They had come a remarkably long way. There was no more certain sign of the Fuegians’ anglicization than their clothing. The first thing FitzRoy had done after kidnapping them, even before feeding them, was to dress them in English clothing. This, he assured the Admiralty in his first communication concerning his protégés, made them “very happy.”
Now, two years on, they walked about the ship in their fancy duds and gazed shoreward from the decks, the oddest of tourists. There was no cruising or yachting gear for passengers, no white ducks or striped blazers. Though they may have been given oiled canvas seacoats to permit them to get some air on deck during inclement weather, the Fuegians would not have dressed as seamen. York Minster and Jemmy Button, in earnest collusion with their captors over their transformation, dressed in the de rigueur fashion of early-nineteenth-century gentlemen: aboard ship and ashore, they wore topcoats with tails, double-breasted waistcoats with lapels, high-collared shirts with cravats, long trousers, and leather boots. They had probably been given cheap watches with fobs to complete the proper “weskit” effect. The full regalia, pounds of English wool, must have been sweltering in the tropics, but it was the clear badge of their elevation from savagery and they wore every layer of it devoutly.
Jemmy Button in particular was observed by everyone to be fastidious about his dress. He had grown fat and vain during his stay in England, he was rarely seen without his white kid gloves, and was scrupulous, even neurotic, about the polish of his boots. While his speech never went far beyond the basic “Me go you” plateau of essential communication, he had an ear for the delicate and foppish in expression. When he visited Darwin in his seasick berth, Jemmy gazed at him with pity and said, “Poor, poor fellow!” This virtual satire of excessive Englishness—closely resembling someone from the lower classes putting on airs—amused captain, crew, and Darwin alike, and endeared Jemmy Button to all of them. He instinctually, if incompletely, understood this and played to his gallery.
Fuegia Basket’s dresses and bonnets were probably more comfortable at sea and in the heat, but no less proper. And all three dressed up in their formal best for FitzRoy’s regular Sunday shipboard services of hymn singing and prayers.
Although thrown into intimate contact with them for more than a year, Darwin’s impressions of the Fuegians were less savvy than his observations of the natural landscapes he glimpsed at the Beagle’s ports of call. He agreed largely with FitzRoy’s opinions of their innate personalities and characteristics, which the captain had derived from his ideas about facial features and the mumbo jumbo of phrenology. Soon after their arrival in England, FitzRoy had taken them to a phrenologist to have the bumps on their heads read. The specialist’s finding was that all three were “disposed to cunning” and possessed “animal inclinations and passions” that would pose problems in making them “usefeul members of society.” Nobody in Christian England would have been surprised by such a diagnosis. Darwin saw a gentler side to Jemmy Button, but his own conclusion that the boy must possess a “nice disposition” was based less on his day-to-day contact with him than his reading of the physiognomy of Jemmy’s face.
Darwin thought the twelve-year-old Fuegia Basket “a nice, modest, reserved young girl, with a rather pleasing but sometimes sullen expression.” He noticed too that she possessed an innate cleverness: “[She was] very quick in learning anything, especially languages. This was showed by picking up some Portuguese and Spanish, when left on shore for only a short time at Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo, and in her knowledge of English.” Fuegia was the best English speaker of the three, and she picked up manners with her languages. She was the charmer, the pet of the lower deck on the voyage back to England from Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy’s showpiece specimen who had won Queen Adelaide’s heart. Fuegia Basket had a natural charm that needed no translation, that bridged any cultural gap, an endearing quality as potent in its way as sex appeal. She understood this and used it.
Darwin’s impressions of York Minster were close to FitzRoy’s, for the little he wrote of the elder, most intractable Fuegian echoes the phrenologist’s report, which Darwin undoubtedly read: “His disposition was reserved, taciturn, morose, and when excited violently passionate; his affections were very strong towards a few friends on board; his intellect good.”
Darwin was most struck by the two Fuegian men’s eyesight. His own had proved extremely sharp in shooting, and he had excellent distance vision, better than most of the crew’s. But York and Jemmy sighted ships at sea and land beyond the horizon long before anyone else on board the ship. They were well aware of their superiority and enjoyed it: “Me see ship, me no tell,” Jemmy liked to tease the officers on watch. Their sense of taste seemed keener too; they appeared to Darwin to have natural powers far beyond the capabilities of Europeans, an impression he was to amplify years later when he came to write his Descent of Man.
The clearest object of York Minster’s affections was Fuegia Basket. It was understood by all on board that once landed in Tierra del Fuego, York and Fuegia would become, as the sailors put it, “man and wife.” Until then, while in his care, FitzRoy kept them apart as far as possible. Fuegia’s hammock was swung aft, near the officers’ quarters, while Jemmy and York bunked forward with the crew.
It was a long slow cruise south. The Beagle made lengthy stops in Rio de Janeiro (FitzRoy left Fuegia Basket ashore here in the company of an English family for three months, where she helped the young children of the family with their English, while picking up Portuguese herself), Montevideo, and Bahia Blanca on the Argentine coast. Between these ports the ship cruised painstakingly back and forth surveying the coast.
Darwin took advantage of this tedious cruising to explore ashore for weeks at a time, renting houses and staying with ranchers, wandering through Brazilian rain forests, galloping across the Argentine pampas with bands of gauchos, thrilling and exhausting himself. He also spent more time in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. For reading material ashore, surrounded by paradisaical natural glories, he carried Milton’s Paradise Lost everywhere. He stayed in touch with the ship and its wanderings by a fairly regular correspondence with FitzRoy. The tone of these letters shows the essential warmth of their friendship. The captain clearly missed Darwin while he was off the ship; his letters reveal an antic, schoolboy banter—a tone he could never have enjoyed with his subordinates—underscoring both FitzRoy’s tender age and the lonely isolation of his rank and often fearsome responsibility:
My dear Philos,
Trusting that you are not entirely expended—though half-starved, occasionally frozen and at times half drowned—I wish you joy from your campaign with General Rosas [an Argentine general whose troops were slaughtering Indians all over the pampas], and I do assure you that whenever the ship pitches (which is very often as you well know), I am extremely vexed to think how much sea practice you are losing;—and how unhappy you must feel on firm ground.
Your home (upon the waters) will remain at anchor near the Monte Megatherii until you return to assist in parturition of a Megalonyx measuring seventy-two feet from the end of his snout to the tip of his tail, and an Ichthyosaurus somewhat larger than the Beagle!…[While still with the ship in Bahia Blanca, Darwin and FitzRoy had discovered on a nearby beach the fossilized bones of several large animals, which they believed could have belonged to a Megatherium or Megalonyx, both extinct.]
My dear Darwin,
Two hours since I received your epistle…. and most punctually and immediately am I about to answer your queries. (Mirabilo!!) But firstly of the first—My good Philos, why have you told me nothing of your hairbreadth escapes and moving accidents? How many times did you flee from the Indians? How many precipices did you fall over? How many bogs did you fall into? How often were you carried away by the floods?…I hear you are saying, “You have got to the end of a sheet of paper without telling me one thing that I want to know.”
Philos, do not be irate, have patience and I will tell thee all.
Tomorrow we shall sail for Maldonado—there we shall remain until the middle of this month—thence we shall return to Monte Video…
Adios Philos—Ever faithfully yours,
Robt. FitzRoy
FitzRoy was anxious to get south to Tierra del Fuego to land the Fuegians and Matthews, the missionary, and help them establish their mission during the brief southern summer, December to January. In September 1832, daunted by the enormity and difficulty of making a thorough survey of the Argentine coast with the Beagle alone, he hired two small local sealing schooners to share some of the work. The seventeen-ton Paz was, FitzRoy wrote, “as ugly and ill-built a craft as I ever saw, covered with dirt, and soaked with rancid oil.” The eleven-ton Liebre was just as filthy, but they appeared seaworthy and suitable. FitzRoy outfitted them from the Beagle’s stores, manned them with his own men, and sent them off to survey the shoal waters and river estuaries between Bahia Blanca and Rio Negro.
By early December, the survey work was done. The Beagle returned to Montevideo for supplies, and then sailed south again.
On December 16, 1832, the Beagle closed with the bleak eastern shore of Tierra del Fuego. Through the long afternoon and twilight the ship sailed southeast, paralleling the shore at a distance of a few miles, and in the evening anchored in an exposed bight off Cape Santa Inez, some 130 miles south of the entrance to the Strait of Magellan. The land ran in a long unbroken line northwest to southeast, offering no safe harbor, ending in sheer cliffs over which seabirds wheeled and cried.
“The sky was gloomy,” wrote Darwin in his diary. “At a great distance to the south was a chain of lofty mountains, the summits of which glittered with snow.”
The Beagle had never visited this part of the Fuegian coast. The crew wondered if it was inhabited. Shortly they knew: smoke rose from the shore. Through his telescope, Darwin saw Indians scattered about the sheer edge of the land “watching the ship with interest.” This southeastern shore of Tierra del Fuego was the territory of the Ona tribes.
With their keen eyesight, the Fuegians aboard the Beagle did not need telescopes. “Oens-men—very bad!” Jemmy and York told FitzRoy, and asked him to fire at them, which he declined to do.
Despite his refusal to kill their enemies, FitzRoy observed that the three Fuegians appeared elated. They stared shoreward from the deck and knew they were home.
The captain’s own feelings at seeing “his” Fuegians so close to their repatriation went unrecorded.