Savage (39 page)

In April 1878 Sulivan wrote to Darwin that the mission was anxious to raise and train two orphan grandsons of Jemmy Button, currently living at the station in Ushuaia. Each child would cost £10 a year to maintain, but the Beckenham branch of the Society had undertaken to pay for one of the two, who would henceforth be known as William Beckenham Button. Would Darwin be willing to join in a subscription, to be raised among former
Beagle
crew members, to pay for the care of the other orphan? Sulivan asked. The child would be called James FitzRoy Button in honour of the old captain, and it would cost the sponsors £1 each a year.

Darwin replied with enthusiasm, but also with a note of concern:

I shall be happy to subscribe £1 annually as long as I live for Jemmy FitzRoy Button; and to save trouble I enclose subscription for next two years. I suppose that you have thought of the Boy's future, and whether it is a real kindness to him to educate him; and secondly that we Beaglers are growing old …

Some confusion followed when Sulivan discovered, to his great disappointment, that Jemmy's grandson had already been adopted and named by a daughter of one of the Society's committee members. He returned Darwin's cheque, but a year later he found that Thomas Bridges had set the child aside for the
Beagle
crew. Sulivan wrote on 13 October 1879,

My Dear Darwin

I find that after all Mr Bridges reserved Button's grandson for Beagles by getting the lady who had taken on herself to provide for him to take another orphan and though he did not write to me about it he has sent them the list of orphans for publication and forgetting that I told him the boy should have FitzRoy's name added, and be called ‘James FitzRoy Button' he had put my name instead of FitzRoy's and called him ‘James Button Sulivan'.

This I will have altered as Mrs FitzRoy likes the name I proposed and so we all did.

She and her daughters wish to give £3 a year towards the £10 required. I am going to give £2 and will ask you again to give the £1 you gave when it was first mentioned. I have no doubt Hamond, Mellersh, Usborne and Stokes will do the same. Johnson is so ill, his memory was so weak the last time I saw him that I will not say anything to him about it …

Sulivan and Darwin corresponded many times in the next two years, frequently discussing the mission at Ushuaia and their adopted orphan. From the naturalist's responses it is indisputable that Sulivan had succeeded in stoking his old friend's enthusiasm. On 3 January 1880 Darwin wrote that journals Sulivan had sent on the mission were very interesting and that ‘I have often said that the progress of Japan was the greatest wonder of the world but I declare the progress of Fuegia is almost equally wonderful.'

In March 1881 Sulivan attended a lecture given by Thomas Bridges on the language of the Fuegians. Afterwards he scribbled a quick letter to Darwin giving him the details of the talk. Writing from Down House, on 20 March, Darwin replied with unequivocal pleasure: ‘The account of the Fuegians interested not only me, but all my family. It is truly wonderful, what you have heard from Mr Bridges about their honesty and about their language. I certainly should have predicted that not all the Missionaries in the world could have done what has been done.'

On 21 November 1881 Darwin received a communication from a surprising source. William Parker Snow wrote to him with the news that he was revising his
A Two Years Cruise in Tierra del Fuego
and that, in looking over his material, he had found that he was at variance with the opinions and researches of the famous evolutionist. It had been twenty-two years since his case against the Patagonian Missionary Society had been heard, but the same themes recurred in his letter: ‘I still propose and have submitted (uselessly to our Government though more favourable to Foreign Powers) the establishment of a small settlement and Harbour of refuge etc about Cape Horn…' There was the same element of discontent in his words, the same grumbling tone and a sense of having been wronged. There was also a tantalising hint (unrecorded elsewhere) that Darwin had helped him out in the past:

In my heavy literary labours, unaided, and much opposed by officials and the Missionary Society, my old days are far from easy, and it will be a question if I can ever bring to fruition and publication what I have for so many years laboured upon, but if I do, a copy shall be sent.

I do not forget a temporary aid you rendered a few years ago.

He offered to visit Down House and bring with him some specimens he had collected in Tierra del Fuego, but his letter seems to have gone unanswered and it is doubtful that the encounter ever took place. Darwin was growing old and, on 1 December 1881, he sent his last letter about Tierra del Fuego to Sulivan. It enclosed two years' subscription for Jemmy FitzRoy Button. ‘Judging from the missionary journal,' he noted, ‘the mission in Tierra del Fuego seems going on quite wonderfully well…'

Sulivan contacted him a couple of days later to let him know that he had paid two shillings too much, but he would put it towards some extra warm clothing for the boy. He had some sad news and a plan:

My youngest son when on his way to visit his agents at North German ports and Riga saw a party of poor Fuegians exhibited in Zoological at Berlin about ten I think men women and children brought from western Tierra del Fuego by a German vessel. They seem to have been shown around like wild beasts. He wrote a long letter to the society describing them and urging that they should be got from their master and brought to England for the purpose of sending them back through our mission station.

It is difficult to advise, but I have suggested that if they can get them when the owner has exhibited them at Hamburg, to which place he was going – they might keep them here long enough to teach them a little cleanliness, decent dress etc and then send them out direct to Sandy Point [Punta Arenas] to go to Ooshwaia. I think they must be from Fuegia's tribe. I have no doubt that friends of the mission would provide the necessary funds.

Darwin's view on the matter is not recorded. He died on 19 April 1882 and was buried amid great ceremony in Westminster Abbey. There is no record of what became of the Fuegians of Berlin Zoo.

Chapter 25

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in September 1884 four warships of the Argentine navy sailed along the Beagle Channel. Their presence came as a surprise to the settlement of Ushuaia on its northern bank and, as the three steamers and one sail-ship dropped their anchors in the port, there was agitation on shore. Thomas Bridges wandered to the quayside. Yamana settlers poured out of their huts and wigwams and surrounded the forty-one-year-old Englishman, chattering and gesticulating, shouting and crying from fear and torment at what dangers the newcomer brought.

Bridges, his assistants John Lawrence and Robert Whaits, and a native crew climbed into a whale-boat and rowed to the largest of the flotilla, the
Villarino.
As they came alongside, its captain greeted them with an instruction, ‘The other ship, Mr Bridges,' pointing at the
Parana.
The crew rowed on and found Colonel Augusto Lasserre waiting for them with a handshake, a smile and an explanation: he had come to claim Ushuaia for the newly created sub-prefecture of Tierra del Fuego, in the republic of Argentina.

The missionary had no complaints. He had known that one day the ‘civilised world' would reach this far, and he promised to co-operate with the new government of the small town. For his part, Lasserre promised not to interfere in the continuing operations of the mission settlement. They went ashore together and, amid a mass of Yamana Indians, the colonel handed Bridges an Argentine flag. The Englishman lowered the missionary flag that had flown over the settlement for sixteen years – a flag similar to but different from the Union Flag, so that imperial ambitions could not be misconstrued – and then raised the pale blue and white standard of the Republic of Argentina. Out at sea the four ships fired a twenty-one-gun salute and the Yamana raised a loud cheer.

The congenial souls of the Argentine Navy were welcomed; they built a new office, set up two reflecting beacons and left behind a small force of twenty men. Disastrously they also brought with them something far less desirable: the measles virus. Within a month over half of the Yamana people were dead. They fell in such numbers that it was impossible for the strong and unaffected to dig graves quickly enough: bodies piled up everywhere. On the outskirts of town corpses were dumped at the entrance to wigwams or dragged to the nearest bushes. Within two years half of the survivors had also died. Exactly a quarter of a century on from the massacre at Wulaia, the Yamana people were staring extinction in the face.

*   *   *

Whether accidental or deliberate, what followed was a final cruel twist in the tale of the Fuegian Indians. It came in the disguise of convicts, gold and sheep.

These days, one has only to turn on the television or open a newspaper to find slaughter on a grand scale: in Kosovo, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, East Timor. In modern times the terms ‘genocide' and ‘ethnic cleansing' have, sadly, become common currency. The massacre of the innocents in these tragic countries has been appalling, but occasionally, whether for added effect or through journalistic sloppiness, the labels are misapplied. When dealing with the Fuegian Indians they are entirely appropriate: anyone unfortunate enough to have witnessed events in that far-off corner of the planet during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth would have been observing the total extermination of a race.

For Thomas Bridges it was too much to bear. Two years after the arrival of the Argentine ships at Ushuaia he abandoned the mission station. The epidemic had sapped his spirit, and the continuing growth of the settlement, which had by now acquired a governor and many of the trappings of government, led him to a decision to break out on his own. With a grant of land forty miles east of Ushuaia he took up ranching, and by 1894 he had enclosed a farm of more than 2,000 acres that he called Harberton, after his wife's home village in Devon.

As Bridges had long feared, the success of Ushuaia brought with it the darker side of civilisation: alcohol, guns and greed. More importantly, every new influx of settlers brought with it disease and infection. After an Argentine penal colony on Staten Island, at the extreme limit of Tierra del Fuego, suffered a bloody uprising among the inmates, the prison was moved to Ushuaia. The result was another epidemic which, in 1888, killed every Yamana Indian within thirty miles of the settlement.

When gold was discovered in the early 1890s small communities of prospectors from Eastern Europe, Spain, North America and Argentina sprang up in locations from Lennox Island and Dawson Island to the eastern coast of Tierra del Fuego as far north as Rio Grande. The first two prospectors had arrived in the area after a three-month ride across the main island during which they had shot every Fuegian they encountered. For the Selk'nam – Jemmy's Oens-men – the miners' presence was like a cancer. From them the Selk'nam stole or traded guns and with these the fragile tribal balance of the area was unhinged. The guanaco, their main food source, was driven into extinction and local feuds were transformed into homicidal rampages, as Indian wiped out Indian. Lucas Bridges relates a number of these incidents in his book
Uttermost Part of the Earth,
as when the Indian Kiyohnishah – which meant guanaco dung – and a band of sixty followers fell upon a larger party of Selk'nam as they feasted on a stranded whale. Kiyohnishah's party carried with it a number of stolen firearms and the slaughter was appalling, men and women randomly gunned down. Later, Bridges describes an attack in which Kiyohnishah was the victim. A Selk'nam by the name of Ahnikin got hold of three Winchester .44 repeating rifles and, with a small party, launched an attack on a camp near Lake Hyewhin.

As day dawned the attackers advanced on the sleeping encampment. The dogs began to bark, but their warning came too late. Taken completely by surprise, Kiyohnishah sprang to his feet. As he looked over the top of his kowwhi to see what the dogs were barking at, a bullet from Ahnikin's rifle blew his brains out. This was followed by a fusillade of shots that brought down six or seven more, among them Chashkil, who died as swiftly as his brother. Kawhalshan fell with a broken leg, Kautempklh, Kilehehen, the boy Teorati, Kilkoat with his rifle and a few others dived into the woods, while the women hid their heads and wailed.

Kawhalshan, lying helpless on the ground, was prodded slowly to death with a blunt arrow by young Kautush, who, as he despatched the wounded man, shouted at him again and again: ‘You killed my father.'

A murderous pursuit continued into the woods at the end of which Ahnikin returned to the scene of his triumph, only to find the women hacking the body of his dead uncle Yoknolpe into bits and feeding them to the dogs. Ahnikin levelled his rifle and shot seven women dead.

Even worse news for the Fuegians was the arrival of the sheep farmers who began to colonise Tierra del Fuego. Huge expanses of pastureland were sold off by the Argentinian and Chilean governments, but the enclosure of vast ranches was anathema to the nomadic ways of the native population, who now crossed their own heartlands as trespassers. Plunged into near starvation by the disappearance of the guanaco they inevitably killed sheep, for which the ranchers exacted a terrible toll. The new settlers quickly came to see the Indians as vermin, and vermin had to be eradicated. They put a price tag on Fuegian heads – as little as £1 was paid for each one killed – and packs of horseback gauchos hunted them down and wiped them out.

Lucas Bridges told of the exploits of one particular brute he called McInch, the self-styled ‘King of the Rio Grande'. McInch was a heavy-drinking Scotsman with broad, ruddy features, wispy red hair and green-blue eyes. As a young man he had gone with Kitchener to Khartoum, and later in life had tried to establish a sheep farm in northern Tierra del Fuego. When it failed he blamed the Selk'nam and vowed revenge.