In Patagonia (23 page)

A certain taste for degradation and the wild hopes of his race carried Radowitzky through the years of swill and potatoes. Some family photographs were his only possessions. He greeted each new indignity with a smile and discovered in himself the power to lead men. The prisoners loved him, came to him with their problems and he led their hunger strikes.

His power, once recognized, made the prison officials hate him more. The warders had standing orders to swing a lantern in his face, every half-hour as he slept. In 1918, the Deputy Governor, Gregorio Palacios, desiring his white flesh and wishing to degrade its owner yet further, buggered him. Three guards held him down and buggered him in turn. They beat his head and ripped his back with cuts and welts.

Radowitzky's friends in the capital got wind of this business and published their version under the title
La Sodoma Fuegina.
The Russian Revolution was in full swing. Graffiti reading ‘Freedom for Radowitzky!' were smeared all over Buenos Aires. Some of the more enterprising Anarchists were planning to spring their favourite martyr from jail.

The only man for the job was Pascualino Rispoli, the ‘last pirate of Tierra del Fuego', a Neapolitan who had tracked his renegade father to the Bar Alhambra in Punta Arenas and stayed. Pascualino had a small cutter, officially for hunting seals and sea-otters, privately for smuggling and stripping wrecks. He sailed in all weathers, dumped loose-lipped crews overboard, lost regularly at cards and was open to any kind of commission.

Sometime in October 1918, two Argentine Anarchists hired Pascualino for the jail-break. The cutter anchored off Ushuaia on November 4th. At dawn, three days later, Radowitzky, in the uniform of a prison guard accomplice, walked through the prison gate. A dinghy ferried him aboard, and before the alarm went up, she was swallowed up in the maze of channels where, four years earlier, the German cruiser
Dresden
had eluded the British Navy.

The Neapolitan wanted to provision the fugitive and drop him on one of the outer islands until the hue-and-cry died down. But Radowitzky's urban soul recoiled from the sinister rain-forests and he insisted on being taken to Punta Arenas.

Meanwhile, the Chilean Navy agreed to co-operate with the Argentine police. Their tug
Yáñez
overtook the cutter on her last reach home, but not before Pascualino had made his passenger swim ashore for the safety of the trees. Finding nothing, but suspecting all, the officers took some of the crew to Punta Arenas, where the police made them squeal. The
Yáñez
steamed back down the coast and caught Pascualino in the act of transferring Radowitzky ashore with a load of barrels. The fugitive lay motionless in the water, under the lee of the cutter, but there was no escape. A force of carabineers had circled the place. Exhausted and freezing, he gave himself up and was shipped back to Ushuaia.

Twelve years passed. Then, in 1930, President Yrigoyen released Radowitzky as a gesture to the working class. One night in May, the ex-convict stood on the deck of a military transport and watched for the lights of Buenos Aires, but he was not allowed to land. His guards transferred him to the Montevideo ferry. Secretly Yrigoyen had promised his police chiefs to expel him from Argentine soil.

Without papers, without money, and dressed in some illfitting clothes got from a Turk in Ushuaia, ‘the victim of the bourgeoisie' walked down the steamer gang-plank to the cheers of an Anarchist crowd. The reception committee hoped for the words and gestures of a firebrand, and were disappointed by the puzzled, mild-mannered man, with beetling brows and a face streaked with livid veins, who smiled vaguely and didn't know where to put his hands.

His new friends embraced him and hustled him off in a taxi. He tried to answer their questions but kept harking back to his friends in Ushuaia. Separation from them, he said, was more than he could bear. When asked about his sufferings, he was tonguetied and fumbled for a piece of paper from which he read a text thanking Dr Yrigoyen in the name of the International Proletariat. When he said he wanted to go back to Russia, the Anarchists laughed. The man hadn't even heard of the Kronstadt Massacre.

Once free, Radowitzky sank back into obscurity and nervous exhaustion. His friends used him to run messages to comrades in Brazil. He fell foul of the Uruguayan police and was put under house arrest, but, having no house, found home again in jail.

In 1936 he sailed for Spain. Three years later he was among the columns of broken men plodding over the Pyrenees into France. He went to Mexico. A poet got him a clerk's job in the Uruguayan consulate. He wrote articles for mimeographed reviews of small circulation and shared his pension with a woman, perhaps the only one he ever knew. Sometimes he visited his family in the United States, where they were making good.

Simón Radowitzky died of a heart attack in 1956.

T
HE YEAR the nations of Europe settled the course of the nineteenth century on the plain of Waterloo, a boy was born on the Murray Narrows, who would make a modest contribution to settling the course of the twentieth.

His birthplace was an arbour of green saplings, sods and rancid seal-skins. His mother cut his umbilical cord with a sharp mussel-shell and rammed his head against her copper-coloured teat. For two years the teat was the centre of his universe. He went everywhere with the teat: fishing, berrying, canoeing, visiting cousins, or learning the names—as complex and precise as Linnaean Latin—of everything that swam or sprouted, crawled or flew.

One day the teat tasted horrible, for his mother had smeared it with rancid blubber. She told him to play with boys his own age, now he could chew a steak of seal. His father then took over his education and taught him to garrotte cormorants, club penguins, stab crabs and harpoon seals. The boy learned about Watauineiwa, the Old Man in the Sky who changed not and resented change; and about Yetaita, the Power of Darkness, a hairy monster who pounced on the slothful and could be shaken off by dancing. And he learned the stories which wander at all times in the minds of all men—of the amorous seal, of the Creation of Fire, or the Giant with an Achilles heel, or of the humming bird who freed the pent-up waters.

The boy grew up fearless and loyal to the customs of his tribe. Season followed season: egg-time, baby-gulls-flying, beach-leaves-reddening, Sun-Man-hiding. Blue sea-anemones heralded the coming of spring; ibises meant equinoctial gales. Men were born and men died. The people had little sense of ongoing time.

The morning of May 11th 1830 was clear and sharp. (For the Fuegians, the date was a combination of bare branches and sea-otters returning.) Under the snow line the hills were blue and the forests purple and russet-brown. Black swells broke in white lines along the shore. The boy was out fishing with his uncle when they sighted the Apparition.

For years the People of the South had murmured about the visits of a monster. At first they assumed it was a kind of whale, but closer acquaintance revealed a gigantic canoe with wings, full of pink creatures with hair sprouting ominously from their faces. These, however, had proved at least half human, since they knew something of the rules of barter. Friends up the coast had swapped a dog for a most useful knife made of a hard, cold, glittering stone.

Heedless of danger, the boy persuaded the uncle to paddle up to the pink man's canoe. A tall person in costume beckoned him and he leapt aboard. The pink man handed the uncle a disc that shimmered like the moon and the canoe spread a white wing and flew down the channel towards the source of pearl buttons.

The kidnapper was Captain Robert FitzRoy, R.N., Chief Officer of H.M.S.
Beagle
, now winding up her first survey of southern waters. All down the coast of Patagonia he had seen, in the beds of fossil oysters, a confirmation of his belief in the Universal Deluge. It followed that, all men were the Children of Adam; all were equally capable of improvement. For this reason he was delighted with this bright-eyed addition to his collection of three natives. The crew called him Jemmy Button.

The next phase of the boy's career is clearly documented. With two other Fuegians (a fourth died of smallpox at Plymouth), he travelled to London, saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to boarding-school at Walthamstow, where he learned English, gardening, carpentry, and the plainer truths of Christianity. He also learned to preen before mirrors and fuss over his gloves. Before leaving, he had an audience with William IV and Queen Adelaide; and, if we believe Mark Twain, his colleague York Minster went to a Court Ball at St James's in the costume of his country—and emptied the ballroom in two minutes.

We would know less of the Fuegians' return were it not for the naturalist on the
Beagle's
second voyage, the pleasant, snub-nosed young man with unrivalled powers of observation and a copy of Lyell's
Geology
in his luggage. Darwin quite liked Jemmy Button, but the wild Fuegians appalled him. He read (but ignored) the description by Drake's chaplain of a ‘comely and harmless people' whose canoes were of fine proportion ‘in the sight and use whereof princes might seem to be delighted'. Instead he lapsed into that common failing of naturalists: to marvel at the intricate perfection of other creatures and recoil from the squalor of man. Darwin thought the Fuegians ‘the most abject and miserable creatures' he anywhere beheld. They resembled the devils in ‘plays like
Der Freischtitz'
and were as fascinated by his white skin as an orang-outang in a zoo. He sneered at their canoe; he sneered at their language (‘scarcely deserves to be called articulate') and confessed he could hardly make himself believe they were ‘fellow creatures and inhabitants of the same world'.

As the
Beagle
coasted towards his home at Wulaia, Jemmy Button stood on deck and pointed to his tribe's enemies standing in groups on the shore. ‘Yapoos!' he shouted. ‘Monkeys—Dirty —Fools—Not Men', perhaps assisting Darwin to his biggest idea. For the mere sight of the Fuegians helped trigger off the theory that Man had evolved from an ape-like species and that some men had evolved further than others. When Jemmy Button reverted to savagery almost overnight, he proved the point.

FitzRoy and Darwin returned to England in October 1836 and began editing their diaries for publication. (Five years of sharing the same mess-table had hardened both men to diametrically opposed views.) FitzRoy, no less than Darwin, was perplexed by these savages ‘the colour of devonshire cattle' bobbing about Cape Horn in bark canoes. If they too had descended from Noah, how and why did they travel thus far from Mount Ararat? And, as an appendix to his
Narrative
, he published a theory of migration that appears to anticipate Freud's mythical events within the Primal Horde:

Somewhere, under canvas, in Asia Minor, the sons of Shem and Japheth loved some black slave girls, of the cursed line of Ham and Cush, and fathered the race of reddish mulattos, who would people Asia and the Americas. Naturally, the fathers preferred their legitimate offspring to half-castes, and the latter, chafing at their bondage, walked out. Their craving for freedom stimulated emigration in all directions ‘and eventually perpetuated that passion for wandering which we see today in the Arab, the migratory Malay, the roving Tartar, and the ever-restless South American Indian'.

FitzRoy believed that the emigrants stepped out clothed and literate, but that foreign climates brutalized them and killed off their livestock. They forgot how to write, took to skins when their clothes wore out, and, at this far end of the world, retained the canoe and some spears, but had degenerated into greasy, matthaired ‘satires upon mankind' whose teeth were ‘flat-topped like those of a horse'.

Among the books in FitzRoy's cabin on the
Beagle
was Captain James Weddell's
Voyage towards the South Pole
in the brig
Jane
and the cutter
Beaufoy.
In the summer of 1822-3, the two vessels sailed south from Cape Horn to hunt for fur seals. They passed through fields of pack ice (one flow was covered with black earth), and on February 8th, at Latitude 74° 15ʹ, farther south than anyone had sailed before, they saw whales, birds of the blue petrel kind, and leagues of open sea. ‘NOT A PARTICLE OF ICE OF ANT DESCRIPTION WAS TO BE SEEN.'

Weddell wrote on his chart: ‘Sea of George IV—Navigable', leaving the impression that the sea got warmer as one neared the Pole. He then sailed northward to look for some phantom islands, the Auroras. Calling in at the South Shetlands one of his sailors saw a ‘Non-describable Animal' with a red face of human form and green hair hanging from its shoulders. Then at Hermit Island, next to the Horn, he ran in with canoe-loads of Fuegians who, at one point, threatened to overrun the ship. He read them a chapter of the Bible and they listened with solemn faces: one man held his ear to the book believing that it spoke. He also jotted down some words of their vocabulary:

and he concluded that the language was Hebrew, though how it had got to Tierra del Fuego was, he admitted, ‘a question of interest to philologists'. His final paragraph commended the savages to the philanthropy of his countrymen and probably set FitzRoy off.

At the precise moment that Darwin and FitzRoy were settling down to their narratives, a copy of Captain Weddell's book turned up in Richmond, Virginia, and lay on the desk of the Editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
, Edgar Allen Poe, who was writing a different kind of narrative. Poe, like Coleridge whom he idolized, was another night-wandering man, obsessed by the Far South and by voyages of annihilation and rebirth—an enthusiasm he would pass on to Baudelaire. He had recently become acquainted with the theory of J. C. Symmes, an excavalry officer from St Louis, who claimed in 1818 that both Poles were hollow and temperate.