Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘Very funny.’ Wet and disgruntled, I watched steam rising from my clothes as if I might burst into flames, but then the boys arrived, bottles of pisco were opened, and when we had all dried out by the fire I felt a great feeling of satisfaction. I even apologized to Selkirk for cursing him. I was glad of that when, much later, I read Sir Richard Steele’s thoughts on him, published in The Englishman in 1713:

  When I first saw him, I thought, if I had not been let into his Character and Story, I could have discerned that he had been much separated from Company, from his Aspect and Gesture; there was a strong but chearful Seriousness in his Look, and a certain Disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in Thought. When the Ship which brought him off the Island came in, he received them with the greatest Indifference, with relation to the Prospect of going off with them, but with great Satisfaction in an Opportunity to refresh and help them. The Man frequently bewailed his Return to the World, which could not, he said, with all its Enjoyments, restore him to the Tranquility and his Solitude.

  The italics in the last sentence are mine.

  *

  One question still remained as I sat in the kitchen of the Aldea Daniel Defoe.

  ‘Maria Eugenia, Teddy, Miguel, Francisco,’ I addressed them all. ‘Where are those wild goats? Crusoe made his hair suit from goatskins, stitching them together with a nail and worsted strands from his socks. But where are they?’

  A chorus answered me. ‘The wild goats stay high up near the Yunque, the Anvil Mountain.’ They added wickedly, ‘Would you like to go up there and see?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, ostentatiously concentrating on squeezing lemon juice into a finger of pisco. ‘But we’ll leave that until I come back to Juan Fernandez.’

  ‘Oh, not till then!’ Teddy slapped me on the shoulder. I looked up, caught his teasing expression and we all laughed together.

  Thirty-two

  ‘No sign of any ship running that British blockade,’ Hernan Cubillos said over a drink when I was back in Santiago.

  I had been away two weeks, returning again in the Carlos Darwin, this time with a dozen or two Juan Fernandez goats and sheep and four-foot bacalao fish hanging round the vessel like sides of beef in a butcher’s shop. According to some mainland veterinary rule, all the animals were slaughtered on deck as we came within sight of Valparaiso, so that the decks were full of piteous bleating and ran with blood like the floor of a temple after a mass sacrifice. With the stink of slaughter and bacalaos heavy around us, and bodies and blood under our feet, we passengers spent our last hours aboard either leaning over the rail as far as we safely could to sniff fresh air, or below in the mess. I had an evening with Captain Pedro and his wife in their flat in Viña del Mar near Valparaiso, and several whiskies with Armanduco in a bar near the wharfside plaza while two langostas he was taking home scrabbled hopelessly on the sawdust-covered floor. Captain Pedro and Armanduco each gave me a ceramic vase decorated with flowers: the words Al Escritor Gavin Young con Afecto Capitan Pedro were inscribed on one, and De la Isla Robinson Crusoe Amistosamente, Armanduco on the other.

  After that I took a bus to Santiago to think out my next move.

  From the first, I had wanted to round the Horn; I had thought of doing it on a freighter – I couldn’t see another way. But now that possibility had been ruled out by the British blockade and a more exciting idea struck me: to go down that two thousand miles of broken coastline and approach the Horn from its northern side. It was midwinter on the Horn, but that couldn’t be helped. I would see it now or never.

  ‘The blockade seems like staying for some time,’ Hernan was saying. ‘But I have done something for you. I’ve spoken to the head of the national shipping line. There’s a Chilean cargo vessel sailing from Rio de Janeiro in a few days’ time. To Cape Town. You could be on her, if you want to go in that direction.’

  Yes, I said, I did want to get across the South Atlantic.

  ‘But?’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to see Cape Horn ….’

  ‘And you’re so near, is that it?’ Hernan laughed. ‘As a matter of fact, I rather thought you might choose to go south. It’s precisely what I should do. You can’t see Cape Horn every day of the week.’

  The chart was on the table before us, with the toe of Tierra del Fuego jabbing out conspicuously into the Atlantic below the irregular sweep of the Straits of Magellan. But my eye drifted lower than that – to the Beagle Channel with the two tiny naval stations, Argentine Ushuaia on the northern shore, Puerto Williams to the south – and lower still, to Navarino Island, Ponsonby Sound, False Cape Horn, Cape Deceit, and at last to Cape Horn Island that hung like a drip at the extreme tip of a very battered nose.

  ‘I told the shipping people that you might after all choose to stay on here a bit,’ Hernan continued. ‘The only thing is I must warn you that, with the Falklands business still unresolved, I can’t guarantee you will get to the Horn. You see, the far south of Chile is in the hands of our navy. The officers at our naval station on the south side of the Channel at Puerto Williams may not have time for a strange British visitor. You understand?’

  I understood perfectly. But to have arrived within striking distance of the Horn and to find the first major war there for nearly seventy years ….

  ‘I’ll consult,’ Hernan said, ‘and see what’s to be done. But meanwhile, why not buy some really warm clothes?’

  When he said that, I was certain I would be able to reach the south. But that did not mean I would see the Horn itself. That ambition seemed to rest in the uncertain hands of General Galtieri in Buenos Aires.

  *

  Within a week I was heading south. First, I took a train to Puerto Montt and made a detour from the direct route to the Straits of Magellan onto the large, bleak island of Chiloe. Darwin didn’t think much of the place, failing in 1834 to buy either a pound of sugar or an ordinary knife there. He found some pure Indians hereabouts, but thought very little of the non-Indians: ‘It was a pleasant thing to see the aborigines advanced to the same degree of civilization, however low that may be, which their white conquerors have attained.’ I hurried past the houses on stilts that he had seen, and through the old cemeteries where the ancient tombs are as large and alarming as any in Père Lachaise in Paris.

  Further down the coast, across valleys and over countless inlets and coves, near the island of San Pedro, I saw my first albatross. It was heavy with self-conscious arrogance, with its cold eye, its cruel beak and a head like the head of a wicked pope. At San Pedro, Darwin wrote:

  two of the [Beagle’s] officers landed to take a round of angles with the theodolite. A fox (Canis fulvipes) of a kind said to be peculiar to the island, and very rare in it, and which is a new species, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching the work of the officers, that I was able by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer. This fox, more curious or more scientific, but less wise, than the generality of his brethren, is now mounted in the museum of the Zoological Society.

  A ferry carrying trucks took me to Punto Natales near the Straits of Magellan. The Evangelistas was a modern ‘roll-on roll-off’ vessel – the loaded lorries were driven directly on board up a wide ramp in the stern. I stayed on deck with my binoculars and a chart folded against the rail and watched the islands and sounds move past like the scattered pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle. The prospect was an unending one of stern headlands, bays, daunting hillsides and bleak inlets with sometimes, in the distance, a snow-covered volcano rising like a glorious pyramid above all the intervening ridges and chasms; a serene white sentinel in the sun. Austere but magnificent vistas were repeated with almost imperceptible variations. In days gone by, it must have been the easiest region in the world to get lost in. Fjord after silent fjord moved towards the Evangelistas’ bows, echoed faintly the deep purr of her engines, and fell behind to merge silently once more into the tableau of a thousand other hillsides. Very rarely the
re was a huddle of houses by a wharf; little fishing villages which we passed by. Mile after mile, the only living things to keep us company were screaming gulls and a few ducks, the flapping ‘steamer’ ducks that skitter over the water’s surface beating up spray like steam. If not truly beautiful, the desolation had a strange, monotonous allure. Inlets shaggy with evergreen beeches, wooded slopes piebald with snow rose on all sides: it was monotonous all right. Even the dangerous Bay of Peñas stayed flat as a millpond.

  HMS Beagle had first crept this way in 1826 to chart the horrendous coast on behalf of the Admiralty in London. Captain Robert FitzRoy had spent four years here before tackling the far rougher regions round the Horn. While probing the western region around Desolation Bay, FitzRoy’s men had lost a whaling boat to some mischievous Indians, and in retaliation FitzRoy had taken hostage four young Fuegians of the region whom eventually he took to England. One of the four, a boy called Boat Memory (after the incident of the lost whaling boat) died of smallpox in the naval hospital in Portsmouth, but the three others passed a cheerful year and a half in a clergyman’s house in Walthamstow. This was the beginning of one of the world’s strangest stories.

  These were the three: York Minster, named after a prominent mountain west of Cape Horn, a ‘thick powerful man’ but morose; Jemmy Button (he had been ‘purchased’ for one pearl button), short, fat and vain, who in England became inordinately fond of gloves, mirrors and highly-polished shoes; and nine-year-old Fuegia Basket, named after Basket Island near Desolation Bay where she was first taken on board the Beagle. By the time the unlikely trio had spent some while at school in London, they spoke a good deal of English, had acquired polished table manners and behaved with the utmost decorum when presented at Court to King William IV and Queen Adelaide. The King asked a good number of questions about their life at home, and gave little Fuegia a ring from his finger; Queen Adelaide gave her the lace cap from her own head. The true story of these three Indians reads like an exaggeration by Defoe: but it slowly came to life as I journeyed south to the Horn.

  *

  The Chilean charts generously retained the names FitzRoy had chosen. South of the Bay of Peñas, for example, I saw Adventure Bay, Benjamin Island, Wickham Sound, Patricio Lynch Island, MacPherson Island, Wellington Island, Evans Island and Kirke Channel, named after a lieutenant on the Beagle who would no doubt be glad to know that his strait will be forgotten by few who see it. It was as much as we could do to squeeze through the needle’s-eye gap in its rock walls. Everyone on board came on deck to watch, and two crewmen stood by the two anchor winches in the bows, ready to let them go if the Evangelistas began to swing out of control. Beyond, a sound that seemed to stretch away for ever had been named Seno Ultima Esperanza or Last Hope Sound by Magellan, who, searching for a route through to the Pacific Ocean, had sailed exhausted and half frozen to the far end of it – and found it was a cul-de-sac.

  At the little Patagonian town of Puerto Natales I disembarked. There was no waterway to the Straits of Magellan from here, so I hired a taxi and, pausing merely for a cup of tea for the driver and pisco for myself, bumped away south to Punta Arenas, the Chilean port halfway between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

  I was getting on, I thought. Across the choppy Straits, several miles wide here, I could see the cone of Sarmiento Mountain behind Dawson Island, and range after range of snowy mountains running down to the Horn. Further to my right, the Straits spread lakelike to Point Famine and swept out of sight round the point of the Brunswick Peninsula. To my left the Straits curved up under the shore of southern Patagonia – Argentina now – and went on to meet the Atlantic at Dungeness Point beyond which, in the open sea, the patrolling warships of the Royal Navy had put a shield in front of the Falkland Islands.

  I could see the northern shore of Tierra del Fuego, named the Land of Fire by the earliest European explorers whose first sight of it had been smoke from the countless fires of the Fuegian Indians. Fire had been the poor Fuegians’ greatest comfort. They made their fires with tinder from birds’ down or parts of a puffball common in these desolate regions, and set them going with the sparks from iron pyrites – firestones; they never wittingly permitted them to go out, caring for them almost as much as they cared for their babies. Required to travel, they carried their fires with them from shore to canoe and back again.

  FitzRoy and Darwin found the Indians in the far south near Cape Deceit in a terrible state. They appeared in bark canoes out of curtains of heavy rain, stark naked, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair tangled. When bad weather prevented them from collecting the shellfish they lived on, they all but starved. When the Beagle entered Goree Roads to the east of Navarino Island, FitzRoy, who was anxious to find a way through from there to Ponsonby Sound to the west, sent off four boats through the channel he had earlier named after the Beagle and which Darwin compared to the valley of Loch Ness in Scotland. It was about a hundred and twenty miles long with an average breadth of about two miles, and crossed the south part of Tierra del Fuego in an east–west line. Nothing existed there except Indians, animals and birds.

  FitzRoy’s three Fuegian protégés were returned – at their own request – to the Land of Fire in 1832, laden down with clothing, books, tools, seeds and plates and accompanied by a missionary, Mr Richard Matthews. At first FitzRoy thought it advisable to land them exactly where they had first been found: in Jemmy’s case, in Ponsonby Sound. Here it was interesting – disturbing, too, no doubt – to watch the conduct of the resident ‘savages’ towards their ‘civilized’ relatives so recently at the Court of St James’s. The Indians of Jemmy’s family were not like the abject, naked wretches in the canoes nearer the Horn. The young men were powerfully built and often six feet tall. They wore cloaks of guanaco hides ‘just thrown over their shoulders, leaving their persons as often exposed as covered’, said Darwin. Not surprisingly, they looked distrustful, surprised and startled. An old man with a fillet of white feathers round his head, their chief spokesman, scarcely deserved, in Darwin’s view, to be called articulate. The language was so odd that Captain Cook had compared it to a man clearing his throat. Poor, vain, overdressed Jemmy Button was acutely embarrassed.

  The Indians immediately perceived the difference between him and themselves and held much conversation one with another on the subject. The old man addressed a long harangue to Jemmy, which it seems was to invite him to stay with them. But Jemmy understood very little of their language, and was, moreover, ashamed of his countrymen. When York Minster afterwards came on shore, they noticed him in the same way, and told him he ought to shave; yet he had not twenty dwarf hairs on his face, whilst we all wore our untrimmed beards. They examined the colour of his skin, and compared it with ours. One of our arms being bare, they expressed the liveliest surprise and admiration of its whiteness. And their interest exceeded admiration: ‘We thought that they mistook two or three of the officers, who were rather shorter and fairer, though adorned with large beards, for the ladies of our party.’

  FitzRoy let himself be guided to a ‘quiet, pretty little cove’ called Wulaia and here Jemmy’s mother and family soon appeared. But the family reunion lacked the warmth Darwin had expected of it; it was, he said, ‘less interesting than that between a horse turned out into a field, when he joins an old companion’. Nevertheless, York Minster and Fuegia both decided to stay here instead of going to their homes further west.

  The name Wulaia – or Woollya, as Darwin writes it – runs through the history of those desolate regions like an owl’s cry of doom. Soon the whole party of Fuegians, and Mr Matthews too, were settled in the little cove there. Wigwams were erected, gardens dug, seeds sown. The Beagle sailed, but no sooner had she disappeared round a snowy headland than the local Indians ran amok, plundering all they could lay hands on. They terrorized Mr Matthews, showing him by signs that they wished to strip him naked and pluck all the hairs out of his face and body. When, luckily, FitzRoy returned unexpectedly, he found Jemmy wringing his hands, blaming
his tribesmen and moaning, ‘All bad men, no savvy nothing. Damned fools.’ Matthews was taken off, quaking, and swiftly made his way to New Zealand.

  A bad start, but a year later worse had befallen poor Jemmy. Returning yet again, FitzRoy and Darwin found the Wulaia settlement oddly quiet, but soon ‘a canoe, with a little flag flying, was seen approaching, with one of the Indians in it washing the paint off his face. This man was poor Jemmy.’ The once plump, mirror-loving dandy was by now only a ‘thin haggard savage, with long disordered hair and naked, except for a bit of blanket round his waist ….’ There had been fighting in the settlement, and York Minster and Fuegia, who had married each other, had deserted him, taking most of Jemmy’s property with them to their home in the west. Nevertheless, Jemmy brought presents of spearheads and otter skins to the Beagle and ate dinner on board ‘as tidily as formerly’. He, too, was married and, although FitzRoy offered to have him on board, he showed no sign of wanting to be taken away again. He returned ashore loaded with presents and ‘every soul on board,’ said Darwin, ‘was heartily sorry to shake hands with him for the last time ….’ As the Beagle stood out into the open sea a farewell curl of smoke rose from Jemmy’s signal fire.