In Patagonia (24 page)

In Poe's
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,
the hero is rescued from shipwreck by a Captain Guy, of the English sealer
Jane Guy.
(A real Captain Guy figures in Weddell's text.) They sail on south in search of the Auroras, pass through the same ice-fields, sight a ‘singular looking animal' with silky white hair and red teeth, and land on a warm island called Tsalal, where everything is black. The Tsalalians are jet black and woolly haired and, since Poe was a good Virginian nigger-hater, they represent the ultimate in bestiality and low cunning. Their headmen are called Yampoos (after Lemuel Gulliver's Yahoos and parallel to Jemmy Button's Yapoos) and the name of their paramount chief is Too-Wit.

Outwardly Too-Wit is friendly, but secretly he is plotting murder. The Tsalalian canoes surround the
Jane Guy
and the savages plunder and tear the crew to pieces. Only Pym and a companion escape from the island, but their canoe is sucked south towards a vortex of destruction. As they plunge into the cataract, they sight—like Ulysses sighting the Mountain of Purgatory—a colossal shrouded figure. ‘And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow.' This figure resurfaces in Rimbaud's poem ‘Being Beauteous'.

Poe's Tsalalians are an amalgam of the Tasmanian Blackfellows (from Captain Cook) and the Southern Blacks (from his childhood), but Captain Weddell's Fuegians are part of it. For the Tsalalians are also descendants of Ham, the swarthy, and their language is Hebrew (Tsalal—‘to be dark', Too-Wit—‘to be dirty'). Neither Poe nor Darwin read each other: that both should have used the same ingredients for a similar purpose is another example of the synchronic workings of the intelligence.

The later career of Jemmy Button did nothing to redeem his people's reputation. In 1855, the Patagonian Mission Society's schooner
Allen Gardiner
anchored in the Murray Narrows and hoisted the Union Jack. On impulse her Captain, Parker Snow, shouted ‘Jemmy Button' and a shout rang back across the water: ‘Yes! ‘Yes! James Button James Button!' A stout man paddled up, asked for clothes, and ‘looking like a baboon dressed for the occasion' took tea in the captain's cabin as if twenty-one years had melted away.

Another four years would pass before Jemmy staged a massacre that could have been written for him by Poe. On November 6th 1869, Morning Service in the first Anglican Church at Wulaia was interrupted by a mob of Fuegians who clubbed and stoned the eight white worshippers to death. Only Alfred Coles, the ship's cook who was making lunch aboard the schooner, escaped. At the official enquiry, he swore that Jemmy planned the killing out of anger at the miserable presents sent him from England, and that afterwards he had slept in the captain's cabin.

Jemmy lived into the 1870s to see a proper mission established at Ushuaia and see the first of his people die of epidemics. About the time Marshal von Moltke was justifying Prussian militarism on Darwinian principles, the man who helped form them sank back on a pile of seal-skins and tried to sleep. His women were wailing and preparing to forget him. We cannot know what he remembered as he passed from the world—a copper-coloured teat? The stomach of a man called Majesty? Or a man-eating lion on the steps of Northumberland House?

I left Ushuaia as from an unwanted tomb and crossed over to Puerto Williams, the Chilean naval base on Navarino Island:

‘A
SK FOR Grandpa Felipe,' the lieutenant said. ‘He's the only pure-blood left.'

The last of the Yaghans lived in a row of plank shanties at the far end of the base. The authorities settled them here, so they should be close to a doctor. It was drizzling. Snow smears came down close to the shore. It was high summer. Behind the settlement the trees disappeared in the clouds. The water was smooth and black and across the channel were the ribbed grey cliffs of Gable Island.

The old man said I could come in. The hut was full of smoke and my eyes smarted. He sat in a pile of fish crates, crab pots, baskets and boat gear. He was hardly taller than wide and his legs were bowed. He wore a greasy cap and had the flat leathery face of a Mongol, and black unmoving eyes that registered no emotion or expression.

Only his hands moved. They were fine hands, agile and netted with dark-grey veins. He earned a little money making canoes to sell to the tourists. He made them of bark and withes and sewed them with sheep sinew. In the old days, fathers made these canoes for their sons. Now there were no sons and still very few tourists. I watched him whittle a miniature harpoon shaft and bind on to it a tiny bone harpoon.

‘Once I made big harpoons.' He broke the silence. ‘I made them of whale's bone. On all the beaches there were bones of whales. But they have gone now. I made the harpoons from a bone inside the head.'

‘From the jaw?'

‘Not from the jaw. From inside the head. In the whale's skull there is a
canalita
and two bones along it. The strongest harpoons came from there. Harpoons made from the jaw were not so strong.

‘You are English.' He looked at me for the first time and seemed to be trying to smile.

‘How did you know?'

‘I know my people. Once I knew many English. There were two English sailors, Charlie and Jackie. They were tall and fair and they were my friends. We spoke English in school. We forgot our language. Mister Lawrence knew our language better than we did. He taught us to speak our own language.'

Grandpa Felipe was born in the Anglican Mission, and was probably related to Jemmy Button. As a boy he watched his people die. He watched all of his children die, except one daughter, and his wife die.

‘Why did she die? She died in her sleep with her arms folded. And I did not know why.'

And he had been ill, he said. Ill all his life. A body without strength. Never able to work.

‘It was the epidemics. The epidemics came and we watched our people die. Mister Lawrence wrote words on stone when they died. We did not know about epidemics. How could we know? We had good health then. We never had epidemics before.'

Boarding the boat back to Ushuaia was a big man with a blotchy red face, upturned moustaches, and the syrupy eyes of an Ottoman pasha. He wore an astrakhan hat. He had come from Santiago to see about a plant for processing krill. The whales had gone but there was still plenty of krill. I talked about Grandpa Felipe and mentioned Charlie and Jackie.

‘He probably ate them,' the fat man said.

F
ROM USHUAIA it was a thirty-five-mile walk along the Beagle Channel to the Bridges's estancia at Harberton.

For the first few miles the forest came down to the shore and you looked down through branches at the dark green water and the purple streamers of kelp rising up and wavering with the tide. Further on the hills drew back and there were pastures of springy grass, dotted with daisies and mushrooms.

All along the tide-mark was a crust of sea-white driftwood, and sometimes a ship-timber or a whale vertebra. The rocks were floury white from guano. There were cormorants on them and kelp geese, flashing black and white as they took off. Offshore there were grebes and steamer ducks and, out in the strait, sooty albatrosses wheeling effortlessly, like knives flying.

It was dark when I limped into the Argentine Navy post at Almanza. Two ratings were stranded there. They spent their days looking through binoculars at the Chileans; but their radio was broken and they could not report what they saw. One came from Buenos Aires and told scatological jokes. The other was a Chaco Indian, who said nothing but sat hunched up looking into the embers of the fire.

Coming into Harberton from the land side, you could mistake it for a big estate in the Scottish Highlands, with its sheep fences, sturdy gates and peat-brown trout streams. The Rev. Thomas Bridges's settlement was strung out along the west shore of Harberton Inlet, shielded from the gales by a low hill. His Yaghan friends chose the site and he named it after his wife's Devonshire village.

The house, imported long ago from England, was of corrugated iron, painted white, with green windows and a soft red roof. Inside, it retained the solid mahogany furniture, the plumbing and the upright presence of a Victorian parsonage.

Clarita Goodall, the missionary's granddaughter, was alone in the house. As a girl she had sat on Captain Milward's knee and listened to his sea-stories. She gave me a copy of Thomas Bridges's
Yaghan Dictionary
and I sat on the veranda reading. The flowers of an English garden seemed to glow with an inner brilliance. A path led through a wicket gate arched with a whale jaw. Woodsmoke drifted over the black water and, on the far shore, geese were calling.

T
HOMAS BRIDGES was a small, straight man, who believed in God's providence and was unafraid of risk. An orphan, he was adopted by George Packenham Despard, a Nottinghamshire clergyman and Secretary of the Patagonian Mission Society, who took him to the Falklands. He was living there when Jemmy Button murdered the missionaries. Later, he continued their work and, with the odd visit to England, lived on in Tierra del Fuego. But by 1886, with the Indians dying off, he realized the Mission's days were numbered, and, with a family of seven to support and no prospects in England, he asked President Roca for title to the land at Harberton. The move damned him in the eyes of the self-righteous.

The young Thomas Bridges had had the ear and patience to sit with an Indian called George Okkoko and master the language Darwin sneered at. To his surprise, he uncovered a complexity of construction and a vocabulary no one had suspected in a ‘primitive' people. At eighteen, he decided to form a dictionary which would help him ‘tell them, to my satisfaction and their conviction of the love of Jesus'. This gigantic operation was scarcely complete at his death in 1898. He had listed about 32,000 words without having begun to exhaust their reserves of expression.

The
Dictionary
survived the Indians to become their monument. I have handled Bridges's original manuscript in the British Museum and like to think of the clergyman, red-eyed into the night, with the wind howling over the house, filling the book of blue-marbled end-papers with his spidery handwriting. We know he despaired of finding in that labyrinth of the particular, words to express the intangible concepts of the Gospel. We also know he was intolerant of the Indians' superstition and never tried to understand it: the murder of his colleagues was too close. The Indians spotted this strain of intolerance and hid their deepest beliefs.

Bridges's dilemma is common enough. Finding in ‘primitive' languages a dearth of words for moral ideas, many people assumed these ideas did not exist. But the concepts of ‘good' or ‘beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas. The Yaghan tongue—and by inference all language—proceeds as a system of navigation. Named things are fixed points, aligned or compared, which allow the speaker to plot the next move. Had Bridges uncovered the range of Yaghan metaphor, his work would never have come to completion. Yet sufficient survives for us to resurrect the clarity of their intellect.

What shall we think of a people who defined ‘monotony' as ‘an absence of male friends?' Or, for ‘depression', used the word that described the vulnerable phase in a crab's seasonal cycle, when it has sloughed off its old shell and waits for another to grow? Or who derived ‘lazy' from the Jackass Penguin? Or ‘adulterous' from the hobby, a small hawk that flits here and there, hovering motionless over its next victim?

Here are just a few of their synonyms:

Some of their linkings were beyond me:

Others seemed obscure and then came clear:

The thought process is as follows:

Snow covers the ground as a scab covers a wound. It melts in patches and leaves a smooth, flattened surface (the scar). The thaw announces the arrival of spring weather. In spring the people start moving and lessons begin.

Another example:

The bogs of Tierra del Fuego are lumpy mattresses of moss, oozing with water. Their colour is a dull yellow with reddish smears, the colour of an open wound suppurating with pus and blood. The bogs cover valley floors, laid out flat as a wounded man.

Verbs take first place in this language. The Yaghans had a dramatic verb to capture every twitch of the muscles, every possible action of nature or man. The verb
Ä«ya
means ‘to moor your canoe to a streamer of kelp';
ōkon
‘to sleep in a floating canoe' (and quite different from sleeping in a hut, on the beach or with your wife);
ukõmona
‘to hurl your spear into a shoal of fish without aiming for a particular one';
wejna
‘to be loose or easily moved as a broken bone or the blade of a knife'—‘to wander about, or roam, as a homeless or lost child'—‘to be attached yet loose, as an eye or bone in its socket'—‘to swing, move or travel'—or simply ‘to exist or be'.

Compared to the verbs, other parts of speech droop in the wings. Nouns hang suspended from their verbal roots. The word for ‘skeleton' comes from ‘to gnaw thoroughly'.
Aiapi
is ‘to bring a special kind of spear and put it in a canoe ready for hunting';
aiapux
is the hunted animal and so ‘the sea otter'.