Evolution's Captain (7 page)

T
he term “collecting” had a particular weight attached to it
in nineteenth-century Britain. Explorers in Africa, Asia, and South America felt duty-bound to collect bugs, birds, spiders, flowers, and native nose rings to ship home. Every far-flung outpost of the empire had its local amateur enthusiast: the Indian Raj hill station doctor who sent home a few butterflies, the missionary in Africa who became fascinated with dung beetles, anyone of a scientific bent who gathered examples of the local flora and fauna. He would look for them himself, and his fellow expatriates and the local natives would bring him anything thought to be worthy of his interest.

These collectors would examine their specimens, categorize, preserve, then package the finer examples with care and send them “home” to England. Sometimes they were sent to a friend who might be storing, housing, or displaying the mounting collection, but just as often to the British Museum or some other interested repository. Country houses, museums, universities, and gentlemen's clubs filled with specimens from around the globe. Taxidermy became a frenzied profession. England, in that age of expanding exploration and colonial possession, became a vast storehouse of every kind of transportable evidence of the warp and weft of Man and Nature.

Notable collectors were Lord Elgin, who in 1806 looted a
shipful of 2,500-year-old marble statues from the Parthenon in Athens and sent them back to England, and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose eight-year-long wanderings through the Malay Archipelago eventually resulted in 125,660 specimens of plants, insects, and animals shipped home.

FitzRoy's savages were a natural part of this ethos. From the moment of first contact, Eskimos, Pygmies, Polynesians, Africans, and “Ioway” American Indians had also been “collected” by European explorers. Captain Cook returned to England at the end of his second voyage with a Tahitian, Omai, who partied in London for two years before returning home with Cook on his last voyage. Fifty-eight thousand people went to see a family of Laplanders with their live reindeer exhibited in London in 1822. Two hundred years earlier, Captain George Weymouth kidnapped five Indians from an island near what is now Port Clyde, Maine, and brought them back to England. They were treated well and when eventually repatriated, they had nothing but good to say of the English. One of them, Tasquantum, or Squanto, taught some English to a friend of his, Samoset, who happened to be in the neighborhood of present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, when the
Mayflower
dropped anchor in December 1620. When its pilgrim passengers went ashore, they were met by Samoset who flabbergasted them by saying “Welcome” and asking if they had any beer.

Such kidnap victims were “specimens,” as FitzRoy naturally described his Fuegians, like breadfruit or the Argentine opossum, to be collected and studied for the benefit of science—and for their own sake: what Kipling termed the white man's burden, the patronizing presumption that it was morally incumbent upon civilized Englishmen to extend (more often than not with overwhelming force) a hand to uplift their colored inferiors. Poked and prodded in all cases, the luckier specimens were treated with genuine compassion and occasionally sent back to their homes with chests of smart clothes and new belongings and amazing stories to tell their descendants. Others found themselves in smoky, overpopulated, industrial cities, exhibited as curiosities at fairgrounds and in the
aters, examples of the freakish lower echelons of creation, destined to die of neglect, despair, and loneliness.

These living trophies satisfied the missionary zeal of the age that was the higher-minded rationale behind the scramble for colonial possession. Men like FitzRoy, and David Livingstone in Africa, believed they were bringing improvement and light to disenfranchised peoples while paving the way for the British to take over their lands and material wealth.

 

Whatever his motives, FitzRoy's collection of natives from the
territory of his survey was not part of his job description. It was an action far beyond the strict orders plainly outlined by the Admiralty, whose responsibility for the Fuegians he had now incurred, to dubious purpose.

As the
Beagle
approached England in September 1830, FitzRoy wrote a letter to his superior officer, Captain Phillip Parker King, of the
Adventure
, telling him what he had done:

FitzRoy then gave a brief account of the
Beagle
's stolen whaleboat and his attempt to secure hostages and interpreters for its return, and his eventual decision to keep the captives aboard.

The passage from Tierra del Fuego was a long one, four and a half months, with stops in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. The Fuegians grew slowly more communicative with the crew, as they picked up a basic and sailorly English, and FitzRoy attempted to make translations of some of their words, a process complicated by the fact that Jemmy Button spoke a different dialect from the other three captives.

The Fuegians made rare tourists aboard their British Navy cruise ship. Montevideo, their first city, would have been a fantastic sight to them. The harbor was filled with ships, a sprawl of buildings and streets tumbled down to the water, large buildings and warehouses lined the docks, and music of all kinds poured out of bars and dance halls and floated across the water to the anchored ship. Here they all went ashore. FitzRoy took them to the local hospital to be vaccinated against smallpox; Fuegia Basket stayed with an English family for a few days, and the three men
accompanied the captain (and probably several of the
Beagle
's marines) on some of his business through the city.

The Fuegians seemed far less astonished and amazed than FitzRoy expected. Animals and boats—things they were familiar with—drew animated responses from them: “A large ox, with unusually long horns, excited their wonder remarkably.” But with much else, the larger, denser jumble of civilization around them, the shock of the new, seemed to overload their senses and dull them into a stolid impassiveness.

In Montevideo, far from home, sweltering in a new, subtropical climate, and perhaps seeing the English captain for the first time as a friend and buffer between them and an unimaginably strange world, the Fuegians began to open up to FitzRoy and talk to him about their home and customs. “It was here that I first learned from them that they made a practice of eating their enemies taken in war. The women, they explained to me, eat the arms; and the men the legs; the trunk and head were always thrown into the sea.”

As the known world opened up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cannibalism was the salacious bogey attached to every dealing with “savages.” Fear of it had sent Captain Bligh and his fellow castaways from the
Bounty
more than 4000 miles across the Pacific and the Strait of Timor in an open boat, rather than putting ashore at any of the many islands and the Australian mainland they passed within sight of. Cannibalism was known to have been
practiced in Africa, Polynesia, and Australasia; any dark-skinned race was presumed to be capable of it. Whether real or imaginary, it underscored the moral imperative that God-fearing Englishmen felt to improve the condition of native cultures everywhere.

According to Lucas Bridges, the son of a missionary who grew up in nineteenth-century Tierra del Fuego, there was never any cannibalism among the Fuegians. FitzRoy's misinformation, Bridges speculated in his book,
Uttermost Part of the Earth
, was probably the result of his own fearful and probing questions about cannibalism, which his Fuegian captives sensed and responded to with black humor: “Do your people ever eat each other?” “Oh, yes, the men eat the legs, the women the arms.”

But with such expected disclosures from his protégés, FitzRoy was more certain than ever of the rightness of his mission to clothe them, carry them home, and steep them in Christian values.

 

After a brief stop in Rio de Janeiro, the
Beagle
sailed on August
6 and hove in sight of England nine weeks later. Montevideo, for all its newness to the Fuegians, was a ramshackle town at the edge of a wilderness; England was the center of the scientific world, throbbing, clamoring, and smoking in the full bore of industrial development. In Falmouth harbor, at the clean edge of the open sea, the Fuegians were terrified by their first sight of it.

After dropping mail to be delivered to the Admiralty, the
Beagle
sailed on to Devonport, the naval dockyard at Plymouth.
Here FitzRoy took the Fuegians ashore at night to “comfortable, airy lodgings.” The next day he brought a doctor to vaccinate them for a second time against smallpox.

A virus that spread like the common cold, smallpox had been more lethal to humans through the ages than all our wars. A victim expelled droplets containing the virus from the nose and mouth; anyone inhaling the droplets or carrying them by the hand to the mouth became infected. The symptoms were unmistakable: aches, a high fever, followed by a rash resembling thousands of small pimples on the face and spreading to other parts of the body. The pimples became larger and filled with pus. The disease killed about 20 percent of its victims. In those who survived, scabs formed over the pimples, leaving permanent scars. The eyes were often infected and many were left blind. Sweeping across Asia, Africa, and Europe, as influenza still does, smallpox was once so common that almost everyone got it at some time. Europeans unfailingly carried it with them in their explorations around the world, killing millions of natives who had no immunity to the disease.

Until the late eighteenth century, the only protection was variolation: inoculation of a healthy person with the pus of a smallpox victim. This could result in a mild case of the disease and subsequent immunity. In 1796, a British physician, Edward Jenner, went further and made a real vaccine from cowpox, a mild form of the disease suffered by milkmaids, who were then said to be immune to smallpox. As with John Harrison, the eighteenth-century clockmaker whose work was persistently ignored or rebuffed (but without which FitzRoy could not have determined his longitude with such accuracy), Jenner's claim and studies were sneered at by his own medical community and rejected by the Royal Society (Britain's premier association of scientists). But his vaccination was quickly adopted elsewhere. President Thomas Jefferson tried it out on family members; Napoleon vaccinated his troops; physicians in Europe and Russia began to use it. By 1830, when FitzRoy brought the Fuegians to England, vac
cination was widespread, even, finally, in England (where Jenner had belatedly been rewarded with £30,000 by Parliament), but the vaccines were of varying quality. Plymouth, a seaport with a large and constantly revolving population of seamen and visitors, was a rich breeding ground for disease. FitzRoy was unsure of the quality of the vaccine at Montevideo, so he started his Fuegians on a new course of vaccinations as soon as possible.

Two days later he brought them to stay at a farm a few miles from Plymouth, where he hoped they would have more room and fresh air and less risk of disease, and where they could quietly remain while he figured out what to do with them.

This wasn't easy. John Barrow, the second secretary at the Admiralty, had responded favorably to his initiative: “Their Lordships will not interfere with Commander FitzRoy's personal superintendence of, or benevolent intentions towards these four people, but they will afford him any facilities towards maintaining and educating them in England, and will give them a passage home again.” This meant little beyond accepting what FitzRoy had done and giving him permission to spend some of his time arranging the welfare of his charges. The Admiralty's only true “facilities” were the berths offered on its ships heading, at some future date, back to Tierra del Fuego.