Savage (37 page)

Praise him all creatures here below.

Praise him above, ye Heavenly Host.

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Amen.

He said that the Indians were now able to repeat it in their own tongue. What Bridges discovered was comical. Despard had been unable to unearth the word for ‘praise', so to try to get over the problem he had complimented one of the Fuegians on his progress in English, and told him that he wished to ‘praise' him for it. As he said this he tapped the Indian on the shoulder. The Indian gave him the word that he thought was wanted. Despard completed his translation. Bridges discovered that not only were most of the words of the Doxology incorrectly rendered, but for three years the native version, sung every day by Fuegians taking Christian education, began with the words ‘Slap God…'

*   *   *

Ushuaia began to take on the appearance of a more settled community. Bridges was joined by Robert Whaits, a skilled handyman who was a blacksmith, joiner and wheelwright rolled into one, John Lawrence, a market gardener, and James Lewis, a carpenter. Each brought his wife and children, and soon the settlement, with its four British couples, its 100-plus Yamana residents and its shifting population of transient Fuegians could rightly be called a village.

The settlement stirred interest among native peoples right across Tierra del Fuego. They were not only interested in the activities of the missionaries and the behaviour of their fellow Fuegians but also saw it as a place to attempt barter and trade. One day in 1873 a party of Alakaluf Indians paddled their canoes into the bay. They were an especially hardy, wild-looking group and among them was Fuegia Basket.

Since her betrayal of Jemmy Button on Devil Island, and her escape with York Minster, there had been few sightings of the young woman who had so charmed the English court. In 1841 an English ship cruising the Straits of Magellan had met a native woman who had asked of the crew, ‘How do? I have been to Plymouth and London.' Ten years later the governor of a Chilean outpost in the area had pointed her out to two English captains, but Darwin in his
Journal of Researches,
published in 1845, sounded the alarm bells:

Capt Sulivan, who, since his voyage in the
Beagle,
has been employed on the survey of the Falkland Islands, heard from a sealer in 1842, that when in the western part of the Strait of Magellan, he was astonished by a native woman coming on board, who could talk some English. Without doubt this was Fuegia Basket. She lived (I fear the term probably bears a double interpretation) some days on board.

Thomas Bridges found the legendary Fuegia in good spirits, strong and healthy. She was ‘short, thickset and with many teeth missing from a mouth that was large even for a Fuegian'. She had some memories of London and Mrs Jenkins, as well as the
Beagle
and Captain FitzRoy. She could also remember the words ‘knife', ‘fork' and ‘beads', but seemed to have forgotten how to sit in a chair because when one was brought out for her she squatted beside it. In Yamana she told Bridges that York Minster had been killed in retaliation for murdering a man, and that though she was now in her fifties, the teenager who accompanied her was her husband.

Mary Bridges brought her two children, Mary and Despard, to meet Fuegia who said, with a big grin, ‘Little boy, little gal.' Bridges tried to recover any remnants of her Walthamstow religious education, but to no avail. She stayed at Ushuaia for a week before setting off back to her own land in the west, where her own two children, by York Minster, were waiting for her. There was one more recorded sighting of Fuegia before she died: in February 1883, while Thomas Bridges was exploring the western flank of Tierra del Fuego, he learned that she was nearby. He found a fragile old woman in her early sixties, visibly nearing the end of her life. She was physically frail and unhappy. Bridges read to her from the Bible and left her in the care of her daughter and two brothers.

Chapter 24

One person who had watched the work of Thomas Bridges with interest was Charles Darwin. The young ‘flycatcher' or ‘stone-pounder', as he had been known on the
Beagle,
had grown into something far more important than the unassuming character of his early days. In the years since the
Beagle
had docked at Plymouth in 1836, he had suffered frequent bouts of crippling ill-health and the strains and stresses of raising a family of ten children. Nevertheless, by the late 1850s he had reached the heights of the Royal Society, become famous for his writings on the
Beagle
's journey and renowned among scientists for his groundbreaking work on barnacles. In November 1859 Darwin published a book that would be among the most famous, enduring and controversial of the nineteenth century.

He first came to public notice after contributing the third volume of the
Narratives of the Voyage of the Beagle,
in which he described his experiences and many of the natural phenomena he encountered on the journey around the world. When published in May 1839, it was his section that proved the most popular. Darwin's account, with its details of fossil records, extraordinary geological formations and strange animals, captured the popular imagination and, before the year was out, had been reprinted separately from the rest of the
Narratives
(though without Darwin's permission). Several editions of the volume were released, under a number of different titles, the most notable of which was its 1845 best-selling version
Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the countries visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle round the world under the command of Captain FitzRoy RN, by Charles Darwin, 2nd Edition, corrected with additions.

His days at sea had a profound impact on Darwin's life: he had seen the world, examined rock formations, mountains, cliffs and river-beds, scrutinised the flora and fauna of three continents, communicated with strange and ‘savage' peoples, and filled notebook after notebook with astute observations and beautiful descriptions. His chance inclusion on the
Beagle
's roster had been the defining moment of his life, as he wrote to FitzRoy in February 1840:

However others may look back to the
Beagle
's voyage, now that the small disagreeable parts are well nigh forgotten, I think it far the most fortunate circumstance in my life that the chance afforded by your offer of taking a naturalist fell on me … These recollections and what I learnt in Natural History I would not exchange for twice ten thousand a year.

The journey had left many indelible images in his mind: his first sight of the ‘barbarians' of Good Success Bay, earthquakes and volcanoes in Chile, the wondrous isles of the South Pacific and the giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands. But the voyage had also raised many questions: the age of the earth, the age of life, the relationship of the Fuegians and other aboriginal peoples to ‘civilisation', and the development of different species. It was after he returned to London and realised that finches he had examined in the Galapagos were distinct to their particular island that he began to question how this could be. As early as 1837 he started collecting facts on the variations of domestic and wild animals and plants, in a notebook set aside for what he called ‘the transmutation of species': ‘I soon perceived that selection was the keystone of man's success in making useful races of animals and plants. But how selection could be applied to organisms living in a state of nature remained for some time a mystery to me.'

The journey on which he had set out took him twenty years to complete. Inspired by the writings of the political economist Malthus on population and the over-production of offspring, Darwin's notebooks took him straight to the heart of natural selection:

In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work.

In 1842 he pencilled a thirty-five-page essay on the subject, which he expanded three years later to 230 pages. It was essential that he now began to accumulate evidence. The family home at Down in Kent became a seething, stinking laboratory, as he boiled up cadavers of wild and domesticated ducks to compare the dimensions of their skeletons. Vats of brine filled all available shelves as he tested the idea that the sea could transport seeds which would germinate on reaching land. Other rooms were littered with the corpses of animals ready to be skinned and measured.

As he had spent much of the early 1840s engaged in the microscopic examination of barnacles – producing a much-praised three-volume work on his findings – so he passed much of the latter half of the decade, and on into the 1850s, observing fancy pigeons. The skill with which pigeon owners bred and cross-bred their birds, and the expert eye with which they judged their beauty, fascinated Darwin and bolstered his belief in the evolution of species. He befriended pigeon-fanciers, went to their shows and conventions, and drank with them in their pubs. He built his own pigeon house at Down and introduced tumblers, fantails and almond runts but then, having become attached to them, he proceeded to boil them down for their skeletons.

Darwin knew the implications of what he was coming to understand about natural selection, and the fury his thesis would arouse. Not by nature a bold or provocative figure, and plagued by a weak stomach and a frequently debilitating lethargy, he ran scared of publishing his findings until he was prompted to act by the fear of being beaten to the draw by a young biologist, Alfred Wallace. In November 1859, just days after the massacre at Wulaia,
On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
was published. ‘It is no doubt the chief work of my life,' he wrote later in his autobiography.

Origin
had an explosive impact and became the basic evolutionist text. It argued that species were not fixed, but adapted, transmuted and diversified in a blind struggle for survival. It contended that organic beings were descended from one stock, and that the continuation of life depended on the continual modification and push away from that stock. The greater the diversification, the better the chance of living. Weaknesses were discarded by nature, strengths preserved. Environment had little to do with the process: evolution was down to the chance variable of competition among closely associated groups. ‘Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows,' Darwin wrote in the conclusion to
Origin.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Grandeur there might have been, but Darwin knew that not everybody would see it that way. He wrote to Alfred Wallace, ‘God knows what the public will think…' It was not long before he found out. The book polarised the worlds of science and religion, and redefined the boundaries of both. Though natural selection had been discussed by others before Darwin, here in
Origin
it was clearly articulated, concisely and brilliantly argued, and backed up with compelling evidence. The scientific and religious establishments were dominated by creationists who believed that species did not evolve but were created whole and fully formed by the hand of an all-powerful superbeing. This God was also responsible for any and all variations from the original. There was no common stock from which life had been derived, just creation itself. They threw up their hands in horror at Darwin's book and called it treacherous, even blasphemous. It undermined the basic doctrines of Christianity and science, they protested. Where was the hand of the maker in natural selection? they asked.

Origin
sold all 1,250 printed copies on its first day and became a powerful weapon in a battle that had been spoiling for years between a group of feisty, but frustrated young turks anxious to seize the reins of scientific power from the grip of the theologians and old-school creationists. Reviews in the country's most important newspapers and periodicals lambasted one another in their support for or antagonism for
Origin. The Times
gave Darwin's favourite acolyte, Thomas Huxley, more than three columns to praise the new philosophy on Boxing Day 1859. By April Huxley had coined the enduring term ‘Darwinism' and was heralding it a ‘Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism'.

Across the battlefield Richard Owen, the influential superintendent of the natural history collections at the British Museum, vilified natural selection in the
Edinburgh Review,
and one of Darwin's old professors at Cambridge wrote to him that he had caused more pain than pleasure and asserted that ‘You have deserted the true methods of induction, and started in machinery as wild, I think, as Bishop Wilkins's locomotive that was to sail with us to the moon.'

Darwin was a timid man, who stood back and let the controversy rage. He knew the logical conclusions that would be drawn sooner or later from a thesis that suggested all life emerged from the same soup, namely that humankind was not superior to the beast but was related to it. Aware that there was mischief to be made from his work, he had therefore deliberately made as few references to humankind as possible. In
Origin
he used anything else as an example: brachiopods and cirripedes, humming-birds and dogs, pigeons and Scotch fir trees. Nevertheless his critics were only too pleased to pinpoint the central heresy. The
Athenaeum
magazine was the first to highlight what it called the evolutionary nonsense of men from monkeys – an idea that captured the public imagination. In Oxford in June 1860, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, more than 700 people witnessed Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, round on Thomas Huxley and ask him whether he was descended from an ape on his grandmother's side or his grandfather's. There was uproar, and one lady fainted. Huxley retorted that he could not see what difference it would make and that if he was asked which he would rather have, ‘a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.' Laughter ricocheted around the room.