This Thing Of Darkness (11 page)

The rest of the winter had been taken up with following the straits to their conclusion, searching for channels in the cold rain and sparse daylight. Sulivan had been remembered again at Cape Bartholomew; King had been commemorated thrice in one vista at Cape Philip, Cape Parker and King Island. They had seen seals teaching their pups to swim, supporting them with one flipper, then gently pushing them away into deep water to fend for themselves. At a dark reach lined by black cliffs, now for ever entered into posterity as Whale Sound, Boatswain Sorrell had screamed ‘Hard a-port! There are rocks under the bows!’ which had revealed themselves instead to be a passing school of humpback whales. The beasts had accompanied the ship for some miles before peeling off to the south, at which juncture one had performed a graceful leap of farewell across the
Beagle’
s stern.

The human inhabitants of the straits had revealed themselves rather more cautiously at first. Not that they could hope to hide themselves from the strangers - far from it. The continuous fires - the most precious possessions of each Fuegian family, which were never allowed to go out - signalled their presence on the hillsides in the dark of night, like ascending banks of church candles. Theirs was a world revealed by darkness, when their dogs barked and their drums spoke. In the daytime the Indians fell silent, and followed at a careful distance in their boats. These canoes were curious, collapsible little vessels, sewn together from tree bark and invariably split into three sections: women, children and dogs in the rear, the women paddling; men at the front, armed with sticks, stones, wooden spears or daggers, the points beaten from shipwrecked iron; and taking pride of place in the centre, the divine, unceasing fire on its bed of clay. Alongside the fire, invariably, green leaves would be piled high for making smoke signals, so that the
Beagle’s
progress was tracked and monitored by all as she passed slowly up the straits. Occasionally, naked men would come to the shore in brave little clusters, shouting the single word ‘
Yammerschooner!
’ and waving ragged pieces of skin at the strangers; but whenever FitzRoy put down boats to establish contact, the Indians would flee into the trees long before the shore party made the beach.

These men were nothing like the ‘noble savages’ of Patagonia. They were short, round, oily creatures, four feet fully grown, who seemed to spend as much time in the icy water - which could not have been more than a degree or two above freezing - as they did on land. They could hold their breath for several minutes at a time, before emerging from the cold black depths with the mussels and sea-eggs that seemed to comprise the bulk of their diet. It was hard to connect them with any other tribe on earth. Indeed, they seemed more like porpoises than men. They were, thought FitzRoy, like a satire on humanity.

At Mount de la Cruz, in that part of the western straits that Cook had christened ‘The Land of Desolation’, they made contact. A group of men appeared furtively on the shore, waving skins and shouting,
‘Yammerschooner!’
as ever. One was painted white all over, another blue, another bright red. The rest were daubed with white streaks. FitzRoy gave orders for the ship to pull in to shore. It had been sleeting heavily for days, her yards and rigging were icebound, and the men’s fingers were blue with cold. The
Beagle
pirouetted slowly round, like a fat ballerina. Despite the temperature, the natives on the shore were quite naked, except for the occasional tattered fox pelt thrown about their shoulders.

Bennet squinted through a spyglass as the Indians began to jabber and gesticulate excitedly.

‘My eye! That crimson fellow reminds me of the sign of the Red Lion on Holborn Hill.’

‘Red, white and blue,’ pointed out Kempe. ‘They’ve run up the Union flag to greet us.’

‘It looks a regular crush on that beach, my boys,’ laughed Murray. ‘Do you reckon that shore is Terra del’s equivalent of a fashionable saloon?’

‘And what would you know of fashionable saloons, Mr Murray, hailing from Glasgow?’

A chuckle ran around the poop deck.

‘Do you think I could hit him from here?’ pondered King, raising his gun to the port rail. ‘That would light a fire under the red savage’s tail!’

‘Put that down!’ snapped FitzRoy. He strode across the deck, eyes blazing, and grabbed the weapon. ‘What the deuce do you think you’re about?’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ King was smarting, bewildered. ‘I was only going to fire over his head, sir. You should see the savages scoot, sir, like ducks. It’s funny, sir. Captain Stokes always permitted gun amusements, sir. I wasn’t really going to shoot him, sir.’

‘So I should think not. They are not animals, put on God’s earth for our sport! I’m ashamed of you, Mr King.’

‘But - but they ain’t human, sir.’

‘They most certainly are men, just as you or I. Unfortunate men, maybe, forced by accident of circumstance to inhabit this Godforsaken spot, but they are our brothers nonetheless. They do not look like us because their physiognomy has adapted itself to the cold and rain. Were I to cast you ashore, Mr King, and were the good Lord to take pity on your soul and spare your life, then within a generation or two your progeny would very likely be short, plump and jabbering away like the lowliest Fuegian.’

‘But it doesn’t mean anything - does it, sir? Those noises they make?’

‘How do you know? To the best of my knowledge, no Dr Johnson has ever taken the trouble to compile a dictionary of their language. An omission I intend to remedy personally. Instead of waving a loaded gun about the maindeck, Mr King, you would be better advised to improve your intelligence of such matters. I suggest you consult the scriptures, commencing with the Book of Genesis.’

With that, FitzRoy turned on his heel and stalked away, leaving a silence both uneasy and amused in his wake.

‘They say the bottle is a strict master,’ murmured Lieutenant Kempe, ‘but the good Lord is far stricter, and no easier to turn aside from.’

They put the boats down, but by the time they reached the shingle, the natives had fled. In a clearing amid the first few trees of the wood, they found abandoned wigwams: not the spindly, elegant constructions of the Patagonians, but clumsy, squat affairs made from branches, leaves, dung and rotten sealskins piled into rounds. Carefully, FitzRoy positioned two empty preserved meat canisters at the entrance to one of the tents, then withdrew.

The next few hours, all that remained of the short southern day, were spent climbing to the frost-shattered summit of Mount de la Cruz to survey the land around. Even though the peak was only two thousand feet above the shore, it was a hard slog. All of Tierra del Fuego’s lowlands seemed to be covered by a deep bed of swampy peat: even in the forest, the ground was a thick, putrefying bog, overlaid with spongy moss and fallen trees, into which the party frequently sank up to their knees. Finally, they reached the sleet-scoured rock above the treeline, took their round of angles, and left a soldered canister - containing a crew list and a handful of British coins - beneath a cairn for posterity.

When they clambered back down to the beach, there was still no sign of the Fuegians, but the canisters were gone. FitzRoy took another two, placed them in the same location, and retreated to the edge of the clearing. Then, with the exception of Midshipman King, he sent the sailors back to the boats. With precautionary pistols loaded, he and King sat on their haunches, their breath condensing in the evening gloom, and waited silently for night to fall.

After a long, cold half-hour, the dark rectangles between the tree trunks were brought into focus by smoky torches. There was a whispering in the forest, a strange, guttural confection of clicks and throat-clearings. King, nervous, edged closer to FitzRoy. Finally, the red-painted man appeared at the far edge of the clearing, tentative, wary. They could see him better now. He had the eyes of a Chinee, black, slanted at an oblique angle to his nose, which was narrow at the bridge but flattened at the point, where his nostrils flared against his face. Beneath these two black holes his face was split in two by an exceptionally wide, full-lipped mouth. His teeth, bared in his nervousness, were flat and rotten, like those of a badly tended horse; no sharp canine points disturbed their even brown line. His chin was weak and small, and retreated into the thick muscular trunk of his neck. His shoulders were square, his upper body tremendously powerful under its broad coating of fat, weighing down on the short bow legs beneath it; his feet were turned inward, his toes levelled off in a perfect rectangle. As the Indian paused, considering flight, FitzRoy could see that the backs of his thighs were wrinkled like an old man’s; presumably from a lifetime of squatting on his haunches. He was like no other creature, man or beast, that FitzRoy had ever seen.

The Fuegian advanced slowly and cautiously towards the two canisters, keeping his eyes on FitzRoy and King throughout, inching forward until his fingers closed on his prize. His fellows watched from behind tree trunks and flaming brands, poised for a general evacuation. But just as he was about to dart for the safety of the woods clutching his reward, FitzRoy spoke in a calm, clear voice:
‘Yammerschooner.’

The man bared his horse-teeth again, not from nerves, this time, but in a smile. Then he seized the two canisters and darted back a pace or two, but stayed poised there, half lit on the edge of the clearing.

Slowly FitzRoy extracted a box of Promethean matches from his pocket, with a small glass bottle containing the ignition mixture of asbestos and sulphuric acid. He unscrewed the lid and dipped the match head into the liquid. It ignited instantly, and a gasp ran round the clearing to see fire flare so mysteriously from one end of a tiny wooden stick. FitzRoy held the flaming Promethean aloft.

‘Yammerschooner,’
he repeated.

Curiosity overcame the red-painted man’s fear, and he edged forward.

‘Mr King,’ whispered FitzRoy, ‘do you have any tobacco about your person?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Slowly now.’

Gingerly, King removed his tobacco pouch from his pocket, extracted a pinch and held it forward.

‘Tabac, tabac,’
said FitzRoy. It was a word the Patagonians had learned. Perhaps it had filtered this far south as well. Certainly the sight of the dried leaves seemed to interest the Fuegian. A few clicks with his tongue and he beckoned the white-painted man and his blue colleague into the clearing.

‘He’s got something in a sack, sir.’

The white-daubed Indian was indeed holding a sack sewn from animal skin, which appeared to be wriggling in his grasp. The man edged forward, gestured eagerly at King’s full tobacco pouch, then opened the sack to reveal the wet eyes and bemused face of a month-old puppy. From the Indian’s gestures it was clear that he wanted to trade.

‘Shall I give him the tobacco, sir?’

‘Well, we might benefit from a ship’s dog. Why not?’

King poured the tobacco into the proffered sack, keeping the leather pouch back for himself, and took the puppy from the Fuegian by the scruff of its neck. There were friendly grins all round.

King, however, wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘The stench is frightful, sir.’

It was indeed. On close inspection, it became clear that the Indians, as well as decorating themselves in outlandishly bright colours, had smeared their naked bodies from head to toe with an insulating coat of rancid seal fat. King had to restrain the puppy from licking its former owners.

‘Keep smiling, if you can bear to,’ said FitzRoy, through a fixed grin.

The white-painted man gestured for the pair to enter the wigwam. King looked enquiringly at FitzRoy, who nodded, and they crawled beneath the tent-flap, into a close, dark world, which reeked of stale smoke and rotting sealskin. The men followed, extinguishing their flaming brands, and more men after them, then women and children, until the tent was heaving with Indians, and curious faces filled the triangle left at the open flap. Brushwood was brought, and before long the wigwam was filled with leaping flames and eye-watering clouds of smoke. Again, FitzRoy mounted a match-lighting demonstration to the amazed crowd, before making a present of box and bottle to the red-painted man.

‘Prometheans,’ he said.

‘Prometheans,’ repeated the Fuegian, remarkably accurately. FitzRoy placed a finger to his own chest.

‘I am Captain FitzRoy.’

The red man pointed to his own chest and repeated gravely: ‘I am Captain FitzRoy.’ The watching crowd in turn indicated themselves and murmured that they, too, were Captain FitzRoy.

FitzRoy smiled, genuinely this time, and gestured to indicate King and himself. ‘Englishmen,’ he announced, and then, pointing to the red man, he added: ‘Indian.’

‘Englishmen,’ repeated most of the Fuegians, each indicating his or her fellow, before pointing out FitzRoy and announcing, ‘Indian.’

‘Did you fetch the notebook?’ FitzRoy asked King, whereupon a chorus of Fuegians also enquired whether King had fetched the notebook.

‘They’re first-rate mimics, sir. It’s why nobody has ever learned their language,’ King explained, handing the book across.

‘Why nobody has ever learned their language,’ added a small boy.

‘They’re first-rate mimics, sir. It’s,’ said a fat lady helpfully.

‘Look,’ said King, shoving a finger up one nostril and crossing his eyes.

‘Look,’ repeated the Fuegians, and every Indian in the tent pulled the same face.

‘This is getting us nowhere,’ sighed FitzRoy.

‘This is getting us nowhere,’ sighed the blue man.

So FitzRoy took the pen, and started to sketch a nearby woman instead. Eagerly, the Indians gathered round to look. A reverential silence settled upon the tent. Emboldened, FitzRoy produced his handkerchief and wiped the white streaks from the woman’s face. She did not object, but adopted the air of a dignified hospital patient. When the sketch was finished, to general approbation, FitzRoy was rewarded by his model, who ornamented his face with white streaks in turn. There were murmurs of approval all round.