In January 1829, HMS Adventure, with Captain King, HMS Beagle, with her new captain, Robert FitzRoy, and a smaller schooner, HMS Adelaide, sailed south again on their surveying mission. (Not often mentioned, the Adelaide, named for England’s queen, the wife of William IV, had been purchased by Captain King earlier in the expedition, and had accompanied the Adventure for much of 1828. Being a “fore-and-after” rather than a square-rigged vessel, she was a handier sailer, able to point closer to the wind than either of the other two ships, and was used for survey work in tighter channels and harbors.)
Captain FitzRoy encountered misfortune early in his command. On January 30, off Maldonado on the coast of Uruguay, the Beagle was caught by a pampero, a vicious squall blowing off the pampas, later said to be the worst in many years. It lasted only twenty minutes, but the Beagle, newly loaded to the brim with supplies, exacerbating the already top-heavy tendency of her class, was knocked over on her beam, and lay pinned by blasts of wind for long minutes, during which it appeared she might capsize. Topmasts, topsails, all sorts of sails and small spars, were torn away and blown to pieces. Two seamen who had been furling sail high in the rigging were blown away with them into the sea and lost.
Such sudden “white squalls” can catch a ship by surprise and knock it down in seconds, long before its captain has time to notice what’s coming and take in sail. The incident was not FitzRoy’s fault (though in later years he was to blame his inexperience for not being more alert and ready for such a possibility), but to lose men so early in his command would have had his crew (seamen are a highly superstitious lot) wondering if their new skipper had the curse of being unlucky.
Two months later, the ships reached the eastern entrance to the Strait of Magellan.
On April 13, as the Beagle was beating down into the strait near Cape Negro against a light southerly breeze, the crew spotted some natives: two women and a child in a canoe near the shore, two men and their dogs close by on the beach. FitzRoy had a whaleboat lowered and a crew of seamen pull him shoreward for a closer look, the people “being the first savages I had ever met.”
To Englishmen, they appeared remarkably unattractive. “hideous…filthy and most disagreeable” was Captain King’s first and lasting impression.
To the Fuegians, the British naval officers and their crew, appearing from seaward in their grand and intricate vessels, with their elaborate clothing, their gadgets, and their inexplicable powers, were as otherworldly as little green men coming out of a spaceship—except that the locals were no longer astonished. Such visitors had been turning up for some time; the occasional glimpses of the Magellans, Sarmientos, and Schoutens had increased to nearly regular traffic. By 1827, the year King’s expedition reached the Strait of Magellan for the first time, sealing and whaling vessels (usually ignored by history because their crews didn’t plant flags, slaughter locals, colonize, or make claims for distant sovereigns) had been passing through Tierra del Fuego, harvesting seals and penguins, and trading with the natives for more than fifty years. Relations had evolved considerably since the earliest contact. The Fuegians had largely forgotten their initial fears and become instead cheeky opportunists. It was the latecomers on the scene, the Englishmen in 1827, who were the naive ones. They were smugly and vastly amused by their own abilities to impress the locals with their beads and cheap magic, underestimating not only the Fuegians’ cleverness, but their self-respect.
Fuegian native of the “Yapoo Tekeenika” tribe, as FitzRoy mistakenly believed they called themselves. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy)
“They were pleased by a ticking watch,” wrote King, of his first encounter with a group of them. While dazzling them with his watch, he surprised a Fuegian by deftly cutting off a lock of the native’s hair with a pair of scissors (perhaps he fancied a small trophy brush fashioned of the coarse hair by the ship’s carpenter, not an unusual item). The man objected until King gave the hair back to him. “Assuming a grave look, he very carefully wrapped the hair up, and handed it to a woman in the canoe, who, as carefully, stowed it away in a basket…the man then turned round, requesting me, very seriously, to put away the scissors, and my compliance restored him to good humor.”
At another encounter, “one of the party, who seemed more than half an idiot, spit in my face; but as it was not apparently done angrily, and he was reproved by his companions, his uncourteous conduct was forgiven.” The Fuegians spat at them, and the English sneakily cut off their hair; what was courteous or idiotic was misunderstood by both sides.
Two years later, Robert FitzRoy saw them in much the same way: they were dirty and primitive. And he brought his own elevated learning, particularly his ideas about physical appearances and phrenology, to the deduction of their innate character.
Their features were…peculiar; and if physiognomy can be trusted, indicated cunning, indolence, passive fortitude, deficient intellect, and want of energy. I observed that the forehead was very small and ill-shaped, the nose was long, narrow between the eyes and wide at the point; and the upper lip, long and protruding. They had small, retreating chins; bad teeth; high cheekbones; small Chinese eyes at an oblique angle with the nose…. The head was very small, especially at the top and back; there were very few bumps for a craniologist.
FitzRoy was not quite so scientific about the younger of the two women in the canoe. She “would not have been ill-looking, had she been well-scrubbed, and all the yellow clay with which she was bedaubed, washed away.”
It was the late, too tender Pringle Stokes who saw these people most clearly. His journal descriptions of his first encounters with Fuegians in 1827 were full of carefully observed details, largely without the prejudicial filter of a self-righteous European sensibility.
As might be expected from the unkindly climate in which they dwell, the personal appearance of these Indians does not exhibit, either in male or female, any indications of activity or strength. Their average height is five feet five inches; their habit of body is spare; the limbs are badly turned, and deficient in muscle; the hair of their head is black, straight, and coarse; their beards, whiskers, and eyebrows, naturally exceedingly scanty, are carefully plucked out…the mouth is large, and the underlip thick; their teeth are small and regular, but of bad colour. They are of a dirty copper colour; their countenance is dull, and devoid of expression. For protection against the rigours of these inclement regions, their clothing is miserably suited; being only the skin of a seal, or sea-otter, thrown over the shoulders, with the hairy side outward.
They also smeared themselves with seal oil and blubber, which “combined with the filth of their persons, produced,” to Captain King, “a most offensive smell.” This seemed manifest lowliness, the benighted savage rolling in filth. The Englishmen didn’t realize it was an effective weatherproofing, something perfectly suited to the climate. No contemporary clothing, no oiled or painted canvas, could keep the densely wet weather of Tierra del Fuego from reaching the body. The English sailors’ habit of wrapping themselves in clammy, moisture-retaining layers ensured constant misery: “Our discomfort in an open boat was very great, since we were all constantly wet to the skin,” they complained.
Stokes carefully noted the natives’ diet—shellfish, seal, sea-otter, porpoise and whale, wild berries, and certain seaweeds—and the fact that they weren’t particular.
Former voyagers have noted the avidity with which they swallowed the most offensive offal, such as decaying seal-skins, rancid seal, and whale blubber, &c. When on board my ship, they ate or drank greedily whatever was offered to them, salt-beef, salt-pork, preserved meat, pudding, pea-soup, tea, coffee, wine or brandy—nothing came amiss.
Of the Fuegians’ typical shelter, which Europeans generally called “wigwams” and characterized as “the last degree of wretchedness,” Stokes again was not content with second-hand descriptions but brought to them his own accurate eye.
To their dwellings have been given, in various books of voyages, the names of huts, wigwams, &c; but, with reference to their structure, I think old Sir John Narborough’s term for them will convey the best idea to an English reader; he calls them “arbours.” They are formed of about a couple of dozen branches, pointed at the larger ends, and stuck into the ground round a circular or elliptical space, about ten feet by six; the upper ends are brought together, and secured by tyers of grass, over which is thrown a thatching of grass and seal-skins, a hole being left at the side as a door, and another at the top as a vent for smoke.
In other words, like the North American Indians (as Europeans, with the lingering cultural memory of the motivations of the first westbound explorers, still referred to aboriginal peoples everywhere west of the Atlantic), the Fuegians had evolved methods and techniques well-adapted to their environment and climate. But this was rarely appreciated by Europeans, who invariably interpreted what they saw as squalor and ungodly sloth.
To a degree greater than anyone else on first acquaintance, Stokes saw in them some of the sweeter traits of the universal human family.
Their manner towards their children is affectionate and caressing. I often witnessed the tenderness with which they tried to quiet the alarms our presence at first occasioned, and the pleasure which they showed when we bestowed upon the little ones any trifling trinkets…. I took a fancy to a dog lying near one of the women…and offered a price for it…. She declined to part with it…. at last my offers became so considerable, that she called a little boy out of the thick jungle (into which he had fled at our approach), who was the owner of the dog. The goods were shown to him, and all his party urged him to sell it, but the little urchin would not consent.
They were all too human. And the history of their relationship with the technologically advanced white men who came from over the horizon followed the same ineluctable course it did everywhere else. Years of trading with sealers had given them a taste for, in the beginning, beads and mirrors, and later the more useful things: metal, cloth, tools, and weapons. In North America, the single most useful item introduced to the natives at their first contact with Europeans, the Spanish conquistadores, was the horse. That tool brought them speed, efficiency, and power; it altered their view of their world and what they could do in it. It was the transforming bone tossed into the air by Stanley Kubrick’s ape that turns into a spaceship.
In the waterworld of Tierra del Fuego, what the Fuegians coveted most were the white men’s boats.
To the elegant, aristocratic, accomplished Robert FitzRoy, looking down at the naked, greasy primitives in their canoes from the immeasurably loftier height of the Beagle’s deck, the Fuegians seemed at first no more than curious local fauna. They bore no relation to him or his work. He was there to survey for the British Admiralty, to employ the formidable skills he had developed and make a name for himself in the world he knew. Yet it was a profoundly fateful encounter. His life and unique place in history, and the entire arc of scientific and religious thinking in the nineteenth century, were to turn on the meeting between Robert FitzRoy and these “savages.”
It was the southern autumn when the survey ships reached Tierra del Fuego. The Beagle, and the schooner Adelaide, now commanded by Lieutenant Skyring, were sent to explore the western half of the Strait of Magellan.
Unlike Stokes, FitzRoy admired the landscape: “I cannot help here remarking that the scenery this day appeared to me magnificent,” he wrote in his journal on April 14, near Port Famine. He so remarked on many days.
In May, FitzRoy anchored the Beagle and set out with some of his crew and a month’s supplies in the ship’s small cutter and a whaleboat, both of which could be easily rowed and sailed, and in these poked far into small bays and narrow channels where the larger ship could have sailed only with difficulty. This small mobile expedition traveled for more than a month, the men camping ashore at night. Following a small, twisting channel that led north from the strait through high snow- and ice-covered hills, they discovered and partially surveyed two vast sea-lakes, each about forty miles long and connected by a narrow channel, hidden away in the southern Andes. FitzRoy named these Otway Water, after his patron, and, with a nod to his loyal subordinate who had gracefully made way for him, Skyring Water.
He reveled in the rigors of the small-boat adventure. As the season advanced and the weather grew colder, he found that his navy cloak, which covered him at night, was stiff with frost in the mornings. “Yet I never slept more soundly nor was in better health.” Late one afternoon, FitzRoy and his crew in the whaleboat were caught in a sudden gale and spent five hours of darkness rowing into the rising wind and waves, bailing frantically to keep the boat from swamping, until the gale died down just as quickly and they made shore. This incident, and the hardship shared and even enjoyed by FitzRoy and his men (with whom he also shared his cutthroat razor), made a strong bond between the new captain and his crew.
In July, with gales bringing snow and winter coming on, the Beagle and the Adelaide sailed west out of the strait, into the Pacific, and north to Chiloé Island to rendezvous with Captain King and the Adventure. On the way, scudding before a southeasterly gale, a moment’s inattention by the helmsman allowed the Beagle to slew sideways off course and a breaking sea smashed aboard and swept away one of the whaleboats hanging in davits off the ship’s stern quarter.
The three ships and their crews spent the southern winter anchored off a small settlement on Chiloé Island, working on the ships, readying them for the next season’s work. Jonathan May, the Beagle’s carpenter, built a new whaleboat to replace the one that had been carried away. May was a shipwright of considerable skill who had served a long apprenticeship in boatbuilding, and the new boat was built of seasoned planks that had been carried aboard the Beagle from England expressly for such a need. FitzRoy was pleased with the new whaleboat. He did not know it was destined to act as the lynchpin of his fate.
In November, with the approach of spring, Captain King gave FitzRoy his orders for the coming season: alone with the Beagle (the Adelaide would be otherwise occupied), he was to explore and survey whatever he could of the ragged, broken southern shores of Tierra del Fuego, from the western to the eastern entrances of the Strait of Magellan. Neither captain knew the magnitude of these orders. Neither had any idea of the extent of this nebulous region’s vast galaxy of razor-sharp rocks and islands scattered across more than 25,000 square miles, bordered by the strait to the north and Cape Horn to the south. FitzRoy had a few inadequate charts, and these were so full of small starlike crosses marking rocks that they appeared (as they still do on modern charts) more like maps of heavenly constellations. They were inaccurate, but they were good indicators of the nature of what lay ahead.
King told FitzRoy to accomplish what he could and rendezvous with the Adventure either in Port Famine by April 1 or in Rio de Janeiro by June 20.
The Beagle sailed south on November 19, 1829.