Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  When anything excited their attention particularly they would appear at the time almost stupid and unobservant; but that they were not so in reality was shown by their eager chattering to one another at the first subsequent opportunity, and by the sensible remarks made by them a long time afterwards, when we fancied they had altogether forgotten unimportant occurrences which took place during the first few months of their sojourn among us.

  In Montevideo, far from home, sweltering in a new, subtropical climate, and perhaps seeing the English captain for the first time as a friend and buffer between them and an unimaginably strange world, the Fuegians began to open up to FitzRoy and talk to him about their home and customs. “It was here that I first learned from them that they made a practice of eating their enemies taken in war. The women, they explained to me, eat the arms; and the men the legs; the trunk and head were always thrown into the sea.”

  As the known world opened up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cannibalism was the salacious bogey attached to every dealing with “savages.” Fear of it had sent Captain Bligh and his fellow castaways from the Bounty more than 4000 miles across the Pacific and the Strait of Timor in an open boat, rather than putting ashore at any of the many islands and the Australian mainland they passed within sight of. Cannibalism was known to have been practiced in Africa, Polynesia, and Australasia; any dark-skinned race was presumed to be capable of it. Whether real or imaginary, it underscored the moral imperative that God-fearing Englishmen felt to improve the condition of native cultures everywhere.

  According to Lucas Bridges, the son of a missionary who grew up in nineteenth-century Tierra del Fuego, there was never any cannibalism among the Fuegians. FitzRoy’s misinformation, Bridges speculated in his book, Uttermost Part of the Earth, was probably the result of his own fearful and probing questions about cannibalism, which his Fuegian captives sensed and responded to with black humor: “Do your people ever eat each other?” “Oh, yes, the men eat the legs, the women the arms.”

  But with such expected disclosures from his protégés, FitzRoy was more certain than ever of the rightness of his mission to clothe them, carry them home, and steep them in Christian values.

  After a brief stop in Rio de Janeiro, the Beagle sailed on August 6 and hove in sight of England nine weeks later. Montevideo, for all its newness to the Fuegians, was a ramshackle town at the edge of a wilderness; England was the center of the scientific world, throbbing, clamoring, and smoking in the full bore of industrial development. In Falmouth harbor, at the clean edge of the open sea, the Fuegians were terrified by their first sight of it.

  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.

  After dropping mail to be delivered to the Admiralty, the Beagle sailed on to Devonport, the naval dockyard at Plymouth. Here FitzRoy took the Fuegians ashore at night to “comfortable, airy lodgings.” The next day he brought a doctor to vaccinate them for a second time against smallpox.

  A virus that spread like the common cold, smallpox had been more lethal to humans through the ages than all our wars. A victim expelled droplets containing the virus from the nose and mouth; anyone inhaling the droplets or carrying them by the hand to the mouth became infected. The symptoms were unmistakable: aches, a high fever, followed by a rash resembling thousands of small pimples on the face and spreading to other parts of the body. The pimples became larger and filled with pus. The disease killed about 20 percent of its victims. In those who survived, scabs formed over the pimples, leaving permanent scars. The eyes were often infected and many were left blind. Sweeping across Asia, Africa, and Europe, as influenza still does, smallpox was once so common that almost everyone got it at some time. Europeans unfailingly carried it with them in their explorations around the world, killing millions of natives who had no immunity to the disease.

  Until the late eighteenth century, the only protection was variolation: inoculation of a healthy person with the pus of a smallpox victim. This could result in a mild case of the disease and subsequent immunity. In 1796, a British physician, Edward Jenner, went further and made a real vaccine from cowpox, a mild form of the disease suffered by milkmaids, who were then said to be immune to smallpox. As with John Harrison, the eighteenth-century clockmaker whose work was persistently ignored or rebuffed (but without which FitzRoy could not have determined his longitude with such accuracy), Jenner’s claim and studies were sneered at by his own medical community and rejected by the Royal Society (Britain’s premier association of scientists). But his vaccination was quickly adopted elsewhere. President Thomas Jefferson tried it out on family members; Napoleon vaccinated his troops; physicians in Europe and Russia began to use it. By 1830, when FitzRoy brought the Fuegians to England, vaccination was widespread, even, finally, in England (where Jenner had belatedly been rewarded with £30,000 by Parliament), but the vaccines were of varying quality. Plymouth, a seaport with a large and constantly revolving population of seamen and visitors, was a rich breeding ground for disease. FitzRoy was unsure of the quality of the vaccine at Montevideo, so he started his Fuegians on a new course of vaccinations as soon as possible.

  Two days later he brought them to stay at a farm a few miles from Plymouth, where he hoped they would have more room and fresh air and less risk of disease, and where they could quietly remain while he figured out what to do with them.

  This wasn’t easy. John Barrow, the second secretary at the Admiralty, had responded favorably to his initiative: “Their Lordships will not interfere with Commander FitzRoy’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.” This meant little beyond accepting what FitzRoy had done and giving him permission to spend some of his time arranging the welfare of his charges. The Admiralty’s only true “facilities” were the berths offered on its ships heading, at some future date, back to Tierra del Fuego.

  FitzRoy asked an acquaintance, the Reverend J. L. Harris, vicar at nearby Plymstock, Devon, to write to the Church Missionary Society on his behalf, for help in placing the Fuegians, at FitzRoy’s expense, with some godly folk who might instruct and enlighten them for two or three years. Perhaps he told Harris too much: “They are Cannibals but now they show a ready appetite for Vegetables,” wrote Harris. The Society, which was primarily concerned with its missions to Africa and the far east, replied that it did not feel the Fuegians to be within its “province.”

  In the meantime, the Beagle was stripped and cleaned out, and on October 27, its pendant was struck—decommissioned, laid up “in ordinary” once more to await its next call to naval service. The Beagle’s crew were paid off and dispersed. “I much regretted the separation from my tried and esteemed shipmates,” wrote FitzRoy. “Of those who had passed so many rough hours together, but few were likely to meet again.” The Beagle’s crew had been a happy one since FitzRoy’s appointment. They had spent two years in close company together aboard the tight quarters of the ship, and rowing and camping in the boats for weeks they had shared food and razors and storms, and when inevitably FitzRoy obtained another commission and another ship, he would have to find, train, and mold another crew to his liking again. But for now, his seamen were laid off, equipped with their meager backpay and perhaps a letter of recommendation from their captain, to look for berths aboard other vessels, or to go home to their families, to the farms or cities they came from, to lose or stay in touch with their former shipmates. FitzRoy retained his coxswain, James Bennett, probably on half-pay, leaving him to keep an eye on the Fuegians while he remained in Plymouth to attend to the details of his survey, and to continue to
look for the right berth for his cannibal savages.

  In early November, he received bad news from Bennett: Boat Memory appeared to have smallpox. FitzRoy contacted Dr. Armstrong at the Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth, who suggested that all four Fuegians be immediately admitted to the hospital, where they could be isolated and given the best treatment. The Admiralty gave its permission, and the Fuegians were taken there on November 7 and placed in the care of two renowned naval physicians, Drs. David Dickson and Sir James Gordon.

  Work on his surveys now took FitzRoy to London for consultation with the Admiralty’s hydrographic department, but he had hardly reached there when he received a letter from Dr. Dickson telling him that Boat Memory had died. FitzRoy was filled with genuine grief and remorse.

  This poor fellow was a very great favourite with all who knew him, as well as with myself. He had 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…. This was a severe blow to me, for I was deeply sensible of the responsibility which had been incurred; and, however unintentionally, could not but feel how much I was implicated in shortening his existence.

  On the long voyage home to England, he had gained a good idea of the personalities and abilities of the Fuegians. By the end of it he’d found York Minster “a displeasing specimen of uncivilized human nature.” Part of this conclusion was undoubtedly the result of FitzRoy’s great belief in the telling aspects of physical appearance. His own portrait drawings of the Fuegians show York Minster, despite a high collar, tie, and frock coat, to be much coarser-featured than the others. His admiration for Boat Memory’s appearance was certainly one reason FitzRoy had placed on him his greatest hopes for a civilizing transformation.

  Now his concern, and his hopes, centered on the other three, two of them children. They had all been revaccinated on first entering the hospital, and the Navy doctors wrote to FitzRoy that they were optimistic of their chances of resisting the disease.

  They didn’t get smallpox. But Dickson, in a wild and cavalier act of medical adventuring—and in the best tradition of progressive experimentation; the two inescapably went together—took Fuegia Basket home with him, where his own children had come down with measles. He thought it an excellent opportunity “to carry the little Fuegian girl through that malady” in order to boost her immune system. He only informed FitzRoy later, telling him that he’d prepared her for it and that she’d had “a very favorable attack.”

  The Fuegians otherwise remained in the naval hospital for the rest of November, while FitzRoy, back in London working on his surveys, anxiously wondered what he would do with them when they were discharged. The rejection by the Church Missionary Society had stalled his plan for their improvement and education.

  But suddenly everything got better. FitzRoy’s hopes for his Fuegians, naive and unplanned, made him some friends. The Church Missionary Society had not felt able to help him, but its secretary, Dandeson Coates, took a personal interest and put him in touch with the Reverend Joseph Wigram, secretary of the National Society for Providing the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. Wigram, then an assistant preacher and later to become the Bishop of Rochester, was the son of a well-to-do landowner and still lived at his father’s home in Walthamstow, Essex, just east of London. Gripped with the fervor of his society’s avowed mission, he approached Walthamstow’s rector, William Wilson, who grew equally excited. Together they hatched a plan for FitzRoy’s savages.

  8

  Early in December 1830, Coxswain Bennett and the Beagle’s recent master, Mr. Murray, a man now much experienced in his dealings with Fuegians, collected FitzRoy’s three charges from the naval hospital in Plymouth. The five of them traveled to London in a privately hired stagecoach. The jolting trip took more than twenty-four hours over rough roads, but Murray told FitzRoy that the Fuegians “seemed to enjoy their journey…and were very much struck by the repeated changing of horses.”

  They were bound for their new home. Rector Wilson and Joseph Wigram had secured a berth for the Fuegians at Walthamstow, where they would be boarded and educated, at FitzRoy’s expense, at the local infant school. The schoolmaster would look after and take charge of them. FitzRoy was hugely relieved. He met them with his own carriage at the coach office in Piccadilly and drove them through London to Walthamstow.

  Passing Charing Cross, there was a start and exclamation of astonishment from York. “Look!” he said, fixing his eyes on the lion upon Northumberland House, which he certainly thought alive, and walking there. I never saw him show such sudden emotion at any other time.

  There was more to see than the statue of a lion. Past Charing Cross, FitzRoy steered his carriage east along the Strand, leaving Mayfair and the tony West End behind, passing through the City of London, the square-mile enclave that by the early nineteenth century had become the financial and business center of the world. Here the streets were lined with banks, shop windows, swinging painted signs, and public houses and filled with a dense circus of costermongers, shoe-blacks, boardmen’s advertisements, two-wheeler cabs, and a thronging mob of people. The City was an ancient, squalid, jumble of activity, bordered by the Thames, and the teeming markets of Billingsgate and Smithfield, both of which had been in place for a thousand years.

  Only 200 yards from St. Paul’s Cathedral, Smithfield was a charnel house nightmare: six acres of slaughterhouses, knackers yards, bone houses, bladder blowers, streets filled with animals alive and hacked to pieces, piles of excrement and steaming entrails, the gutters running with blood and gore. Charles Dickens described Smithfield as a “shameful place…asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam.” In Oliver Twist, he described a typical market morning.

  The ground was covered nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire; and a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog…. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a dense mass…the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of beasts, the bleating of sheep, and the grunting and squeaking of pigs…the shouts, the oaths and quarelling on all sides, the ringing of bells, and the roar of voices that issued from every public house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng, rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene which quite confused the senses.

  The same hubbub arose over the selling of fish at nearby Billingsgate, where the streets were awash with a briny soup of fish scales, guts, and blood. And on the other side of the road, along the banks of the Thames, boys and women smoking short clay pipes picked through piles of refuse, looking for tin, old shoes, bones and oyster shells, anything useful, “with faces and upper extremities begrimed with black filth, and surrounded by and breathing a foul, moist, hot air, surcharged with the gaseous emanations of disintegrating organic compounds,” as a concerned medical officer wrote.

  The smell that washed over the Fuegians as they passed through London was a rich one. The Thames, viscous with sewage and refuse, stank at high tide and low; the streets reeked with decomposing food and litter, “street mud” and “night soil.” This blended with “the Scents that arose from Mundung as Tobacco, Sweaty Toes, Dirty Shirts, the Shit-tub, stinking Breaths and uncleanly carcasses.” There was the stench of tanneries and glue manufactories, lime kilns, tallow, stables, decaying wood, boiled cabbage, and the odor of graveyards.

  From a suburb, the noise of London was said to be “like the swell of the sea-surge beating upon a pebbly shore when it is heard far inland.” But in the city the noise was not so white, not the blended, homogenized din of our own time. Contained in the intimacy of narrow streets and alleyways, it was a bed
lam of particulate and identifiable sounds: from herds of market-bound animals, roosters and barking dogs, the shouting and shrieking of men, women, and boys, including the incessant hawking of street sellers, the whinnying, rearing, and sharp hoof-fall of horses, the jangle of harness, the thundering of coaches, carts, wagons, ships’ horns on the river, the ringing of hand bells and clock towers, the streetworks and traffic bottlenecks that were a constant feature of nineteenth-century London, the hammering of blacksmiths, artisans, coopers, and armorers, the crying of babies.

  If the English weather was “fair” that morning in December, it would have resembled at best conditions in Tierra del Fuego. But the climate of London in the early nineteenth century was colder than it is now, and the city was plagued by terrible smogs. Dense cold fogs were made much worse by the widespread burning of “sea coal,” a cheap, poor-quality coal carried down the North Sea by coaster colliers from the north of England. Burned in thousands of fireplaces, industrial furnaces, and coal-powered steam engines, sea coal spewed a heavy smoke into the air that condensed over the city like the fallout from a volcano. The poet William Wordsworth and his wife and a friend were forced to abandon their coach a mile from home one day in December 1817 in a fog so dense that the coachman could no longer find his way. They could not see the houses on either side of the street and groped the rest of the way home between railing and curb like blind people, in a fog “not only thick but of a yellow colour [that] makes one as dirty as smoke.”