Evolution's Captain (17 page)

Woollya, just below Murray Narrows, Ponsonby Sound. The site of FitzRoy's, and others', hoped-for New Jerusalem in Tierra del Fuego. (Narrative of HMS
Adventure
and
Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy
)

In the evening, a deep, booming voice was heard around the cove, coming from a canoe far down the sound. Jemmy recognized it instantly: “My brother!” he said. He abandoned the nails and tools he had been distributing, and scrambled onto a large rock to watch the canoe approach. It held, along with his stentorian brother, three younger brothers, two sisters, and his mother. The canoe was a long time in reaching the cove, and when it arrived, the family reunion was a strange one. His mother and sisters barely looked at him before running off to hide, Fuegian fashion. The brothers approached Jemmy slowly, their once naked brother now returned as fancy and particular about his dress as Phileas Fogg, and circled him wordlessly, like dogs sniffing a stranger. Jemmy stole glances at his English friends and suffered a mortification known in all cultures: he was embarrassed by his family. But the Englishmen were delighted, and the family immediately became “The Buttons,” Jemmy's two older brothers becoming Tommy and Harry (in some accounts Billy) Button. At last Jemmy tried to speak to them. Darwin observed this meeting.

The thronging natives left the English camp at sunset, to set up their own fires and wigwams a quarter of a mile away. During the evening, Jemmy spent time with his mother and family, and York and Fuegia went visiting from wigwam to wigwam, explaining their presence, and the Englishmen's intention of establishing a settlement at Woollya. This seemed to have a calming effect on the locals, who appeared more relaxed the next day.

For the next four days, until January 27, the Englishmen worked at preparing the settlement that Matthews, York, Fuegia,
and Jemmy were to call home. They gave them the best the Royal Navy and missionary zeal could provide. The sailors erected three homes. These were called wigwams, fashioned, like the native enclosures, of saplings and thatched with grass and twigs, but probably also wrapped with sailcloth and girded and strengthened with rope. Built by the ship's carpenters, riggers, sailmakers, bosuns, and seamen used to arranging the ingenious mechanical devices aboard a ship to their liking, they were substantial structures, built to last as long as possible, far superior to the makeshift, temporary, and transportable wigwams of the natives. Matthews's new home had both an attic made with boards to house his abundant stores, and a “cellar”—a pit beneath the floorboards—to secrete his more valuable possessions.

Near the wigwams, the seamen stepped off a good-sized plot and dug, planted, and sowed a kitchen garden of potatoes, carrots, turnips, beans, peas, lettuce, onions, leeks, and cabbages. The British were then a nation of gardeners—farmers, crofters, fruit and flower growers. Apart from its fast-diminishing forests, Britain was almost entirely under cultivation, and a green thumb lay dormant or active in every Briton. These
Beagle
gardeners probably longed, as seamen chronically do, for a home and garden of their own, or had them, far away, tended by a wife or family member. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Navy and merchant service were often the only possibility of employment for young men from an expanding and overpopulated rural labor force who sought a living on farms or from their own smallholdings, whose only alternative was to look for work in densely overcrowded cities. The loving care these seamen expended on creating this English country garden for a few savages in remote Tierra del Fuego cannot be overestimated; the exchange of tips and advice coming from grizzled salts resembling the
Bounty
mutineers would have been as dedicated and earnest, authoritative and argumentative, as any gathering of the Royal Horticultural Society.

Around this industry, Fuegians continued to gather and watch.
Over the next few days their numbers grew to more than 300. Interaction between them and the Englishmen was initially harmonious, but there were constant attempts at thievery and incessant importuning with the word the English transliterated as “Yammerschooner.” (According to Thomas Bridges's Yamana-English dictionary,
yamask-una
means “Do be liberal to me.”) “The last & first word is sure to be ‘Yammerschooner,'” wrote Darwin. The Englishmen gave them small presents but these were never enough. “It is very easy to please but as difficult to make them content…. they asked for everything they saw & stole what they could.”

After several days, the pilfering grew bolder, and on January 26 there occurred several hostile incidents when a few older Fuegian men tried to force their way into the English encampment. One of them, rebuffed by a sentry from the site boundary, spat in the seaman's face and then pantomimed killing, skinning, and cutting up a man. FitzRoy was already concerned that his increasingly outnumbered party of thirty-odd men could be overwhelmed if the mood turned sour—the death of Captain Cook at the hands of his former devotees in Hawaii in 1779 cast a long shadow over subsequent relations between English seamen and aboriginal natives—so that evening he set the marines to some target practice with their muskets. The Fuegians watched this keenly, squatting on their haunches around the boundary like spectators at a fireworks display. FitzRoy had the targets arranged “so that they could see the effects of the balls.” The natives were duly impressed, and afterward went off to their own camps, “looking very grave and talking earnestly.”

The next morning, as the final thatching went into the wigwams, nearly all the Fuegians, including the Buttons, broke up their camps and paddled away or disappeared over the surrounding hills. Only half a dozen men were still too curious to leave. The English wondered if they'd been frightened off by the target practice, or whether an attack was being planned. FitzRoy decided to avoid any possibility of a conflict by withdrawing his men and marines to another cove a few miles away. Rather
boldly, he also decided to leave Matthews and his three Fuegians to spend their first night—unguarded, with all their goods and stores—in the new wigwams. York and Jemmy both told FitzRoy that they were sure they would come to no harm, and Matthews appeared as steady and trusting as ever. The captain was impressed by his stoicism. At sunset, the four boats paddled away, leaving the settlers behind.

FitzRoy passed a sleepless night.

Since all seemed well, FitzRoy decided to leave the group in Woollya for another week or so while he explored the western arms of the Beagle Channel, and then return to see how they were doing. He sent the yawl and one whaleboat back to the
Beagle
in Goree Road and set out with Darwin and a smaller group in the other two boats.

 

For a week, Darwin and FitzRoy had exciting but relatively
trouble-free cruising. The weather began hot and sunny, and they were surprised to find themselves sunburned. They saw many whales breaching and spouting in the channel, which ran deep right up to the shore.

Both young men loved this sort of boat-camping. It was very like the trips FitzRoy had made with the whaleboats through Otway and Skyring Waters in the first year of his command aboard the
Beagle
, when he had slept on beaches beneath his sea cloak, finding it frozen hard over him in the mornings, and himself exhilarated by the experience.

For Darwin, the rough and truly dangerous conditions greatly appealed to the physically rugged side of his nature that had found its outlet at home in riding and shooting; it was a magnificent enlargement on the geologizing ramble he had made across Wales with Professor Sedgwick. Here, in addition to the cornucopia of natural phenomena to explore, there were wild savages to contend with, a sailing ship to call home, and weather severe enough to prompt him to grow a long beard whose tip he could see below his hand when he made a fist around it. It was the grandest adventure a boy ever had.

On successive nights they landed to make camp at deserted spots, the first at Shingle Point just west of the Murray Narrows, only to be quickly discovered and bothered by canoes full of aggressive Fuegians. These appeared unfamiliar with firearms, so the Englishmen's weapons were no deterrent. Rather than spend the night holding them at bay or in conflict, each time they packed up and moved on, trusting that the Fuegians would not follow them after dark. Nevertheless, even when they found campsites free of any sign of natives, they kept watch in turn through the night.

On his watch, sitting close to a fire in the dead dark of night, Darwin's imagination flamed. Fed by stories of the scuffles of the
Beagle
's previous voyage, by tales of Cook and others, he was ever ready for an attack from wild savages.

The day after recording such febrile imaginings, nature made a rush for Darwin. His courageous and instant response got his name stamped into geography for the first time.

That day, the two boats entered the northern arm of the Beagle Channel and the scenery changed dramatically. The land along the north shore of the channel now rose steeply to the high, permanently snow-covered, jagged southern cordillera of the Andes. Cottagey Kincaid country gave way to waterlogged Himalayan vistas. Waterfalls poured from the heights, glaciers tumbled into the Beagle Channel only a few hundred yards from the men's oars, surrounding the boats with small icebergs, or “growlers.” The land turned tundra-like, scraped clean of all but the most stunted, wind-bent vegetation. The water in the channel, right up to the deep edge of the land and in the dense shadows of the glaciers, was a dark blue-black. Both FitzRoy and Darwin remarked on the “beryl blue” sepulchral glow of light refracting through the glacial ice.

At midday they stopped to cook a meal on a sandy point of land “immediately in front of a noble precipice of solid ice,” wrote FitzRoy, “the cliffy face of a huge glacier, which seemed to cover the side of a mountain, and completely filled a valley several leagues in extent.” It was not a good spot for lunch. As they gathered around their fire, the edge of the glacier right in front of them suddenly calved.

Darwin was among the first to jump up and grab the boats from the sudden waves that would undoubtedly have carried them off, stranding the men ashore. His instant grasp of the situation, quicker than most of the seamen in the group, and his action in helping save the boats, prompted a special consideration from FitzRoy.

FitzRoy later named the high mountain above the Beagle Channel Mount Darwin. Many bestowals upon geography by early explorers have been lost or changed over time (for instance, a number of Captain Cook's names for the headlands and harbors of the New Zealand coastline have, in recent, more politically correct times, been replaced by their original Maori names). But Cerro Darwin still rises 7,975 feet high in the Cordillera Darwin above Seno Darwin on modern maps of Chilean Tierra del Fuego.

Several days later, the boats reached the open Pacific. In “miserable weather” they turned around, traveling back along the southwest arm of the Beagle Channel. From a whaleboat,
FitzRoy's observations and surveying of this western end of the Beagle Channel were quick and relatively rough, but accurate enough to provide the basis of charts still in use today.

On February 5, at Shingle Point, close to the Murray Narrows—where they had earlier been disturbed by a group of Fuegians and decided to move camp—they met some of this same group again. Now they appeared to be “in full dress,” as FitzRoy put it: covered with red and white paint, goose down and feathers. They also wore ribbons and scraps of red cloth—gifts from the
Beagle
's seamen handed out at Woollya if they hadn't been stolen since—but one of their women, “noticed by several among us as being far from ill-looking,” was wearing one of Fuegia's dresses. “There was also an air of almost defiance among these people, which looked as if they knew that harm had been done.” FitzRoy immediately grew anxious about settlers at Woollya.