This Thing Of Darkness (16 page)

‘My God,’ he exclaimed.

 

May’s new boat was finished on the twenty-third. Kempe, meanwhile, had supervised the watering of the ship, and the stitching of new topmast rigging. As soon as the work was over, the
Beagle
weighed anchor, warped to windward and made sail out of Christmas Sound, steering small amid the profusion of rocks and islets. She made her way south-east along the coast to False Cape Horn, that cunning natural replica that lies some fifty miles up the coast from the real thing. There she turned north into Nassau Bay, her binnacle lamp a lonely pinpoint of light in the darkening winter evenings. The sick list was lengthening now, an untidy catalogue of colds, pulmonic complaints, catarrhal and rheumatic afflictions, not to mention two badly injured men. The fresh food of summer - the seabird meals of redbill, shag and bittern - had become a rarity. Anything they could catch or shoot now was offered first to the sick, and then to the Indians, on FitzRoy’s orders. Nassau Bay, long known but long unexplored, was to be their final ‘boat service’ of the trip, for which the captain was duly grateful. Surgeon Wilson had impressed upon him that the crew’s health was in dire need of recruiting. FitzRoy was all too painfully aware that this decline had begun following the episode with the whaleboat. Even though there had been no sign of any relapse on his part, it was as if the crew took its communal health - silently, invisibly - from him, as if damage to the head was reflected in the spirits of the body corporate.

The education of Boat Memory was now coming on so fast that FitzRoy could hardly bear to break off to recommence surveying operations. Fuegia, too, amazed to find that FitzRoy could suddenly communicate with her in her own tongue, had started to learn English with an astounding rapidity. Only York Minster, a brooding, intimidating presence to all but Fuegia, stayed silent. He sat in his berth up by the chimney grating in all weathers, surrounded by his secreted piles of food, oblivious of the cold and rain. Some among the crew thought he brought bad luck, or wished storms upon them, but none dared to confront him. To approach York felt like walking towards the entrance of a bear cave.

‘I’m afraid the water in the wash-hand basin is a mask of ice, sir.’

FitzRoy’s steward had arrived to waken him, bearing a bowl of steaming skillygalee porridge, but he had already been roused to half-sleep by the rattle of the anchor chain below. It was just before six o‘clock, halfway through the morning watch, and it would not become light for a good couple of hours yet. Snow lay dark and thick on the skylight above. In terms of personal discomfort this was no more than FitzRoy was used to, but it did mean that much of the day would be taken up with the tiresome business of de-icing the rigging. He wolfed his breakfast, struggling into his uniform as he did so, and left his cabin, unwashed, as the sentry rang four bells. It was too cold to clean the decks, so the ship’s company were already busy lashing up and stowing their hammocks. A tired-looking Murray, who was on duty at the wheel, seemed relieved to see a friendly face. ‘I think it’s going to be a fine day, sir. The stars are out and we have a good anchorage - one of the few on this coast fit for a squadron of line-of-battle ships.’

‘Excellent.’

Murray paused. ‘I’m afraid we lost the small bower anchor in the night, sir. The seaward cable parted through frost. It froze right through, sir. I had the remainder of the small bower cable shackled to the best bower, and rode with two-thirds of a cable on the sheet, and a cable and a half on the bower. I’ve had the men keep the cables constantly streaming wet at the hawse-holes with seawater all night, sir, to prevent any more icing up.’

‘Well, it’s a pity about the small bower, but you’ve done well, Mr Murray. I am grateful to you for your quick thinking.’

‘Thank you sir.’

As FitzRoy’s eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he became aware of a dim column of warm breath beyond the foremast, which signalled the solitary presence of York Minster, shrouded in a blanket in his accustomed spot. Boat and Fuegia had been persuaded to sleep below decks, but York chose to keep guard out in the open.

‘He’s been there all night, sir. As usual.’

The
Beagle
had anchored in darkness, but the emerging moon now illuminated steep wooded hillsides, hemming in the ship on three sides. Towards the northern end of the bay these slopes converged in a mess of islands. Here, as so often, FitzRoy, Stokes and Murray would have to hunt for channels, short-cuts and hidden routes into the interior of Tierra del Fuego.

A sudden commotion arose at the far end of the deck. York had sprung to his feet, all his senses alert like a hunted animal’s. His eyes scanned the darkness intently, and then he began to shout. The head of Boat Memory soon appeared at the companionway, and behind him Fuegia Basket scampered on deck. All three began to run about agitatedly, dashing up to the rail where they would scream derisively and pull faces into the darkness, before shuttling back again, as if afraid to show themselves for too long.

‘What the deuce are they shouting at?’ wondered FitzRoy.

Neither he nor any of the lookouts could see anything, even with a nightglass. But then, conducted like electricity through the clear black air, came faint answering shouts and catcalls. At first they came by the score, and then, as they came closer, by the century. Screwing up his eyes and squinting into the gloom, FitzRoy could see tiny silhouettes, black shapes cut in the moonlit sheen of the distant channels. Canoes, a good hundred of them. Boat Memory ran past waving his arms and shouting,
‘Yamana! Yamana!’
Even the normally solemn York was running about in agitated circles. Fuegia, FitzRoy noticed, was in tears.

‘What is it, Boat? Who are they?’

Boat was too panicked to answer. FitzRoy grabbed his arm roughly as he hurtled past and spun him round. ‘Boat. Who are these men?’

‘Bad men. Yamana! Kill Boat Memory!’ He gestured to two scars on his arm as proof of the strangers’ murderous intentions.

‘Yamana?’

‘Yamana! Bad men. Kill Alik’hoo‘lip.’

‘You are Alikhoolip? You and York and Fuegia?’

‘Yes. Yamana kill Alik’hoo‘lip! Bad men!’

‘Nobody will kill you here. Understand? Nobody will kill you here.’

But Boat was already charging to the starboard rail to deliver another volley of insults into the darkness.

 

FitzRoy gave the order to beat to quarters, and the
Beagle’s
drums thundered out into the blackness of the sound. Locks were produced for the guns, along with trigger lines, priming wires and powder, handspikes and rammers. The decks around the guns were wetted and liberally sanded. After a minute of frantic activity the men were standing by, waiting for the order to load.

‘Are you going to give the order to open fire, sir?’ asked Murray.

‘I hope to God it will not be necessary. The recoil could play merry hell with the chronometers.’

A great flotilla of canoes was converging on the
Beagle
now, from more than one direction. Silhouetted figures stood in the little boats, waving otterskin mantles the size of large pocket handkerchiefs, or holding what appeared to be substantial wooden clubs in their fists. The shouts of the men in the canoes jostled and competed with each other to cross the gap between them and the ship. Now that they were closer, the jeers of Boat and York, and the wails of Fuegia, seemed suddenly pathetic by comparison. Steadily, the Yamana canoes converged into a tight ring around the Beagle, but still no attack was launched. The sailors stood tense and nervous by the guns; FitzRoy, pistol drawn, held himself in readiness to give the order to fire.

‘Sir! Sir!’ It was Coxswain Bennet who had shouted. ‘They’re not clubs, sir, they’re fish!’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Bennet?’

The coxswain wore a huge grin of relief. ‘Those aren’t clubs they’re holding, sir, they’re fish. They’ve come to sell us fresh fish!’

 

At first light, leaving Kempe in charge of the
Beagle
, FitzRoy sent Murray east to map the open end of Nassau Bay, and Stokes west to explore the side-channels there. He, Bennet and King, fortified with plenty of fresh-cooked fish, headed north, where the walls of the bay narrowed. Strange, bright green conical structures lined the shore, which proved on closer inspection to be huge mounds of discarded sea shells, turned emerald by mould, and a profusion of wild celery shoots twisting through and around them. Despite the cold, this was the most heavily populated area they had visited: it was dotted with ramshackle, cone-shaped, brush wigwams, which looked like badly tended haycocks. The people seemed even poorer, muddier and more degraded than those to the west, having no sealskins, but their manner — in spite of Boat, York and Fuegia’s terror — was unquestionably friendlier and more tractable. As soon as they saw the cutter they would rush to their canoes to trade fish and shellfish, waving their tiny ragged otterskins to attract attention. They would shout for a
‘cuchilla’,
the Spanish for ‘knife’: evidently, at some point in history, a party of Spaniards had passed this way. Miles of stubbly shingle beach fringed this end of the bay, guanaco hoofprints showing in the muddy banks of streams; after a year in the storm-battered depths of Tierra del Fuego, even the knowledge that a herd of guanaco was nearby felt like a friendly harbinger of civilization.

They sailed the cutter up into the northern arm of the bay, where it narrowed to a twisting channel barely wide enough for two ships to pass. Here, they came across an obstacle: three native canoes in line abreast, blocking their way.

‘They don’t wish us to go any further,’ said King.

‘They’re trying to protect something,’ said Bennet, realizing.

‘Proceed slowly.’

The cutter pushed forward and, without a sound, the three native canoes parted to let it pass. The morning sun shone brilliantly for the first time in months; the water was glass. The sailors’ breath rose and condensed frostily in their overgrown hair. At a quarter speed, the cutter drifted inch by inch along the final hundred yards of the narrows, to the place where the rock walls opened out once more. There it stopped; some of the men stared to the west, and some stared to the east, but in whichever direction they chose to look, the sight before them took their breath away.

‘Well hang me,’ murmured King.

‘Great heavens,’ said FitzRoy.

They were sitting in a channel between the mountains, except that the word ‘channel’ hardly sufficed. This was a ravine, a chasm, an axe-cut running through the heart of the continent, straight as an arrow, for perhaps sixty miles in either direction. It was about a mile or two in width, with snow-capped mountains three or four thousand feet in height ranged on either side, their sunny summits apparently suspended vertically over the deep blue water. Beneath the mantle of white, countless magnificent azure glaciers gushed cascading meltwater from side valleys balanced hundreds of feet in the air. Every arm of the sea in view was also terminated by a tremendous glacier; occasionally a steepling tower of ice would crumble from one of these cliffs into a distant corner of the sound. The far-off crash would reverberate through the lonely channels like the broadside of a man-of-war, or the distant rumble of a volcano. Hundred-foot ice blocks would bob gently through the water, like polar icebergs in miniature, and when the ripples reached the cutter, dazzling light flung itself out from their surface and broke into stars. Along the entire length of the ravine, the tree line ran absolutely level, as if drawn by a child with a ruler. The beech leaves clinging to the cliffs glowed an autumnal red at the base, merging into the customary yellow-green further up, where the cold had retarded the action of the seasons. Not for the first time, FitzRoy wished that an official ship’s artist had been retained aboard the
Beagle
.

‘This is unbelievable, sir. It’s incredible. We have found a channel to rival the Straits of Magellan.’

‘Indeed we have, Mr Bennet. If its two ends can be located and are joined to the sea, as they surely must be, then we have found a navigable channel that escapes the necessity of rounding the Horn.’

‘What should we call it?’

‘The narrows that brought us here will be named after Mr Murray. This channel is too important to be named after any one man. I think we should call it the Beagle Channel.’

‘Are we to survey it ourselves, sir?’ asked King.

‘It would take a month at least. We are in want of provisions — we have only a few weeks’ aliment left — and we are ordered to reach the Brazils by June. No, this is a task for some future expedition.’

They sat in silent awe for some twenty minutes further before finally setting to work. They surveyed the immediate locality of the channel and the Murray Narrows, climbed a nearby summit (which they named Mount King) by following the guanaco trails, collected greenstone samples for stratigraphic analysis, and gathered specimens of local barnacles and other shellfish. They camped that night on a narrow shelf of shingle, close-packed and shivering in their makeshift tent.

On their return through the narrows the next morning, the three silent canoes, each containing its own family, lay strung across the channel exactly as before, like guards of honour to an invisible potentate. A gentle breeze had sprung up, presaging the end of the precious clear spell, so the crew of the cutter tacked back down the narrows, a judicious oar here and there helping to keep them on course.

‘Pull alongside that canoe.’

‘Sir?’

‘We have three of the western tribe aboard the
Beagle
— the Alikhoolip. We do not have any of the Yamana.’

‘We are to take them with us? As specimens?’

‘Not as specimens, Mr Bennet. As fellow men, to share in our civilization, that we may form them in the ways of our society. Besides, the die is now cast. We have not the provisions to return to the west, but if we release our three Indian guests here I suspect they will be torn limb from limb. So, yes, we are to take them with us.’