Savage (4 page)

By the end of 1829 the situation was more troublesome. Matters were coming to a head. Four days before Christmas, a party of sailors was sent out in a boat to map the eastern end of Landfall Island. The task should have taken a few days, but with the weather worsening, FitzRoy watched apprehensively from the ship's deck for their return. Christmas and Boxing Day passed. By now the small party would have run out of food. FitzRoy grew anxious. Just before noon on 27 December, the
Beagle
's lookout spotted the missing mate and coxswain waving from the shore. A boat was sent to collect them. They were exhausted and weak, not having eaten for three days and having spent the previous afternoon and night walking to the ship. The rest of their party, they reported, were in a cove at the back of the island. They had tried to get back every day, but each attempt had been abandoned in the face of driving gales. The appalling weather had ruined their ammunition and tinder – not only had they been without food since Christmas Eve, they had also been unable to build a fire. On a more sinister note, when they had gone down to the seafront, twenty Fuegians had taken advantage of their enfeebled state to assault the coxswain and steal his clothes.

FitzRoy took the boat and collected the missing crew. His plans to take vengeance on the truculent Fuegians were thwarted by their disappearance from the scene. The weather, the work, the isolation were starting to play on the young captain. As if conditions were not harsh enough, he also had to contend with what he saw as the perpetual larceny of the native peoples, their constant jabbering, their untiring pursuit and now their assault on one of his men. His tolerance was slipping, his nerves beginning to fray.

Chapter 3

It was a whale-boat that caused FitzRoy to snap.

At the end of January 1830, the ship's master, its coxswain and a small crew departed on a three-day expedition to chart the waters around the western fringe of Tierra del Fuego.

Over the next few days the weather closed in, gales lashed the
Beagle
at anchor and the expedition's deadline for returning passed. Hour followed hour without any sign from them. A week went by and still no word. Then, at three in the morning of 5 February, FitzRoy was roused from his sleep. The missing coxswain and two men had reached the ship in a clumsy coracle-like basket, made from the boughs of a tree and the remnants of a canvas tent, lined with clay.

The whale-boat was gone, reported the coxswain, filched by Indians. The rest of the crew were safe in a cove on Cape Desolation, but they were cold and had no food, most of it having disappeared with the boat. Threatened by starvation and the local people, the master had ordered the construction of the frail vessel. Then with only a biscuit each to sustain them, the three men had paddled all day and all night until, with exhaustion threatening to overwhelm them, they had been alerted by the barking of the ship's dogs.

FitzRoy was furious. Part of him could not believe that the Fuegians would steal the boat. Part of him suspected a ruse, a cover-up for carelessness on the part of his own men. But most of him sensed that this was not so, that what they said was true. He was concerned at the threat to his men, and appalled by the loss of the boat. The
Beagle
had already lost one earlier in the voyage, and this one had been built while they had rested up in Chiloe. It was, FitzRoy claimed, a particularly fine piece of work. Things had come to a fine pass. What little tolerance he had left for the Fuegians was spent. One senses that, in this haze of fury, a moment of clarity was reached in the mind of the commander. Months of exasperation, of tolerating the intolerable, of pussy-footing around the natives were all blown away. He would rescue his men then deal appropriately with the offending savages.

A boat was prepared for immediate departure. A fortnight's victuals for eleven men, two tents and fresh dry clothing were loaded aboard and, in the face of intermittent rain and a fresh wind, the rescue party pushed off. Thus began a chase that lasted months, that became an obsession, a bizarre pursuit in a speck of a boat against a backdrop of towering, snow-capped mountains, vast plains and roaring seas. It would result in terror, bloodshed, kidnapping and hostage-taking. FitzRoy wanted his boat back and he wanted justice.

*   *   *

After a vigorous seven-hour pull, the boat reached the stranded men waiting on the shore of Cape Desolation. While they changed clothes and dug into their first meal in days, FitzRoy cross-questioned the master, Mr Murray, about the disappearance, and scrutinised the mooring where the boat had been secured. This was such an isolated site that the normal practice of keeping guard at night had been thought unnecessary. Clothes, theodolite and chronometer had been unloaded and stored in the tent, but mast, sails and food had been left where they lay in the boat's hold. At two o'clock in the morning one of the men had been sent to check how the boat was riding at her mooring. All was well, he reported. At four o'clock another man went, but the craft had gone. In panic, the men fanned the shoreline looking for it. They found no boat, but within a mile of their camp they discovered the remains of two wigwams and a fire with still-smouldering ashes. The next morning Murray had organised the construction of the coracle.

The interrogation over, the eleven men climbed into the rescue boat and headed for an island two miles away. Here they found their first clue: the boat's chopped-up mast near the remains of a recently occupied wigwam. That evening they passed a canoe with a man and ‘the best-looking' Fuegian woman FitzRoy had seen, even though she ‘was uncommonly fat, and did justice to a diet of limpets and muscles [
sic
]'. From them the commander learned that several canoes had recently passed to the north.

Two days later they pounced on canoes belonging to a native family, and found the lead line of the missing whale-boat. FitzRoy was overjoyed. ‘This was a prize indeed,' he wrote in his
Narratives of the Voyage of HMS Adventure & Beagle.
One man was taken hostage and made to understand that for his own sake he must lead them to the Fuegians who had given him the line.

By early afternoon they had surprised a group of six women in canoes moored in a cove. With them were their children, a teenage boy and an old man. While they huddled in fear, FitzRoy conducted a search. There was a sail, an oar, an axe and a tool-bag all belonging to the boat.

The women understood what we wanted, and made eager signs to us to explain to us where our boat was gone. I did not like to injure them, and only took away our own gear, and the young man, who came very readily, to show us where our boat was, and, with the man who brought us to the place, squatted down in the boat apparently much pleased with some clothes and red caps, which were given to them.

The crew rowed for four hours before making camp on a beach. The two Fuegians were allowed to sleep by the fire, but under cover of the dark, they fled – with a couple of tarpaulin coats. FitzRoy was infuriated. After a hopeless search for the escaped prisoners, he pointed his hard-pressed crew back to the native settlement. As they approached the Fuegians ran. The sailors pursued, but their prey escaped. In an act of spite, the commander ordered the Fuegians' canoes to be torched.

Three more days were spent in aimless island hopping before they returned to this native settlement. FitzRoy had been away from the
Beagle
for eight days now, time was moving on, and on 12 February he raised the stakes. They arrived at the cove late in the day, but there was still time for planning. Half the party was given a rest, while the others tracked down the much-harassed Indians to a far-off bay. After they had scouted the land and counted the Fuegian numbers, they returned to their base ‘and prepared for surprising the natives and making them prisoners. My wish was to surround them unawares, and take as many as possible, to be kept as hostages for the return of our boat, or else to make them show us where she was…'

The next day, each man armed himself with a pistol, a cutlass and a length of rope. They sailed nearer to the wigwams and crawled through the brush, encircling the native camp. Dogs barked, the sailors jumped up, the Indians bolted. Seaman Elsmore was the swiftest of the attacking party, but in attempting to leap a stream he stumbled and fell at the feet of three hidden Fuegians, who pinned him down and pummelled him with rocks. Sharp blows to the head rendered him insensible, a crunching blow to the temple shattered an eye. His head sank under the waters of the stream. From out of the bush came a flash and a bang. Murray had fired. The floundering sailor broke free. The wounded Fuegian staggered back, then threw a boulder with great power and accuracy, hitting Murray in the chest and snapping a powder horn that hung from his neck. Two more rocks forced sailors to dive for cover. The Fuegian hurled one last missile, then sank into the stream and died.

Fighting broke out along the bank, and several Fuegians escaped, but FitzRoy began to accumulate his hostages. He and the coxswain pinned down one woman who had the strength of a horse, and another, the oldest woman of the tribe, ‘was so powerful, that two of the strongest men of our party could scarcely pull her out from under the bank of the stream'. At a muster on the beach, FitzRoy discovered that the dead Fuegian was one of the two who had escaped a few nights back; he also found that he had the missing coats back, and that he had eleven Indians – two men, three women and six children – in captivity. There were now twenty-two people on board the boat, and his project was becoming unwieldy. Next morning they began the journey back to the
Beagle.
The ship weighed anchor and with the Fuegians on board they sailed off towards Cape Castlereagh from where FitzRoy and Murray set off again, this time in two boats. They took with them three Fuegian guides – two women and a young man – hoping that they would feel that the lives of their loved ones, left on the
Beagle,
depended on their complicity. However, on making camp for the night FitzRoy found his concept of fidelity sorely tried.

He had fed his prisoners mussels, limpets and pork, and let the three curl up together by the warm glow of the fire. ‘I would not tie them, neither did I think it necessary to keep an unusual watch,' the commander wrote, for he presumed that ‘their children being left in our vessel was a security for the mothers far stronger than rope or iron'. Instead he covered the captives with old blankets and his own poncho, under which they were concealed. His was first watch and, at midnight, as he stood staring out to sea, he heard a rustling noise. He turned round, but the Fuegians slept on. He crouched down to peer at his watch in the firelight. It was just before midnight. There was another rustle. His dog jumped up and barked. The blankets looked the same, but when he investigated them he found them propped up by bushes. The Fuegians were gone.

The crews split up over the course of the next couple of days for a solemn and increasingly demoralised scout of Gilbert Island, Adventure Sound and Thieves' Cove. By 22 February both boats had arrived back at the
Beagle
only to find that the night before all but three of the prisoners had jumped overboard and swum away. All FitzRoy had now to show for his efforts was the wardship of three abandoned children and no whale-boat. But he had learned some important lessons:

This cruise had also given me more insight into the real character of the Fuegians, than I had then acquired by other means. I became convinced that so long as we were ignorant of the Fuegian language, and the natives were equally ignorant of ours, we should never know much about them, or the interior of their country; nor would there be the slightest chance of their being raised one step above the low place which they then held in our estimation.

The decision was made to abandon the chase, to sail to a sheltered harbour and make a new whale-boat. At the end of the month they hove-to in Christmas Sound with the spectacular promontory of York Minster – named after the cathedral – in the background. While the new boat was under construction, Murray was instructed to carry out more surveying, and to take with him the three children, whom he would leave with any Fuegians he came across. However, at the last minute, there was a change of plan. Only two of the children climbed into the departing boat. ‘The third, who was about eight years old, was still with us,' wrote FitzRoy. ‘She seemed to be so happy and healthy, that I determined to detain her as a hostage for the stolen boat, and try to teach her English.'

This girl, who FitzRoy said was as broad as she was high, had been named by the men Fuegia Basket – in honour of the wicker canoe built on Cape Desolation. Always referred to as a merry, happy child, she had become a favourite among the crew, ‘a pet on the lower deck'. How much choice she really had in the matter of going home can only be speculated on; whether she knew what she had let herself in for is doubtful.

*   *   *

Less than twenty-four hours after Murray left, the
Beagle
was visited by more Fuegians anxious to climb on board. FitzRoy would have none of it: he was done with the annoyance, the theft and the noise. He instructed the mate to scare them off by firing a gun over their heads. The effect was but temporary, for although they retreated, FitzRoy knew that they did not comprehend the power of firearms and would be back before long. He therefore instructed the mate to chase them out of the vicinity. However, as he did so, he toyed with one more idea: the possibility of getting another Indian on board, another potential intermediary between Englishman and Fuegian. He joined the chase, and on catching up with the native canoes, pulled one alongside. Looking at the youngest man, he demanded that he get into the boat which, according to FitzRoy, he did ‘quite unconcernedly and sat down, apparently contented and at his ease. The others said nothing, either to me or to him, but paddled out of the harbour as fast as they could.' This man, whom they called York Minster after the local geography, was a sullen brute, to British eyes, in his mid to late twenties, whose spirits only picked up when the now scrubbed and dressed Fuegia took it upon herself to console and amuse him. The new passenger had a mighty appetite and a habit of burying food for later in a secret cubby-hole. According to FitzRoy, ‘as soon as he was well cleaned and clothed, and allowed to go about where he liked in the vessel, he became much more cheerful'.