The Darwin Conspiracy (25 page)

Roland was gone.

He checked his watch. Beth would be waiting for him at the Prince
Regent. He felt like having a drink. As he walked down the front steps, he patted the photocopy in his pocket.

My God, he thought. She’s pregnant. This is unbelievable. She’s gone and gotten herself pregnant. What’s going to happen to her? It’s strange, this attempt to put a life back together 150 years after the fact, to make sense of things. Sometimes the pieces fit and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes the historian knows more than the actual person living the life.

In this case Hugh knew that at some point in the not-too-distant future, Lizzie would get pregnant by a man she didn’t marry. That singular event would bring her world crumbling down. That knowledge, while she was chattering on in her journal, not yet in her twenties, musing about visitors to Down House and playing roundabouts and all the rest, was terrible to have. It was like seeing a speeding car and knowing that it is soon to crash. Possessing that knowledge was like being God.

As the
Beagle
followed the coast of Tierra del Fuego, Charles stood on deck, holding fast to the rigging. The ship lunged and heaved in the choppy swells. He peered through the fog at the shore and gave a small involuntary shudder—he had never seen such God-forsaken terrain.

Sharp rocks marched down to the sea. The land was cloaked with a dismal mist, the only vegetation sad-looking Antarctic beeches. Distant mountains rose in jagged peaks like edges of oyster shells, appearing not majestic but menacing. All around swirled a perpetual rain-soaked bog. Everything was desolate and gray.

Jemmy Button walked over and stood beside him. In recent weeks, ever since they had journeyed far enough south to experience the chilly climate and inhale the dank smell of land, the three Fuegians had been acting strangely. Fuegia Basket, whose body was swelling (to Charles’s eyes she looked pregnant), remained belowdecks much of the time and rarely spoke. York Minster turned possessive and went into a sulk whenever someone else sat near her. Jemmy himself lost his customary jovial air and seemed anxious, sometimes appearing eager to reach their destination, sometimes seeming to fear it.

Now, holding on to the railing with his white gloves, his face looked blacker in the fog, the color of polished ebony. With his finely cut collar flapping in the wet wind, he cut an almost comical figure except for his forlorn expression.

Charles was moved to chastise him. “Come, come, lad. You’re going home soon. A little appreciation is in order. Captain FitzRoy has gone 
to great lengths to return you to your native land and you ill repay him with your sullenness.”

“But dees no be my people. Dees be Oens-men. Very terrible.”

“Yes, but remember: You have lived in England. You have even met the King. You are above them. You have the armor of civilization to protect you.”

“My peeple very civilized. You come meet my peeple, meet great man. Der be no Devil der. Promise.”

“I haven’t forgotten. I have given you my word. I shall meet your people and your great leader.”

Jemmy turned to stare once more at the forbidding shore. At times like this Charles deemed the young man as petulant and demanding as a six-year-old. In fact, that was the way all three of the Fuegians were acting—like children. He sighed. He had long believed that all human beings were essentially the same on some fundamental level; it was the force of disparate societies that made them different, one higher than another. Humanity was a ladder of progress leading to rationality and morality; primitive tribes occupied the bottom rung, Englishmen and certain Continentals the top. The alacrity with which the savages had adopted the civilized code underscored the correctness of his view. But now he wondered, as they approached their native habitat, if they weren’t losing the qualities of civilization as quickly as they had gained them.

Jemmy moved away and Charles became aware of another figure lurking behind him. He sensed who it was before he turned.

“Enjoying the view?” asked McCormick laconically.

“Quite.”

“I say, has Jemmy been on to you about visiting his village?”

“Yes, why?”

“He’s been pestering me about it relentlessly. Wants us to trek inland and meet his family and his tribal chieftain. Some chap named Okanicutt or something like that.”

“I told him I would do it.”

“So did I, though now that I think of it I can’t for the life of me say why. It’s something like a day’s hard going just to get there.” He paused a beat, then continued. “Have you ever noticed these people don’t seem to have a word for no? Perhaps it’s the conception they don’t have. I’ve certainly never known them to give up when they want something.”

Charles didn’t respond. The truth was he had absolutely no idea what went on in Jemmy’s mind. He could not imagine what it was like to inhabit his mental universe. Jemmy’s way of reasoning seemed so opaque, so alien, so far removed from normal categories of space and time, cause and effect. It was magical, riddled with superstition and animism. A thing didn’t have to be one thing or another, it could be two things at once. Everything seemed to flow out of everything else in some causal way that Charles couldn’t grasp. It was organic, like a bud opening into a flower and then becoming a piece of fruit, except that the bud and the flower and the fruit had nothing to do with one another.

“I say,” McCormick interrupted his thoughts. “Have you heard that we may be taking on another ship?”

“Another ship? Why in Heaven’s name?”

“It seems that Captain FitzRoy believes we need additional support if we’re to get the surveying done. There’s no time to contact the Admiralty, so he’s prepared to pay for it out of his own purse and then seek reimbursement.”

“But that’s daft. He must not undertake something like that without permission. What if they disapprove?”

“Oh, I dare say they won’t. He has excellent contacts, you know.”

Charles harbored misgivings but did not have a chance to voice them. For at that moment as the
Beagle
rounded a headland and moved closer to shore, a hole opened up in the fog. What Charles and McCormick saw stole their breath away.

There at eye level, no more than forty feet away, were a dozen savages, naked except for some kind of filthy skins thrown over their shoulders. Their long, matted hair hung to their breasts and their faces were smeared with red and white paint. They jumped from the ground and waved their arms in the air, gesticulating and yelling hideously. As the ship moved, they ran along the shore, lunging from rock to rock.

Soon some began frothing at the mouth and bleeding from their noses, so that their brown bodies were smeared with grease and blood and spittle.

“By Jove,” said McCormick, “I have never seen the like. Do you think they are dangerous?”

Charles was hard put to answer. To him they were like spirits from another world, like the devils he had seen as a student in the Weber opera
Der Freischütz.

The ship rounded another promontory and he observed that all around, on rocky islands and small plateaus in the foothills, fires were burning, sending up smoke that mingled with the fog. It was what Magellan had seen, the fires that moved him to call the land Tierra del Fuego. Had they lit the fires to encourage the ship to land or to warn other natives of her arrival?

Some days later the
Beagle
anchored in Good Success Bay and sent down boats to shore. Charles and FitzRoy were in the whaleboat.

Jemmy, resplendent in a blue jacket and white breeches, huddled in the stern, clearly afraid. Scores of natives had gathered on the shore, moving up and down and shouting in sonorous whoops, while others looked down from rocky outcroppings.

“These are Ona,” said FitzRoy. He explained that unlike Jemmy Button’s people, these were Indians of the forest, who did not use canoes and hunted with bows and arrows. They were tall, usually around six feet. Half a dozen fractured words in Spanish—usually for things they wanted, like
cuchillos,
knives—were proof of some contact with foreigners.

The boats reached shore and the Indians crowded around, pointing at objects and yelling. The crewmen handed over all sorts of gifts, which the Indians grabbed and immediately took away. The natives slapped Charles and one or two others full in the chest, somewhat roughly, and they slapped back with equal force. It seemed a friendly enough greeting, though there were no smiles to dissipate a sense of menace in the air. The Indians circled Jemmy Button, poking him and talking among themselves, puzzled. He could not speak their language and his eyes were wide with fear.

“Dees not my peeple,” he said, almost tearfully.

The crewmen broke out a fiddle and pipes and began playing tunes, which caused a hilarity among the Indians that grew more and more frenzied. One Indian stood back-to-back with the tallest seaman to compare their respective height; found to be taller by half an inch, he went bounding down the beach, shouting like a madman and swinging a club. A crewman suggested a bout of wrestling matches, but FitzRoy, looking around at the ever-growing number of natives pouring down 
from the surrounding hills, thought better of it. He ordered the men back into the boats.

The Indians followed them into the water, wading beside the boats and tugging at the sailors’ belts and shirts. One midshipman threw some boxes of ribbons overboard—immediately, the Indians released his boat and struggled to retrieve them. An Indian grabbed Charles’s boat by the side and pulled it to a stop, but the oarsman smacked his fists with the blade and he let go. They quickly moved into deeper water.

On the way back to the
Beagle
Charles noticed that Jemmy, collapsed back in the stern, kept his legs tightly closed. He soon saw why: a yellow stain had spread down the thighs of his white breeches. Back on board, he hurried down to his cabin to hide his shame and did not emerge for the rest of the day.

That evening, dining alone with FitzRoy, Charles thought the Captain looked crestfallen. He worried about him and tried to buck him up.

“I dare say that business on the beach was a bit disconcerting—but it was only the first contact. I imagine things are bound to improve in the days ahead.”

FitzRoy made no reply; indeed, he stared down at the table as if he did not hear the words.

All in all, Charles thought, it was hardly an auspicious beginning to FitzRoy’s grand scheme of bringing civilization and Christianity to this benighted part of the world. Weeks ago, when the Captain had talked about it during their dinners, at times getting so excited that he broke off his meal and paced about the cabin in a kind of delirium, holding up the Bible, it had sounded so feasible that Charles had half expected the savages to be awaiting them on shore with open arms.

Captain FitzRoy faced a difficult decision: where to set down his human cargo.

Jemmy Button and young Richard Matthews, he had decided, should be put ashore close to where the young savage had been abducted two years earlier. The spot was roughly halfway through the Beagle Channel, which cut through lower Tierra del Fuego and had been named by the Captain himself on the previous trip. But he took it into his head that York Minster and Fuegia Basket, coming as they did 
from a different tribe farther to the west, should be dropped off at the channel’s Pacific side. This meant sailing around Cape Horn, the most treacherous waterway in the world.

For twenty-four days, the
Beagle
battled horrendous storms, including one that nearly sank her with a wave that Charles, holding on for dear life and sick to the gills, estimated at two hundred feet. But eventually, even though the summer months were supposed to make the passage easier, the weather proved insurmountable.

FitzRoy relented. He turned back north, entered the channel from the east, and, protected on both sides, reached the calm waters of Pon-sonby Sound. All along the way, Indians besieged them. They rode out in canoes, gesticulating as they drew alongside, banging on the sides of the ship and screaming
“Yammerschooner”
over and over. These, said FitzRoy, were the Yamana, a vast tribe with many clans. They sheltered in makeshift wigwams, lived off shellfish and seals, and moved to a new site every four or five days. Virtually naked, they were protected from the cold by only a thin layer of grease, mostly seal fat. The three Fuegians were Yamana, he said, but their clans were very different.

Jemmy’s was the most advanced, as evidenced by the fact that it eschewed consumption of human flesh.

After two days’ sail, the
Beagle
came to Woollya, a protected cove off Navarin Island. By chance, it was a sunny afternoon. The land rose gently around a half-moon bay. There was a beach and beyond that a strip of grassy ground that looked fertile and a thick grove of trees at the base of gentle hills. They could see steams that carried clear water.

FitzRoy declared it ideal for the settlement.

Immediately, the crew set about building the mission station. They constructed three small wooden huts, one for the missionary Matthews, one for Jemmy, and one for the other two Fuegians. They dug and planted two vegetable gardens and raised a small fence and marked the boundaries of the station with a ditch. Then, when all was completed, came the great unloading from the ship: they carried off crates of goods donated by the London Missionary Society, items that spoke more to the mentality of the donors than to survival in this brutish part of the world: soup tureens, tea-trays, butter-bolts, wineglasses, beaver hats, fine white linen, a mahogany dressing case. The sailors laughed as they handed down china chamberpots.

All this time, the local Yamana stared in bewilderment. More and 
more of them arrived by canoe and by foot, drawn by the prospect of gifts, as word of the interlopers spread. Soon they numbered about three hundred. They squatted to watch the work and wheedled, endlessly repeating
“Yammerschooner.”
As the days wore on, they became bolder. Sometimes they stole—belts and shirts, nails and axes, whatever was left unguarded for the briefest moment. The sailors set up night patrols, but even this did not stop the pilfering.