Savage (40 page)

On one occasion he heard that a large party of Selk'nam were heading across wide open grasslands towards Cape Penas where they would hunt the thousands of seal that landed there. Bridges took up the story:

Armed with repeating rifles and eager for excitement, Mr McInch and a band of mounted white men encircled the headland, thereby cutting off the retreat of the luckless sealers, who, when the tide rose, were driven from their refuge at the foot of the cliffs into the range of the enthusiastic manhunters.

I do not know how many natives were killed that day. Mr McInch claimed afterwards that they had shot fourteen. He maintained that it was really a most humanitarian act, if one had the guts to do it. He argued that these people could never live their lives alongside the white man; that it was cruel to keep them in captivity at a mission where they would pine away miserably or die from some imported illness; and that the sooner they were exterminated the better.

Such barbarous acts in Tierra del Fuego often set off small chain reactions. One example of this occurred after McInch's bloody attack. The Selk'nam Indian Kilcoat successfully escaped into the woods with his wife and child. A few days later, after he had been hunting, Kilcoat returned to find his wife lying dead, face down in a swamp, her child tied to her back. She had been shot from behind with a bullet that had skimmed the child's ribs. The child was still alive. Kilcoat was devastated and sought vengeance against the first white man he came across. He hid behind a rock and when a lone miner passed by he shot him in the back with an arrow. He then stole the dead man's repeating rifle and ammunition. This was one of the firearms used subsequently to such deadly effect when Kiyohnishah massacred his fellow Selk'nam feeding on the stranded whale, and was used again during the killings at Lake Hyewhin.

The missions of which McInch spoke were Roman Catholic Salesian projects on the main island and on Dawson Island. In the face of the land-grab that was going on throughout Tierra del Fuego, these missions were the only concessions granted to the indigenous population, their only refuge from the Winchester rifle. In the eyes of many they provided a humane alternative to the lives the Indians were living, and the destruction they were facing in the wild. Some sheep farmers offered £5 a head for the capture of natives and their placement in the missions; others tried to persuade them that it was for their own good. More than a hundred Selk'nam were transported to Dawson Island, where they learned new skills alongside Alakaluf Indians who had been similarly rounded up. For the men there was work in the saw mill, in forestry and sheep shearing, for the women there was spinning and weaving. Another attempt at establishing an Anglican mission near to Cape Horn came to nothing when its founder, Leonard Burleigh, drowned off the coast of Hoste Island.

There can be little doubt that those who ran the Catholic missions in Tierra del Fuego did so with the best of intentions for the indigenous population. In their eyes it was the latest chapter in the age-old story of bringing God and civilisation to a savage people. They brought with them clothes, warm accommodation and good food, but in their own way the Salesian missions were as efficient in killing off the Fuegians as the gunmen at their perimeter. Wool, blankets, immigrant priests, nuns and supply ships brought disease to the heart of the stations. The change of climate ruined the immune systems of the Selk'nam who were taken to Dawson Island. The effects on a free and nomadic people of being corralled and regimented into close, confined quarters was depressing: their spirit was broken, their resistance crushed.

Few ever understood the Fuegians, or saw beyond their naked, primitive appearance. The racial attitudes of Europeans towards people of non-European descent are appalling to modern eyes. To attempt an assessment of the lives of Fuegians, or indeed other tribal peoples around the world, without condescension, was not part of the nineteenth-century psyche. As ‘civilisation' expanded, whether through secular empire-building or religious missionary endeavours, the need to ‘save' the rude savage became imperative. To white European imperialists, or missionaries, these people were crude, barbarous aborigines. They were generally black, unclothed, apt to live in poor shelter, content to dine on sub-standard food and prone to violent outbursts. They communicated through a limited number of grunts, exhibited little curiosity and no knowledge of God or Christ. European visitors could see that there was need to regiment, to organise, to fill their lives with order, work and religious joy. The fact that the Fuegians had survived in their habitat for centuries was irrelevant to the European mind: that it transpired that their language was, in some respects, more sophisticated than English only exposed the intruders' ignorance. What was important was saving them for God and heaven.

Alternatively, if they could not save the ‘savage' they could always destroy them – though often the effect was the same. The Europeans, and later the Argentines and Chileans, judged those Fuegians unwilling to play the game – those who were less acquiescent to the white man's demands, those who were troublesome, less adaptable to change, and more assertive – to be worthless primitives who could be dismissed with the click of a trigger. It is difficult to put numbers on the scale of the tragedy that befell the Fuegians because there are no precise records. When the
Beagle
carried Jemmy Button back to the Yahgashaga in 1833 there were probably three thousand Yamana Indians. In the early 1850s, there were 7,000–9,000 Fuegian Indians, of all tribes. By 1908 there were barely 170 Yamana Indians alive; by 1947 there were only 43, and less than 150 surviving pure Fuegians of any tribe, with roughly the same number of mixed race. It is doubtful that there are any pure Fuegian Indians today.

In the story of Jemmy Button the notion of what was savage or barbarian and what was civilised is of great importance. Civilisation was defined by the apparently civilised, who also designated what was savage. Yet there was no lack of paradoxes. What was civilised about the abduction of native peoples, their removal from their families and their transportation across the world? Or about men hunting down packs of Indians and wiping them out without fear of reprisal? Or the forced herding of Fuegians into mission stations and their coercion into work programmes and the trappings of European societies? It is worth bearing in mind that Jemmy Button, along with York, Fuegia, and four more Fuegians in the 1860s, went to England, were indulged in polite society and survived; they proved adaptable, intelligent and understanding. The same could not always be said for Europeans going the other way.

It is possible to speculate on how close the Fuegians came to avoiding their miserable end. Tierra del Fuego was a forsaken corner of the world, important only for its location on a major shipping route. By the second decade of the twentieth century it had been made largely irrelevant by the construction of the Panama Canal. As there was no longer reason for ships to risk a rounding of Cape Horn, there would have been little reason for the clash of cultures, and nobody would have had to worry about the fate of marooned sailors in these parts. Had the canal been built half a century earlier one could fairly ask whether or not some living remnant of the Fuegians would still be with us.

It is also important to consider the role, no matter how unwitting, that Jemmy Button played in his people's downfall. It was he who unlocked the final catastrophic floodgates, though he was hardly to blame. For over three centuries European ships had passed through these waters, had traded with the Fuegian Indians and had moved on. They had passed along the Magellan Straits, through the many channels of the archipelago, or even round the Horn. There had been the occasional skirmish, an isolated violent death, and certainly when a ship was wrecked here, sailors had as much to fear from the people as they did from the raging seas. But the balance of Fuegian Indian life and their relationships with the environment and each other were not challenged irrevocably until FitzRoy abducted the four Fuegians and brought them back to England for their education and betterment.

In a nineteenth-century context it is difficult to question his motives: once again, here was a person who genuinely believed he was doing good, that with luck and God's will he would improve the lot of all Fuegian Indians, transform their nomadic existence into some form of settled society. FitzRoy failed, but the return of Jemmy, York and Fuegia to Tierra del Fuego drew the attention and raised the hopes of future missionaries.

The presence of Jemmy near Wulaia, with his ability to speak and understand English, his rudimentary grasp of Christianity and his awareness of English cultural expectations was too much to resist. He was a magnet to colonising missionaries and the nature of contact between Fuegian and foreigner was transformed; the white man no longer arrived, hunted seal and perhaps traded fish before moving on, he came to stay, and in his wake came trouble.

Of course, it was in the nature of nineteenth-century exploration and colonial expansion that if it had not been Jemmy it would have been another Fuegian. Sooner or later a European was bound to have seen the region as ripe for colonisation. It was always certain that ‘civilisation' would spread south from the burgeoning republics of Chile and Argentina, but Jemmy was the catalyst. His abduction opened up a period of unprecedented interference in the lives of Fuegian Indians and within a few decades of his death on Button Island the rest of his people had been eliminated.

In
Uttermost Part of the Earth,
Lucas Bridges (who, it should be remembered, was the adopted grandson of George Packenham Despard) wrote that the plans of the missionary martyr Allen Gardiner had been ‘followed as closely as possible through trials and disasters to a successful conclusion. Though I am well aware that, within less than a century, the Fuegians as a race have become almost extinct, I deliberately use the word “successful”.'

This success, which Lucas Bridges heralded so triumphantly, was bittersweet indeed. When considering the Fuegian people and the tragedy that engulfed them it is natural to view their existence with sadness and no little anger at the treatment meted out to them. On 30 September 1889
The Times
carried the following story about an exhibition held at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster. Seven Selk'nam Indians – one man, two women, two girls and two boys – had been taken from their homeland by a gold-digger who wished to show them off at the Paris Exhibition. He had arrived too late for the show, and instead passed them on to a Mr Farini for exhibiting in London. The newspaper reported that a tent had been erected for them in the aquarium and that

They are of a dark, swarthy brown colour, and their hair, which is of a blueish black tinge, is arranged so as to form a large fringe which almost entirely covers the eyes … only one of the party, a boy, showing any signs of cheerfulness, the rest maintaining a sullen demeanour. In stature they are small, but their limbs are well developed and show signs of considerable muscular power. Their dress consists merely of a skin, and it is said that they prefer their meat raw. They are unable to understand anything beyond a few signs, and their language has apparently little resource, as their communications seem to consist almost entirely of a few low ejaculations … At present they sit about round a large stove, cowering in their skins, apparently contented with the warmth. They will be on view at the Aquarium for some time to come.

It was a sad spectacle, a human zoo, typical in its unfeeling, arrogant and ill-judged representation of a soon-to-disappear people – a people deep in crisis. Without Jemmy Button this would have been the abiding image of the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. But in his life we are left with a powerful contradiction to it. Jemmy's existence and his reaction to his experiences throw open a different window on the Indians of Tierra del Fuego, which offers a far more interesting and revealing view.

At the opening of his odyssey there was nothing that marked out Jemmy as more competent or more intelligent than his friends and family. Yet in his life we see his strength – both mental and physical – and his bold response to his English captors. Orundellico was transformed from the primeval child, out fishing and bartering with his uncles, into the hybrid creation Jemmy Button, neither completely Fuegian nor remotely English. Kidnapped, used and abused in his early life, harassed and troubled in his later years, he emerged nevertheless as a man of character and fortitude. He was a battler, a survivor, a child and man of good nature. He was a boon to FitzRoy's project, someone who adapted to and thrived in the hothouse of London, who adored dressing up and preening like the most narcissistic of dandies. He grew into something respectable enough to present not only to the aristocratic friends of the young captain, but also to the pinnacle of English society, royalty itself. From FitzRoy's own observations on the Fuegian peoples, this was more than he could realistically have expected when he began seizing Fuegian Indians. In the end the captain's experiment with his Fuegian missionaries failed, but that had little to do with the abilities of Jemmy, York and Fuegia and more to do with its ill conception, half thought-out design and poorly resourced execution.

It is true that in his later years Jemmy became more fractious, less helpful and was at times a thorn in the side of those who sought him out. It is also distinctly probable that he was involved, and possibly led, the massacre at Wulaia Cove in November 1859. Yet Fuegians lived by different rules and values and this was their customary response to the threat of foreign incursion, the fear of further kidnappings and, it is important to remember, to a twice-repeated insult in the form of the searches imposed on them by the missionary and the captain of the ship. Moreover, as with other victims throughout history, it shows that they offered some resistance and were not willing just to lie down and die.

Many years before, Jemmy Button had been used and discarded like flotsam, abandoned to the vagaries of his people, the selfishness and cravings of York Minster, and the self-doubts that grow in the heart of the exile. With hindsight it was hardly startling that, when the white man came calling once more, he would be reluctant to help. As he stated in his testimony at Port Stanley in 1860, he had ‘had plenty of it – no want to go back…' and, in the words of the assistant secretary in the Colonial Office, when the missionaries started to force the issue it was ‘not surprising that murder should follow'.