Darwin was among the large group that set out on January 19, headed for the place near Murray Narrows that Jemmy Button called his “conetree,” from where he had first been taken. This was where FitzRoy now decided the new settlement and mission should be established.
For about a day, he had considered the land on Lennox and Navarin Islands around the Beagle’s anchorage in Goree Road. More towns and cities have come into being because of their proximity to a safe harbor than for any other reason. The coast hereabouts was unusually flat for this drowned-mountain region, and FitzRoy thought it might prove suitable to agriculture. But after tramping across it for a few miles with Darwin, they found the whole area to be a swamp, “a dreary morass…quite unfit for our purposes.” Jemmy’s country, where he was keen to return, seemed more promising.
FitzRoy, Darwin, Matthews and the three Fuegians, Bynoe, the Beagle’s surgeon, and about twenty-seven seamen, marines, and officers, filled three whaleboats and the ship’s 26-foot yawl. Temporarily decked over, the yawl was also crammed with the cargo largely donated by the Church Missionary Society and others to start the Fuegians and Matthews on their new life.
The choice of articles [wrote Darwin] showed the most culpable folly & negligence. Wine glasses, butter-bolts, tea-trays, soup turins, [a] mahogany dressing case, fine white linen, beavor hats & an endless variety of similar things shows how little was thought about the country where they were going to. The means absolutely wasted on such things would have purchased an immense stock of really useful articles.
The folly and the culpability were mainly FitzRoy’s, as Darwin surely knew. The captain, better than any of the well-meaning donors, knew the conditions of the wild, uttermost shores upon which the pioneers would be deposited. He had apparently not instructed the generous suppliers on what might have been more useful, nor sold or traded the linens, tea trays, and beaver hats for tools. He had been the prop master organizing the shipping and handling of all these silly items. He had watched them being carried into the Beagle’s hold at Devonport, where they had taken up valuable cargo space. It was one thing to have the queen of England presenting Fuegia Basket with a ring as a keepsake from a famous patron, but something else altogether to transport a boatload of genteel and mainly useless bric-a-brac to Tierra del Fuego. What could he have been thinking?
Here was the crazy myopia of FitzRoy’s vision, fueled and abetted by Britain’s expansionist aspirations and its own special relationship with God: three little wigwams raised against the williwaws of Cape Horn, each fixed up inside as an English drawing room, in which York, Jemmy, and Fuegia would repose, in their tailcoats and cravats and bonnet, with Matthews in the third wigwam to lead them in Sunday services. If such a thing was possible, what might not have grown from it? This was FitzRoy’s dream, and he had pursued it with the energy of Alexander.
The boats traveled north from Goree Road and entered the Beagle Channel. This remarkable, two- to three-mile-wide, nearly straight, easily navigable waterway running east-west for 120 miles between high mountains, had been discovered by Murray, the Beagle’s master on the previous voyage.
Darwin’s doubts about the venture didn’t prevent him from enjoying the outing or the constantly magnificent scenery.
In our little fleet we glided along, till we found in the evening a corner snugly concealed by small islands.—Here we pitched out tents & lighted our fires.—nothing could look more romantic than this scene.—the glassy water of the cove & the boats at anchor; the tents supported by the oars & the smoke curling up the wooded valley formed a picture of quiet & retirement.
It was like a camping scene by the American painter-franchiser Thomas Kincaid, whose lurid sublimity and mossy palette would be just right for the exaggerated picturesqueness of Tierra del Fuego.
As the group pulled west along the channel the next day, Fuegians appeared on the shore. They gaped at the cruisers in astonishment and ran for miles beside the channel to keep up with the boats. The Beagle Channel does not appear to have been noticed by voyagers before Murray came upon it in 1830; it would have been out of the way and unknown to the sealing and whaling vessels that frequented the region’s ocean coasts or the Strait of Magellan, so it’s probable that many of the Fuegians who saw the Englishmen in their boats that day had never seen any but their own people before. Fires sprang up all along the coast, both to attract the strangers’ attention and to spread the news of their presence. For Darwin, the Fuegians delivered another gothic-opera spectacle:
I shall never forget how savage & wild one group was.—Four or five men suddenly appeared on a cliff near us.—they were absolutely naked & with long streaming hair; springing from the ground & waving their arms around their heads, they sent forth the most hideous yells. Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants.
The Anglicized Fuegians traveling with the Englishmen thought no better of these people than the group they had met a few weeks earlier in Good Success Bay. “Large monkeys,” York Minster called them, laughing at them with what to FitzRoy must have been a dispiriting lack of Christian feeling. (Since there were no monkeys in Tierra del Fuego, York could only have acquired this derogatory comparison in England, and it’s not hard to imagine how.) Jemmy Button assured the captain that these people were greatly inferior to his own, who were “very good and very clean.”
It was Fuegia Basket who had the strongest reaction to the sight of her countrymen in their original state—her first in two and a half years, since she hadn’t come ashore with the others at Good Success Bay. She was plainly terrified. After two years of total immersion among the most fragrant of English sensibilities, she was shocked at their nakedness and brute appearance. She may also have felt an acute embarrassment: this was who and what she really was. She had been lifted out of this, taken to another world and given the profoundest makeover. But now she was being returned to starkest heathendom—it is nowhere recorded whether she was pleased to come back or not—to be left here with a chest full of dresses and petticoats, some tea trays, and her great hulking twenty-eight-year-old suitor York Minster. Fuegia was still only twelve years old at the most, an intuitive, clever girl to be sure. But such attributes may not have helped her at this moment, when dumb ignorance might have been preferable. Her grasp of all that had happened to her, and was about to, can only be guessed at. FitzRoy, with his tunnel vision, so ready to believe what he wanted to believe, is our only witness to her feelings. He wrote: “Fuegia was shocked and ashamed; she hid herself, and would not look at them [the wailing wild men ashore] a second time.”
Two days farther westward along the Beagle Channel, the convoy passed below what is now the port of Ushuaia. That evening, in a cove at the north end of the Murray Narrows, they met a small group of “Tekeenica” Fuegians. They were members of Jemmy Button’s tribe, whom he remembered, and they remembered him.
Both FitzRoy, and therefore Darwin and others, described Jemmy’s tribe as the Yapoo Tekeenica, or the Yapoo division of the Tekeenica tribe. It’s not clear where FitzRoy got this, though he wrote that he believed he had heard Boat Memory and York Minster referring to the Fuegians of this area as Yapoos on the previous voyage. But he was mistaken. The tribe, and Jemmy Button, actually called themselves Yamana. Lucas Bridges, son of the missionary Thomas Bridges, who later established a mission at Ushuaia and produced a 32,000-word Yamana-English dictionary, explained such a misunderstanding in his book Uttermost Part of the Earth.
It is interesting to note how many names have arisen through mistakes and even become permanent by finding their way into Admiralty charts. Early historians tell us of a place called Yaapooh, and speak of the people of that country. No such place or people existed, and this word is simply a corruption of the Yaghan [Yamana] name for otter, iapooh. No doubt FitzRoy, pointing towards a distant shore, asked what it was called. The [Fuegian’s] keen eyes would spy an otter, and he would answer with the word, “Iapooh.”
In all the charts of this country—both Spanish and English—a certain sound in Hoste Island bears the name Tekenika. The Indians had no such name for that or any other place, but the word in the Yaghan tongue means “difficult or awkward to see or understand.” No doubt the bay was pointed out to a native, who, when asked the name of it, answered, “Teke uneka,” implying, “I don’t understand what you mean,” and down went the name “Tekenika.”
Much of what FitzRoy “learned” from his dealings with Fuegians must be set against misunderstandings like this—and his reliance on translators who were frequently under coercion.
Although they were his people, Jemmy found he had forgotten much of his native language and had trouble understanding them. York Minster, though from another tribe, did better and acted as a translator. In this way, Jemmy heard the news that his father had died. He had already had a “dream in his head” to that effect, wrote Darwin, so he seemed unsurprised, but according to FitzRoy, he looked “grave” at this news, went and found some green branches, which he burned with a solemn look. After that, he returned to his usual, cheerful self.
In the morning, a large number of natives arrived at the cove as the Englishmen were breaking camp. Many had run so fast over the mountains from Woollya (now Wulaia) that blood was streaming from their noses. Their mouths foamed as they talked, feverishly lobbing questions at Jemmy and the others. Bleeding, frothing at the mouth, gasping for breath, painted white, red, and black, they looked like “so many demoniacs” according to Darwin.
These were all “Tekeenicas,” natives of southeastern Tierra del Fuego according to FitzRoy, who believed he saw marked differences between them and other Fuegians. These were
low in stature, ill-looking, and badly proportioned. Their colour is that of very old mahogany, or rather between dark copper, and bronze. The trunk of the body is large, in proportion to their cramped and rather crooked limbs. Their rough, coarse, and extremely dirty black hair half hides yet heightens a villanous expression of the worst description of savage features.
This is FitzRoy’s standard description of all Fuegians in the wild, no matter where he saw them. It was how he saw the ungodly savage anywhere. It fitted not only his own drawing of Jemmy Button, a “Tekeenica,” after the ameliorating influences of his stay in England had worn off and left his features coarsened as of old, but also his later drawings of Maoris in New Zealand, whose lips curl threateningly and whose expressions are uniformly villainous. “Satires upon mankind” was FitzRoy’s summing up of the physiognomy of Tekeenica men. He was no more generous with the women.
They are short, with bodies largely out of proportion to their height; their features, especially those of the old, are scarcely less disagreeable than the repulsive ones of these men. About four feet and some inches is the stature of these she-Fuegians—by courtesy called women.
As the Englishmen’s convoy got underway, they were joined by more natives on the water.
In a very short time there were thirty or forty canoes in our train, each full of natives, each with a column of blue smoke rising from the fire amidships, and almost all the men in them shouting at the full power of their deep sonorous voices. As we pursued a winding course around the bases of high rocks or between islets covered with wood, continual additions were made to our attendents; and the day being very fine, without a breeze to ruffle the water, it was a scene which carried one’s thoughts to the South Sea Islands, but in Tierra del Fuego almost appeared like a dream.
So this flotilla passed through the Murray Narrows to Woollya, the place where Jemmy Button had first been taken from a canoe. As they reached Ponsonby Sound at the southern end of the narrows, Jemmy recognized where he was. He now guided the boats into the quiet cove where he had once lived. There were only a few natives ashore. The women ran away, the remaining men nervously watched the boats land.
FitzRoy was immediately happy with the look of the place.
Rising gently from the waterside, there [were] considerable spaces of clear pasture land, well-watered by brooks, and backed by hills of moderate height, where we afterwards found woods of the finest timber trees in the country. Rich grass and some beautiful flowers, which none of us had ever seen, pleased us when we landed, and augured well for the growth of our garden seeds.
The English sailors pulled hard to stay ahead of the following canoes. As soon as they were ashore, the marines marked a boundary line on the ground with spades and spaced themselves out to guard the enclosed site on which the seamen now set to work erecting the settlement’s wigwams and digging a garden. The canoes began arriving, and more natives gathered on the shore. York and Jemmy were kept busy explaining to them the meaning of the boundary line, and what was happening, and the natives squatted down to watch.
Woollya, just below Murray Narrows, Ponsonby Sound. The site of FitzRoy’s, and others’, hoped-for New Jerusalem in Tierra del Fuego. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy)
In the evening, a deep, booming voice was heard around the cove, coming from a canoe far down the sound. Jemmy recognized it instantly: “My brother!” he said. He abandoned the nails and tools he had been distributing, and scrambled onto a large rock to watch the canoe approach. It held, along with his stentorian brother, three younger brothers, two sisters, and his mother. The canoe was a long time in reaching the cove, and when it arrived, the family reunion was a strange one. His mother and sisters barely looked at him before running off to hide, Fuegian fashion. The brothers approached Jemmy slowly, their once naked brother now returned as fancy and particular about his dress as Phileas Fogg, and circled him wordlessly, like dogs sniffing a stranger. Jemmy stole glances at his English friends and suffered a mortification known in all cultures: he was embarrassed by his family. But the Englishmen were delighted, and the family immediately became “The Buttons,” Jemmy’s two older brothers becoming Tommy and Harry (in some accounts Billy) Button. At last Jemmy tried to speak to them. Darwin observed this meeting.
It was pitiable, but laughable, to hear him talk to his brother in English & ask him in Spanish whether he understood it. I do not suppose, any person exists with such a small stock of language as poor Jemmy, his own language forgotten, & his English ornamented with a few Spanish words, almost unintelligible.
The thronging natives left the English camp at sunset, to set up their own fires and wigwams a quarter of a mile away. During the evening, Jemmy spent time with his mother and family, and York and Fuegia went visiting from wigwam to wigwam, explaining their presence, and the Englishmen’s intention of establishing a settlement at Woollya. This seemed to have a calming effect on the locals, who appeared more relaxed the next day.
For the next four days, until January 27, the Englishmen worked at preparing the settlement that Matthews, York, Fuegia, and Jemmy were to call home. They gave them the best the Royal Navy and missionary zeal could provide. The sailors erected three homes. These were called wigwams, fashioned, like the native enclosures, of saplings and thatched with grass and twigs, but probably also wrapped with sailcloth and girded and strengthened with rope. Built by the ship’s carpenters, riggers, sailmakers, bosuns, and seamen used to arranging the ingenious mechanical devices aboard a ship to their liking, they were substantial structures, built to last as long as possible, far superior to the makeshift, temporary, and transportable wigwams of the natives. Matthews’s new home had both an attic made with boards to house his abundant stores, and a “cellar”—a pit beneath the floorboards—to secrete his more valuable possessions.
Near the wigwams, the seamen stepped off a good-sized plot and dug, planted, and sowed a kitchen garden of potatoes, carrots, turnips, beans, peas, lettuce, onions, leeks, and cabbages. The British were then a nation of gardeners—farmers, crofters, fruit and flower growers. Apart from its fast-diminishing forests, Britain was almost entirely under cultivation, and a green thumb lay dormant or active in every Briton. These Beagle gardeners probably longed, as seamen chronically do, for a home and garden of their own, or had them, far away, tended by a wife or family member. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British Navy and merchant service were often the only possibility of employment for young men from an expanding and overpopulated rural labor force who sought a living on farms or from their own smallholdings, whose only alternative was to look for work in densely overcrowded cities. The loving care these seamen expended on creating this English country garden for a few savages in remote Tierra del Fuego cannot be overestimated; the exchange of tips and advice coming from grizzled salts resembling the Bounty mutineers would have been as dedicated and earnest, authoritative and argumentative, as any gathering of the Royal Horticultural Society.
Around this industry, Fuegians continued to gather and watch. Over the next few days their numbers grew to more than 300. Interaction between them and the Englishmen was initially harmonious, but there were constant attempts at thievery and incessant importuning with the word the English transliterated as “Yammerschooner.” (According to Thomas Bridges’s Yamana-English dictionary, yamask-una means “Do be liberal to me.”) “The last & first word is sure to be ‘Yammerschooner,’” wrote Darwin. The Englishmen gave them small presents but these were never enough. “It is very easy to please but as difficult to make them content…. they asked for everything they saw & stole what they could.”
After several days, the pilfering grew bolder, and on January 26 there occurred several hostile incidents when a few older Fuegian men tried to force their way into the English encampment. One of them, rebuffed by a sentry from the site boundary, spat in the seaman’s face and then pantomimed killing, skinning, and cutting up a man. FitzRoy was already concerned that his increasingly outnumbered party of thirty-odd men could be overwhelmed if the mood turned sour—the death of Captain Cook at the hands of his former devotees in Hawaii in 1779 cast a long shadow over subsequent relations between English seamen and aboriginal natives—so that evening he set the marines to some target practice with their muskets. The Fuegians watched this keenly, squatting on their haunches around the boundary like spectators at a fireworks display. FitzRoy had the targets arranged “so that they could see the effects of the balls.” The natives were duly impressed, and afterward went off to their own camps, “looking very grave and talking earnestly.”
The next morning, as the final thatching went into the wigwams, nearly all the Fuegians, including the Buttons, broke up their camps and paddled away or disappeared over the surrounding hills. Only half a dozen men were still too curious to leave. The English wondered if they’d been frightened off by the target practice, or whether an attack was being planned. FitzRoy decided to avoid any possibility of a conflict by withdrawing his men and marines to another cove a few miles away. Rather boldly, he also decided to leave Matthews and his three Fuegians to spend their first night—unguarded, with all their goods and stores—in the new wigwams. York and Jemmy both told FitzRoy that they were sure they would come to no harm, and Matthews appeared as steady and trusting as ever. The captain was impressed by his stoicism. At sunset, the four boats paddled away, leaving the settlers behind.
FitzRoy passed a sleepless night.
I could not help being exceedingly anxious about Matthews, and early next morning our boats were again steered towards Woollya. My own anxiety was increased by hearing the remarks made from time to time by the rest of the party, some of whom thought we should not again see him alive; and it was with no slight joy that I caught sight of him, as my boat rounded a point of land, carrying a kettle to the fire near his wigwam. We landed and ascertained that nothing had occurred to damp his spirits, or in any way check his inclination to make a fair trial. Some natives had returned to the place, among them one of Jemmy’s brothers; but so far were they from showing the slightest ill-will, that nothing could be more friendly than their behaviour.
Since all seemed well, FitzRoy decided to leave the group in Woollya for another week or so while he explored the western arms of the Beagle Channel, and then return to see how they were doing. He sent the yawl and one whaleboat back to the Beagle in Goree Road and set out with Darwin and a smaller group in the other two boats.
For a week, Darwin and FitzRoy had exciting but relatively trouble-free cruising. The weather began hot and sunny, and they were surprised to find themselves sunburned. They saw many whales breaching and spouting in the channel, which ran deep right up to the shore.
Both young men loved this sort of boat-camping. It was very like the trips FitzRoy had made with the whaleboats through Otway and Skyring Waters in the first year of his command aboard the Beagle, when he had slept on beaches beneath his sea cloak, finding it frozen hard over him in the mornings, and himself exhilarated by the experience.
For Darwin, the rough and truly dangerous conditions greatly appealed to the physically rugged side of his nature that had found its outlet at home in riding and shooting; it was a magnificent enlargement on the geologizing ramble he had made across Wales with Professor Sedgwick. Here, in addition to the cornucopia of natural phenomena to explore, there were wild savages to contend with, a sailing ship to call home, and weather severe enough to prompt him to grow a long beard whose tip he could see below his hand when he made a fist around it. It was the grandest adventure a boy ever had.
On successive nights they landed to make camp at deserted spots, the first at Shingle Point just west of the Murray Narrows, only to be quickly discovered and bothered by canoes full of aggressive Fuegians. These appeared unfamiliar with firearms, so the Englishmen’s weapons were no deterrent. Rather than spend the night holding them at bay or in conflict, each time they packed up and moved on, trusting that the Fuegians would not follow them after dark. Nevertheless, even when they found campsites free of any sign of natives, they kept watch in turn through the night.
On his watch, sitting close to a fire in the dead dark of night, Darwin’s imagination flamed. Fed by stories of the scuffles of the Beagle’s previous voyage, by tales of Cook and others, he was ever ready for an attack from wild savages.
It was my watch till one o’clock; there is something very solemn in such scenes; the consciousness rushes on the mind in how remote a corner of the globe you are then in…the quiet of the night is only interrupted by the heavy breathing of the men & the cry of the night birds.—the occasional distant bark of a dog reminds one that the Fuegians may be prowling, close to the tents, ready for a fatal rush…their courage is like that of a wild beast, they would not think of their inferiority in number, but each individual would endeavour to dash your brains out with a stone, as a tiger would be certain under similar circumstances to tear you.
The day after recording such febrile imaginings, nature made a rush for Darwin. His courageous and instant response got his name stamped into geography for the first time.
That day, the two boats entered the northern arm of the Beagle Channel and the scenery changed dramatically. The land along the north shore of the channel now rose steeply to the high, permanently snow-covered, jagged southern cordillera of the Andes. Cottagey Kincaid country gave way to waterlogged Himalayan vistas. Waterfalls poured from the heights, glaciers tumbled into the Beagle Channel only a few hundred yards from the men’s oars, surrounding the boats with small icebergs, or “growlers.” The land turned tundra-like, scraped clean of all but the most stunted, wind-bent vegetation. The water in the channel, right up to the deep edge of the land and in the dense shadows of the glaciers, was a dark blue-black. Both FitzRoy and Darwin remarked on the “beryl blue” sepulchral glow of light refracting through the glacial ice.
At midday they stopped to cook a meal on a sandy point of land “immediately in front of a noble precipice of solid ice,” wrote FitzRoy, “the cliffy face of a huge glacier, which seemed to cover the side of a mountain, and completely filled a valley several leagues in extent.” It was not a good spot for lunch. As they gathered around their fire, the edge of the glacier right in front of them suddenly calved.
Down came the whole front of the icy cliff, and the sea surged up in a vast heap of foam. Reverberating echoes sounded in every direction, from the lofty mountains which hemmed us in; but our whole attention was immediately called to great rolling waves which came so rapidly that there was scarcely time for the most active of our party to run and seize the boats before they were tossed along the beach like empty calabashes. By the exertions of those who grappled them or seized their ropes, they were hauled up again out of reach of a second and third roller; and indeed we had good reason to rejoice that they were just saved in time.
Darwin was among the first to jump up and grab the boats from the sudden waves that would undoubtedly have carried them off, stranding the men ashore. His instant grasp of the situation, quicker than most of the seamen in the group, and his action in helping save the boats, prompted a special consideration from FitzRoy.
The following day, the 30th, we passed into a large expanse of water, which I named Darwin Sound—after my messmate, who so willingly encountered the discomfort and risk of a long cruise in a small loaded boat.
FitzRoy later named the high mountain above the Beagle Channel Mount Darwin. Many bestowals upon geography by early explorers have been lost or changed over time (for instance, a number of Captain Cook’s names for the headlands and harbors of the New Zealand coastline have, in recent, more politically correct times, been replaced by their original Maori names). But Cerro Darwin still rises 7,975 feet high in the Cordillera Darwin above Seno Darwin on modern maps of Chilean Tierra del Fuego.
Several days later, the boats reached the open Pacific. In “miserable weather” they turned around, traveling back along the southwest arm of the Beagle Channel. From a whaleboat, FitzRoy’s observations and surveying of this western end of the Beagle Channel were quick and relatively rough, but accurate enough to provide the basis of charts still in use today.
On February 5, at Shingle Point, close to the Murray Narrows—where they had earlier been disturbed by a group of Fuegians and decided to move camp—they met some of this same group again. Now they appeared to be “in full dress,” as FitzRoy put it: covered with red and white paint, goose down and feathers. They also wore ribbons and scraps of red cloth—gifts from the Beagle’s seamen handed out at Woollya if they hadn’t been stolen since—but one of their women, “noticed by several among us as being far from ill-looking,” was wearing one of Fuegia’s dresses. “There was also an air of almost defiance among these people, which looked as if they knew that harm had been done.” FitzRoy immediately grew anxious about settlers at Woollya.
They hurried on, rowing until it was too dark to see. They were in the boats again at daybreak. Sluicing through the Murray Narrows they saw more natives “ornamented with strips of tartan cloth or white linen, which we well knew were obtained from our poor friends. No questions were asked; we thought our progress slow, though wind and tide favoured us: but hurrying on, at noon we reached Woollya.”
The beach was thick with canoes; a hundred Fuegians were gathered along the shore and wandering around the new settlement. “All were much painted, and ornamented with rags of English clothing, which we concluded to be the last remnants of our friends’ stock.”
FitzRoy’s darkest visions seemed about to be realized when the two whaleboats touched the shore and the Fuegians ran down to the water and surrounded their crews, leaping and shouting at them.
But then Matthews appeared, his clothes and person intact, followed by York and Jemmy, still dressed in their English duds and looking as well as usual.
Fuegia Basket did not appear. She was in York’s wigwam, they said. FitzRoy gave no further explanation, but the reason for her indisposition is obvious: her first nights inside the wigwam with York Minster had also been her first alone with him. He had almost certainly had sex with his twelve-year-old bride. He had probably raped her, repeatedly.
FitzRoy pulled Matthews into a whaleboat and instructed the crew to row them a little distance offshore. There, away from the noise and interruption, he heard his story, while the natives squatted on their haunches along the beach watching them, “reminding me,” wrote FitzRoy, “of a pack of hounds waiting for a fox to be unearthed.”
The young missionary’s zeal and stoicism had collapsed in the face of the rude attention directed at him.
Matthews gave a bad account of the prospect which he saw before him, and told me, that he did not think himself safe among such a set of utter savages as he found them to be.
At first there had been only “a few quiet natives.” But three days after the English boats had left, canoes full of rowdier Fuegians had turned up to bedevil him night and day. They stole anything he left lying around his wigwam; others crowded inside it all day, chattering and imploring him to give them everything they saw. Some of them became belligerent when he refused. More than one, he told FitzRoy, “went out in a rage, and returned immediately with a large stone” implying that he would kill Matthews if he didn’t hand over what had been demanded. Others amused themselves by teasing him, “making mouths at him,” and holding him down and pulling the hair out of his face. For a few days Matthews had been able to leave Jemmy guarding his wigwam while he visited the women in theirs, where they fed him and asked nothing in return, but soon the besieging, importuning, thieving mob made it impossible for him to leave his wigwam. Despite Jemmy’s constant assurances to the contrary, Matthews told FitzRoy that he believed he would soon be killed.
York Minster, a superior physical specimen among the Fuegians, had not been bothered and had lost nothing. Fuegia had his protection against everything outside their wigwam. But Jemmy had been “sadly plundered, even by his own family.” “My people very bad,” he told FitzRoy mournfully, “great fool, know nothing at all, very great fool.”
The seamen’s prize garden had been wantonly trampled, despite Jemmy’s attempt to explain its purpose, and—or perhaps because of—his best efforts to keep people off it.
FitzRoy decided to take Matthews away with him, and the formerly zealous missionary gave no argument. The seamen quickly retrieved his chest and cache of personal possessions from the cellar in his wigwam and got it all into the whaleboats. FitzRoy himself distributed some of Matthews’ stores—axes, saws, knives, and nails—among the surrounding natives, as a measure of goodwill, hoping some of this might reflect on his three protégés who were to remain: Jemmy, York, and Fuegia.
FitzRoy promised Jemmy and York he would return in a few days to see how they were getting on. Then the Englishmen pushed off in the whaleboats.
When fairly out of sight of Woollya, sailing with a fair wind towards the Beagle, Matthews must have felt almost like a man reprieved, excepting that he enjoyed the feelings always sure to reward those who try to do their duty, in addition to those excited by a sudden certainty of his life being out of jeopardy.
Matthews had spent more than a year and come a long, hard way, with the blessing and endowments of many patrons, to establish the mission settlement in Tierra del Fuego. He may indeed have felt a manic surge of relief at being rescued from his worst imaginings. But if he felt as happy as FitzRoy suggests, he was fulfilling all Darwin’s doubts about him. “He is of an eccentric character & does not appear…to possess much energy,” Darwin had confided to his diary days earlier, before they had left Matthews in his wigwam. “I think it very doubtful how far he is qualified for so arduous an undertaking.”
FitzRoy does not record his own feelings at seeing Matthews so readily abandon his post and this crucial element of his noble design, so long hoped-for, fail so quickly and completely. His remarks about Matthews are charitable. Behind them his own bitter disappointment shouts in mute, raging relief.
A week later, after briefly surveying sections of the Wollaston and Navarin Islands and Ponsonby Sound, FitzRoy returned with a single whaleboat crew to Woollya.
The scene that met him allayed his “considerable anxiety.” The whaleboat passed women fishing peacefully from canoes. On the beach at Woollya, FitzRoy met Jemmy, York, and Fuegia, dressed as usual, Fuegia even “clean and tidily dressed.” There were only a few other natives present, and they seemed “quiet and well disposed.” FitzRoy inspected the three wigwams and found them unchanged and in good repair. The formerly trampled garden had recovered, and was now even sprouting a few vegetables. Beside York and Fuegia’s wigwam lay a partly completed canoe that York was building from planks left behind by the crew. The place looked peaceful and productive.
Jemmy complained (he did a lot of this) that many of his things had been stolen. But apart from a few lapses by his own brothers, the thieves had mostly been strangers, now gone, and he and his family were on good terms. Jemmy’s mother came down to the boat to greet her son’s benefactor—and her own, for she was wearing a dress Jemmy had brought for her.
When FitzRoy and his boat crew shoved off, he was hopeful. “I left the place, with rather sanguine hopes of their effecting among their countrymen some change for the better.”
FitzRoy had done his best—his considerable utmost, with the full backing of the Royal Navy, his king, queen, and the blessings of many like-minded Christians of England. Surely, his faith in all he held to be true assured him, God would now take this seed and make it grow.
Darwin was not so easily persuaded.
It was quite melancholy leaving our Fuegians amongst their barbarous countrymen: there was one comfort; they appeared to have no personal fears.—But in contradiction to what has often been stated, 3 years has been sufficient to change savages, into, as far as habits go, complete & voluntary Europæans.—[but] I am afraid whatever other ends their excursion to England produces, it will not be conducive to their happiness.—They have far too much sense not to see the vast superiority of civilized over uncivilized habits; & yet I am afraid to the latter they must return.
Distracted as he had been from his survey work (one gets the feeling, reading FitzRoy’s narrative, that he was never again able to bring to it the singlemindedness that had characterized his efforts before the whaleboat had been stolen, just over three years earlier), FitzRoy felt he had covered enough of eastern Tierra del Fuego. On February 26, 1833, the Beagle sailed out into a gale in the Strait of Le Maire and ran in heavy seas toward the Falkland Islands.