The term “collecting” had a particular weight attached to it in nineteenth-century Britain. Explorers in Africa, Asia, and South America felt duty-bound to collect bugs, birds, spiders, flowers, and native nose rings to ship home. Every far-flung outpost of the empire had its local amateur enthusiast: the Indian Raj hill station doctor who sent home a few butterflies, the missionary in Africa who became fascinated with dung beetles, anyone of a scientific bent who gathered examples of the local flora and fauna. He would look for them himself, and his fellow expatriates and the local natives would bring him anything thought to be worthy of his interest.
These collectors would examine their specimens, categorize, preserve, then package the finer examples with care and send them “home” to England. Sometimes they were sent to a friend who might be storing, housing, or displaying the mounting collection, but just as often to the British Museum or some other interested repository. Country houses, museums, universities, and gentlemen’s clubs filled with specimens from around the globe. Taxidermy became a frenzied profession. England, in that age of expanding exploration and colonial possession, became a vast storehouse of every kind of transportable evidence of the warp and weft of Man and Nature.
Notable collectors were Lord Elgin, who in 1806 looted a shipful of 2,500-year-old marble statues from the Parthenon in Athens and sent them back to England, and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose eight-year-long wanderings through the Malay Archipelago eventually resulted in 125,660 specimens of plants, insects, and animals shipped home.
FitzRoy’s savages were a natural part of this ethos. From the moment of first contact, Eskimos, Pygmies, Polynesians, Africans, and “Ioway” American Indians had also been “collected” by European explorers. Captain Cook returned to England at the end of his second voyage with a Tahitian, Omai, who partied in London for two years before returning home with Cook on his last voyage. Fifty-eight thousand people went to see a family of Laplanders with their live reindeer exhibited in London in 1822. Two hundred years earlier, Captain George Weymouth kidnapped five Indians from an island near what is now Port Clyde, Maine, and brought them back to England. They were treated well and when eventually repatriated, they had nothing but good to say of the English. One of them, Tasquantum, or Squanto, taught some English to a friend of his, Samoset, who happened to be in the neighborhood of present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, when the Mayflower dropped anchor in December 1620. When its pilgrim passengers went ashore, they were met by Samoset who flabbergasted them by saying “Welcome” and asking if they had any beer.
Such kidnap victims were “specimens,” as FitzRoy naturally described his Fuegians, like breadfruit or the Argentine opossum, to be collected and studied for the benefit of science—and for their own sake: what Kipling termed the white man’s burden, the patronizing presumption that it was morally incumbent upon civilized Englishmen to extend (more often than not with overwhelming force) a hand to uplift their colored inferiors. Poked and prodded in all cases, the luckier specimens were treated with genuine compassion and occasionally sent back to their homes with chests of smart clothes and new belongings and amazing stories to tell their descendants. Others found themselves in smoky, overpopulated, industrial cities, exhibited as curiosities at fairgrounds and in theaters, examples of the freakish lower echelons of creation, destined to die of neglect, despair, and loneliness.
These living trophies satisfied the missionary zeal of the age that was the higher-minded rationale behind the scramble for colonial possession. Men like FitzRoy, and David Livingstone in Africa, believed they were bringing improvement and light to disenfranchised peoples while paving the way for the British to take over their lands and material wealth.
Whatever his motives, FitzRoy’s collection of natives from the territory of his survey was not part of his job description. It was an action far beyond the strict orders plainly outlined by the Admiralty, whose responsibility for the Fuegians he had now incurred, to dubious purpose.
As the Beagle approached England in September 1830, FitzRoy wrote a letter to his superior officer, Captain Phillip Parker King, of the Adventure, telling him what he had done:
Beagle, at sea, 12 September 1830
Sir,
I have the honour of reporting to you that there are now on board of His Majesty’s Sloop, under my command, four natives of Tierra del Fuego.
Their names and estimated ages are:
York Minster…26
Boat Memory…20
James Button…14
Fuegia Basket (a girl)…9
I have maintained them entirely at my own expense, and hold myself responsible for their comfort while away from, and for their safe return to their own country: and I have now to request that, as senior officer of the expedition, you will consider the possibility of some public advantage being derived from this circumstance; and of the propriety of offering them, with that view, to His Majesty’s Government.
FitzRoy then gave a brief account of the Beagle’s stolen whaleboat and his attempt to secure hostages and interpreters for its return, and his eventual decision to keep the captives aboard.
I thought that many good effects might be the consequence of their living a short time in England. They have lived, and have been clothed like the seamen, and are now, and have been always, in excellent health and very happy. They understand why they were taken, and look forward with pleasure to seeing our country, as well as returning to their own.
Should not His Majesty’s government direct otherwise, I shall procure for these people a suitable education, and, after two or three years, shall send or take them back to their country, with as large a stock as I can collect of those articles most useful to them, and most likely to improve the condition of their countrymen, who are now scarcely superior to the brute creation.
Robt. FitzRoy
The passage from Tierra del Fuego was a long one, four and a half months, with stops in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro. The Fuegians grew slowly more communicative with the crew, as they picked up a basic and sailorly English, and FitzRoy attempted to make translations of some of their words, a process complicated by the fact that Jemmy Button spoke a different dialect from the other three captives.
The Fuegians made rare tourists aboard their British Navy cruise ship. Montevideo, their first city, would have been a fantastic sight to them. The harbor was filled with ships, a sprawl of buildings and streets tumbled down to the water, large buildings and warehouses lined the docks, and music of all kinds poured out of bars and dance halls and floated across the water to the anchored ship. Here they all went ashore. FitzRoy took them to the local hospital to be vaccinated against smallpox; Fuegia Basket stayed with an English family for a few days, and the three men accompanied the captain (and probably several of the Beagle’s marines) on some of his business through the city.
The Fuegians seemed far less astonished and amazed than FitzRoy expected. Animals and boats—things they were familiar with—drew animated responses from them: “A large ox, with unusually long horns, excited their wonder remarkably.” But with much else, the larger, denser jumble of civilization around them, the shock of the new, seemed to overload their senses and dull them into a stolid impassiveness.
When anything excited their attention particularly they would appear at the time almost stupid and unobservant; but that they were not so in reality was shown by their eager chattering to one another at the first subsequent opportunity, and by the sensible remarks made by them a long time afterwards, when we fancied they had altogether forgotten unimportant occurrences which took place during the first few months of their sojourn among us.
In Montevideo, far from home, sweltering in a new, subtropical climate, and perhaps seeing the English captain for the first time as a friend and buffer between them and an unimaginably strange world, the Fuegians began to open up to FitzRoy and talk to him about their home and customs. “It was here that I first learned from them that they made a practice of eating their enemies taken in war. The women, they explained to me, eat the arms; and the men the legs; the trunk and head were always thrown into the sea.”
As the known world opened up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cannibalism was the salacious bogey attached to every dealing with “savages.” Fear of it had sent Captain Bligh and his fellow castaways from the Bounty more than 4000 miles across the Pacific and the Strait of Timor in an open boat, rather than putting ashore at any of the many islands and the Australian mainland they passed within sight of. Cannibalism was known to have been practiced in Africa, Polynesia, and Australasia; any dark-skinned race was presumed to be capable of it. Whether real or imaginary, it underscored the moral imperative that God-fearing Englishmen felt to improve the condition of native cultures everywhere.
According to Lucas Bridges, the son of a missionary who grew up in nineteenth-century Tierra del Fuego, there was never any cannibalism among the Fuegians. FitzRoy’s misinformation, Bridges speculated in his book, Uttermost Part of the Earth, was probably the result of his own fearful and probing questions about cannibalism, which his Fuegian captives sensed and responded to with black humor: “Do your people ever eat each other?” “Oh, yes, the men eat the legs, the women the arms.”
But with such expected disclosures from his protégés, FitzRoy was more certain than ever of the rightness of his mission to clothe them, carry them home, and steep them in Christian values.
After a brief stop in Rio de Janeiro, the Beagle sailed on August 6 and hove in sight of England nine weeks later. Montevideo, for all its newness to the Fuegians, was a ramshackle town at the edge of a wilderness; England was the center of the scientific world, throbbing, clamoring, and smoking in the full bore of industrial development. In Falmouth harbor, at the clean edge of the open sea, the Fuegians were terrified by their first sight of it.
I think that no one who remembers standing for the first time near a railway, and witnessing the rapid approach of a steam-engine, with its attached train of carriages, as it dashed along, smoking and snorting, will be surprised at the effect which a large steam ship passing at full speed near the Beagle, in a dark night, must have had on these ignorant, though rather intelligent barbarians.
After dropping mail to be delivered to the Admiralty, the Beagle sailed on to Devonport, the naval dockyard at Plymouth. Here FitzRoy took the Fuegians ashore at night to “comfortable, airy lodgings.” The next day he brought a doctor to vaccinate them for a second time against smallpox.
A virus that spread like the common cold, smallpox had been more lethal to humans through the ages than all our wars. A victim expelled droplets containing the virus from the nose and mouth; anyone inhaling the droplets or carrying them by the hand to the mouth became infected. The symptoms were unmistakable: aches, a high fever, followed by a rash resembling thousands of small pimples on the face and spreading to other parts of the body. The pimples became larger and filled with pus. The disease killed about 20 percent of its victims. In those who survived, scabs formed over the pimples, leaving permanent scars. The eyes were often infected and many were left blind. Sweeping across Asia, Africa, and Europe, as influenza still does, smallpox was once so common that almost everyone got it at some time. Europeans unfailingly carried it with them in their explorations around the world, killing millions of natives who had no immunity to the disease.
Until the late eighteenth century, the only protection was variolation: inoculation of a healthy person with the pus of a smallpox victim. This could result in a mild case of the disease and subsequent immunity. In 1796, a British physician, Edward Jenner, went further and made a real vaccine from cowpox, a mild form of the disease suffered by milkmaids, who were then said to be immune to smallpox. As with John Harrison, the eighteenth-century clockmaker whose work was persistently ignored or rebuffed (but without which FitzRoy could not have determined his longitude with such accuracy), Jenner’s claim and studies were sneered at by his own medical community and rejected by the Royal Society (Britain’s premier association of scientists). But his vaccination was quickly adopted elsewhere. President Thomas Jefferson tried it out on family members; Napoleon vaccinated his troops; physicians in Europe and Russia began to use it. By 1830, when FitzRoy brought the Fuegians to England, vaccination was widespread, even, finally, in England (where Jenner had belatedly been rewarded with £30,000 by Parliament), but the vaccines were of varying quality. Plymouth, a seaport with a large and constantly revolving population of seamen and visitors, was a rich breeding ground for disease. FitzRoy was unsure of the quality of the vaccine at Montevideo, so he started his Fuegians on a new course of vaccinations as soon as possible.
Two days later he brought them to stay at a farm a few miles from Plymouth, where he hoped they would have more room and fresh air and less risk of disease, and where they could quietly remain while he figured out what to do with them.
This wasn’t easy. John Barrow, the second secretary at the Admiralty, had responded favorably to his initiative: “Their Lordships will not interfere with Commander FitzRoy’s personal superintendence of, or benevolent intentions towards these four people, but they will afford him any facilities towards maintaining and educating them in England, and will give them a passage home again.” This meant little beyond accepting what FitzRoy had done and giving him permission to spend some of his time arranging the welfare of his charges. The Admiralty’s only true “facilities” were the berths offered on its ships heading, at some future date, back to Tierra del Fuego.
FitzRoy asked an acquaintance, the Reverend J. L. Harris, vicar at nearby Plymstock, Devon, to write to the Church Missionary Society on his behalf, for help in placing the Fuegians, at FitzRoy’s expense, with some godly folk who might instruct and enlighten them for two or three years. Perhaps he told Harris too much: “They are Cannibals but now they show a ready appetite for Vegetables,” wrote Harris. The Society, which was primarily concerned with its missions to Africa and the far east, replied that it did not feel the Fuegians to be within its “province.”
In the meantime, the Beagle was stripped and cleaned out, and on October 27, its pendant was struck—decommissioned, laid up “in ordinary” once more to await its next call to naval service. The Beagle’s crew were paid off and dispersed. “I much regretted the separation from my tried and esteemed shipmates,” wrote FitzRoy. “Of those who had passed so many rough hours together, but few were likely to meet again.” The Beagle’s crew had been a happy one since FitzRoy’s appointment. They had spent two years in close company together aboard the tight quarters of the ship, and rowing and camping in the boats for weeks they had shared food and razors and storms, and when inevitably FitzRoy obtained another commission and another ship, he would have to find, train, and mold another crew to his liking again. But for now, his seamen were laid off, equipped with their meager backpay and perhaps a letter of recommendation from their captain, to look for berths aboard other vessels, or to go home to their families, to the farms or cities they came from, to lose or stay in touch with their former shipmates. FitzRoy retained his coxswain, James Bennett, probably on half-pay, leaving him to keep an eye on the Fuegians while he remained in Plymouth to attend to the details of his survey, and to continue to look for the right berth for his cannibal savages.
In early November, he received bad news from Bennett: Boat Memory appeared to have smallpox. FitzRoy contacted Dr. Armstrong at the Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth, who suggested that all four Fuegians be immediately admitted to the hospital, where they could be isolated and given the best treatment. The Admiralty gave its permission, and the Fuegians were taken there on November 7 and placed in the care of two renowned naval physicians, Drs. David Dickson and Sir James Gordon.
Work on his surveys now took FitzRoy to London for consultation with the Admiralty’s hydrographic department, but he had hardly reached there when he received a letter from Dr. Dickson telling him that Boat Memory had died. FitzRoy was filled with genuine grief and remorse.
This poor fellow was a very great favourite with all who knew him, as well as with myself. He had a good disposition, very good abilities, and though born a savage, had a pleasing, intelligent appearance. He was quite an exception to the general character of the Fuegians, having good features and a well-proportioned frame…. This was a severe blow to me, for I was deeply sensible of the responsibility which had been incurred; and, however unintentionally, could not but feel how much I was implicated in shortening his existence.
On the long voyage home to England, he had gained a good idea of the personalities and abilities of the Fuegians. By the end of it he’d found York Minster “a displeasing specimen of uncivilized human nature.” Part of this conclusion was undoubtedly the result of FitzRoy’s great belief in the telling aspects of physical appearance. His own portrait drawings of the Fuegians show York Minster, despite a high collar, tie, and frock coat, to be much coarser-featured than the others. His admiration for Boat Memory’s appearance was certainly one reason FitzRoy had placed on him his greatest hopes for a civilizing transformation.
Now his concern, and his hopes, centered on the other three, two of them children. They had all been revaccinated on first entering the hospital, and the Navy doctors wrote to FitzRoy that they were optimistic of their chances of resisting the disease.
They didn’t get smallpox. But Dickson, in a wild and cavalier act of medical adventuring—and in the best tradition of progressive experimentation; the two inescapably went together—took Fuegia Basket home with him, where his own children had come down with measles. He thought it an excellent opportunity “to carry the little Fuegian girl through that malady” in order to boost her immune system. He only informed FitzRoy later, telling him that he’d prepared her for it and that she’d had “a very favorable attack.”
The Fuegians otherwise remained in the naval hospital for the rest of November, while FitzRoy, back in London working on his surveys, anxiously wondered what he would do with them when they were discharged. The rejection by the Church Missionary Society had stalled his plan for their improvement and education.
But suddenly everything got better. FitzRoy’s hopes for his Fuegians, naive and unplanned, made him some friends. The Church Missionary Society had not felt able to help him, but its secretary, Dandeson Coates, took a personal interest and put him in touch with the Reverend Joseph Wigram, secretary of the National Society for Providing the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. Wigram, then an assistant preacher and later to become the Bishop of Rochester, was the son of a well-to-do landowner and still lived at his father’s home in Walthamstow, Essex, just east of London. Gripped with the fervor of his society’s avowed mission, he approached Walthamstow’s rector, William Wilson, who grew equally excited. Together they hatched a plan for FitzRoy’s savages.