Evolution's Captain (26 page)
Read Evolution's Captain Online
Authors: Peter Nichols
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 influenceâFitzRoy's original scheme exactly. Despard wrote to FitzRoy for his imprimatur; his reputation might have been tarnished in New Zealand, but in matters Fuegianâespecially when mixed with religionâFitzRoy 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 villagesâ¦[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 WoollyaâFitzRoy's cherished spot for a missionâtwo 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 nativesâ¦[wrote Snow] “Jemmy Button? Jemmy Button?” To my amazement and joyâalmost rendering me for a moment speechlessâan 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 said, “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 vesselsâas Fuegia Basket hadâin 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”âJemmy'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 Fuegianâ¦. 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.
Â
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 Buttonâthe hapless talisman and focus of so many people's earnest ambitionsâback 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 shoreâthe founding of the Elysian Fuegian harbor town envisaged by the Patagonian Missionary Society.