Savage (36 page)

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In 1867 Stirling and Bridges felt confident enough of their relationship with the Yamana and their knowledge of the terrain to undertake a more ambitious scheme. Ever since the massacre at Wulaia, one of the Society's goals had been to move in among the Indians in their homeland. Stage one was the founding of the small settlement of Laiwaia here at the mouth of the Murray Narrows. Ookoko, Pinoiense, Lucca, Jack and their spouses were settled with building materials and agricultural implements brought over in the
Allen Gardiner.
At the same time the missionaries surveyed the area for a site suitable for settlement by the white man – the area around the Murray Narrows, with its rush of water, made for difficult access and, besides, they wanted more open pastureland and a good harbour. The location they chose was called Ushuaia, which means ‘inner harbour to the west'. It was a large open bay on the northern shore of the Beagle Channel that promised both good shelter and fertile land.

In 1868 Thomas Bridges was recalled to England to take holy orders. Early the next year, with Bridges still absent, Stirling took a three-room prefabricated shack to Ushuaia on the
Allen Gardiner
and, once it was erected, ordered the crew of the missionary schooner to leave him there on his own. This was extraordinarily brave, some would say foolhardy, but when the ship came back a month later, in February 1869, its company found a small settlement of wigwams belonging to friendly Indians radiating out from the shack. In the building, Stirling had been joined by the Fuegian Jack and his wife, both of whom had fled from Laiwaia where things had been going significantly less well. There, the small community was on the edge of collapse in the face of attacks from groups of marauding Indians.

Stirling remained at Ushuaia for six months before he himself was recalled to England, where he was consecrated Bishop of the Falklands (a diocese that encompassed the whole of mainland South America). Development of the new settlement continued over the next two years. More Fuegians, including all of those who had been at Laiwaia, moved under its aegis and began the gradual transformation to a sedentary, agricultural life. Bridges, who was now married, returned from Europe and oversaw the construction of a new and larger building – Stirling House – at Ushuaia, and the transfer of materials to the area from Keppel Island.

On 1 October 1871, Thomas Bridges, his wife Mary and their young daughter disembarked from the
Allen Gardiner
at the Beagle Channel settlement that would be their home for the next thirteen years. Mary Bridges had not stepped outside her native Devon until recently, and her initial impressions must have been both powerful and stark. Ushuaia consisted of a double peninsula. To the south, small hills rolled, clothed in scrub and grassland, and to the north dramatic mountains, covered with dense beech trees, deep gullies and glaciers, climbed from the water's edge. She must have been stunned by the beauty of what confronted her and a little frightened by the isolation and mystery of the landscape and its inhabitants. Her as yet unborn son Lucas, who was to grow up in Ushuaia, speculated on this moment of his mother's life in his book
Uttermost Part of the Earth:

As they were rowed ashore from the
Allen Gardiner,
this Ushuaia, of which she had heard so much, was new, strange and rather frightening. Behind the shingle beach the grassland stretched away to meet a sudden steep less than a quarter of a mile from the shore. Between shore and hill were scattered wigwams, half-buried hovels of branches roofed with turf and grass, smelling strongly, as she was to find later, of smoke and decomposed whale blubber or refuse flung close outside. Round the wigwams dark figures, some partially draped in otter skins, others almost naked, stood or squatted, gazing curiously at the little boat as it approached the beach.

Some canoes lay hauled up on the shingle, and in others women were fishing or paddling alongside the schooner, trying to barter fish or limpets for knives or those great delicacies introduced by foreigners, biscuits and sugar. These Paiakoala [beach people] were wanderers, attracted by the wish to see what the white men were doing at Ushuaia.

On the summit of the thornbush-covered hill in the background she saw her future home, Stirling House, a five-roomed bungalow of wood and corrugated iron. It was not yet completed, and looked very lonely perched up there all by itself.

The presence of white settlers among the Yamana led to a much closer understanding of a native people so easily dismissed by past explorers as grim, base, primeval specimens – the ‘miserable barbarians', as Darwin had called them. In addition to building the settlement – constructing new homes, and laying out roads – Bridges devoted much time to working with the Yamana, learning their customs and traditions, watching them hunt, analysing the relationships of one Fuegian to another, transcribing their language. He taught them English, encouraged them to work, preached Christianity and occasionally got involved in serious disputes. This sometimes led him into danger and Bridges was threatened more than once.

Not long after he had made Ushuaia his home, one of the local inhabitants had been murdered. Bridges intervened in the resulting dispute between relatives of the deceased and the killer. As he stood between the squabbling parties a spear was jabbed at his chest. Another time, after he had harangued a native called Tom Post for laziness, he was walking away when his dog viciously attacked the Fuegian. Bridges dragged it off and smacked it, only to be told later by other Indians that the dog had saved his life. ‘Tom Post was going to kill you with his axe,' they informed him.

When a man called Harrapuwaian stole another's wife, Bridges reprimanded him. The situation appeared to resolve itself with the return of the wife, but Harrapuwaian was bristling with anger. He told a friend that he was going to knock on Bridges' door and ask for a biscuit, then, when the missionary turned to get one, he would whip out an axe and crack open his head. The friend informed on him, but Bridges would not believe the story until, one evening, the Fuegian turned up on his doorstep, and duly asked for the biscuit. Without turning his back, the missionary lunged at his visitor's arm and shouted, ‘Why do you come here with a hatchet? Give it to me.' Harrapuwaian was stunned by the missionary's prescience and handed over the specially sharpened weapon without question. He was even more surprised when, after a short chat, Bridges handed back the hatchet, asking him to leave it at home next time he called.

Bridges came to know the Yamana better than anyone previously; he understood their habits and emotions, their superstitions and rituals, and was able to dispel important myths that had become enshrined as given truths about them. Most notably he put an end to the centuries-old story that the Yamana, and indeed all of the Fuegian tribes, were cannibals. This story had persisted since the times of Magellan and Drake, and had been further propagated by the stories of Jemmy, York and Fuegia. It was completely without foundation. Fuegian people never devoured their enemies or their old women and never cooked the cadavers of shipwrecked sailors. Bridges found that nothing could be further from the truth. That death was distressing to them was already well known. In a paper Bridges read to the English Literary Society of Buenos Aires in 1888 he stated that the Yamana had always been misunderstood:

They have been called cannibals and the sketches of them have been caricatures rather than the truth. They will eat neither fish nor meat in its raw state … Cannibalism is utterly impossible among these aborigines by the laws of their society of living, in which human life is considered sacred and every relation of a murdered man considers himself bound to avenge the death. There have been times of extreme famine when on account of the bad weather it has been impossible for them to obtain provisions from the ships, from the coasts, or from the sea. At such times I have known them to eat their foot-gear and their raw-hide thongs, without a suggestion that they should eat human flesh. The lives of the old men, which according to Darwin, were those fixed upon for the purpose of cannibalism, are as sacred to them as those of any other person, for they are protected by their relatives.

All of this begs the question why, if it was false, Jemmy, York and Fuegia were so keen to perpetuate the myth. In his later years Jemmy often said that York's people were cannibals and that they had eaten marooned crews, but he was probably using an opportunity to slander his old colleague and adversary. The claims of the three when they were in England and when they were on the
Beagle,
when they convinced even Darwin with their stories, are more intriguing and more difficult to answer. In
Uttermost Part of the Earth
Lucas Bridges asks the same question and offers what can be the only remotely plausible solution: FitzRoy's Fuegians had answered questions in the way they felt was expected of them. In the early days of their abduction their English would have been poor and when asked, ‘Do you kill and eat men?' their responses would have been limited to ‘Yes' or ‘No'. As their English improved they might have embellished their story to a point where, as Bridges noted, ‘This delectable fiction once firmly established, any subsequent attempt at denial would not have been believed, but would have been attributed to a growing unwillingness to confess the horrors in which they had formerly indulged.'

In the 1880s, when Lucas Bridges read a report of Fuegian cannibalism carried in the
Liverpool Weekly News
to a group of Yamana Indians, he observed that the

gruesome story lost nothing of its horror when I translated it for the benefit of my companions. They fairly rocked with mirth. Then the face of one of them, Halupaianjiz, became grave. ‘Why,' he asked me, ‘do these people tell lies about us? We do not say bad things about them. You ought to write and tell them the truth.'

Thomas Bridges' most significant contribution to the understanding of the Fuegian peoples was his English–Yamana dictionary. He had been compiling a vocabulary of Fuegian words ever since his earliest days on Keppel Island. What he discovered about the Yamana language contradicted the belief of European visitors to Tierra del Fuego – including Darwin and FitzRoy – that Yamana consisted of barely a few hundred grunted words. It also exposed as sham the claims of the missionaries at Cranmer under Despard that they had had a great understanding of the language.

Bridges' dictionary brought together 32,000 Yamana words. The language, he found, had more inflections than Greek, more words than English and when constructed phonetically the structure suggested the possibility of two or three more characters than the Roman alphabet. A single short word could describe what in English would need a short sentence; additional letters to the word could mean an additional sentence. A letter prefixed to a word could give a different tense or sense. For example,

Distant family relationships that took a sentence in English to unravel could be explained succinctly in the native tongue. Yamana had sixty-one words for relations, in comparison to the twenty-five English words. It had a host of pronouns that indicated not only the person or object but also their location in relation to, for example, their wigwam or to the person being addressed: different words were used if the speaker was in a canoe, on land, or in a wigwam. The word for beach depended on its position in relation to the speaker – the direction it faced and whether there was land or water between the speaker and it. There was a precision to the language that lent it a slightly bizarre feel: the word
hatanisanude
meant ‘I thought so' when to do so was correct,
hayengude
meant ‘I thought so' when to do so was a mistake; there were five words for snow and, Lucas Bridges recalled, among the many words employed by the Yamana for the verb ‘to bite', one meant ‘coming unexpectedly on a hard substance when eating something soft' – a pearl in an oyster.

The language was far more sophisticated than had been thought. It had certainly fooled the Europeans, whose errors in comprehension were frequently egregious. Perhaps the most striking and most common mistake was over the word
yammerschooner.
This had been screamed, shouted, chanted and mumbled at every foreign visitor to the area. Traveller after traveller had commented on the irritating repetition of
‘yammerschooner, yammerschooner…'
that had greeted their arrival on Fuegian islands and that had echoed from the flotillas of canoes that had come to trade. Some Europeans had even invented a verb for it: the natives had been ‘yammerschoonering', they commented. It was usually said with one hand outstretched, as if in begging, and it was believed that it meant ‘give me'. It did not. Down the centuries, Fuegian Indians had been abused by the crews of passing ships and had come to fear the presence of strangers, and the potential for violence that they brought.
Yammerschooner
did not mean ‘give me' but ‘be kind to me', or ‘be kind to us'.

Another example of radical misinterpretation came from the mission station at Cranmer. Despard had boasted a number of times in his journals and letters home that he had translated the Doxology into Fuegian:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.