking understandable phrases of their own language. Seaman C—, who held the Fuegians in contempt, was aghast:

‘Well, I'm blowed! What a queer thing! This beats me out and out! There's that blear-eyed, dirty-looking, naked, savage, speaking as clearly to the skipper as one of us; and I be hanged, too, if he isn't as perlite as if he'd been brought up in a parlour, instead of born in this outlandish place! – Well it is queer, and so is all the whole affair. – I can't make it out. – Fair winds, – never any harm, – lots of wild barbarians civil to us, – and now one of 'em talking as plain a'most as ourselves! It knocks me down quite!'

Snow had to find a mooring for the night, and as soon as the initial introductions were over, he asked Jemmy for a good place to anchor. The Fuegian spluttered an answer, and Snow ordered the ship to follow a route into a small, rocky cove.