Savage (3 page)

In March 1828 Stokes was instructed to survey Patagonia's Pacific coastline from the western mouth of the straits to the most northerly point of the Gulf of Penas. It proved a difficult and exhausting voyage, covering more than 400 miles and five degrees of latitude. Progress was slow: the weather played cruel tricks – intermingling vicious storms, hurricane squalls, known as williwaws, and prolonged periods of paralysing calm – one man died from ‘inflammation of the bowels', sickness debilitated the crew, the ship's deck was constantly awash, rain quashed the men's spirit, days passed with no surveying possible, fatigue set in, and Stokes was overwhelmed by the monotony of the country he found himself consigned to.

Four months after she had left the
Adventure,
the
Beagle
rendezvoused with her sister ship at Port Famine. It was 27 July 1828, the ship was three days late, and there was already concern for her whereabouts. As she passed under the stern of the
Adventure,
Pringle Stokes's deputy, Lieutenant Skyring, shouted bad news from the
Beagle
's deck – the captain was ill and confined to his cabin. King went on board and found Stokes in a state of near mental collapse brought on by extreme fatigue and demoralisation. ‘He expressed himself much distressed by the hardships the officers and crew under him had suffered … I was alarmed at the desponding tone of his conversation.' Hoping for explanations, King read Stokes's journal and found the roots of his colleague's melancholia spelled out in its description of the journey he had just completed:

Nothing could be more dreary than the scene around us. The lofty, bleak and barren heights that surround the inhospitable shores of this inlet were covered, even low down their sides, with dense clouds, upon which the fierce squalls that assailed us beat, without causing any change: they seemed as immovable as the mountains where they rested.

Around us, and some of them distant no more than two thirds of a cable's length, were rocky islets, lashed by a tremendous surf; and as if to complete the dreariness and utter desolation of the scene, even birds seemed to shun its neighbourhood. The weather was that in which (as Thompson emphatically says) ‘the soul of man dies in him'.

Over the next few days Stokes alternated between periods of delirium and clarity. King wrote, ‘Suspicions arose in my mind that all was not quite right with him…' They were well founded. On 1 August a boat slipped across from the
Beagle
with the news that Stokes had fallen into a deep depression and, alone in his cabin, had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Efforts to save him were forlorn, and the surgeons found they could do little to save his life.

During the delirium that ensued, and lasted four days, his mind wandered to many of the circumstances, and hairbreadth escapes of the
Beagle
's cruize. The following three days he recovered so much as to be able to see me frequently and hopes were entertained by himself, but by no-one else, that he would recover. He then became gradually worse, and after lingering in most intense pain, expired on the morning of the 12th.

Thus it was that in November 1828, Robert FitzRoy, flag lieutenant on HMS
Ganges,
based on the Brazilian station, found himself appointed to the command of the
Beagle,
which had recently limped into Rio to report its sad news.

It was a difficult commission for the young man. The continuing work of the survey was demanding, he had been promoted above Stokes's expected successor, Skyring, and there was an air of gloom on the ship following the demise of the captain. One of FitzRoy's first tasks would be to restore morale and mend fences. Nevertheless, despite his youth, he was well qualified for the task ahead. A gold-medal graduate of Portsmouth naval college, his career had thundered along a fast track, aided by influential relatives, hard work and his undoubted seamanship. It had taken just nine years to rise from lowly midshipman to the command of his own ship. But he was a man of stark contrasts. His background was aristocratic. Grandson of the third Duke of Grafton, he could trace a direct lineage back to Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers, as the name FitzRoy implies – the bastard son of a king. His politics were those of the highest, archest Tory: he was bigoted, morally confident, asserted the authority of the Church and the power of the landed interests. He was also convinced of the innate necessity of slavery.

FitzRoy was a strict disciplinarian, who trusted in firm but fair justice. He believed that punishments should always be in proportion to the offence committed. Many men endured floggings during the course of the two
Beagle
voyages under his command, but he prided himself that all understood the purpose of the punishment and its equity. If he was not loved by the men around him, he was certainly respected as a man of principle and a man of his word. Add this to his indefatigable energy, and his crew found in FitzRoy a man who led by example, a commander who never shirked his responsibility and who was always first to take on the hard work of keeping a ship afloat and on course.

None the less, if he exhibited all the confidence and self-assurance that went with his social standing, he also showed much of the fragility of temperament that went with it. Here was a man of volatility and unpredictability that in later life would descend into instability. ‘Blue evils' was how he referred to the dark moods that endowed him with self-doubt, discontent and depression. In 1822 his uncle, the Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, had slit his own throat, and this played heavily on FitzRoy's mind. Now he was headed for one of the world's bleaker outposts to take over the command of a man who had also taken his life. The result was unexpected vitriol, a whiplash temper that could tear a strip off the sturdiest of sailors. This capricious rage led to unease among his immediate coterie of officers, who not infrequently questioned his sanity. To gauge the mood of the man, they created little codes and warning signs. Most notably officers coming on duty would discover the captain's humour by asking ‘whether much hot coffee had been served out this morning'.

*   *   *

The
Beagle
and its new commander arrived back in the Straits of Magellan in April 1829, and later that month FitzRoy encountered his first Fuegians. They made an immediate impact with

… their hair hanging down on all sides, like old thatch, and their skins of a reddish brown colour, smeared over with oil, and very dirty. Their features were bad, but peculiar; and if physiognomy can be trusted, indicated cunning, indolence, passive fortitude, deficient intellect, and want of energy. I observed that the forehead was very small and ill-shaped, the nose was long, narrow between the eyes and wide at the point; and the upper lip, long and protruding …

Aided by the newly purchased schooner HMS
Adelaide
– which had been bought in Rio to add versatility to the expedition – the
Beagle
was to pass through the Straits of Magellan and explore the western waters and sounds of Tierra del Fuego, before heading north to the island of Chiloe for a reunion with HMS
Adventure
and new instructions from Captain King. The nature of the geography, the tortuous inlets, shallow coasts and impassable channels, meant that the greater part of this work was done not from the decks of the ship, but from its more versatile cutter and whale-boat. Parties were despatched for days, sometimes weeks, with provisions and equipment to sound the coasts, plot their courses and report back. As a consequence they made contact with the native populations scattered across the archipelago.

In the 300 years since Magellan's voyage, there had been no fewer than eighty-one expeditions to Tierra del Fuego, with a mixed history of brutality and tolerance in European–Indian dealings. Drake's chaplain, Francis Fletcher, had described the archipelago as ‘frequented by comely & harmless Poeple [
sic
] but naked men & women & children … gentile and familiar to strangers'. However, in November 1599 the Dutch Admiral Olivier van Noort took exception to a group of native men at Cape Nassau who shook their weapons in defiance at the passing ships. Van Noort pursued them to a cave, ‘which they stubbornly defended to the last Man, dying every one of them upon the Spot. The Dutch, being got in, found their Wives and Children in that Dark Receptacle; and the Mothers, who expected nothing but present Death to themselves and their Infants, covered the little ones with their own Bodies, resolving to receive the first Stab themselves.' The slaughter was over, though, and the Dutch crew left with four boys and two girls as hostages.

Another Dutch explorer, Sebald de Weert, who was stranded in Tierra del Fuego for nine months in 1599, speculated that the Fuegians were descendants of a lost tribe of Welsh because, he wrote, ‘penguin in the British (vulgarly called Welsh) signifies white Head, and these birds have white Heads, it has been argued from hence, that these Savages are descended from a Colony of Britons, supposed to be settled in America by Madoc, Prince of North Wales, about the year 1170.' De Weert kidnapped a young girl, aged about four years old, whom he took back to Amsterdam where she died.

The violence was not always one-sided, and shipwrecked sailors could rarely expect sympathy from the Indians they encountered. Where help was forthcoming it often brought unpleasant surprises. When the British ship the
Wager
was wrecked on the shores of Tierra del Fuego in 1741, survivors were helped for a while by a Fuegian they called Martin. One day Martin went with his wife to collect sea-eggs in their canoe. They filled a basket and on their return were welcomed by their young son who ran into the sea to greet them. Martin passed the boy the basket, but he dropped it. The Fuegian man picked up his son and flung him against the rocks. The boy died in a pool of blood. Martin walked off unconcerned. The stranded seamen looked on, incredulous.

Europeans rarely treated the Fuegians as anything more than savages; descriptions of early communication between the crew of the
Beagle
and the various Fuegian tribes leave one in no doubt as to the disgust that these ‘civilised', educated and house-trained Europeans felt as they watched the locals feast on their favourite meal, whale blubber: ‘… The whole affair from first to last is most offensive to the sight; and the countenance of the carver is beyond description, for his eyes being directed to the blubber, squint shockingly and give his ugly face a hideous appearance.' The blubber was drawn through the teeth, sucked, warmed in the fire, cut into small pieces and swallowed without chewing.

Around the same time Captain King reported that, during an apparently friendly meeting, one of the Fuegians ‘who seemed more than half an idiot, spit in my face; but as it was apparently not done angrily, and he was reproved by his companions, his uncourteous conduct was forgiven'. Little wonder that ‘civilised' visitors dismissed the interests of the Fuegians and treated them with contempt. American sealers who worked the area frequently abused its inhabitants; on one occasion an American captain even amused himself by firing grapeshot at the Indians on the beach.

Yet, on the whole, the early meetings between FitzRoy's survey and the native people were banal, tedious and somewhat irritating. Native canoes would follow the British boats with scrawny fish and even scrawnier furs for barter. Their pursuit was persistent and their clamours of
‘Yammerschooner',
which the British took to mean ‘give me', were unrelenting and often deafening. Where they could, the Fuegians would climb on board the boats, pat the foreigners vigorously on their chests, and insist on trades for trinkets, glass beads, rags, cloth. Sometimes they stayed for hours.

Trades were sometimes amusing and informative, as when FitzRoy astonished the Indians with his watch, which he put to their ears: ‘… each came in his turn to hear it tick. I pointed to the watch and then to the sky; they shook their heads and suddenly looked so grave, that from their manner in this instance, and from what I could understand from their signs, I felt certain they had an idea of a Superior Being, although they have nothing like an image, and did not appear to us to have any form of worship.' The visits were also bewildering. When FitzRoy bought a dog for a pinch of tobacco, he then found its former owners demanding it back. The Fuegian man hurled abuse at the captain, calling on the wind to destroy him. The wife cried and scolded. The man's ‘gestures were very expressive and animated. I was surprised to see so much feeling for a wretched little half-starved puppy, and made them happy by returning it to them without asking for the tobacco.' These sessions, which were characterised by petty theft on the part of the Fuegians, might also affront the prim sensibilities of the captain and his officers. Early on in the
Beagle
's expedition, Captain King had been offered a surprising barter. One Fuegian man was so desperate that, King commented, he ‘at last offered his wife, as a bribe, who used all her fancied allurements to second his proposal … So highly did they esteem beads and buttons that a few of each would have purchased the canoe, his wife and children, their dogs and all the furniture.' Such inducements were not uncommon. On another occasion FitzRoy received a similar proposition:

One of the men having parted with all his disposable property, tendered one of his daughters, a fine girl of 14 or 15 years of age, for some mere trifle, and, being refused, became very pressing and importunate to close the bargain for the price that was jestingly offered; nor was it without difficulty that he was convinced we were not in earnest.

The frequent encounters, however, were becoming worrying. They were slowing down the work of the survey, and the constant vigilance needed to counter the incessant pilfering was wearisome. There was a more serious problem, too. Many of the early parleys between members of the
Beagle
crew and the Fuegians had been charged with an underlying tension, an implicit threat of violence on both sides. The British would claim that there was a purely defensive reflex to their suspicions that many of the natives they encountered wished them ill. Whenever crew members camped on land, they routinely placed sentinels around tents, organised musketry demonstrations and marked boundaries in the sand with rope, which Fuegians were forbidden to pass. Occasionally tempers flared. In June 1828, a Fuegian who persistently crossed a boundary line threw a boulder at one of the guards. He was manhandled back over the line by a marine ‘upon which he ran to his canoe and took out several spears … but the appearance of two or three muskets brought him to his sense, and the spears were returned to the canoe; after which he became familiar and apparently friendly'.