Savage (27 page)

In the mission's terms there were indeed a number of successes to boast of: all nine Fuegians attended church, moved their lips in time with prayers and said, ‘Amen.' They were polite, they shook hands and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Despard.' The women kissed the missionary women when they met them in the morning. There were hints, too, that the Fuegians had started to understand their keepers' idea of morality: when Wyeenagowl's daughter stole from the dining room her mother chastised her; when Macooallan found a turn-buckle he took it back to the carpenter.

The women in particular were singled out for praise. Their time at Cranmer had turned them from lethargic sloths into energetic, industrious labourers, who had ‘learned to work at their needle, though in a rough way, to wash some of their clothes, to keep them and their persons clean, and also to perform many household duties'. And there were also, of course, the educational achievements of young Ookoko and Lucca to be proud of. Descriptions of the two told of them sitting at desks drawing and writing with pens, saying, ‘God bless this food,' over dinner, and dressed in their best clothes for tea in the mission house. Late in their stay Lucca even wrote the following letter to a Mr Scott of Dublin, honorary secretary of the Patagonian Missionary Society in Ireland. It was written in phonetic Fuegian, the translation of which read,

My Friend

I am glad to saw much; to plane much. By and bye I shall be a carpenter.

I shall visit England; and you will give me a hatchet, a chisel, and a bradawl; and I shall say, thank you.

Luccaenche Tellon.

When Despard looked back on these months, he did do so with no small satisfaction. He claimed to have built his Fuegian vocabulary up to more than 800 words and felt the need to comment, ‘We were sorry to part with Jemmy Button and his party, but we shall really grieve much to part with our present friends, and shall miss them very much, they have behaved so very well.' He also wrote, ‘Jemmy Button could never have been what Ookoko is now – a really smart, good-looking, intelligent lad, full of cheerfulness, and perpetually coruscating in smiles…'

There was another side to this story, not formally recorded by the missionaries, but surprisingly easy to find amid the tales of good deeds and heartwarming progress. As early as 20 January 1859, just three weeks after the Fuegians' arrival, Phillips had had a serious run-in with the most volatile of the group, Schwaiamugunjiz. His wife Wyruggelkeepa had been passing time with the wives of the mission in Sulivan House, but after having been left on her own for a few minutes she was accused by Mrs Despard of stealing a piece from a chess set. Phillips went to the Fuegians' house, rummaged through Wyruggelkeepa's possessions and found a pawn in one of her bags. The catechist hectored the woman. It was bad to steal, they had been good to her, how could she do this? ‘She seemed rather ashamed of herself,' Phillips noted in his journal.

The Fuegian men had been away collecting mussels and limpets and when they returned Phillips visited them to wish them goodnight. What he found waiting for him there was an incensed Schwaiamugunjiz, barely able to contain his anger. The Fuegian shouted and screamed at Phillips, who remembered,

He was in a terrible rage about his wife being accused of stealing (shraena). His manner was so fierce, and his bearing so threatening, that I felt for the moment fearful. I well knew, however, that it would not do to appear timid, and immediately went in, and shut the door upon the whole party, and then and there talked him down – explaining fully the whole circumstance, and giving him and others well to understand that although we should be very kind to them, and, if they worked a little every day, we would reward them accordingly, yet no stealing would be allowed; and, moreover, that they always would be found out. We parted for the night excellent friends, and they had from me the assurance which they eagerly desired, that I was their ‘Tagacollo' (friend). I had evening prayer with them ere I left.

At times Phillips and the others were seen to be treating their Fuegian guests with disrespect and disdain. Even Ookoko was not immune. After a day's hunting with the catechist, in which many wild geese were shot, the boy was rewarded with a less tasty alternative. Phillips admitted, with disarming honesty, ‘I intended paying him in victuals for his labour, but had not the remotest idea of giving him five geese, when loggerhead ducks would please his palate as well.' Ookoko was furious, but despite a vociferous argument and his refusal to accept the duck, Phillips eventually won the day.

Schwaiamugunjiz, though, was the most bellicose of the Fuegians. A small, but passionate man, with an extraordinary indentation on his forehead, he went by the nickname Squire Muggins, or just the Squire, and was described by Despard as the ‘most light-fingered of the lot … his approach is the signal for gathering up and placing in safety any articles lying around'. When his wife stole it was said that she did so either ‘by command or example of her Indian lord'. On 25 April, as Ookoko helped Bartlett pile turnips into the storehouse, Schwaiamugunjiz tried to snaffle a few vegetables for himself. Despard strode over and ordered him to stop, ‘whereat he flew into a great passion, flourished his arms, and uttered a wild cry. I ordered him peremptorily out of the store; he obeyed but gesticulated fiercely, and looked daggers. I gave him look for look, and then he calmed down, and began to talk calmly about some other thing.'

A week later a comb disappeared, and Despard asked Schwaiamugunjiz if he knew anything about it. Wyruggelkeepa, or his wife, exploded with rage and, as Despard ignored her and ordered a search of her corner of the house, she seized furniture, clothes, anything she could get hold of and threw it on the roof. Equally crazed, Schwaiamugunjiz joined in, flinging his property out of the door, yelling in Yamana that he was ‘as innocent as the babe unborn'.

Despard stood and watched, incredulous but affecting unconcern. When the noise died down, and the Fuegians' wrath had run its course, he walked up to Schwaiamugunjiz and said arrogantly,
‘Quellala shrayena, pallill cowshoo bab shrayena'
– bad man steals; English good man does not steal. With that he walked out. Soon after Ookoko called the missionary and pointed to the comb at the foot of the steps in the mission house. He claimed to have seen the Squire drop it there. Despard was sceptical and realised that Schwaiamugunjiz had probably been telling the truth; Ookoko was the more likely perpetrator. To give him credit he noted, ‘Schwy is a sort of a peg to hang all sorts of naughty things on.'

On 1 July Garland Phillips wrote to Charles Turpin, who had recently quit the mission and gone to live in Port Stanley, that Macooallan and Schwaiamugunjiz had attempted to break into the storehouse and ‘when accused of it they denied it in toto and said the rats had been eating the wood away'.

The trivial nature of the thefts and the missionaries' overbearing responses to them beggar belief. The removal of a few turnips, a chess pawn and a comb hardly amounted to felony, yet the mission's officers repeatedly threatened their whole enterprise, risking the confidence and support of the Fuegians in whom they had placed so much hope in an effort to punish and teach them a lesson. There is no doubt that they saw theft as a serious crime, that the Fuegians had a reputation for thievery and that they believed such behaviour needed to be stamped out. At times, though, the accusations were ill-founded, clearly offensive and possibly ill-judged. The Saturday after the comb incident, Schwaiamugunjiz arrived at morning prayers, despite having announced that he would no longer be attending. He walked up to Despard and offered the hand of friendship. The missionary had neither admitted his mistake nor practised forgiveness. It is ironic that in this act the ‘savage' was articulating the virtues and magnanimity espoused by the man with whom he was effecting a reconciliation.

The Fuegians were never as settled on Keppel Island as the missionaries led their backers to believe. As early as April, with six months of their sojourn still ahead of them, they were said to be growing restless and homesick. Even Despard recorded their disquiet in his journal: ‘They begin to talk a good deal of going home to see parents and friends, wives and children and to get good “push-aki” fire wood.' In late June a meeting in the Cenobium raised the question of when they would be allowed to go home, and soon afterwards Macooallan, who had another wife and children in Tierra del Fuego, became fidgety. In September Garland Phillips wrote, ‘Our present guests are very desirous of returning to their own people.' Despard remembered later that the Fuegians ‘often asked when the schooner was coming back, but were satisfied when we told them soon'.

The
Allen Gardiner
was away on the South American mainland fetching the captain's wife, his son and brother John Fell, who would be the ship's chief officer. When it arrived back on 17 September it was two weeks ahead of schedule. As the next day was a Sunday all the Fells and four of the crew came ashore for morning service. Despard noted that they were

looking so nice in their Guernseys, with the words ‘Mission Yacht' on their breasts. The new crew are certainly the finest, nicest-looking set of men we have had yet in the schooner. Three of them are fine young Swedes. One is old H McD, who was the ship's sportsman last year – a dead shot, an acute fisherman, an Arctic voyager, a veteran tar, and a capital seaman. The cook is Ookoko's ‘cookoman' come back again, who says he won't leave the
Allen Gardiner
as long as there is a berth to be had in her, for he had never been in a better sea-boat.

The time to take the Fuegians home was fast approaching.

Chapter 20

At just after eleven o'clock on the morning of Wednesday 28 September 1859, Captain Fell sent Despard a message: the tide and winds were good, the ship was ready, it was time to get the Fuegians on board in preparation for their return. The start of ‘wild bird egg' season was just a week away – on 4 October – and they were showing increasing signs of anxiety to get home.

Despard rounded up Phillips and three of the station's labourers, and headed for the jetty on Committee Bay. Here they waited as their departing guests arrived with odd-looking bundles and bags. The missionary stopped them in their tracks, and ordered his men to begin a thorough and uncompromising search. The Fuegians were outraged at the implication that they were thieves, and as the party opened the bags of Wyeenagowlkippin, her husband Macalwense roared at the top of his voice. At the same time Macooallan tried, without success, to pass his goods into the waiting boat, and when he failed he flung the lot, a bundle of biscuits and a box of gifts, into the sea. A furious Schwaiamugunjiz raised his fist at Despard's back, took his jacket off and threw it, too, into the water. A box that Despard had had made for his small articles and gifts followed. The women ripped off their clothes and flung them onto the jetty.

In the midst of the uproar Despard and his men continued the search, although according to some unconfirmed sources the catechist Phillips voiced strong objections. Nevertheless they turned up an axe, two chisels, a smoothing plane, a carpenter's line, an oil stone, Captain Fell's leggings, a long line belonging to the missionary's net, a new hammer, a mason's hammer, a gimlet, several pieces of iron band, rags, and various odds and ends including the necks of geese and animal entrails, pots and canisters of biscuits. It was, doubtless, an impressive haul and Despard would have been pleased with his initiative, though disappointed that his visitors had still to learn to refrain from pilfering. Yet one wonders at the wisdom of his actions. The Fuegians had just given up more than nine months of their lives on Keppel Island with little tangible reward. Despard was aware of how seriously they took the accusations of larceny, how deeply such allegations cut. He even recognised that the results of the search were

highly illustrative of that dislike of being found out, which prevails, as it seems, beyond the precincts of civilised society. To do wrong is one thing; to be found out is quite another. And to many the latter is by far the more painful of the two. The Fuegians are very jealous of their character for honesty; the more so, perhaps, as it stands sometimes in peril.

He knew therefore from experience that, no matter how conclusive the evidence was, such accusations caused deep hurt to the Fuegians. However, at the risk of destroying any remaining vestiges of goodwill, Despard felt the need to drum home the message one last time that theft was a sin and thieves did not prosper.

The situation calmed, the Fuegians went to the ship and once on board Schwaiamugunjiz demanded the box that he had thrown into the sea. Despard gave each a blanket to keep them warm in their homeland. Now, however, having got seven of the party on board – Ookoko and Lucca were to be kept on shore until the last minute – it appears that the opportunity for sailing was lost. Heavy winds, whipped up across the Falkland plains, made it impossible for the ship to pull out of Committee Bay. After three days of sitting around the Fuegians became increasingly frustrated at the delay and anxious to get home. Indignation at the search still ran high, hours spent idle saw grumbles foment into groans and then into strident complaints. On Saturday their seething discontent boiled over: Schwaiamugunjiz and Macalwense jumped on the unsuspecting ship's cook, Alfred Coles, and in the ensuing fracas dragged him across the deck. Macooallan intervened and pulled them apart. Coles recovered his composure and punched Schwaiamugunjiz down into the hold.

In the meantime, back on shore, Despard was giving Garland Phillips his instructions for the journey ahead in a letter.

Dear Mr Phillips …

Should there be a friendly spirit in Woollyah, I would try and spend two or three days there on shore, in the house erected during my last visit there, and get a hand from the vessel to stop with you. The captain will furnish you with biscuits etc for encouragement to the natives; and I recommend you to cause a garden to be dug and seeds to be sown, etc.