Savage (32 page)

The rather downcast gentlemen of the committee turned to discuss matters that, if carried out in the field, would lead to the winding down of the mission's affairs in the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego. They agreed the sale of the
Perseverance.
They agreed that all stores at Cranmer that were not needed should be sold off. They gave the go-ahead to refit the
Allen Gardiner,
if she was recovered from Wulaia, so that she could be brought back to England, with Despard and his family (unless they preferred to be dropped off on mainland South America). And finally they decided that, for the moment, they should hang on to their Keppel Island outpost until new plans could be drawn up. Thirty-nine years after Allen Gardiner had founded the Patagonian Missionary Society defeat was once again staring it in the face.

Chapter 22

The delay in communications between Britain and its South Atlantic outpost meant that by the time news filtered through to London of the menace, events had moved on several stages in the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego. Smyley had wanted to return for the
Allen Gardiner
with the islands' garrison to wreak revenge and teach the natives a painful lesson they would not forget. This could not be countenanced by the authorities in Stanley, but when the
Nancy
left to return Jemmy Button and retrieve the abandoned schooner, the captain did so with a crew of double its normal complement, six carbines and a supply of ball cartridge loaned him by the Falklands' governor.

He had a rough passage to what was a tough job. Ice and snow greeted him at Wulaia, as did a small fleet of thirty-eight Fuegian canoes. It was natural that recent events would instil a greater sense of caution into the ship party's dealings with the Indians, and although Smyley needed no reminding of this, the fact that many of the latter wore European clothes, necklaces of shillings and half-crowns, and in one case the back of a watch underlined it. The Fuegians seemed friendly, but for the week that it took to salvage the
Allen Gardiner,
Smyley took no risks: Jemmy Button was placed under house arrest on the ship. He was allowed visitors and treated with respect, but while he was in custody the Fuegians were unlikely to turn violent.

The
Allen Gardiner
had dragged her anchor and drifted some way from Wulaia, but with Jemmy acting as interpreter the
Nancy
traced her course. The schooner had been fortunate: although she had nearly been dashed and wrecked against the rocks her chains had been trapped under a submerged boulder shortening her leeway. It took a full day to raise the chain and several more to patch up the ravaged ship sufficiently for the journey ahead. As Smyley had already ascertained from Coles, she was little more than a shell, all her ironwork gone, her sails stripped and the instruments stolen. Across the deck were black scorch marks where fires had been lit.

As work continued the Fuegians maintained their good spirits. Macooallan paddled a full day to fetch the
Allen Gardiner
's longboat, which he returned undamaged. He also organised transportation of a cargo of wood for the
Nancy.
Short forays ashore by the crew in search of the bodies of the massacre victims proved fruitless, but they learned that six of the party were buried at the foot of a rock and Ookoko said that the other two were somewhere behind the house, but that many foxes had feasted on their flesh.

Before setting off for Wulaia, Despard had asked Smyley to bring back more Yamana for Keppel Island. It was an insensitive and impolitic request that the governor refused immediately, but while they were repairing the ship Ookoko had come on board and demanded to be taken back to Cranmer. This sounds too convenient to be credible, but it is probably true. Ookoko had not come from Wulaia; on the day of the slaughter he had been visibly distressed by the slayings and now, he said, he feared for his life. He described the aftermath of the tragedy, how two Fuegian men had died after eating the ship's soap thinking it was meat, how when the ship's clock stopped they had thought it was dead and smashed it up. He said he was married and would like to bring his sixteen-year-old wife, Camilenna-keepa, with him to Keppel Island. Smyley agreed to take the pair, knowing that although the governor would be annoyed, there was little he could do to stop Ookoko and spouse being transported to Cranmer. Smyley was an American citizen and could claim that he was helping two young people escape apparent danger.

On 11 April 1860 the
Allen Gardiner
was ready to move. Both ships got under weigh, and Jemmy Button was helped into a waiting canoe and allowed to paddle ashore. The ships reached Port Stanley five days later, where the waiting Despard said she presented ‘a mournful sight, with all her furniture broken, and damage everywhere, through wanton mischief'.

*   *   *

With Jemmy Button in Tierra del Fuego and the
Allen Gardiner
back in the Falklands a chapter in the tragedy had been closed, but the question of who had carried out the killings and why remained open. There had only been one eye-witness, and Alfred Coles remained firm in his conviction that he had seen Billy Button (Macalwense) throw the stone that killed Garland Phillips, and that Jemmy Button had been at the head of the mob because he had been envious of the presents that others were receiving. However, Coles had seen the massacre from the deck of the ship, which had been anchored more than 300 yards out to sea: how reliable was his report of the mayhem ashore and the bloody confusion? After all, there had been 300 Indians involved in the attack.

One man who agreed with the ship's cook was Smyley, who knew these parts and who, when he arrived to rescue Coles, was quick to assess the scene. From a more distant perspective others were quick to muddy the waters. They asserted that things were not so clear cut. Emotions ran high, but despite the early desire of Port Stanley's inhabitants for revenge, as evidenced in the attempt to lynch Jemmy Button and the suggestion of sending a force against the guilty Fuegians, it is remarkable how quickly Coles's testimony came to be disregarded. Jemmy's willingness to go to Port Stanley and give evidence – and just how willing he actually was is open to conjecture – impressed the authorities there, as did his statement that the killings had been perpetrated by outsiders. Another puzzling factor was that if he and his people had been responsible, why had they treated Alfred Coles with such care and compassion for four months? They had fed him, clothed him and even given him a gun. Why had they not destroyed the
Allen Gardiner
and dismantled the evidence? Some said it was because they were afraid of reprisals and that they hoped in saving the cook and the ship that the white man would look kindly on them. However, if the people at Wulaia had been the assassins a more logical course of action would have been to wreck the ship, burn it, kill Coles, then claim that the
Allen Gardiner
had been in the area but had sailed on to the west.

The identities of the assassins were a mystery and there seems to have been a disinclination on the part of the government and the Patagonian Missionary Society to get to the truth. Positive identification of guilty parties would lead to difficult choices and unwanted consequences. When Jemmy Button came to Stanley and pointed the finger at the Oens-men it was seized upon by both sides as a convenient solution to a tricky problem. In private Jemmy even told Despard that he had been in the house when the attack was launched, he had remonstrated against the assailants, but given up through fear of men who ‘no sabby God'. It was not very convincing – he surely did not go to the house unaware of what was about to happen – yet Despard wrote, in a letter of reassurance to Jemmy's old mentor, Robert FitzRoy, ‘James Button, and Tom (Macooallan), Ookokko and Lucca, I am persuaded, had no hand in the deed.'

After conducting the official interview with Jemmy at Port Stanley, the colonial chaplain Charles Bull wrote, ‘I may add my own impression that Jemmy Button did not take part in the awful tragedy; that afterwards he joined in the plunder; but his kindness to Alfred Cole, and his coming voluntarily on board the
Nancy,
prove that it was not a premeditated act.' Yet how true was this? How likely was it that the Oens-men were the protagonists of the drama at Wulaia?

It is true that there were many more Indians on the cove that week than was normally the case, but past experience showed that Yamana numbers swelled quickly in response to the news of potential booty, even without the presence of the Oens-men. To believe Jemmy's story was not only to ignore Coles's eye-witness report and his accounts of Jemmy and other Yamana Fuegians coming on board the
Allen Gardiner
in the days leading up to the tragedy (confirmed, in Fell's diary, as being ‘troublesome'), but to accept that the Yamana and the Oens-men could co-exist peacefully in the same enclave for almost a week. Judging by Jemmy's known fear of these people and the historic ferocity of their exchanges, such as that experienced when York Minster and Fuegia Basket were at Wulaia, this was unlikely.

Another element does not ring true: the Oens-men were expert archers, yet there was no suggestion that any of the mission party was killed other than by bludgeoning or stoning. Whenever Jemmy had had problems in the past and white men had been present, he had accused the Oens-men. They were a convenient peg on which to hang the blame, and this was probably so with the tragedy at Wulaia Cove. Jemmy Button might have woven a tale to save his neck.

But why was his explanation championed by so many people? Throughout the empire the British had established a reputation for avenging ills inflicted upon their own, for pulling the trigger before asking questions, for doling out lessons in morality and ethics to those they deemed lesser mortals. In this instance, however, everybody in authority from the governor to the colonial chaplain to the Secretary of State removed their fingers from the trigger before the gun could go off. There can be no doubt that they were uneasy about the course of events in Tierra del Fuego and the Falkland Islands: they had never approved of the Patagonian Missionary Society and only ever given it lukewarm support. To have acknowledged the culpability of Jemmy Button would have necessitated action they were unwilling to carry out: they were far from sure that he and his people had been responsible and thought that harsh revenge against ignorant ‘savages' would not only be pointless but counterproductive to future relations. This, of course, had never stopped the British in the past, but something else was going on here: a feeling of disquiet at the activities of the mission, a suspicion that it had not been straight with the authorities, that it was up to no good, and that although the deaths could not be justified, they might have been foretold.

In private they chose to blame the chief missionary: as the scribbled minute in the Colonial Office read, the dead had ‘paid the penalty of the wilfulness of one gentleman who still lives.' That gentleman was George Packenham Despard. In short, the authorities in Port Stanley and London believed it would be unfair to attack the Yamana. The governor summed up the feeling in his despatch of 8 May:

The statements of Jemmy Button, the discontented and threatening language which has been used by the natives who have already been taken to Keppel and the bloody revenge which they took instantly on their return to Tierra del Fuego are my tangible evidence that their residence at Keppel Island was enforced and irksome, and I submit to Your Grace that it is practically impossible for Mr Despard or his agents, only acquainted with a few words of the language of one tribe, to make a contract which could for a moment be considered equal or fair with the savages.

The Society's motivation was completely different. If its work was to continue – and that, of course, was not certain – then it had to present an optimistic face by propagating the message that significant progress had been made and that lives had not been frittered away. If it had been admitted that the Indians they had taken to Keppel Island had turned against them, whether for plunder or revenge, all their efforts would have been halted in their tracks, their past work written off, their hopes for the future untenable. If Jemmy Button and his brothers had killed the missionary party despite all the education and time that had been invested in them, they were obviously beyond the pale. Not only was the Society unable to justify taking more Fuegians to Keppel Island, it would receive neither support at home nor the permission of the Port Stanley authorities to do so. If it admitted that Jemmy had been the ringleader it was signing its own death warrant. Thus when it might have been expected to believe its own ship's cook, the Society's representatives, both in the South Atlantic and in Bristol, seized the explanation that other Indians had been responsible.

Stirling set out its public position in a letter to the Duke of Newcastle:

With respect to other members of his [Button's] tribe, with the exception of one who was seen to hurl a stone at Mr Phillips, we have no proof at all that they continued or even shared in the fatal attack on the mission party. All that is really known is that it took place at Woollya the headquarters of the tribe to which the natives who had been at Keppel belonged … the great majority of the natives assembled at Woollya belonged not to the tribe usually located there, and which is but a very small one, but to the larger, and more powerful tribe called Oens men. To these Jemmy Button attributes the massacre and if the Committee from their previous knowledge of the habits of these people may hazard an opinion in so uncertain a matter, they would venture to suggest that jealousy of the peculiar favours bestowed upon the little tribe at Woollya and a desire to enrich themselves by the plunder of the mission vessel stimulated the Oens men to seize the remarkable opportunity for the massacre presented by the defenceless condition of the missionary party; on the morning of Nov 6 1859.