Savage (31 page)

Waite Stirling responded for the Society on 26 June, emphatically denying that natives had been taken to Keppel Island against their wish. He argued that Jemmy Button's deposition was far from clear, that it had been made under duress, and that his responses resulted from leading questions put to him by people unacquainted with his language, with preconceived opinions about the cause of the killings. In fact, he went on, not only had Jemmy Button agreed to go to Keppel Island for ‘four moons', he also gave such a good report of it that nine more of his compatriots had agreed to go there for ten months. Furthermore, the searches of the Fuegians might have been injudicious but that did not mean that they were wrong: they had to be taught not to steal.

Stirling went on to address the frequently heard accusation that insufficient precaution had been taken by the men on the day of the massacre, but said that this could only have arisen because captain, catechist and crew had been confident of the friendliness of the people at Wulaia. As to the actual causes of the massacre, the committee believed they had been ‘sought within too narrow a limit, such that consequently mere incidental circumstances have been invested with a fictitious importance, and have been magnified so as to assume the character of primary causes'. As reluctant as they claimed to be to apportion blame, they felt that, despite Alfred Coles's assertion that Jemmy was the culprit, those responsible were most likely the Oens-men who had flooded the area and whom Jemmy had accused.

In the Society's opinion the Fuegians of Wulaia were almost certainly accessories to the attack and to the subsequent plunder: ‘In the excitement of the attack it would have been remarkable if men, who knew little of the restraints of Christian civilisation, should have wholly abstained from acts of violence.' Nevertheless the governor had acted correctly in repressing the feelings of revenge that had boiled over in Stanley, but Stirling hoped that the government would send a warship to patrol the channels of Tierra del Fuego as an occasional show of force and would also lift the prohibition on Indians going to Keppel Island.

*   *   *

The Colonial Office received a further barrage of letters from William Parker Snow. Just five days after the colonial secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, heard of the deaths, on 9 May, Snow was writing with the scent of victory in his nostrils and, as he said, in the character of a person ‘having the rights of Kings'.

A fearful massacre of a whole ship's Company has taken place. I foretold it: I warned the authorities; I pointed it out to the Government at home; and I entreated for interference to prevent the natives being taken away by those men who under the name of ‘Missionaries' were reckless of consequences so long as they could carry on the system and thus obtain money from an easy public. I offered to clearly prove that the whole plan was not only deceptive but dangerous to others as well as to the poor subordinates engaged in it. But my voice was of course unheeded. The result is now seen!

Once again Snow spelled out what he had been through, what he had predicted and how he had been ignored. Yet again he demanded an inquiry and insisted that the authorities at Port Stanley be punished for their handling of his misfortune and the corruption that permeated their dealings. In private the officers of the Colonial Office agreed. A minute appended to one of Snow's letters on 11 May read, ‘It cannot be denied that Mr Snow has a sort of triumph. He foretold sad consequences from the course of this mission and his predictions have been verified. There is something moving in his earnestness…' Another minute exposed the quandary that the department found itself in:

The difficulty is to know what Mr Snow wishes to be done. A great calamity has happened, – the worst of his prophecies of evil has been fulfilled, – and it really seems, by some of the latest evidence, as if a new addition has been made to the instances in which religious zeal has lately taken the shape of kidnapping. But granting all this, what is it that this Department can do?

More letters from Snow followed, reiterating his case, demanding responses and urging action. He wrote on 22, 26 and 30 May, finally threatening to publish all the letters and communications that had passed between him and the government over the course of the previous four years. He said he would have the facts printed up and distributed throughout the country so that ‘people may know how true it is our Rulers utterly despise and trample the People under foot when certain individual interests connected with government are to be considered.' Government officers were unimpressed by the threats, and after a week or two in which they had felt a certain grudging respect for the Society's former skipper, they clearly began to tire of him. They decided to put an end to their side of the correspondence. On Snow's letter of 30 May Elliot jotted,

Two more rhapsodies have arrived from Mr Snow. I think with a loud adventurer of this kind, the boldest course is the safest, and after taking care, for upwards of a year and a half, to exhibit ample patience and supply full explanations I should recommend administering to him now such a letter as will stand well in his way in any passionate and one-sided representation that he may contemplate publishing …

One last letter was issued. It declared that the Colonial Office had no right to interfere in properly constituted court cases and should Mr Snow wish to spend vast sums of money publishing his correspondence, then so be it.

*   *   *

The attacks from Governor Moore, the government and William Parker Snow had not been entirely unexpected, but the Society would have been more surprised by the comments of the colonial chaplain in the Falklands that appeared in the Anglo-Catholic weekly the
Guardian
on 9 May. The Reverend Charles Bull accused the Society of lamentable mistakes in its operations with the Fuegians, criticised the searches that were carried out, and suggested a major rethink by the missionaries: ‘Would it not be well to establish a body of missionaries on the spot – say, at this very Woolya; give them an iron house to live in, placing firearms in their hands to use on an emergency, and visiting them regularly from Stanley or Monte Video?' In this way, Bull suggested, the seed of a Christian church could be planted in Fuegian soil, allowing constant intervention in the lives of the people there while providing a measure of security for the missionaries on the spot.

In early May the Society was reeling from the events and the criticism. It realised that its initial response – Stirling's first letter to the
Western Daily Press
of 8 May – had not been good enough; a more robust defence was needed. The detailed response to the Colonial Office and its declaration of innocence were part of this. On 11 May a public meeting was held in the schoolroom of St Paul's church, at Clifton near Bristol. It was a Friday afternoon, but the room was packed with local worthies. The meeting began with the singing of a psalm and a reading of the second chapter of Zechariah, after which Waite Stirling rose to make a statement on the massacre. He confessed that when he had first heard the news he had doubted that the mission could survive. But he had received seventy or eighty letters, all but one supportive, and he now felt that it was the Society's duty to continue. The massacre had been a test set by God that the Society must pass. He argued that the depot at Keppel Island was the only way forward, that it had been the
Allen Gardiner
's inspiration and that the public would not have supported any other course of action. He added that though the Society had been guilty of shortcomings it had made progress with the Fuegians and now understood impressive amounts of their language. To give up would be to throw away so many hard-won gains.

Stirling's audience that afternoon was not entirely sympathetic. The mysterious Scrutator might have been sitting among the crowd for, in a letter to the
Western Daily Press,
he renewed his attack:

And now, Gentlemen, let me remark, after the above facts, upon the strange consolation derived from this disaster by the good people assembled at the prayer meeting in Upper Park Street, to wit ‘that it happened on the Sabbath day,' and ‘it seemed as if God pointed out that it was Satan raging against His work;' but I have proved that it was produced by the recklessness of the society and their agents, and therefore I must conclude that Satan is much maligned in this matter.

To the outside world the Patagonian Missionary Society presented a united front, but some senior figures – and they may have been in the majority – harboured grave misgivings about its operations. The committee meeting of 5 May, at which the tragic news was broken, triggered general discussions about the missionary schooner, and how to ensure the safety of Mr Schmidt, who had gone off on his own to set up a mission in Patagonia, as well as examining ways of defraying the expenses of the widows Mrs Phillips and Mrs Fell. An interesting discussion resulted in an intriguing minute: ‘The present impression of the Committee was to the effect that Cranmer had failed to produce the advantages which were expected from it.'

The massacre caused the Society committee to meet more frequently than normal during May and June. It had to agree a response to the tragedy, a public stance with which to go forward, and a strategy for both the immediate and long-term future. On 16 May the committee minutes record a shift in its thinking on policy:

The question as to whether it would be expedient to renew the work in Tierra del Fuego was answered in the affirmation. The proper subject for consideration was how to conduct future operations? Keppel Island had been unavailing to prevent the most terrible of disasters. Was not the right principle to work on the mass, not on the few? A vessel with a screw propeller, would perhaps give reasonable security to the Mission party hereafter engaged in the work. Or a station either at Picton Island or at Elizabeth Island might perhaps be advantageous. To get amongst the natives as much as possible with as great security as possible was the problem to be solved.

A week after Charles Bull's letter had appeared in the
Guardian
suggesting greater integration of the Society's work with the lives and lands of the Fuegians, the committee, despite publicly rejecting the option, was privately moving in that direction.

However, the most interesting discussion took place at a meeting on 7 June. The vagaries of the mail from South America meant that the committee had received two letters from George Packenham Despard in the same delivery. His first had been written on 10 February, when he was concerned about the delayed return of the
Allen Gardiner
but did not yet know what had happened. The second was written on 6 March, soon after Smyley had returned from Wulaia Cove with the bad news.

For some reason that is not mentioned in the minutes of the meeting of 7 June – and the original letter no longer exists – the first letter from Despard offered his resignation. With the massacre as yet undiscovered, the idea of Despard standing down is intriguing. As has been seen, the official publications of the Society for that period are uniformly optimistic: Despard had been portrayed in the
Voice of Pity
as a man fulfilled, carrying out good and highly successful work at Cranmer and Wulaia, surrounded by a family happily settled into their Falkland Island home. Was his offer to resign an admission that things were not going as well as planned and publicly stated, and that members of the committee were as unhappy with their missionary superintendent as had been a number of their people in the field? It is possible that William Parker Snow's criticisms had been privately acknowledged by members of the Society. If so Despard might have been told this. It would have been costly and inexpedient to get rid of him while the court case dragged on, but by February the chief missionary would have been informed of the Society's legal victory against its former skipper and might have felt under pressure to go.

A number of influential members of the committee were unable to attend the meeting that day, most notably Society stalwarts the Reverends E.G. and J.W. Marsh, in-laws of Allen Gardiner, and Captain Bartholomew Sulivan (Retired). However, each supplied their thoughts on the resignation in letters to the meeting. The Marshes advised Despard not to act hastily, and to consider the circumstances of the mission. Sulivan was more controversial: his letter announced that he ‘scarcely thought it expedient to continue the services of Mr Despard'. A general discussion broke out, and it soon became clear which way the debate was going.

It was well known in Committee that Mr Despard had exceeded their wishes in some particulars, and that he had conceived plans, and wished to develop them beyond what the Committee deemed necessary, or expedient. To ask Mr Despard to reconsider his resignation would be to commit the Committee to all his plans.

The contents of the letters were discussed. In his first missive Despard had resigned giving six months' notice; from the tenor of the second the committee deduced that he still intended to resign, but the fact that he put in a request for more men and supplies suggested that he would not leave in August at the end of his notice period. A resolution was passed:

The Rev. G.P. Despard BA having tendered to the Committee his resignation as Superintendent of the Patagonian Mission abroad, under date of Stanley Feb 10 1860 – and the circumstances of the Mission having undergone a material change since the massacre of the Catechist, and the ship's crew in Tierra del Fuego, on Nov 6 1859 – the Committee deeply regrets being compelled to accept his resignation and desire the Secretary to communicate their decision to him. At the same time the Committee think it incumbent upon them to express their admiration, and gratitude to the Rev. G.P. Despard BA for the untiring devotion of himself, and his family to the work from the commencement, and they most heartily wish himself and his family every blessing.

The decision was that Despard would leave, and his departure would be handled so that it tied in neither with the Snow case nor with the missionary massacre. Damage to the Society would thereby be limited. At some later date, Despard's removal might be attributed to his having completed his stint on the station.