This Thing Of Darkness (48 page)

Another platitude. Surely the Church Missionary Society could have found someone more dynamic for their great enterprise
? As they drew closer to their destination, FitzRoy’s confidence in the chances of Matthews’s success dwindled with every passing mile.

Darwin wiped a splash of seawater from his beard and stared at the youth.
He must be out of his mind
, he thought.

 

By the time the walls of the Beagle Channel narrowed, and it became recognizable as the ravine they had discovered almost three years previously, there were some thirty canoes in their wake, carrying at least three hundred Indians. Their pursuers stayed back, though - at night their fires were visible off to the east — preferring to shadow the little convoy at a distance. When the
Beagle’s
boats reached the turn-off to the Murray Narrows, the wind funnelling southward out of the channel suddenly filled their sails, and they surged ahead of their retinue. It meant, as they curved back round upon themselves into the bay at Woollya, that they would have a good few hours of peace in which to establish a camp.

For all apart from Jemmy, it was their first sight of Woollya, and the sun nudged aside the persistent grey clouds in celebration. There, in a sheltered cove, nestled an acre or so of rich, sloping pastureland, well watered by brooks and protected on three sides by low, wooded hills. The pretty little natural harbour was studded with islets, the water smooth and glassy, with low branches overhanging a rocky beach. It was so beautiful, so unexpected amid the wilds of Tierra del Fuego, that it possessed an almost dreamlike quality. It was the perfect place to build a mission.

‘Jemmy, it’s - it’s idyllic,’ said FitzRoy.

‘I told you.’ Jemmy beamed with pride. ‘My land is good land.’

‘The Lord is merciful,’ said Matthews, with what sounded like relief.

FitzRoy gave the order to begin unloading the yawl. An area of pasture was staked out for the mission buildings, boundary markers were put up and sentries placed at each corner. There were wigwams over to the north side of the cove, but they were deserted. Darwin investigated a tall green cone on the shoreline, prodding it gingerly with a stick.

‘It’s a midden. An old shell-midden,’ explained FitzRoy.

‘Good grief,’ said Darwin, withdrawing the stick. ‘A nine-inch-thick coating of pure mould. Look — there are seasonal layers. One might be able to date this, like the rings of a tree.’

Something, some primitive instinct, told both men suddenly that they were being watched. They stood stock still, eyes fixed on the treeline. FitzRoy gestured the sailors to quieten their unloading. Each man held his position, tensed, motionless, silent. And then, at last, there was a rustling in the trees, and an extremely old man, painted white from head to toe, emerged into plain view.

‘He’s as white as a miller,’ whispered Darwin.

The old man walked slowly and deliberately in a straight line towards Jemmy Button. The three Fuegians had been standing watching the unloading, Jemmy in his smart scarlet dress-coat and fashionably tight stockings. The white-painted man, ignoring York and Fuegia, took up a position a foot away from Jemmy and defiantly began to harangue him.

FitzRoy and Darwin came cautiously across. Presently the old man finished his tirade.

‘What does he say, Jemmy?’

Jemmy stumbled, red-faced with confusion.

‘I - I do not know. I do not understand him.’

‘But that is your language, is it not?’

‘English is my language now. I forget this language.’

‘You have
forgotten
your own language?’

‘I was young boy when I came with you. For many years I do not need it.’ Jemmy turned to the old man. ‘I do not understand you. No sabe. I do not understand you.’ He seemed almost panic-stricken.

‘I think he’s telling the truth,’ said Darwin.

There was another volley from the old man, who gestured angrily to FitzRoy and his companion, followed by an inadvertent guffaw from York Minster.

‘Do you understand him, York?’ asked FitzRoy sharply. ‘Do you speak Yamana?’

‘Yes.’

‘You never told us you could speak Jemmy’s language. Not once in three years.’

‘You never ask me.’

FitzRoy could have strangled him, in theory at least. ‘What does the old man say?’

‘He says you are dirty men. You have hairs on your face. That is very dirty.’

‘Capp’en Fitz’oy?’ said Jemmy nervously.

‘Yes, Jemmy?’

‘I am afraid to stay here.’

 

With the Church Missionary Society’s collection of soup tureens, tea-trays, beaver hats and fine linen forming another incongruous cone in the centre of the marked-off area, a party of sailors set to chopping the beech-logs, which, with the planking carried in the yawl, would go to construct the three mission cottages. Another group began turning over the topsoil for the vegetable garden, where they would sow carrots, turnips, beans, peas, leeks and cabbages. It was late in the year for planting - the various unforeseen delays on their journey south had seen to that - but many of the sailors had been farm-labourers in more prosperous times, and were sure that the tubers and seedlings would survive. The profusion of wildflowers in the Woollya meadows - none of them known to European eyes - and the rich dark soil, which was softer and more fertile that the usual acidic peat of Tierra del Fuego, augured well.

By the end of the first day, the canoes of the pursuing Fuegians were arriving by the score. Tribesmen came by land too, sweating and exhausted, until eventually a crowd of several hundred had been disgorged on to the beach. What had been a pleasant, deserted Eden became a milling throng, a semi-permanent camp the size of a small town. The Indians sat in naked rows, staring intently at the strange pale men going about their mysterious business. Their principal fascination, however, was reserved for Jemmy Button, who was followed by a hundred pairs of eyes wherever he went: they could not take their eyes off his lurid tail-coats, his polished boots and his gleaming white gloves. Not without trepidation, he went among them handing out little presents, nails, buttons and the like, which were invariably received without a sound or any flicker of expression. The natives of Woollya were, of course, no different from those they had seen further east, and Jemmy felt as naked as they were in his shame.

‘They are monkeys. Fools. Not men!’ said York with derision. To the Yamana, York appeared as one of the white men, a foreigner by dint of his European clothes; but more than that, he carried an aura about him, a sense of innate power, and they gave him a wide berth.

By night, the Fuegians would steal. No matter how many sentries were posted, the sailors would wake up with items missing - knives, spades, hammers, even their clothes and shoes - for there was nothing the Indians would not take. Even by day, the bolder ones were capable of the most audacious thefts. One Fuegian almost succeeded in removing Hamond’s axe from under his arm without his noticing. Just as the haft disappeared, Hamond felt the faintest disturbance and turned to challenge the thief.

‘Hey! That’s m-my axe!’

The man nodded in supplication and returned the implement gracefully.

FitzRoy tried to defend the Fuegians later that night, as the officers lay in their makeshift tents, mere sailcloths slung across crossed oars.

‘Think what treasures such tools represent to these men! Imagine the Beagle’s crew, surrounded by untended piles of gold and jewels. What would be the result?’

‘We’re all going to d-die in our b-beds,’ said Hamond gloomily.

On the third day, Jemmy became excited, and announced that his family were approaching. Asked how he knew such a thing, he said that he had heard his brother shouting from his canoe, about a mile and a half away. The Fuegians’ powers of hearing, it seemed, was as astonishing as their powers of sight. Sure enough, a quarter-hour later, a canoe containing Jemmy’s mother, brothers and sisters swung into the bay. They stared in wonder at his finery, and the little girls blushed and hid in the bottom of the boat. Jemmy’s elder brother, who appeared to have been elected spokesman, circled Jemmy cautiously and addressed him at length.

‘I do not understand.
No sabe. No sabe.
Why you no speak
English?
Why you
no sabe
?’ hissed Jemmy, urgently, and all could see that he was humiliated by the state of his family.

‘Fools! Beasts!’ chortled York Minster.

Eventually, Jemmy recalled enough rudimentary Yamana to conduct a halting conversation with his brother, punctuated with bursts of English and the occasional Spanish or Portuguese word. He was most concerned to clothe his family as soon as possible, and managed to persuade his mother into a smock. His brother was induced to cover his nakedness with a Guernsey frock, breeches and a lady’s tartan cap.

‘What does your brother say, Jemmy?’ asked FitzRoy, desperate to make sense of whatever he could.

‘He says my father is dead. He is dead at the last moon.’

‘I am sorry, Jemmy. I am very sorry.’

‘Me no help it. Me know this already. Also, he say my mother was very sad when I leave. She look for me many months, search every bay, search every island.’

Darwin, who did not believe this for a second, thought that two horses in a field could not have been less interested in each other than Jemmy and the members of his family. In fact, the sound they made when speaking to each other, he concluded, was exactly that made by a man trying to encourage a horse — a sort of clicking noise produced from the side of the mouth. For all this scepticism, however, Jemmy’s family became familiar figures around the camp; the elder brother was nicknamed Tommy Button by the sailors, and the younger one Harry Button.

Bennet and Bynoe made earnest efforts to engage with the Fuegians: the coxswain cast embarrassment aside, and sang and danced for them, accompanied by the surgeon on a Jew’s harp. The natives’ ability to remember and mimic the words was extraordinary, but sadly their sense of rhythm was non-existent; so much so that when they attempted to join in, despite being word perfect, they would frequently start singing several seconds in arrears.

After two weeks’ hard labour the mission was finished, and the crew could look proudly upon three log cabins with thatched roofs and a substantial vegetable garden, the whole enclosed by an elegant white-painted picket fence. The central cottage was given to Matthews, who assiduously furnished it with the best that the charitable ladies of Walthamstow had to offer — lacework, linen and framed samplers embroidered with improving texts - until it looked from the inside like a respectable parlour in rural Essex. The Fuegians were not the only ones capable of nocturnal stealth: all those implements most valuable to the new mission - spades, axes, knives and so forth - had been secreted by night in a false ceiling built into Matthews’s cottage, and in a cellar under the floorboards. The cottage to Matthews’s right was given to Jemmy Button, and the cottage to his left to York and Fuegia, who were married - Matthews officiating — in a short ceremony that bewildered most of the participants and nearly all of the onlookers. FitzRoy himself gave the bride away, unsure whether the ceremony represented an important bridge with civilization or a desperate attempt to prolong an unconvincing illusion. They sang a hymn together, and Bennet felt more self-conscious than he had done dancing a jig for the natives.

On the day after the wedding they were due to take their farewells. Darwin emerged bleary-eyed from their tent to a grey and pleasantly sticky morning, rubbed his eyes, and thought about heading down to the shore to begin the daily task of washing his pale flesh before a hundred pairs of bewildered eyes. FitzRoy, pushing the canvas flap aside, crawled out into the daylight and stood beside him.

‘Not such a bad day,’ ventured the Philosopher.

‘I beg to differ,’ said FitzRoy abruptly. ‘The women and children are gone.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said, the women and children are gone. It must mean they are planning an attack. I can think of no other explanation.’

Darwin peered at the patient multitude drawn up in lines beyond the mission’s boundary markers. FitzRoy was right. Every single woman and child had vanished, Jemmy’s mother and sisters included. Innumerable ranks of seated men returned his gaze implacably. A cold shudder ran down his spine. ‘Could we repel such an attack?’

‘Repel it? We are outnumbered more than ten to one. Even with guns, I doubt we could repel it. No, my friend, I intend to forestall it.’ And FitzRoy stalked off to the perimeter, to discover what, if anything, the sentries had noticed during the night.

Nobody, of course, had seen or heard a thing. But as FitzRoy made his rounds, the old white-painted man stood up and approached McCurdy, one of the foretopmen, who stood at the nearest sentry-post. Nervously, McCurdy planted his feet apart and indicated, as had been made clear many times to the Fuegians, that they should not pass the boundary fence. The old man stared at him.

‘He’s a regular quiz, this one, sir,’ said the sentry edgily. Suddenly, the old man spat directly into his face.

‘Do not retaliate!’ called FitzRoy. ‘Do you hear me, McCurdy? Do
not
retaliate.’

‘Aye aye sir.’

‘Continue to indicate with your body position that he must not cross the boundary fence.’

‘Sir!’

The old man essayed an extremely realistic mime of how McCurdy would shortly be eaten, after he had been first killed and skinned.

‘If you retaliate, there will be a massacre. Simply block his path, but try to smile.’

McCurdy managed a glassy grin. The old man produced an axe, one that had been stolen a few days earlier, and raised it threateningly above his head, as if daring the sentry to take it off him. FitzRoy strode across with a rifle and fired into the air. All the Fuegians recoiled at the report of the weapon, but afterwards simply looked confused; a few scratched the backs of their heads, inspecting themselves for damage.