Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  Te Rauperaha explained that the Maoris believed the land in question had not been legally purchased. He described the arrival of the Nelson magistrate, who had waved a pair of handcuffs and threatened to handcuff the chief. Apart from the indignity this would have caused him, Te Rauperaha told FitzRoy he would rather have died than be restrained. He said the whites had opened fire, that Maori women and children—including Te Rauperaha’s own daughter—had been killed. As to killing the prisoners, it was, he said, the Maori custom to kill captured chiefs.

  FitzRoy questioned the chief on some points, and then was silent for half an hour, making notes, considering his judgment. Then he spoke again.

  Listen, O ye chiefs and elder men here assembled, to my words. I have now heard the Maori statement and the paheka statement of the Wairau affair; and I have made my decision. In the first place the white men were in the wrong. They had no right to survey the land which you had not sold until Mr Spain [the land commissioner] had finished his enquiry; they had no right to build the houses they did on that land. As they were, then, first in the wrong, I will not avenge their deaths.

  He repeated the last phrase several times, in English and in translation.

  But although I will not avenge the deaths of the pahekas who were killed at Wairau, I have to tell you that you committed a horrible crime in murdering men who had surrendered themselves in reliance on your honour as chiefs. White men never kill their prisoners. For the future let us live peaceably and amicably—the paheka with the native, and the Maori with the paheka; and let there be no more bloodshed.

  Naturally, this solemn judgment enraged the whites. Local opinion was that the new governor was weak, an imbecile, a coward. The Maoris held him in contempt for his weakness. Te Rauperaha was reported as saying that he would eat the governor and his ship. And nobody liked his pompousness.

  It was an impossible situation for FitzRoy. His course of action was not unreasonable: an arrest—even if that had been possible—and trial of the two chiefs would only have exacerbated tensions. The tribes would have stepped up hostilities against the settlers; British troops, barracked in warships, would have proven ineffective at protecting them or chasing down Maoris in the bush. More skirmishes, and outright warfare, might have resulted. It was no way to further British interests or to govern.

  But FitzRoy’s decision on the Wairau affair set the tone of his governorship. It was messy and inconsistent, and it pleased no one. The fledgling colony was receiving no money from England, which felt that it should support itself. With the need to produce a national revenue, FitzRoy increased customs duties, then cut them when this proved wildly unpopular. He called in extra troops from Sydney but didn’t use them. His sense of fair play for the Maoris led him to reverse a decision made by the land commissioner, giving land back to the natives that had apparently been legally purchased by the New Zealand Company. Finally, the settlers around Cook Strait sent a petition to Parliament to have their governor removed. FitzRoy’s effigy was burned in Nelson. Less than two years after he arrived in New Zealand, FitzRoy was recalled.

  He was fired less for his unpopularity in New Zealand than for the tendencies that had previously got him into hot water with the Admiralty: he acted without instructions or against them. Like buying and hiring schooners, FitzRoy did what he thought was best and wrote home about it later. It was good officer initiative, and he might have waited six months before hearing back from England on any idea—but it wasn’t good politics, and it wasn’t the way things were done.

  His greatest fault was keeping his government in the dark, allowing it to hear the complaints of its subject settlers without supplying explanations for those complaints.

  The official Colonial Office comment on his governorship was damning.

  He was surrounded by many difficulties which increased under his system of government, and was pressed by conflicting interest, which he had not the decision and firmness to adjust. Under a constant excitement and perpetual hurry he seemed neither to have had the power to adopt judicious and constant measures nor the calmness to keep the Secretary of State informed on the acts of his Government or the motives of his actions.

  FitzRoy had been too fair to the Maoris, too concerned that they not be robbed, swindled, killed, and marginalized along the inevitable lines that characterized the takeover of every other colonial prize. He did not always automatically champion his constituents, whose government at home had hired him. He was too idealistic. He was too naive.

  As one historian put it: “Captain FitzRoy, as Governor, had he been endowed with very great abilities, would probably, under the circumstances, have failed; but, unhappily, his qualities were such as to make his failures certain and complete.” Another wrote, “FitzRoy…must have been the despair of his well-wishers in that he seemed not only ignorant of how to come out of the rain but undesirous of doing so.”

  His successor as governor, army captain George Grey, had better instincts. He attacked the Maoris on Sundays while they prayed in their new Christian churches. He captured Te Rauperaha and put him in prison. He was charming, ruthless, political, an opportunist. He earned the thanks of the settlers and the fearful respect of the Maoris, and was knighted by his government.

  As he voyaged home with his family to England—a long, stormy passage east through the Roaring Forties, and through his old cruising ground the Strait of Magellan—FitzRoy must have reflected bitterly on the promise his career had shown just three years earlier. His removal as governor had left him with the certainty that his reputation had been “deeply and irreparably injured.”

  Despite his unquestionable accomplishments as a surveyor, sailing through Tierra del Fuego once more could only have plunged him into deeper gloom. At some point he had received a letter from his old lieutenant, and close friend, Bartholomew Sulivan, who as commander of HMS Philomel, was again sailing in southern South American waters, surveying and charting the Falkland Islands. Darwin had also corresponded with Sulivan, and a footnote in the revised 1845 edition of Journal and Researches is the only clue of what FitzRoy would also, undoubtedly, have learned.

  Captain Sulivan, who, since his voyage in the Beagle, has been employed on the survey of the Falkland Islands, heard from a sealer in (1842?) [Darwin’s parenthesis], that when in the western part of the Strait of Magellan, he was astonished by a native woman coming on board, who could talk some English. Without doubt this was Fuegia Basket. She lived (I fear the term probably bears a double interpretation) some days on board.

  As he passed through the Strait of Magellan, a passage of 310 miles, which might have taken a week, FitzRoy must have scanned the shore he knew so well for hours at a time, often through a telescope. He must have wondered if he would see her.

  He could not have appreciated Fuegia’s evolution: that the natural adaptation of her sweet empathy, together with all she had learned while in his care, now fitted her so superbly for survival along the increasingly trafficked shores of the Strait of Magellan. FitzRoy could not have understood that for Fuegia Basket, hooking on the beach was pure Darwinism.

  23

  Religious mania was mainstream in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as if in anticipation of the shattering scientific suggestions that were fast approaching, the social standing of the church reached a noonday zenith by midcentury. Church-going and religious observances as formalized as Japanese tea ceremonies were the foundations of respectability, the bookends of daily activities.

  Church and state were inseparable partners. Religion went hand-in-glove with Britain’s colonizing efforts, and the astounding success of these confirmed to every Briton the moral rightness of might. Beneath the ordered decorum of it all lay an iron chauvinism. British Protestantism in the mid-Victorian era was as serious, committed, and, in its long well-funded reach, as deadly as any sect or brigade of today or a thousand years ago. It had its dogma, its bigotry, its bombast of clergical denunciations. It hungered to embrace the whole world. It had clear geopoliti
cal designs and, for all its piety and rectitude, was as rapacious and genocidal in its furtherance of these as Cortez or Ghengis Khan.

  Believers in England concerned themselves mightily with the plight of heathens abroad. They knew that unless someone saved the natives of their far-flung, pink-mapped empire, and converted them to a belief in the one true God, those unhappy souls would perish. Out of this concern was born the missionary movement, with its own fundamentalist martyrs.

  Britain’s missionary societies, with their arsenals of prayer-books and clothes for the naked, were the perfect, complementary trailblazers for its empire. Missionaries like David Livingstone in Africa opened up territories and continents, sending back vivid reports, descriptions of mineral wealth, maps and population numbers. Their interests exactly paralleled their government’s. Even Livingstone, revered by the whole world, including his African friends and servants, knew what would follow him, and pragmatically sought the alliance of church and political and commercial interests. “I go back to Africa to try to make an open path for commerce and Christianity,” he told a crowd at Cambridge University in December 1857. Britain’s interests in India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Dominion of Canada (where British missionaries were in serious competition with their Jesuitical French brothers) were clear, and by midcentury its colonies around the world were well established. The missionary path to the farthest reach of every last backwater and billabong in this realm was a well-trod furrow.

  No nation, however, seemed interested in Tierra del Fuego. There was nothing there anybody wanted; nothing but suicide-inducing bleakness, appalling weather, and the most abject savages. Few in England gave these souls any thought. It would take an unusually zealous, masochistic missionary to bother trying to save them.

  Allen Gardiner was such a one, but it took him decades of conscientious searching to find his Calvary at the bottom of the world. A Royal Navy officer eleven years older than Robert FitzRoy, Gardiner visited Polynesia in his twenties and was moved by the missionary efforts he saw there. At age thirty-two he retired from the navy to devote himself to missionary work. He went to Africa with his wife, who bore him five children before dying in 1834. His efforts to save the Zulu king Dingaan and his tribe were muddied by the concerns of white traders and residents and ended with the Zulus’ slaughter of great numbers of Boers and their own people. Gardiner fled Africa, severely disillusioned. He tried and failed to establish a mission in New Guinea, then again in numerous places in South America, where he was opposed and driven out by the tight, well-funded club of the Catholic Church. Gardiner returned to England disheartened, but there he read of FitzRoy’s Fuegians, and the captain’s efforts, a decade earlier, to set up a mission at Woollya.

  To Gardiner, Tierra del Fuego seemed perfect. The absence there of everything but natives who needed saving appealed to him. Missionary work there would be untainted by political designs; it would be pure God’s work. In 1841 he visited the Strait of Magellan briefly and returned to England, where he founded the Patagonian Missionary Society. Its focus, the remote, virtually unknown Patagonia, was new and therefore all the more urgent.

  Plea for Patagonia

  Weep! weep for Patagonia!

  In darkness, oh! how deep,

  Her heathen children spend their days;

  Ah, who can choose but weep?

  The tidings of a saviour’s love

  Are all unheeded there,

  And precious souls are perishing

  In blackness of despair.

  But Patagonia’s isolated purity worked against it. It had nothing to offer—the same reason the Church Missionary Society, preoccupied with Africa, had felt unable to take an interest in FitzRoy’s Fuegians in 1830. Patagonia lacked cachet, and Gardiner was no Livingstone. Despite raising almost no money, Gardiner voyaged out to Tierra del Fuego in 1845 and again in 1848, in hopes of establishing a mission, first with one companion, the second time with five others. Both attempts failed. On the second, Gardiner and his men landed with three boats, two wigwams and six months of supplies on Picton Island at the eastern end of the Beagle Channel. The Fuegians quickly stole everything and within a week of their arrival the missionaries boarded the ship that had brought them out and returned again to England.

  Gardiner was undaunted. He saw in his failures evidence that God was ratcheting up the stakes. Gardiner was the man for such trials. The bleaker the outlook, the more fervent were his efforts. He would not be dissuaded. He passed a point of no return. Back in England, he met the Reverend George Packenham Despard, a grim, overbearing private schoolmaster from Bristol (and/or, depending on accounts, a pastor of Lenton, Nottinghamshire), who shared Gardiner’s determination to bring light to the southernmost souls on Earth. Together they hatched a plan: they would buy or have built a 120-ton brigantine to act as a floating mission station in Tierra del Fuego, while building a more permanent base in the Falkland Islands. A lady in Cheltenham donated £1000. It wasn’t enough to buy a ship, but Gardiner was impatient, so he bought instead two 26-foot launches and two smaller dinghies and headed back to Tierra del Fuego.

  He took with him six men. In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959, 109 years after Gardiner departed for the fourth time to Tierra del Fuego, sailor H. W. Tilman, looking for crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: “Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure.” Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.

  Gardiner’s pool of applicants was even bigger, made up not only of would-be adventurers but also those gripped by religious fervor. His fellow missionary-adventurers were three pious Cornish fishermen, John Pearce, John Badcock, John Bryan; a Sunday school teacher, John Maidment, who had been recommended by the YMCA; a doctor, Richard Williams; and Joseph Erwin, a carpenter who had already been to Tierra del Fuego with Gardiner and wanted badly to go back with him. Gardiner’s company, Erwin said, was like “Heaven on earth.”

  A ship, the Ocean Queen, bound for San Francisco, landed the group, their boats, and supplies on Picton Island, at the eastern entrance of the Beagle Channel, in December 1850. This was just on the other side of Navarin Island from Woollya and Button Island. Gardiner hoped to make contact with the Jemmy Button he had read of in the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages, who had not been heard of since FitzRoy had last seen him, reduced again to savagery, in March 1834, sixteen and a half years earlier. Here, Gardiner reasoned, was a soul who had seen the uplifting way of righteousness and would surely jump at the chance to embrace it again, and in doing so would help his mission establish a beachhead.

  Almost immediately, things went badly. Threatening natives forced the men off the island and into their boats. They sailed south to Lennox Island, but both dinghies were lost in rough weather. On Lennox Island, the launches were damaged. They repaired them and sailed north again into the more protected waters of the Beagle Channel, where they put into Spaniard Harbour. But here, in bad weather, both launches were wrecked beyond repair. They dragged one ashore and used it for shelter.

  Fresh food was a problem: they’d forgotten to take the powder for their shotguns off the Ocean Queen, so they were unable to shoot fowl or guanaco. Even though three of them were fishermen, they had poor luck fishing. Then their net was torn to shreds by ice. Gardiner took all this with sublime stoicism.

  Thus the Lord has seen fit to render another means abortive, and doubtless to make His power more apparent, and show that all our help is to come immediately from Him.

  The Lord sent them precious little: mussels, seaweed, and infrequent dead carcasses of fish,
birds, and seals that washed up on the beach. By March they were ill with scurvy. As their hunger and illness mounted, so did their ecstasy: “Ah, I am happy day and night,” wrote Richard Williams, the doctor, who might, one imagines, have been only too aware of his physical condition. “Asleep or awake, hour by hour, I am happy beyond the poor compass of language to tell.”

  The severity of their circumstances was clear to the natives. There was nothing to yammerschooner for here. The Englishmen were left uncommonly alone.

  Gardiner had sent a letter to Bartholomew Sulivan, who had taken a leave of absence from the navy to farm in the Falkland Islands, telling him of their plans. He believed that a government ship from the Falklands would be passing through the Beagle Channel monthly to collect timber and would bring them supplies. He had also been assured by a Montevideo merchant that his trading vessels would reach their vicinity now and then and look out for them. As the months went by, none of these ships appeared.

  Gardiner and his men were as marooned as castaways, but they did nothing to help themselves. They made no attempt to go for help. With the wreckage of their boats, they could have fashioned some floatable contraption to cross the Beagle Channel, only two miles in width, to look for Jemmy Button, but they lacked the initiative of FitzRoy’s crew, who had once made a basket out of branches, caulked it with mud, and paddled away.

  There are numerous cases of shipwrecked and deserted mariners who sustained themselves for long periods in Tierra del Fuego before being rescued by passing ships. In December 1834, on the western shore of Patagonia near Cabo Tres Montes, a wilder and more unforgiving site than any cove in the Beagle Channel, FitzRoy had picked up five American sailors who had deserted their New Bedford whaling ship more than a year earlier. Their stolen whaleboat had been wrecked, and they had been pinned to the shore for fourteen months. “Yet those five men, when received on board the Beagle, were in better condition, as to healthy fleshiness, colour, and actual health, than any five individuals belonging to our ship,” wrote FitzRoy. They had no firearms, just two hatchets and their knives. They had lived well enough on seal flesh, shellfish, and wild celery. A few days before sighting the Beagle, they had managed to kill nine seals. They had made fire by using a flint to strike sparks off the steel of their hatchets. They had expected nobody, least of all God, to look out for them.