Evolution's Captain

by Peter Nichols

  But with the peculiar, wanton passivity of those who entrust themselves so entirely into God’s hands, Gardiner and his ecstatic martyrs lay down on the freezing shore and awaited their fate.

  The Lord in His providence has seen fit to bring us very low [Gardiner wrote], but all is in infinite wisdom, mercy, and love…. The Lord is very pitiful and of tender compassion. He knows our frames. He appoints and measures all His afflictive dispensations, and when His set time is fully come, He will either remove us to His eternal and glorious kingdom, or supply our languishing bodies with food convenient for us.

  In October, the merchant ship from Montevideo finally sailed into the Beagle Channel. From its decks, the wreckage of the missionaries’ boats was visible on the beach. The ship’s crew found three bodies scattered around the shore in various stages of decomposition, before bad weather forced the ship back out to sea. Word reached the British naval ship, HMS Dido, which went to investigate. The bodies of all seven men were found. Gardiner’s corpse lay beside the wreckage of a boat. Inside the boat lay his diary and a letter Gardiner had managed to scribble out to Richard Williams, unaware that his fellow missionary lay farther down the beach, already dead.

  My dear Mr Williams,

  The Lord has seen fit to call home another of our little company. Our dear departed brother [Maidment, the Sunday school teacher] left the boat on Tuesday afternoon and has not since returned. Doubtless he is in the presence of his Redeemer, whom he served faithfully…I neither hunger nor thirst….

  The public reacted in horror when the news reached England. But the Times expressed anger and a call for common sense.

  Neither reverance for the cause in which they were engaged nor admiration of the lofty qualities of the leader of the party, can blind our eyes to the unutterable folly of the enterprise as it was conducted, or smother the expression of natural indignation against those who could wantonly risk so many valuable lives on so hopeless an expedition…. Let us hear no more of Patagonian missions!

  But Gardiner and his fellow martyrs had finally struck pay dirt. The story put Tierra del Fuego and the Patagonian Mission Society on the map. People suddenly wanted to hear a great deal more of Patagonian missions. “With God’s help the mission shall be maintained!” the society’s secretary, Reverend Despard fired back to the Times. And the money began to flow.

  The public saw in Gardiner’s woeful demise the same providential gauntlet he had seen thrown down before him. The episode begged redress from a caring nation. Even Bartholomew Sulivan saw in the deaths, and in his own glancing involvement, the workings of a divine scheme. The letter Gardiner had sent to him, advising him of the missionaries’ position and hopes of resupply from the Falklands, arrived after Sulivan had left the islands. “Is it not another proof that their deaths were the appointed means for carrying on the mission?” he suggested.

  Thousands thought so. Patagonia suddenly acquired the sort of cachet that Tibet later enjoyed in Hollywood. The Patagonian Mission Society swelled with recognition, patronage, and donations. Despard now determined to implement the earlier plan he and Gardiner had conceived: to buy a ship, establish a mission base in the Falkland Islands, and run the ship between the base and a suppliable foothold in Tierra del Fuego. Fuegians might then be induced to come to the Falklands base, where they could be educated with benign guidance, then be returned to their homeland to spread that civilizing influence—FitzRoy’s original scheme exactly. Despard wrote to FitzRoy for his imprimatur; his reputation might have been tarnished in New Zealand, but in matters Fuegian—especially when mixed with religion—FitzRoy remained a uniquely experienced authority. The captain wrote back with lofty reserve.

  I have given the subject of your letter my best consideration. It appears to me that your present plan is practicable and comparatively safe, that it offers a fairer prospect of success than most Missionary enterprises at their commencement, and that it would be difficult to suggest one less objectionable.

  That was good enough. FitzRoy’s approval made it kosher.

  The society steamed full ahead. A ship of 88 “registered tons” (about 120 tons of displacement) was bought and outfitted. The society’s publication, The Voice of Pity, described its Elysian vision of a new Tierra del Fuego, an ambitious advance beyond anything Robert FitzRoy had ever dared imagine. A place of

  gardens, and farms and industrious villages…[where] the church-going bell may awaken these silent forests; and round its cheerful hearth and kind teachers, the Sunday school may assemble the now joyless children of Navarin Island. The mariner may run his battered ship into Lennox Harbour, and leave her to the care of Fuegian caulkers and carpenters; and after rambling through the streets of a thriving sea port town, he may turn aside to read the papers in the Gardiner Institution, or may step into the week-evening service in the Richard Williams chapel.

  Here was the wildest Victorian pipe dream of colonization from the opium of faith and ignorance. It gave no thought to the absence of any need for such a seaport town at the bottom of the world (the Strait of Magellan maybe, but not in the Beagle Channel where there was, as Gardiner had proved, absolutely no traffic), or to the likelihood of befriending and training all those industrious, mysteriously motivated Fuegian caulkers and carpenters. But it was a vision born of the times and it had, at last, no lack of subscribers.

  The Patagonian Missionary Society’s new ship, the schooner Allen Gardiner, sailed from England in October 1854, bound for the Falkland Islands. Its captain was William Parker Snow, the son of a Royal Navy lieutenant who had seen action at the battle of Trafalgar. Snow had also joined the navy, but left at sixteen to pursue a remarkable knockabout career on land and sea between England, where he took dictation as Thomas Macaulay spoke his History of England; Australia, where he wandered the outback and ran a hotel; Africa, where he rescued a shipmate from a shark; and the Arctic, where he went on one of the many unsuccessful expeditions searching for the lost Sir John Franklin. Snow wrote a book about his action-packed life, A Two Years’ Cruise off Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, Patagonia, and in the River Plate: A Narrative of Life in the Southern Seas. It was in good part concerned with his unhappy relationship with the Patagonian Missionary Society, which began to disintegrate from the beginning. When he took the command of the Allen Gardiner, he was thirty-seven years old, unusually capable, and strongly opinionated. He was a believer, but he didn’t get on with his missionary passengers, in particular the zealous catechist Garland Phillips, or his equally religious and fractious crew, two of whom he discharged in Montevideo.

  The ship reached the Falkland Islands in January 1855. Snow and his team of missionaries set about acquiring land and building a house on Keppel Island. They bickered and disagreed about everything. The British governor, George Rennie, found them a nuisance, and was offended by hearing that the Reverend Despard had described the Falkland inhabitants as “depraved, low, and immoral.” Snow got away several times by sailing back to Montevideo in the hope of picking up the society’s mission supervisor, a Mr. Verity, who had been delayed in England, but in August he learned that Verity had been arrested on a bankruptcy charge. Finally, in October, a year after leaving England, Snow, Phillips, and some of the other missionaries sailed for Tierra del Fuego.

  Early in November, the schooner passed through Murray Narrows. As it neared Button Island, making for Woollya—FitzRoy’s cherished spot for a mission—two canoes put out from the island’s shore, filled with waving Fuegians. They approached the Allen Gardiner’s stern.

  Standing on the raised platform aft, I sang out to the natives…[wrote Snow] “Jemmy Button? Jemmy Button?” To my amazement and joy—almost rendering me for a moment speechless—an answer came from one of the four men in the [first] canoe, “Yes, yes; Jam-mes Button, Jam-mes Button!” at the same time pointing to the second canoe, which had nearly got alongside.

  As the second canoe came alongside the ship, a “stout, wild and shaggy-looking man” rose from it and sai
d, “Jam-mes Button, me!” and asked for the ship’s ladder.

  Snow ordered the crew to round the schooner up into the wind, shorten sail, and lower the ladder. In a moment, Jemmy Button, fat and naked, stood on deck.

  Very possibly Jemmy had met and talked with the crews of sealing vessels—as Fuegia Basket had—in the intervening years, but Snow’s meeting with him was the first recorded identification of Jemmy Button since FitzRoy had said good-bye to him in the same spot in March 1834, twenty-one and a half years earlier.

  As Snow anchored his ship, at least sixty or seventy Fuegians surrounded it in canoes. Some of the men in the canoes, Jemmy told him, were “bad men”—Jemmy’s eternal enemies the Oens-men, whom he usually blamed for any misfortune. Snow could see no difference between the “bad men” and the rest of the Fuegians in their canoes, but he instructed his crew to be on their guard and allowed only Jemmy’s uncle, two brothers, and Jemmy’s daughter’s boyfriend to board the ship.

  As soon as Jemmy understood that there was a woman on board (Captain Snow’s wife) he asked for trousers, and when he had put them on, said

  “Want braces” as distinctly as I could utter the words. In fact he appeared suddenly to call to mind many things. His tongue was, as it were, loosened: and words, after a moment’s thought, came to his memory expressive of what he wished to say. There was no connected talk from him; but broken sentences, abrupt and pithy. Short inquiries, and sometimes painful efforts to explain himself were made, with, however, an evident pleasure in being again able to converse with someone in the “Ingliss talk.” That he must have been greatly attached to it, is evident from the fact, that he had not omitted to teach his wife, children, and relations. I could hardly credit my senses, when I heard Mrs Jemmy Button from the canoe calling aloud for her husband to come to her.

  Snow took him below to his cabin to give him more clothes. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Jemmy.

  I had been amongst numbers of the Aborigines in various lands: but I had never before fallen in with one who had been transplanted to the highest fields of intellectual knowledge, and then restored to his original and barren state. It was therefore with a curious eye that I scanned this travelled Fuegian…. He was a rather corpulent man, with the usual broad features, and moderately dwarfish in stature, his height being about 5 feet 3 inches. My clothes I found were small for him in size: but I think if he had been properly clothed and cleaned, he would have looked not unlike a bold and sturdy man-o-war’s-man. As it was, with his shaggy hair and begrimed countenance, I could not help assimilating him to some huge baboon dressed up for the occasion.

  Jemmy then ate supper with Captain Snow and his wife. His power of articulation largely deserted him, but Snow pulled FitzRoy’s narrative from his bookshelves and tried several of the “Tekeenica” words FitzRoy had provided in the Fuegian vocabulary of his appendix, and some of these Jemmy understood. Snow showed him FitzRoy’s book and explained that a good part of it was about him.

  The portraits of himself and the other Fuegians made him laugh and look sad alternately, as the two characters he was represented in, savage and civilized, came before his eye. Perhaps he was calling to mind his combed hair, washed face, and dandy dress, with the polished boots it is said he so much delighted in.

  Jemmy spoke of England, “Ingliss conetree,” and “Capen Fitzoy, Byno, Bennet, Wilson and Walamstow” with apparently great feeling. But when Snow asked him to return with them to the mission station in the Falklands, Jemmy steadfastly refused. This had been one of the main charges in Snow’s instructions: to induce Jemmy Button and his family to spend time at the mission there. But Jemmy had had enough of sailing away with Englishmen. He wouldn’t go.

  Snow didn’t pressure him. Perhaps his sensitivity to the extraordinary dislocations Jemmy had already experienced stayed his appeals. He had the grace to let Jemmy be. After showering the Fuegian, his wife, and family with clothes and gifts, the Allen Gardiner sailed back to the Falklands.

  The Patagonia Missionary Society was displeased with this setback of its master plan. The Reverend George Packenham Despard, frustrated by apparent inaction and failure, decided to take the place of the felonious Mr. Verity as the mission’s senior supervisor and set sail for the Falklands with his family and a shipload of furniture. He arrived in August 1856, with sixteen others, among them Allen Gardiner Jr., the son of the martyred founder of the mission.

  Very soon, Despard and Snow quarreled, and Despard dismissed him on the spot. He gave the captain and his wife three hours to get off the Allen Gardiner, their home for more than a year. He refused to give Snow any compensation or money for the couple’s passage home to England. Snow and his wife soon boarded a vessel, and by December they were back in England, where Snow immediately began suing the Patagonian Missionary Society for wrongful dismissal. He began writing his book, and also published an angry pamphlet, The Patagonian Missionary Society, and some truths connected with it.

  But under Despard, the mission flourished. The mission house on Keppel Island was enlarged, cabins were built around it, livestock was purchased and reared; a settlement came into being. A new captain, Robert Fell, was appointed to the command of the Allen Gardiner. In June 1858, Despard sailed to Tierra del Fuego, determined to lure Jemmy Button—the hapless talisman and focus of so many people’s earnest ambitions—back to Keppel Island. Despard, young Gardiner, and Charles Turpin, another missionary, spent a week pressuring, pestering, pursuing him around Button Island, offering him who knows what riches in this life and glories in the next, and Jemmy, once and fatefully dazzled by all things “Ingliss,” was finally unable to resist them. Jemmy, the older of his two wives, and three of his children, agreed to return to the Falklands with Despard in the Allen Gardiner, and live there for five months of further social and religious study.

  It was not a happy sabbatical for the natives. They were housed in a 10-foot-square brick hut, which was soon called Button Villa. Great emphasis was placed on their strict adherence to good manners and housekeeping: wiping their boots upon entering any house; table etiquette; floor sweeping. They were taught hymns and went to church every day. Gardiner Jr., Turpin, and the others instructed the Fuegians in English, and also did their best to learn Fuegian. They tried to translate the Lord’s Prayer into Fuegian with mixed results: “Dead Father, who art in…” There was no Fuegian word for Heaven.

  For the Buttons, the experience was much like being in prison. Fed, watered, instructed, they cleaned, worked, and prayed to a rigorous, unrelenting schedule. They were never accepted as equals at the mission; rather, they were treated and celebrated as performing monkeys. Jemmy was constantly admonished for what was seen as his chronic idleness. And there was always the suspicion of theft, thought to be endemic with Fuegians. Jemmy’s wife was wrongly accused of stealing fence paling to use as firewood, and Jemmy was properly angry. They soon longed to return to their “contree.”

  The Allen Gardiner took them home in late November. The ship remained at Woollya for a month while Despard and his crew, with Fuegian help, built a small wooden house to stand as the mission’s toehold on the Fuegian shore—the founding of the Elysian Fuegian harbor town envisaged by the Patagonian Missionary Society.

  Jemmy and his family had proved unsatisfactory as acolytes—except for their publicity value in the Voice of Pity, which delighted subscribers in England who read of the natives’ great progress in issue after issue. Despard wanted younger, newer blood, and with the promise of clothes and other gifts, he lured nine other Fuegians onto the ship to return to the Falklands with him.

  On Keppel Island, these newcomers faced the same prison treatment. They were woken at 7 A.M. each morning, made to sweep and clean their house, wash and dress. Prayers followed. Then they were put to work around the settlement. This was mainly hard physical labor: digging peat or garden trenches, carrying stones; the women were taught to weave baskets from grasses and saplings. They were the mission’s slave force and were only too aware
of the caste barrier that existed between them and their “benefactors.”

  These nine Fuegians remained on Keppel Island for nine months. They were homesick and unhappy. They were frequently accused of stealing, and though they were often guilty, the thefts were small: a comb, some turnips, items of no great value. The missionaries’ scowling, Bible-thumping reprimands infuriated the Fuegians, to whom the accusation of theft—in their society made only in the most serious of cases, such as the theft of a canoe or a wife—was a particularly black slur. Relations between the missionaries and their guests worsened and continued to the very end of their stay. As they were boarding the Allen Gardiner to go home in late September 1859, they were subjected to a search as thorough as that now conducted at any airport. It revealed sundry small tools, rags, bits of animal carcasses, boxes of biscuits. Not much to show for nine months of hard labor, but it was too much for Despard; it was sin and he wouldn’t overlook it. The Fuegians were outraged and ripped off their clothes and threw them into the water from the gangplank. Later, they retrieved their clothes and put them on again, their feelings still outraged, but they were headed for home.