Savage (6 page)

Yet there might have been other reasons for their behaviour. After the cold and wet of Tierra del Fuego, Monte Video days were heavy and oppressive. Perhaps they were struggling with the change of climate, or perhaps, even, they were more resilient than the British gave them credit for. Possibly they expressed surprise in ways alien to the European mind, or were frightened and kept their feelings to themselves. It is feasible too that everything that was happening to them was too much to take in: they were dumbstruck. They had no framework, and as yet no vocabulary, to explain what they were going through. The effect, perhaps, was numbing, disconcerting and too difficult to handle.

The
Beagle
had been due to rendezvous with the
Adventure
and
Adelaide
in Monte Video, but found that they had already left for Rio de Janeiro. FitzRoy cut short the time he had planned to spend in the city. Fuegia was put into the care of an expatriate English family living on shore, while the men spent their days with him. Concerned about the possibility of infection, FitzRoy organised vaccinations against smallpox for the Fuegians at a local hospital.

During this period of relative relaxation, FitzRoy learned more about his charges, and most startlingly, the details of their people's cannibalism. This was a nineteenth-century hobbyhorse for English adventurers. As they opened up new and unexplored territories, tales of man-eating natives added frisson and fear to their expeditions. Lurid stories of missionaries boiled in pots, or wild savages gnawing on the bones of dead seafarers, gripped the public imagination. FitzRoy's Fuegians did not disappoint. They told him that women ate the arms and men the legs of captured enemies, with the trunk and head being discarded in the sea, and of how, in times of famine, they consumed the old women of the tribe. This ‘strange and diabolical atrocity' served only to confirm in his mind the prescience of his mission. ‘I no longer hesitate to state my firm belief in the most debasing trait of their character…' he wrote in his narratives of the voyage. Nevertheless, the slow journey to England, through Rio and on across the Atlantic to Plymouth, gave him time to draw a largely favourable impression of the Fuegians. Only York Minster proved something of a let-down:

During the time that elapsed before we reached England, I had time to see much of my Fuegian companions; and daily became more interested about them as I attained a further acquaintance with their abilities and natural inclinations. Far very far indeed were three of the number from deserving to be called savages – even at this early period of their residence among civilized people – though the other, named York Minster, was certainly a displeasing specimen of uncivilized human nature.

PART TWO

Inglan

Chapter 5

An old ledger is stored deep in the vaults of the Public Records Office in Kew, the 1830 Muster Roll for the Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth. Turn the browning leaves to a November page that lists the names of syphilitic sailors, and seamen with boils, gonorrhoea, ulcers and pneumonia, and at the top can be found the following scribbled entries:

The Fuegians were in hospital. It was an inauspicious start to FitzRoy's project.

*   *   *

The
Beagle
arrived at Plymouth in mid October 1830. It was reported in many local and national newspapers, some even picking up on the presence of the Fuegians. Under the headline
INTERESTING VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
the
Morning Post
said:

The
Beagle
has brought to England four natives of Tierra del Fuego … taken prisoners, during the time that the
Beagle
was employed on the southwest coast of that country … [Captain Fitzroy's] intentions are to procure them a suitable education, and in the course of a few years, to send or take them back to their own country. Captain Fitzroy maintains them, and holds himself responsible for their comfort while absent from, and for their safe return to their own country. He hopes that by their assistance the condition of the savages inhabiting the Fuegian Archipelago may be in some measure improved, and that they may be rendered less hostile to strangers. At present they are the lowest of mankind, and, without a doubt, cannibals …

The final leg of the journey had been long and frustrating. The Fuegians had kept up their stoical lack of interest until the
Beagle
made a mail call at Falmouth, where for the first time they saw a steamship entering the harbour. The huge, fuming vessels, a recent development in industrial Britain, were described in one music-hall joke as ‘a saw mill on one side, a grist mill on t'other, a blacksmith's shop in the middle, and down cellar there's a tarnation pot boiling all the time'. For Jemmy and his compatriots the steamer that roared across their path roaring was a terrifying monster. As it chugged close by the
Beagle
on the night of 13 October, all four Fuegians cowered. The
Beagle
's crew tried to put their minds at ease, but FitzRoy understood their apprehension and later wrote,

I think that no one who remembers standing for the first time near a railway, and witnessing the rapid approach of a steam-engine, with its attached train of carriages, as it dashed along, smoking and snorting, will be surprised at the effect which a large steam ship passing at full speed near the
Beagle,
in a dark night, must have had on these ignorant, though rather intelligent barbarians.

As the
Beagle
approached the Royal Dockyard at Devonport the sight that greeted the Fuegians was dramatic. In the harbour lounged the might of British sea power: out-of-service men-of-war moored by immense chains, yardarms, masts and rigging stripped, painted yellow and protected against the elements by temporary roofs. On the quayside sat the convict hulk
Captivity,
with 400 prisoners awaiting transportation. In a former incarnation it had been called HMS
Bellerophon
and had fought at the battles of the Nile and Trafalgar. It had been the site of Napoleon's surrender and had brought the defeated French emperor to Plymouth, where he had been greeted by crowds of jeering locals. Above it all, rising over the eastern bank of the Hamoaze, spread the town.

Images of busy, crowded dockyards, piles of wood and iron, the smells of pitch, tar, varnish, paint, and deafening noise inform our received picture of the ports of the nineteenth century, but Devonport was not like that: it had an ordered Britishness that disguised the flurry of activity that went with the constant arrival of new ships. One journalist of the day described himself as ‘pleasantly undeceived' on entering the highly organised world.

At first he does not see even the ships in dock, nor the storehouses, and unless some extraordinary operation, such as that of raising a vessel, is going on, he does not even hear, or scarcely hears, the sound of a hammer. The broad avenue from the Dockyard gates has not a chip on its surface – it is as clean as the indefatigable broom can make it … An air of serenity, of order, of cleanliness, pervades the whole spot.

The Fuegians were whisked away into the town to ‘comfortable, airy lodgings' where they spent the next two days.

Devonport was a populous city of around 35,000 inhabitants, with straight, wide, rather monotonous streets paved with variegated marble. It had expanded rapidly in size, boosted in recent times by the defensive and offensive needs of the Napoleonic wars. Until 1824 it had been called Plymouth Dock, but amid great ceremony and the erection of an 124-foot Doric column the town adopted its new name.

If its appearance was lacklustre it nevertheless had a number of buildings that demonstrated the English trait of looting the world for architectural styles. Here on these mundane streets were a Calvinist meeting house, built in the ‘fantastic Hindoo style', a library in the Egyptian fashion and a town hall with a Doric portico and four fluted columns.

How much Jemmy, Fuegia, York and Boat saw of this is not recorded. They travelled at night and once in their lodgings it is almost certain that they remained inside as far as possible. As a large seaport Devonport was an entrance point for disease and FitzRoy was ‘anxious to protect the Fuegians, as far as possible, from the contagion of any of those disorders, sometimes prevalent, and which unhappily have so often proved fatal to the aboriginal natives of distant countries when brought to Europe'. On their first morning in town he took them for another vaccination against smallpox.

On their second day in England the Fuegians were removed to Castle Farm just outside Plymouth, where they would be able to ‘enjoy more freedom and fresh air', and where, the
Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle
explained, they seemed ‘to be satisfied with their present situation. As soon as they are sufficiently acquainted with the language, and familiarized with the manners of this country, they will begin a course of education adapted to their future residence in their native country.'

*   *   *

Happy that the four were being well cared for, under the supervision of the
Beagle
's coxswain James Bennet, FitzRoy returned to the ship and sailed on, calling at Portsmouth then berthing at Woolwich where the
Beagle
was paid off.

He had many arrangements to make. There was all the business normally attendant on decommissioning a ship that had been away for five years, there was the social whirl in which a young man, long absent from home, liked to indulge, and he had also to sort out the lives of the Fuegians.

Back in September, as the
Beagle
approached Britain, he had written to Philip Parker King on the
Adventure,
reminding him of his human cargo and pointing out that he had maintained them entirely at his own expense. ‘I have now to request,' he wrote, ‘that, as senior officer of the Expedition, you will consider of the possibility of some public advantage being derived from this circumstances; and of the propriety of offering them, with that view, to his Majesty's Government.'

FitzRoy had known that Captain King would forward the letter to the Admiralty. He had therefore detailed the ages of each Fuegian and explained why they were on board, emphasising all the time their happiness and contentment. He concluded,

Should not his Majesty's Government direct otherwise, I shall procure for these people a suitable education, and, after two or three years, shall take them back to their country, with as large a stock as I can collect of those articles most useful to them, and most likely to improve the condition of their countrymen, who are now scarcely superior to the brute creation.

On 19 October John Barrow at the Admiralty responded:

I am commanded to acquaint you that their Lordships will not interfere with Commander Fitz-Roy's personal superintendence of, or benevolent intentions towards these four people, but they will afford him any facilities towards maintaining and educating them in England, and will give them a passage home again.

In other words the Admiralty did not object to the presence of the Fuegians and FitzRoy could do what he wanted with them, but the commander was in no doubt that he would receive little assistance. He sought help elsewhere, turning first to the powerful Church Missionary Society. Although the Society's focus was mainly in Africa they had a long-running, though not necessarily successful, track record of bringing native peoples to England. As far back as 1816 one of their first African converts in Sierra Leone had been brought to London. When he died suddenly in Church Missionary House he was judged by the Society ‘the first ripe ear gathered into the heavenly garner from the Society's missions'.

FitzRoy tried an indirect approach, through the vicar of Plymstock. ‘I am very anxious to place the two young men, whom I have brought from Tierra del Fuego, with some person or persons who would instruct them, and enlighten their minds as much as might be practicable during the two or three years they will probably pass in England,' he told the Reverend J.L. Harris on 30 October. Would he, asked FitzRoy, write to the Church Missionary Society and ask them to provide an education for York Minster and Boat Memory? ‘My principal object is to enable them to act as interpreters and to give to their countrymen some of the new ideas they will experience while under the care of a sensible person.' His intentions at this point for Jemmy and Fuegia are not recorded.

The next day Mr Harris posted a letter to the Society explaining that his friend Robert FitzRoy had taken four Fuegians prisoner and that he ‘has discovered they are Cannibals but now they show a ready appetite for Vegetables. I should be glad of the receipt of your advice as to the most desirable institution to place these in and as to the expense of so doing…'

The Society considered the matter on 16 November. The minute of the discussion records,

Resolved,
That Mr Harris be informed that the Committee do not conceive it to be within the province of this Society to take charge of the Individuals mentioned in this Letter.