Evolution's Captain (15 page)

T
hey had come a remarkably long way. There was no more
certain sign of the Fuegians' anglicization than their clothing. The first thing FitzRoy had done after kidnapping them, even before feeding them, was to dress them in English clothing. This, he assured the Admiralty in his first communication concerning his protégés, made them “very happy.”

Now, two years on, they walked about the ship in their fancy duds and gazed shoreward from the decks, the oddest of tourists. There was no cruising or yachting gear for passengers, no white ducks or striped blazers. Though they may have been given oiled canvas seacoats to permit them to get some air on deck during inclement weather, the Fuegians would not have dressed as seamen. York Minster and Jemmy Button, in earnest collusion with their captors over their transformation, dressed in the
de rigueur
fashion of early-nineteenth-century gentlemen: aboard ship and ashore, they wore topcoats with tails, double-breasted waistcoats with lapels, high-collared shirts with cravats, long trousers, and leather boots. They had probably been given cheap watches with fobs to complete the proper “weskit” effect. The full regalia, pounds of English wool, must have been swel
tering in the tropics, but it was the clear badge of their elevation from savagery and they wore every layer of it devoutly.

Jemmy Button in particular was observed by everyone to be fastidious about his dress. He had grown fat and vain during his stay in England, he was rarely seen without his white kid gloves, and was scrupulous, even neurotic, about the polish of his boots. While his speech never went far beyond the basic “Me go you” plateau of essential communication, he had an ear for the delicate and foppish in expression. When he visited Darwin in his seasick berth, Jemmy gazed at him with pity and said, “Poor, poor fellow!” This virtual satire of excessive Englishness—closely resembling someone from the lower classes putting on airs—amused captain, crew, and Darwin alike, and endeared Jemmy Button to all of them. He instinctually, if incompletely, understood this and played to his gallery.

Fuegia Basket's dresses and bonnets were probably more comfortable at sea and in the heat, but no less proper. And all three dressed up in their formal best for FitzRoy's regular Sunday shipboard services of hymn singing and prayers.

Although thrown into intimate contact with them for more than a year, Darwin's impressions of the Fuegians were less savvy than his observations of the natural landscapes he glimpsed at the
Beagle
's ports of call. He agreed largely with FitzRoy's opinions of their innate personalities and characteristics, which the captain had derived from his ideas about facial features and the mumbo jumbo of phrenology. Soon after their arrival in England, FitzRoy had taken them to a phrenologist to have the bumps on their heads read. The specialist's finding was that all three were “disposed to cunning” and possessed “animal inclinations and passions” that would pose problems in making them “usefeul members of society.” Nobody in Christian England would have been surprised by such a diagnosis. Darwin saw a gentler side to Jemmy Button, but his own conclusion that the boy must possess a “nice disposition” was based less on his day-
to-day contact with him than his reading of the physiognomy of Jemmy's face.

Darwin thought the twelve-year-old Fuegia Basket “a nice, modest, reserved young girl, with a rather pleasing but sometimes sullen expression.” He noticed too that she possessed an innate cleverness: “[She was] very quick in learning anything, especially languages. This was showed by picking up some Portuguese and Spanish, when left on shore for only a short time at Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, and in her knowledge of English.” Fuegia was the best English speaker of the three, and she picked up manners with her languages. She was the charmer, the pet of the lower deck on the voyage back to England from Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy's showpiece specimen who had won Queen Adelaide's heart. Fuegia Basket had a natural charm that needed no translation, that bridged any cultural gap, an endearing quality as potent in its way as sex appeal. She understood this and used it.

Darwin's impressions of York Minster were close to FitzRoy's, for the little he wrote of the elder, most intractable Fuegian echoes the phrenologist's report, which Darwin undoubtedly read: “His disposition was reserved, taciturn, morose, and when excited violently passionate; his affections were very strong towards a few friends on board; his intellect good.”

Darwin was most struck by the two Fuegian men's eyesight. His own had proved extremely sharp in shooting, and he had excellent distance vision, better than most of the crew's. But York and Jemmy sighted ships at sea and land beyond the horizon long before anyone else on board the ship. They were well aware of their superiority and enjoyed it: “Me see ship, me no tell,” Jemmy liked to tease the officers on watch. Their sense of taste seemed keener too; they appeared to Darwin to have natural powers far beyond the capabilities of Europeans, an impression he was to amplify years later when he came to write his
Descent of Man
.

The clearest object of York Minster's affections was Fuegia Basket. It was understood by all on board that once landed in
Tierra del Fuego, York and Fuegia would become, as the sailors put it, “man and wife.” Until then, while in his care, FitzRoy kept them apart as far as possible. Fuegia's hammock was swung aft, near the officers' quarters, while Jemmy and York bunked forward with the crew.

 

It was a long slow cruise south. The
Beagle
made lengthy stops
in Rio de Janeiro (FitzRoy left Fuegia Basket ashore here in the company of an English family for three months, where she helped the young children of the family with their English, while picking up Portuguese herself), Montevideo, and Bahia Blanca on the Argentine coast. Between these ports the ship cruised painstakingly back and forth surveying the coast.

Darwin took advantage of this tedious cruising to explore ashore for weeks at a time, renting houses and staying with ranchers, wandering through Brazilian rain forests, galloping across the Argentine pampas with bands of gauchos, thrilling and exhausting himself. He also spent more time in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. For reading material ashore, surrounded by paradisaical natural glories, he carried Milton's
Paradise Lost
everywhere. He stayed in touch with the ship and its wanderings by a fairly regular correspondence with FitzRoy. The tone of these letters shows the essential warmth of their friendship. The captain clearly missed Darwin while he was off the ship; his letters reveal an antic, schoolboy banter—a tone he could never have enjoyed with his subordinates—underscoring both FitzRoy's tender age and the lonely isolation of his rank and often fearsome responsibility:

FitzRoy was anxious to get south to Tierra del Fuego to land the Fuegians and Matthews, the missionary, and help them establish their mission during the brief southern summer, December to January. In September 1832, daunted by the enor
mity and difficulty of making a thorough survey of the Argentine coast with the
Beagle
alone, he hired two small local sealing schooners to share some of the work. The seventeen-ton
Paz
was, FitzRoy wrote, “as ugly and ill-built a craft as I ever saw, covered with dirt, and soaked with rancid oil.” The eleven-ton
Liebre
was just as filthy, but they appeared seaworthy and suitable. FitzRoy outfitted them from the
Beagle
's stores, manned them with his own men, and sent them off to survey the shoal waters and river estuaries between Bahia Blanca and Rio Negro.

By early December, the survey work was done. The
Beagle
returned to Montevideo for supplies, and then sailed south again.

 

On December 16, 1832, the
Beagle
closed with the bleak eastern
shore of Tierra del Fuego. Through the long afternoon and twilight the ship sailed southeast, paralleling the shore at a distance of a few miles, and in the evening anchored in an exposed bight off Cape Santa Inez, some 130 miles south of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan. The land ran in a long unbroken line northwest to southeast, offering no safe harbor, ending in sheer cliffs over which seabirds wheeled and cried.

“The sky was gloomy,” wrote Darwin in his diary. “At a great distance to the south was a chain of lofty mountains, the summits of which glittered with snow.”

The
Beagle
had never visited this part of the Fuegian coast. The crew wondered if it was inhabited. Shortly they knew: smoke rose from the shore. Through his telescope, Darwin saw Indians scattered about the sheer edge of the land “watching the ship with interest.” This southeastern shore of Tierra del Fuego was the territory of the Ona tribes.

With their keen eyesight, the Fuegians aboard the
Beagle
did not need telescopes. “Oens-men—very bad!” Jemmy and York told FitzRoy, and asked him to fire at them, which he declined to do.

Despite his refusal to kill their enemies, FitzRoy observed that the three Fuegians appeared elated. They stared shoreward from the deck and knew they were home.

The captain's own feelings at seeing “his” Fuegians so close to their repatriation went unrecorded.

N
owhere are the designs of men more subject to the cooperation
of the natural world than among the dangers of the Cape Horn region. All of FitzRoy's hopes and plans, his schemes for the Fuegians, his surveying mission, the lives of all aboard his ship, depended on his carrying them all through a war zone of wind and waves. Above and beneath every other piece of business now came the daily struggle to survive conditions that had long made of this place a graveyard.

Almost immediately, this meant flight. A heavy swell, harbinger of an Atlantic storm far to the north, came in the night and set the
Beagle
rolling violently. There was little breeze, but as the swell deepened, FitzRoy, who had hoped to spend a day or two in the vicinity to make observations, grew anxious that the waves and the wind that might follow them could drive the ship into the cliffs. At 3
A.M
., when first light came, he gave the order to weigh anchor, but with her tethers to the seafloor raised, the ship drifted uncertainly, pushed shoreward by the swell as the crew scrambled in the rigging to work her seaward in light airs. Then the breeze FitzRoy had anticipated sprang up, filled the sails, and carried the
Beagle
out of immediate danger. But weather was coming and there was
no protection from it on this long inhospitable shore, so FitzRoy turned his ship south again and ran for the Strait of Le Maire.

At noon, the masthead lookout reported very high breakers ahead off Cape San Diego: the Southern Ocean's flood tide was pouring east from Cape Horn like a millrace through the strait, piling up against the rising north wind and swell, creating seas that could overwhelm a modern tanker. “The motion from such a sea is very disagreeable,” wrote Darwin with considerable understatement; “it is called ‘pot-boiling,' & as water boiling breaks irregularly over the ship's side.” The
Beagle
escaped a pot-boiling that day for when she reached Cape San Diego an hour later at 1
P.M
., the tide had turned, running now in the same direction as the wind and waves; the breakers disappeared, and the
Beagle
sluiced through the strait on the new, and now favorable, ebb tide.

A few hours later, close under the lee of the Fuegian shore, the ship sailed into Good Success Bay (any anchorage in the Strait of Le Maire is a success story), and Darwin got his first look at Fuegians not in English clothing, but in their natural element.

As soon as the
Beagle
's anchors were down, the wind shifted from the north to the southwest and began to blow hard. Heavy squalls and hurricane-force williwaws swept down upon the ship from the high surrounding hills, but the water in the anchorage remained flat, undisturbed by waves or swell, and the fine white sand on the floor of Good Success Bay proved to be firm holding ground.

This was Darwin's first experience of Cape Horn conditions, but he was confident of the ship and her men.

The next morning Darwin met a group of Fuegians ashore. He was amazed: “I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage and civilized man is,” he wrote in his diary.

With just the skin of a guanaco (a South American animal similar to a llama) thrown over their shoulders, daubed with red and white “paint” and charcoal, they reminded Darwin strongly of the Wolf's Glen devils in Carl Maria von Weber's gothic
Der Freischutz
, which he had seen on the stage in Edinburgh eight years earlier.

The elder “devil” slapped him simultaneously on the chest and back three times while making “the same noise which people do when feeding chickens,” and then asked Darwin to slap him back in the same fashion. He obliged, making the Fuegian happy. Darwin concurred with Captain Cook's description of the sound of the Fuegian language.

He was equally struck by the primitiveness of their lifestyle.

He also observed, as others had before him, that the Fuegians were excellent mimics, able to mime the Englishmen's physical mannerisms precisely and parrot back whole sentences in the English they couldn't understand. What European could possibly do that, or follow an American Indian through a sentence of more than three words? Darwin wondered. He believed this skill was a complement of the superior natural powers of taste, smell, and sight that he had observed in the Fuegians aboard the
Beagle
.

He returned to the ship for lunch and was rowed ashore again that afternoon with a party that included FitzRoy, Jemmy Button, and York Minster.

This was FitzRoy's first encounter with Fuegians in their natural state since leaving Tierra del Fuego two years earlier. He was impressed all over again by their savagery, but now he saw that condition, with a kind of brotherly affection, as improvable.

In attempting to describe their color, FitzRoy sought a palette of comparisons.

The two “civilized” Fuegian men, Jemmy and York, became instant snobs. They alternately laughed at the squalor of their countrymen and appeared ashamed by them. They even pretended not to understand the Fuegians' speech (for Jemmy this might have been true), but York Minster could not help laughing hysterically when one of the older Fuegians, recognizing him as a fellow native despite his fine clothes, chided him and told him he was dirty for not shaving the few hairs on his face.

Richard Matthews, the missionary who was to establish a new Jerusalem on these wild shores, was also getting a first look at his future parishioners in the raw. His true impressions were not recorded, but according to FitzRoy he remained stoically unfazed: “[he] did not appear to be at all discouraged by a close inspection of these natives. He remarked to me, that ‘they were no worse than he had supposed them to be.'”

 

After three days of survey work, while Darwin and others
climbed the nearby hills and attempted unsuccessfully to shoot one of the giant guanacos they had spotted, the
Beagle
sailed from Good Success Bay. FitzRoy was eager to settle Matthews
and the Fuegians ashore at last and tried to make for Christmas Sound and March Harbour, west of Cape Horn—the neighborhood where his fine whaleboat had been stolen two and a half years earlier, and where he had abducted York Minster and Fuegia Basket.

The ship passed south of the Horn on December 21, but then the wind shifted and began to blow at gale force, as it so often does here, driving them out to sea. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, the
Beagle
's crew worked her through driving hail into a small cove on Hermite Island, just west of Cape Horn. There they remained for Christmas and until the end of the month, in a secure anchorage, while storms and williwaws blew around them.

On December 31, though conditions were little improved, the
Beagle
weighed anchor, as FitzRoy was impatient to reach March Harbour, now only 100 miles away. But the weather remained relentlessly against him. For the first two weeks of January he pushed the
Beagle
westward through a succession of gales, battling the entire time to make that short distance. For days the ship made no headway at all: the tiny offshore Diego Ramirez Islands were sighted through the murk close off the ship's port beam on January 2 and again in exactly the same place on January 5. Life aboard the ship beating with no letup into gale force winds and icy breaking seas was reduced to the grimmest continuum of food, water, rest, and struggle. Seawater made its way everywhere below, through hatches and streaming from the men's soaked clothing. This is what the
Bounty
—much the same size and shape as the
Beagle
—faced in this same spot in 1788, before Bligh gave up, turned at last downwind, and sailed around the world the other way to reach the Pacific.

The
Beagle
's captain and crew were not as unhappy as the
Bounty
's, but her natural philosopher was as miserable as he had ever been. Swinging wildly in his hammock, he complained to his diary: “[Since December 21] I have scarcely for an hour been quite free from seasickness. How long the bad weather may last,
I know not; but my spirits, temper, and stomach, I am well assured, will not hold out much longer.”

On January 11, the towering rock formation that had given York Minster his name was sighted ahead, “looming among driving clouds.” FitzRoy believed they would soon be at anchor in March Harbour, then only a mile ahead, when the gale suddenly increased to storm force and darkness, violent squalls, rain and hail drove the
Beagle
out to sea again.

All the following day the ship lay hove-to south and just west of Cape Horn, drifting slowly back over the sea miles she had won with so much effort. It was twenty-four days since they had passed the Horn and they were now barely twenty miles west of it. The storm steadily worsened until it reached a pitch of screaming intensity around noon on the 13th. It was the worst weather FitzRoy had ever encountered. The waves had grown to such heights that he remained on deck in the driving wind and rain, able to do nothing but watch them anxiously, feeling a sense of imminent catastrophe. At 1
P.M
., three great rollers bore down on the ship.

In other words, the ship was knocked right over on her side, capsized.

Water burst open doors and hatches, cataracts tumbled below into the chart room where Darwin lay in his misery and spread through the cabins. The
Beagle
tried to rise but wallowed on her side, listing with the weight of the water now trapped
against her bulwarks. “Had another sea then struck her,” wrote FitzRoy, “the little ship might have been numbered among the many of her class which have disappeared.”

Lieutenant Sulivan struggled up onto the deck from below (as he later described the event to his son) and found the
Beagle
on her side. Carpenter Jonathan May was already sliding along the nearly vertical wall of the deck, struggling with a hand spike to open the hinging wooden ports at the edge—now the bottom—of the deck to allow the water to drain off. Sulivan helped him and when a few of these had been knocked open, the water drained off the deck and the ship came up. One of the new whaleboats had been torn off its davits astern and was hanging smashed alongside the hull; crewmen had to take an ax to its tackle to chop it adrift. But the ship was otherwise unscathed. None of its rigging had carried away, no one had been swept overboard. Apart from the whaleboat, the only recorded damage was to one chronometer and Darwin's “irreparable loss” of some of his specimens.

The knockdown marked the height of the storm. The wind soon abated sufficiently for the crew to set some sail and the ship turned north, off the wind, to find shelter. It was after dark when the
Beagle
let go her anchors in quiet water behind False Cape Horn at the edge of Hardy Peninsula, only twelve miles from her last anchorage on Hermite Island, which she had left two weeks earlier.