Savage (2 page)

At the heart of their territory was the Yahgashaga, the Yamana word for the channel of a mountain valley, which was known in English as the Murray Narrows. Here, in the waters and on the banks of the Beagle Channel and Ponsonby Sound, the Yamana fished, hunted and scoured the coastline for food. The prizes were birds' eggs, fish and beached whales, mussels and limpets and, in the thickly forested western flank of Navarin Island, berries and the occasional animal. On these shores the Yamana endured makeshift lives, in temporary wigwams with frames of branches and coverings of twigs, grass and leaves. They were built into small hollows that offered little protection against a clattering wind.

Despite the adverse climate and the paucity of their shelter, the Yamana wore little clothing. Hides could be obtained from otters, foxes, seals and occasionally the llama-like guanaco, but these rarely provided much more than an apron and a stole for the shoulders. In what little class distinction existed among these people, an impoverished Yamana – one who had failed to obtain a fur – would be called
api-tupan,
skin only.

There were few rules or laws to Yamana life, and while there is evidence that they were superstitious, it appears they had no concept of a Superior Being or God. According to their folklore, when the first settlers came to Tierra del Fuego the men had all the unpleasant tasks in life: making meals, building huts, minding the children and tending the fires. Women were free spirits who wore masks and practised witchcraft; they led the hunting and fishing, and came and went as they pleased. The men, however, were biding their time. Neglected and oppressed, they rose in rebellion, seized the terrifying masks and killed the women, sparing none but the baby girls. To these they repeated a mantra: their only duty in life was to serve. After years of indoctrination the men were able to relax, their dominance successfully established.

If this story had any basis of truth, though, it was not reflected in the day-to-day dealings of the indigenous people, for while men claimed some authority over their women, they also respected and deferred to their spouses – unlike the Selk'nam, who held women in strict submission. Nevertheless there was a well-defined sexual division of labour. Yamana women had great power and responsibility. They carried out the domestic chores – prepared the food and looked after the children – but they also controlled the canoes, did most of the paddling and caught mullet, smelt and conger eel with strands of their hair, cut and plaited into a fine line and baited with discarded fish tails. Such was their standing that the women kept all the fish they caught and decided with whom they would share it.

Men took greater responsibility for land-based activities: whereas the women were proficient swimmers, their husbands were barely able to float. They therefore took charge of hunting, collecting fuel, repairing canoes and tending fires.

The provision of food was the Yamana's most constant concern. They used slings, snares and spears of finely honed and barbed bone to hunt shags and steamer ducks; highly prized, vicious dogs hounded sea otters out of kelp jungles and chased guanacoes off the coast and into the sea, where they were easy meat for the waiting canoes. Against whales and seals they flung specially designed spears with heads connected to the shaft by leather thongs that would detach when they hit the target. The beleaguered creature would drag the shaft through the water, until its energy dissipated and the the pursuing Yamana overtook it and pounced. Mussels and limpets were scraped off the rocks at low tide. The Yamana's meat intake was supplemented by berries –
belacamaim
(rain berry),
shanamaim
(swamp berry), the bright red clumps of
sepisa
and the grape-like
goosh.

Meat and blubber were often consumed raw, but sometimes cooked over the family fire, which was perhaps the most valuable element of all: for cooking, as a buttress against cold and, with smoke, a warning signal to others of visitors or danger. The upkeep of a fire was a great responsibility: once built it was rarely allowed to die and then only through carelessness. A fire was watched day and night, and if it went out, glowing embers had to be cadged off a neighbour.

The Yamana were nomads, who passed their days shifting from one location to another in bark canoes or large dug-outs. In these circumstances their fires posed a particular problem: how to keep them alight while at sea. Each canoe was fitted with a plinth of sand and turf upon which a small blaze could be placed and transported without posing any risk to the vessel (canoes were far from watertight anyway, so there was little danger and there was the added bonus of heat during freezing journeys). When a family pulled into a rocky cove for the night and was unable to beach the boat, the woman would paddle the canoe to the shore and the man would lift the fire off the plinth and carry it to land. Once the operation was completed the woman would row out – sometimes hundreds of metres – to a bed of sea kelp, where she would moor the boat with fronds then jump into the icy water to swim back to her family and the warmth of a glowing bonfire.

It was around these fires that the latest news would be spread by passing travellers: sightings of whale or seal; where the
alacush
(steamer duck) was nesting; and the death of distant relations. And it was here that the many tales of Yamana folklore were passed down to new generations: of how canoes were invented, and of the stone man that ate young girls. Amid tales of incest, infidelity, menstruation, violence and anthropomorphism, young children would have heard how the truculent Wasana had been turned into a mouse, of how the rockfish got its flat head, and stories of the wild men who lived in the woods or the monsters that dwelled in the lakes.

*   *   *

The story of Tierra del Fuego has been told many times by exploiters, explorers and settlers – in the chronicles and narratives of the likes of Magellan, Drake, de Sarmiento, van Noort, Anson, Fitzroy, Darwin and Bridges to name but a few. But the Fuegians are absent, save as freaks and novelties or nuisances and obstacles to the advance of the white man and his civilisation. To most of the Europeans and North Americans who ventured into these parts, they were a primitive and wretched group of savages, lawless atheists who lived in squalor – as Darwin was to say, they were ‘the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld' – and thus undeserving of a history. Eventually, when they began to be heard, as in the accounts of the Ushuaia mission station, established in the 1870s, it was both too late and their listeners too plagued by Victorian values and prejudices. Most tragically, by the time historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and ethnographers with a different, more sympathetic approach to the native population arrived on the scene, there was virtually no one left to study. Wiped out in a genocide launched from the barrel of a gun and the spread of alien diseases, much of the history of the Fuegian peoples died with them.

At the time that this story begins, in May 1830, there would have been nothing extraordinary about a Yamana boy called Orundellico. Not long into his teens, he lived on the shores of the Yahgashaga in a loose grouping of father, mother, brothers, sisters and several uncles and their families. As winter was closing in and the skies blackened, news began to filter through of the activities of white men in their area. This would not have troubled Orundellico's people. Their relations with these strange visitors had largely been cordial and when, around 7 May, the white man eventually appeared, it caused little consternation. The arrival of the foreigner opened up opportunities for the bartering of dogs and dried fish, sparkling stones, metal objects, and the lengths of cloth they craved.

Alerted that a large boat bearing Europeans was plying the area, Orundellico's family boarded three canoes and went in chase. They carried fish and skins to trade. Alongside Orundellico were several men he would have known as his uncles. Each would have been anxious to intercept the foreigners before any other group could get to them. That way the spoils of trade were greater. It would, therefore, have been with some satisfaction that, within sight of the coast, they encountered the large boat alone and hailed it with their offerings, waving their arms and banging their chests with clenched fists. All seemed normal, the white men expressed interest, the fish were being examined, trinkets were being received and then something unexpected happened. The basic facts are clear: over the course of the next few minutes Orundellico was removed from his canoe and carried on board the foreigners' boat. A large button was thrown to an uncle as payment. Then the white men sailed away with Orundellico. What is less clear is the level of coercion, the degree of willingness on the Fuegians' part to trade one of their own and how far they understood the transaction. The only account we have of this moment is that of Robert FitzRoy, commander of the
Beagle,
and in charge of the whale-boat in question. His report of 11 May 1830 reads:

… we continued our route, but were stopped when in sight of the Narrows by three canoes full of natives, anxious for barter. We gave them a few beads and buttons, for some fish; and, without any previous intention, I told one of the boys in a canoe to come into our boat, and gave the man who was with him a large shining mother-of-pearl button. The boy got into my boat directly, and sat down. Seeing him and his friends seem quite contented, I pulled onwards, and, a light breeze springing up made sail. Thinking that this accidental occurrence might prove useful to the natives, as well as to ourselves, I determined to take advantage of it. The canoe, from which the boy came, paddled towards the shore …

There is no way of testing the account's reliability, no means of knowing whether Orundellico was happy to climb into the large boat, or if he was torn kicking and screaming from his uncle. FitzRoy knew no Yamana, and the Fuegians could neither speak nor understand English. It is highly unlikely that they understood what was about to befall Orundellico – and had they known would they really have sold him for a cast-off button? But however the abduction was achieved, FitzRoy was only too aware that if, indeed, he had ordered his men to seize the young boy and hold him against his will on the boat, he had committed an act of kidnap, for which he could expect to be severely reprimanded. If this was so he was unlikely to admit to it in his official report. In further elaboration and justification of his conduct, FitzRoy wrote that his new captive ‘seemed to be pleased at his change and fancied he was going to kill guanaco, or
wãnãkäye
as he called them – as they were to be found near that place'.

The boat sailed swiftly to a beach where camp was made for the night. Orundellico must have soon realised that it was no guanaco hunt he was engaged in. Whether willingly traded by his parents, or seized by the English barterers, the consequence for him was the same: he had been abducted. And in that critical moment, when Orundellico passed from one boat into the other, he crossed an invisible frontier. In his new existence he would begin to shed his Fuegian identity – his clothes, his habits and his language. But first his captors took his name. As the Fuegian child was hauled into the boat, Orundellico became Jemmy Button.

Chapter 2

By May 1830 Robert FitzRoy had been with the
Beagle
for just eighteen months. His acquaintanceship with Tierra del Fuego was barely a year old. It had been a challenging, frustrating and at times exasperating experience. When he accepted command of the ship, his first captaincy, he was twenty-three years old, and he took on the job in tragic circumstances.

The two ships HMS
Adventure
and HMS
Beagle
had set out from England in 1826 charged with establishing accurate longitudes for the city of Monte Video and the cape of Santa Maria. When that was done they were to survey and map the southern coastline of South America, from Cape St Antonio on the Atlantic coast to the island of Chiloe on the Pacific. Even by the shortest route possible, through the Straits of Magellan, this would have been a survey covering more than 2,500 miles; going the long way around the Horn would have added another 500 miles. The task before the ships, however, included all of this plus plotting the complex coves, bays and channels of Tierra del Fuego and the labyrinthine western coast of Patagonia, many hundreds, if not thousands of miles extra.

The justification for the work was simple: in the days before the Panama Canal, the passage around Cape Horn and Tierra del Fuego constituted one of the world's most important shipping channels, and the major route around the Americas, but countless ships came to grief on these terrible shores – at the end of the nineteenth century up to nine ships a year foundered on Staten Island alone, at the eastern tip of the archipelago. This survey would make the route a far safer proposition. There was more to it, though. This was conquest and influence by mapping. The Royal Navy was the most deadly sea force on the globe, the world's self-appointed policeman: information was not only crucial to maintaining its position of power, but plotting the courses and coastlines of unexplored passages and territories gave it and its officers immense status and intensified prestige.

At the head of the expedition, on board the
Adventure,
was Captain Philip Parker King. The son of the first governor of New South Wales, he had already built a reputation surveying the coast of Australia, yet he was still only in his mid-thirties. His number two, in command of the
Beagle,
was Pringle Stokes, an industrious yet frail sailor whom King was keen to praise for his ‘daring, skill and seamanship'. Between them they divided up the workload of the survey: while the
Adventure
concentrated on the area around Port Famine to the east of the Straits of Magellan, the
Beagle
headed off to the straits' western mouth to fix the positions of Cape Pillar and Cape Victory, then to survey the Evangelist Islands. Over the next months each of the ships was to have a number of escapades – including, on the
Beagle
's part, the rescuing of a ship's crew stranded in Fury Bay – before reuniting and turning back to Rio de Janeiro to refit.