Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  The Beagle’s crew, in a nod to the wicker-like craft built by Murray and his men that had first brought them news of the stolen whaleboat, had taken to calling this child Fuegia Basket.

  6

  FitzRoy’s instructions from the British Admiralty contained no provisions about capturing or killing foreign nationals. He sailed a warship across a lawless world and what he did was up to him. His code of behavior was that of an English gentleman, which carried with it the assumption of moral, intellectual, and religious superiority. This gave him, he felt, the unquestioned right to attempt to retrieve his stolen property as he saw fit, to stop, question, capture, and even kill natives in the course of his inquiries, if this seemed necessary. He tried not to kill, he behaved as decently as he thought fit, but kidnapping people didn’t faze him. He took to it without hesitation.

  The acquisition of Fuegia Basket marked a turning point. It was by then surely clear to him that hostage-taking was unlikely to produce the ransom of his missing whaleboat. Fuegian mothers, pretending to lead the crew toward their missing boat, had run away, effectively abandoning their children held aboard the Beagle, rather than complying with the Englishmen’s demands. No entreaty had come for Fuegia Basket, child of the “boat stealers’ family.” She was unclaimed property.

  Clothed in seaman’s garb, the little girl had the run of the ship. Eight years old (young enough to lie below the sexual radar of most of the Beagle’s crew), small, easily amused, no doubt amusing, she had become, according to FitzRoy, “a pet on the lower deck.” From his earliest descriptions of her, FitzRoy was keenly aware of her as a personality; he saw the child rather than her use as a bargaining commodity. He was charmed by her. He wanted to keep her.

  As carpenter May worked ashore in March Harbour on the new whaleboat, FitzRoy and Murray tried to turn their attention once more to surveying, but Fuegians again got in the way. A group of them in a canoe approached the ship on March 3 wanting to come aboard. Impatient with the nuisance they represented, wary of their pilfering with May’s carpentry shop set up on shore, FitzRoy sent Mr. Wilson, the mate, in one of the boats to chase them away, to fire pistol shots over their heads.

  But almost immediately, his curiosity about the Fuegians, by now deepened nearly to obsession, made him change his mind. He set out himself in another boat. In his published journals, FitzRoy would later write: “Reflecting…that by getting one of these natives on board, there would be a chance of his learning enough English to be an interpreter, and that by this means we might recover our lost boat…I went after them, and hauling their canoe alongside of my boat, told a young man to come into it; he did so, quite unconcernedly, and sat down, apparently contented and at his ease.” The rest of the Fuegians “paddled out of the harbour as fast as they could.”

  Back aboard the Beagle, the young man was christened York Minster, after the dominating topographical feature of the neighborhood. He was cleaned and fed, and introduced to Fuegia Basket. They talked and York Minster, sullen at first, grew “much more cheerful.”

  Five days later, while on a hill taking angles for his survey of March Harbour, FitzRoy saw smoke coming from a cove near the harbor entrance. Unable to resist, he ran down to the shore and had two men row him to the cove to see if this group possessed anything that might have come from the stolen whaleboat. But as the Englishmen approached, these natives became “very bold and threatening,” so FitzRoy returned to the Beagle, filled two boats with armed men, and set off after the Fuegians, who were now paddling away fast across the harbor. The Englishmen chased them to shore where a fight ensued, an exchange of rocks and gunfire, during which no one was injured except for a seaman hit by a rock. The natives escaped into the bush. FitzRoy’s men found part of the lost boat’s gear in the beached canoes, and he concluded that among this group must be the whaleboat’s thieves. (Items from the stolen boat—oars, line, beer bottles—appeared to have been so widely disseminated throughout Tierra del Fuego that FitzRoy was able to see the thieves everywhere.) He destroyed their canoes.

  The next morning he set out again with an armed party in the direction of smoke seen above nearby islands, hoping still to find his boat. Again he saw Fuegians paddling away in canoes and intercepted them. As the Englishmen’s boat reached the first canoe, its occupants jumped overboard. The crew grabbed one of them, a young man, who was hauled into FitzRoy’s boat after a fierce fifteen-minute struggle in the water. The Englishmen returned to the Beagle with this new captive, whom FitzRoy optimistically christened Boat Memory. Despite being frightened, the new Fuegian aboard “ate enormously, and soon fell fast asleep.”

  FitzRoy now had three Fuegian captives aboard the Beagle. He was as happy with them as a big game hunter with a good bag of trophies.

  “Boat” was the best featured Fuegian I had seen, and being young and well made, was a very favourable specimen of the race; “York” was one of the stoutest men I had observed among them; but little Fuegia was almost as broad as she was high: she seemed to be so merry and happy, that I do not think she would willingly have quitted us. Three natives of Tierra del Fuego, better suited for the purpose of instruction, and for giving, as well as receiving information, could not, I think, have been found.

  Some design for them, not fully formed, was taking shape in FitzRoy’s mind. The specimens were clothed in regulation seaman’s dress, and instructed in English.

  With the new whaleboat completed by carpenter May, the Beagle sailed from March Harbour on the last day of that month. The ship trended southeast along the ragged shore of Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy no longer chased native fires in search of his stolen boat and concentrated on his surveying work. His Fuegian specimens were, according to him, “becoming very cheerful, and apparently contented.”

  In Orange Bay, on the Hardy Peninsula west of Cape Horn, a group of Fuegians approached the ship to barter. FitzRoy was surprised at the reaction of his captives to these visitors. They spoke a different dialect than Boat Memory and York Minster, who nevertheless recognized the newcomers and yelled at them, calling them, FitzRoy believed, “Yapoo.” They showed FitzRoy scars from wounds they’d received fighting the “Yapoos,” a distinct and different tribe, he concluded. FitzRoy also referred to them as “Yahoos”—he had undoubtedly read Gulliver’s Travels (1726), whose protagonist refers to the brutish and imaginary race of that name as “those filthy Yahoos.”

  Late in April, the Beagle anchored near Horn Island, the southernmost point of South America, the false cape, the infamous Ultima Thule to all seamen known as Cape Horn. FitzRoy and a party rowed ashore, climbed the island’s height, and took the usual observations. Then they put aside their instruments and erected an 8-foot high pile of stones over a memorial to dead seamen, broke out the Union Jack, and toasted the health of King William IV. Like tourists everywhere, like the plundering Oxford scholars in Greece or the astronauts who visited the moon, when they rowed away from the island they took with them fragments of Cape Horn.

  Early in May the Beagle anchored in a bay on the east coast of Lennox Island, north of Cape Horn. Three boats headed off to survey the area around wide Nassau Bay. FitzRoy went in one of them with a group of seamen, heading west across Nassau Bay and then north toward a narrow channel discovered by Murray on a boat trip a few weeks earlier. Murray Narrows, as FitzRoy named it, led into what appeared to be a wide straight channel that ran east and west through the heart of Tierra del Fuego, which FitzRoy called Beagle Channel.

  FitzRoy met Fuegians in canoes and ashore, the same Yapoos encountered earlier. Unlike the aggressive, boat-thieving Yamana Fuegians farther west, these natives were mainly interested in barter. They had clearly had contact with sealing vessels, whose voracious appetite for every kind of skin made the Yapoos now attempt to hide their guanaco hides at the sight of the Englishmen. They offered instead fish, which they traded for beads and buttons. With one group, FitzRoy traded a knife for a “very fine dog.”

  On May 11, near the entrance to Murray Narrows,
FitzRoy’s boat was intercepted by three canoes eager for trade.

  We gave them a few beads and buttons, for some fish; and, without any previous intention, I told one of the boys in a canoe to come into our boat, and gave the man who was with him a large shining mother-of-pearl button. The boy got into my boat directly, and sat down. Seeing him and his friends quite contented, I pulled onwards, and, a light breeze springing up, made sail. Thinking that this accidental occurrence might prove useful to the natives, as well as to ourselves, I determined to take advantage of it…. “Jemmy Button,” as the boat’s crew called him, on account of his price, seemed to be pleased at his change.

  With orders to be in Rio de Janeiro by June 20, FitzRoy turned the Beagle eastward to survey what remained of the coast of Tierra del Fuego before turning north to Rio and, beyond that, England.

  Four Fuegian captives still remained aboard. FitzRoy now had a plan for them.

  I had…made up my mind to carry the Fuegians…to England; trusting that the ultimate benefits arising from their acquaintance with our habits and language, would make up for the temporary separation from their own country. But this decision was not contemplated when I first took them on board; I then only thought of detaining them while we were on their coasts; yet afterwards finding that they were happy and in good health, I began to think of the various advantages which might result to them and their countrymen, as well as to us, by taking them to England, educating them there as far as might be practicable, and then bringing them back to Tierra del Fuego…. In adopting the latter course I incurred a deep responsibility, but was fully aware of what I was undertaking.

  According to FitzRoy, the Fuegians “understood clearly when we left the coast that they would return to their country at a future time, with iron, tools, clothes, and knowledge which they might spread among their countrymen.” The four natives could not possibly have comprehended such a scheme from a rudimentary exchange that might have communicated, at most, “You come with us, get tools, knives, we bring you back.” But, according to FitzRoy, the only chronicler-witness to what was said and understood, the Fuegians appeared content and interested in self-improvement and made no use of several opportunities to escape.

  They helped the crew whenever required; were extremely tractable and good-humoured, even taking pains to walk properly, and get over the crouching posture of their countrymen. When we were at anchor in Good Success Bay, they went ashore with me more than once, and occasionally took an oar in the boat, without appearing to harbour a thought of escape.

  On June 7, the Beagle passed through the Strait of Le Maire, out of the waters of Tierra del Fuego, and sailed north into the warming Atlantic.

  PART TWO

  7

  The term “collecting” had a particular weight attached to it in nineteenth-century Britain. Explorers in Africa, Asia, and South America felt duty-bound to collect bugs, birds, spiders, flowers, and native nose rings to ship home. Every far-flung outpost of the empire had its local amateur enthusiast: the Indian Raj hill station doctor who sent home a few butterflies, the missionary in Africa who became fascinated with dung beetles, anyone of a scientific bent who gathered examples of the local flora and fauna. He would look for them himself, and his fellow expatriates and the local natives would bring him anything thought to be worthy of his interest.

  These collectors would examine their specimens, categorize, preserve, then package the finer examples with care and send them “home” to England. Sometimes they were sent to a friend who might be storing, housing, or displaying the mounting collection, but just as often to the British Museum or some other interested repository. Country houses, museums, universities, and gentlemen’s clubs filled with specimens from around the globe. Taxidermy became a frenzied profession. England, in that age of expanding exploration and colonial possession, became a vast storehouse of every kind of transportable evidence of the warp and weft of Man and Nature.

  Notable collectors were Lord Elgin, who in 1806 looted a shipful of 2,500-year-old marble statues from the Parthenon in Athens and sent them back to England, and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose eight-year-long wanderings through the Malay Archipelago eventually resulted in 125,660 specimens of plants, insects, and animals shipped home.

  FitzRoy’s savages were a natural part of this ethos. From the moment of first contact, Eskimos, Pygmies, Polynesians, Africans, and “Ioway” American Indians had also been “collected” by European explorers. Captain Cook returned to England at the end of his second voyage with a Tahitian, Omai, who partied in London for two years before returning home with Cook on his last voyage. Fifty-eight thousand people went to see a family of Laplanders with their live reindeer exhibited in London in 1822. Two hundred years earlier, Captain George Weymouth kidnapped five Indians from an island near what is now Port Clyde, Maine, and brought them back to England. They were treated well and when eventually repatriated, they had nothing but good to say of the English. One of them, Tasquantum, or Squanto, taught some English to a friend of his, Samoset, who happened to be in the neighborhood of present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, when the Mayflower dropped anchor in December 1620. When its pilgrim passengers went ashore, they were met by Samoset who flabbergasted them by saying “Welcome” and asking if they had any beer.

  Such kidnap victims were “specimens,” as FitzRoy naturally described his Fuegians, like breadfruit or the Argentine opossum, to be collected and studied for the benefit of science—and for their own sake: what Kipling termed the white man’s burden, the patronizing presumption that it was morally incumbent upon civilized Englishmen to extend (more often than not with overwhelming force) a hand to uplift their colored inferiors. Poked and prodded in all cases, the luckier specimens were treated with genuine compassion and occasionally sent back to their homes with chests of smart clothes and new belongings and amazing stories to tell their descendants. Others found themselves in smoky, overpopulated, industrial cities, exhibited as curiosities at fairgrounds and in theaters, examples of the freakish lower echelons of creation, destined to die of neglect, despair, and loneliness.

  These living trophies satisfied the missionary zeal of the age that was the higher-minded rationale behind the scramble for colonial possession. Men like FitzRoy, and David Livingstone in Africa, believed they were bringing improvement and light to disenfranchised peoples while paving the way for the British to take over their lands and material wealth.

  Whatever his motives, FitzRoy’s collection of natives from the territory of his survey was not part of his job description. It was an action far beyond the strict orders plainly outlined by the Admiralty, whose responsibility for the Fuegians he had now incurred, to dubious purpose.

  As the Beagle approached England in September 1830, FitzRoy wrote a letter to his superior officer, Captain Phillip Parker King, of the Adventure, telling him what he had done:

  Beagle, at sea, 12 September 1830

  Sir,

  I have the honour of reporting to you that there are now on board of His Majesty’s Sloop, under my command, four natives of Tierra del Fuego.

  Their names and estimated ages are:

  York Minster…26

  Boat Memory…20

  James Button…14

  Fuegia Basket (a girl)…9

  I have maintained them entirely at my own expense, and hold myself responsible for their comfort while away from, and for their safe return to their own country: and I have now to request that, as senior officer of the expedition, you will consider the possibility of some public advantage being derived from this circumstance; and of the propriety of offering them, with that view, to His Majesty’s Government.

  FitzRoy then gave a brief account of the Beagle’s stolen whaleboat and his attempt to secure hostages and interpreters for its return, and his eventual decision to keep the captives aboard.

  I thought that many good effects might be the consequence of their living a short time in England. They have lived, and have been clothed like the s
eamen, and are now, and have been always, in excellent health and very happy. They understand why they were taken, and look forward with pleasure to seeing our country, as well as returning to their own.

  Should not His Majesty’s government direct otherwise, I shall procure for these people a suitable education, and, after two or three years, shall send or 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.

  Robt. FitzRoy

  The passage from Tierra del Fuego was a long one, four and a half months, with stops in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. The Fuegians grew slowly more communicative with the crew, as they picked up a basic and sailorly English, and FitzRoy attempted to make translations of some of their words, a process complicated by the fact that Jemmy Button spoke a different dialect from the other three captives.

  The Fuegians made rare tourists aboard their British Navy cruise ship. Montevideo, their first city, would have been a fantastic sight to them. The harbor was filled with ships, a sprawl of buildings and streets tumbled down to the water, large buildings and warehouses lined the docks, and music of all kinds poured out of bars and dance halls and floated across the water to the anchored ship. Here they all went ashore. FitzRoy took them to the local hospital to be vaccinated against smallpox; Fuegia Basket stayed with an English family for a few days, and the three men accompanied the captain (and probably several of the Beagle’s marines) on some of his business through the city.

  The Fuegians seemed far less astonished and amazed than FitzRoy expected. Animals and boats—things they were familiar with—drew animated responses from them: “A large ox, with unusually long horns, excited their wonder remarkably.” But with much else, the larger, denser jumble of civilization around them, the shock of the new, seemed to overload their senses and dull them into a stolid impassiveness.