Savage (7 page)

FitzRoy's plans were faltering: he was not receiving the help he had expected. However, by the time he received the Society's response he had much bigger problems on his hands.

*   *   *

Smallpox had been the scourge of mankind since 10,000
BC
. It had wiped out millions of people across Europe and the so-called New World and brought three empires – Roman, Aztec and Inca – to their knees. As that other great killer, bubonic plague, disappeared from Europe in the seventeenth century, smallpox became the most feared disease. Cesspits of cities, with squalid, filthy streets, festered and propagated vicious epidemics. At the end of the eighteenth century 400,000 people died of smallpox every year in Europe, driven to their graves by a virus that debilitated its victims with fever, nausea and a pus-filled rash. Those who survived were scarred by the lesions the disease left.

But battle was being waged against it. After learning that Gloucestershire milkmaids were said to be immune to smallpox, Edward Jenner took a sample of the mild disease cowpox from a milkmaid and injected it into the arm of a boy called James Phipps. When Jenner subsequently exposed Phipps to smallpox, he was found to be immune to it. Vaccination – from the Latin
vacca
for cow – had proved successful and the tide was turning.

Within two years of Jenner publishing his findings in 1798, over 100,000 people had been vaccinated and the new cure had spread across Europe and was rapidly reaching all corners of the globe. In 1803 Charles IV of Spain sponsored the world's first mass overseas vaccination campaign when his country's Expedición de la Vacuna set sail for Spanish outposts in the Americas and Asia. Twenty-two orphan children were taken on the three-year voyage and each was vaccinated in sequence to keep the vaccine alive. In 1805 Napoleon ordered his whole army to be vaccinated and followed it up a year later with the full-scale vaccination of the French population. The procedure was made compulsory in Bavaria in 1807, and in Denmark three years later.

By 1830 the disease, if not eradicated, was in retreat. The National Vaccine Establishment reported in April 1831, ‘We have furnished the means of protection to the Army and Navy, to every county in England and Scotland, to Ireland, to the Colonies, and moreover to several of the capitals of Europe; and nearly 12,000 of the poor of the Metropolis and its immediate neighbourhood have been vaccinated in the course of last year.'

But in early November 1830, Robert FitzRoy received ‘sad intelligence' from Devonport: Boat Memory had contracted the disease and was in a critical condition. Back in Plymouth FitzRoy sought the advice of Navy physicians, who advised that all four Fuegians should be placed in the Royal Naval Hospital's smallpox ward as soon as possible. Here they would be in the care of the renowned doctor David Dickson, superintended by Sir James Gordon.

FitzRoy returned to London where he wrote to the First Secretary of the Admiralty, Sir John Croker, requesting
post facto
permission for Jemmy, Boat, York and Fuegia to be admitted into the hospital, ‘until this dangerous period of their existence is passed'. In addition, he asked that the
Beagle
's coxswain James Bennet be allowed to attend to them, ‘as he partly understands their language and has always had the care of them'.

Consent was immediately forthcoming, but it was too late. The next day, on 11 November, FitzRoy received the following letter from Dr Dickson:

Dear Sir

I am sorry to inform you that Boat Memory died this afternoon in the eruptive stage of … Smallpox. He was perfectly covered with the eruption; but the pustules did not advance to maturation as they should have done and as the breathing was much impeded, I had little, or no expectation of his recovery … he has been saved much suffering – and those about him from attending a loathsome Disease.

In the boy Button the appearance of the vaccine bacilli is satisfactory – and as the others have been revaccinated … I am in hope they will be saved from the fate of their countryman.

Yours faithfully

D.H. Dickson

Boat's death was a severe blow for FitzRoy and he felt, quite rightly, personally implicated. He informed the Admiralty at once, blaming the ‘badness of the Vaccine Virus' and claiming that the contagion had hit too hard and too early for the final shot to take effect.

By the time Boat died, the Fuegians had been vaccinated four times, but this did not make FitzRoy immune to criticism. On 20 November the
Royal Devonport Telegraph
commented:

TERRA DEL FUEGO
– The four natives of this island, who were brought home by Captain Fitzroy, in his Majesty's ship
Beagle,
have taken the small pox, and are at present in the Naval Hospital. One of them (named Boatwilliam by the crew of the
Beagle
) has fallen a victim to the disease in the course of the past week, but the others are expected to recover. – It is to be regretted that the propriety of vaccination did not suggest itself to Captain Fitzroy, nor to the Surgeon of his ship, as the generally fatal effects of this disorder to foreigners might have frustrated the praiseworthy intentions of the Captain in bringing them to England.

The news took longer to reach the national press but on 7 December the
Morning Advertiser
informed its readers that it understood that the Fuegians ‘were vaccinated previously to their sailing for England, but it is supposed they did not properly imbibe the virus'.

That FitzRoy felt the loss of Boat is beyond doubt. He commented in his narratives that the young man was a great personal favourite with a ‘good disposition, very good abilities, and though born a savage, had a pleasing, intelligent appearance. He was quite an exception to the general character of the Fuegians, having good features and a well proportioned frame.'

Boat was buried on 18 November in a lonely little ceremony near Plymouth. The other three remained in hospital until the end of the month. In what now seems a remarkable act of risk-taking, especially in the context of her compatriot's death, Fuegia Basket was removed from the hospital and taken to the home of Dr Dickson where his children had measles. In Dickson's opinion it was a chance to expose Fuegia to the disease and strengthen her immune system. So, in the words of FitzRoy ‘he prepared her for it, and then took her into his house, among his own children; where she had a very favourable attack, and recovered thoroughly'.

*   *   *

The effect of Boat's death on the other three Fuegians is not recorded. That such a popular character should die in what were, for them, confusing and tragic circumstances must have shocked and upset them, if only because they would miss his gregarious presence. They might have been afraid of contracting the disease themselves or because they did not understand the cause of his death: they would have seen a strapping man transformed into a feverish wreck.

Yet their most likely reaction to Boat's demise was self-absorption and no visible response. Fuegians of all tribes had a strange relationship with death. It made them sad and introspective. When visitors came to Fuegian settlements after a long time away, it was considered impolite to ask after missing people in case they had died in the intervening period, for this would force those present to explain the absence. When a Yamana died his or her body was burned on a small pyre and the encampment abandoned for good. When stories of life and death were told around Fuegian fires, Indians of all ages would become quiet, weep, and even leave for their wigwams mid-story. It was an attitude that was dismissed by the British as brusque and brutish, a sign of a Fuegian's lack of emotional depth and understanding of spirituality.

Whatever their feelings, though, they were now inmates of the Royal Naval Hospital. It was not a prison, but it was not the English countryside either. Its ten buildings, which looked down on an exercise quad, could hold up to 1,200 patients. It was peace-time, so it is doubtful that many men were there. Still, FitzRoy would have been aware that hospitals not only cure disease but propagate it. As soon as he could, he had to get them out of there and move his plan on to the next stage – their education and civilisation.

Chapter 6

The three survivors spent a miserable twenty-four days in the naval hospital before Dr Dickson felt confident enough to give them the all-clear. It was time enough for FitzRoy to pick up the tattered pieces of his grand benevolent plan.

If the Church Missionary Society had not been overly helpful, its energetic lay secretary, Dandeson Coates, nevertheless tapped into his extensive personal network of contacts and pointed FitzRoy in the direction of the Reverend Joseph Wigram, secretary of the National Society for Providing Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. Wigram was an influential man, not just through his position – he later became the Bishop of Rochester – but also by virtue of being the son of one of the country's most powerful merchants. He introduced FitzRoy to William Wilson, the vicar of Walthamstow, Wigram's home village, and founder of the oldest church school in the country. Wilson was only too happy to help. FitzRoy would remain responsible for the Fuegians and pay handsomely for their education, but the burden of their day-to-day care would be shouldered by the schoolmaster Mr Jenkins and his wife. FitzRoy noted that Wilson

at once relieved my mind from a load of uncertainty and anxiety, by saying that they should be received into his parish, and that he would talk to the master of the Infant School about taking them into his house, as boarders and pupils. In a short time it was arranged that the schoolmaster should receive, and take entire charge of them, while they remained in England, and should be paid by me for their board and lodging, for his own trouble, and for all contingent expenses.

Mr Wilson proposed to keep a watchful eye over them himself and give advice from time to time to their guardian and instructor …

At the beginning of December 1830, Jemmy, York and Fuegia were discharged from hospital and loaded into a London-bound stage-coach, with James Bennet and the
Beagle
's old master Mr Murray. Six coaches left Devonport every day for London, a journey of between twenty-three and thirty hours. However, the coach that they took would have been a privately hired one, to avoid drawing attention to themselves, but it would have followed a well-established route across the West Country to Piccadilly, where it would have pulled in at either the Black Bear or the Old White Horse Cellars – around the corner from FitzRoy's Stratton Street home.

Most frequent travellers found the vehicles bumpy and uncomfortable, but the Fuegians, Murray reported, ‘seemed to enjoy their journey in the coach, and were very much struck by the repeated changing of horses'.

*   *   *

If the physical landscape that the Fuegians' stage-coach traversed was well established, then the political, social and cultural landscapes of the country they crossed were far less certain. Indeed, as agitation for political reform spilled onto the streets and mixed with unprecedented social tension, Britain was nearer to revolution now than at any time in her history.

The industrial revolution had transformed British society. Although the landscape was not yet dominated by gargantuan mills and smoke-spewing chimneys – except perhaps in some of the textile areas of Lancashire – swelling urbanisation was having an incalculable effect on it. Britain's population in 1801 had been 10.6 million, double what it had been a century before. By 1831 it had reached 16.6 million. In 1750 only London and Edinburgh had had more than 50,000 inhabitants. By 1851 there were 29 cities of this size. Between 1760 and 1830 the population of Manchester grew from just 17,000 to 180,000. And in 1831 London supported more than 1,700,000 inhabitants.

The cities were crucibles of inequality and discontent. While the industrial revolution feathered the beds of the upper classes and created a whole new thrusting middle class, it condemned the labouring masses to misery and degradation on a hitherto unimaginable scale. In
Great Expectations,
when Pip comes up from the countryside for the first time, he comments, ‘We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow and dirty.'

These were mean streets of pestilence, pollution and disease. Cholera and typhoid thrived in the cities of the 1830s, crime flourished, and the urban poor crowded into some of the most wretched slum housing ever created. Throughout the whole of the decade one in every ten people was a pauper.

Little surprise, then, that the streets seethed with agitation under the influence of political unions, radical organisations, embryonic socialist movements, anarchic gangs and a disaffected proletariat. Pressure for reform, and in particular electoral reform, was coming to a head in the autumn of 1830, sponsored as much by the aspirations of the middle class as by the rage of the mob. The Great Reform Bill, which would address some of the problems of voting rights and the indecency of rotten boroughs, was before Parliament and resisted by both the Prime Minister, who was the Duke of Wellington, and the House of Lords.

Debates in Parliament acted as a catalyst for the rabble-rousers on the streets. In the first week of November the new King, William IV, and his wife Adelaide, abandoned plans to visit the City of London for fear that they would be assassinated.

On 9 November, the day that Boat Memory lay dying in Plymouth, the
Morning Advertiser
reported, under the headline ‘
ALARMING STATE OF THE METROPOLIS
', that during the day gangs of pickpockets had run amok in the City and Westminster only to be replaced in the early evening by throngs of people who blocked avenues leading to the Palace of Westminster, many of whom assailed the carriage carrying the soon-to-be Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel.