Read Evolution's Captain Online
Authors: Peter Nichols
FitzRoy asked an acquaintance, the Reverend J. L. Harris, vicar at nearby Plymstock, Devon, to write to the Church Missionary Society on his behalf, for help in placing the Fuegians, at FitzRoy's expense, with some godly folk who might instruct and enlighten them for two or three years. Perhaps he told Harris too much: “They are Cannibals but now they show a ready appetite for Vegetables,” wrote Harris. The Society, which was primarily concerned with its missions to Africa and the far east, replied that it did not feel the Fuegians to be within its “province.”
In the meantime, the
Beagle
was stripped and cleaned out, and on October 27, its pendant was struckâdecommissioned, laid up “in ordinary” once more to await its next call to naval service. The
Beagle
's crew were paid off and dispersed. “I much
regretted the separation from my tried and esteemed shipmates,” wrote FitzRoy. “Of those who had passed so many rough hours together, but few were likely to meet again.” The
Beagle
's crew had been a happy one since FitzRoy's appointment. They had spent two years in close company together aboard the tight quarters of the ship, and rowing and camping in the boats for weeks they had shared food and razors and storms, and when inevitably FitzRoy obtained another commission and another ship, he would have to find, train, and mold another crew to his liking again. But for now, his seamen were laid off, equipped with their meager backpay and perhaps a letter of recommendation from their captain, to look for berths aboard other vessels, or to go home to their families, to the farms or cities they came from, to lose or stay in touch with their former shipmates. FitzRoy retained his coxswain, James Bennett, probably on half-pay, leaving him to keep an eye on the Fuegians while he remained in Plymouth to attend to the details of his survey, and to continue to look for the right berth for his cannibal savages.
In early November, he received bad news from Bennett: Boat Memory appeared to have smallpox. FitzRoy contacted Dr. Armstrong at the Royal Naval Hospital in Plymouth, who suggested that all four Fuegians be immediately admitted to the hospital, where they could be isolated and given the best treatment. The Admiralty gave its permission, and the Fuegians were taken there on November 7 and placed in the care of two renowned naval physicians, Drs. David Dickson and Sir James Gordon.
Work on his surveys now took FitzRoy to London for consultation with the Admiralty's hydrographic department, but he had hardly reached there when he received a letter from Dr. Dickson telling him that Boat Memory had died. FitzRoy was filled with genuine grief and remorse.
This poor fellow was a very great favourite with all who knew him, as well as with myself. He had a good disposition, very good abilities, and though born a savage, had a pleasing, intelligent
appearance. He was quite an exception to the general character of the Fuegians, having good features and a well-proportioned frameâ¦. This was a severe blow to me, for I was deeply sensible of the responsibility which had been incurred; and, however unintentionally, could not but feel how much I was implicated in shortening his existence.
On the long voyage home to England, he had gained a good idea of the personalities and abilities of the Fuegians. By the end of it he'd found York Minster “a displeasing specimen of uncivilized human nature.” Part of this conclusion was undoubtedly the result of FitzRoy's great belief in the telling aspects of physical appearance. His own portrait drawings of the Fuegians show York Minster, despite a high collar, tie, and frock coat, to be much coarser-featured than the others. His admiration for Boat Memory's appearance was certainly one reason FitzRoy had placed on him his greatest hopes for a civilizing transformation.
Now his concern, and his hopes, centered on the other three, two of them children. They had all been revaccinated on first entering the hospital, and the Navy doctors wrote to FitzRoy that they were optimistic of their chances of resisting the disease.
They didn't get smallpox. But Dickson, in a wild and cavalier act of medical adventuringâand in the best tradition of progressive experimentation; the two inescapably went togetherâtook Fuegia Basket home with him, where his own children had come down with measles. He thought it an excellent opportunity “to carry the little Fuegian girl through that malady” in order to boost her immune system. He only informed FitzRoy later, telling him that he'd prepared her for it and that she'd had “a very favorable attack.”
The Fuegians otherwise remained in the naval hospital for the rest of November, while FitzRoy, back in London working on his surveys, anxiously wondered what he would do with them when they were discharged. The rejection by the Church Missionary Society had stalled his plan for their improvement and education.
But suddenly everything got better. FitzRoy's hopes for his Fuegians, naive and unplanned, made him some friends. The Church Missionary Society had not felt able to help him, but its secretary, Dandeson Coates, took a personal interest and put him in touch with the Reverend Joseph Wigram, secretary of the National Society for Providing the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. Wigram, then an assistant preacher and later to become the Bishop of Rochester, was the son of a well-to-do landowner and still lived at his father's home in Walthamstow, Essex, just east of London. Gripped with the fervor of his society's avowed mission, he approached Walthamstow's rector, William Wilson, who grew equally excited. Together they hatched a plan for FitzRoy's savages.
E
arly in December 1830, Coxswain Bennett and the
Beagle
's
recent master, Mr. Murray, a man now much experienced in his dealings with Fuegians, collected FitzRoy's three charges from the naval hospital in Plymouth. The five of them traveled to London in a privately hired stagecoach. The jolting trip took more than twenty-four hours over rough roads, but Murray told FitzRoy that the Fuegians “seemed to enjoy their journeyâ¦and were very much struck by the repeated changing of horses.”
They were bound for their new home. Rector Wilson and Joseph Wigram had secured a berth for the Fuegians at Walthamstow, where they would be boarded and educated, at FitzRoy's expense, at the local infant school. The schoolmaster would look after and take charge of them. FitzRoy was hugely relieved. He met them with his own carriage at the coach office in Piccadilly and drove them through London to Walthamstow.
Passing Charing Cross, there was a start and exclamation of astonishment from York. “Look!” he said, fixing his eyes on the lion upon Northumberland House, which he certainly thought alive, and walking there. I never saw him show such sudden emotion at any other time.
There was more to see than the statue of a lion. Past Charing Cross, FitzRoy steered his carriage east along the Strand, leaving Mayfair and the tony West End behind, passing through the City of London, the square-mile enclave that by the early nineteenth century had become the financial and business center of the world. Here the streets were lined with banks, shop windows, swinging painted signs, and public houses and filled with a dense circus of costermongers, shoe-blacks, boardmen's advertisements, two-wheeler cabs, and a thronging mob of people. The City was an ancient, squalid, jumble of activity, bordered by the Thames, and the teeming markets of Billingsgate and Smithfield, both of which had been in place for a thousand years.
Only 200 yards from St. Paul's Cathedral, Smithfield was a charnel house nightmare: six acres of slaughterhouses, knackers yards, bone houses, bladder blowers, streets filled with animals alive and hacked to pieces, piles of excrement and steaming entrails, the gutters running with blood and gore. Charles Dickens described Smithfield as a “shameful placeâ¦asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam.” In
Oliver Twist
, he described a typical market morning.
The ground was covered nearly ankle-deep with filth and mire; and a thick steam perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fogâ¦. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a dense massâ¦the barking of dogs, the bellowing and plunging of beasts, the bleating of sheep, and the grunting and squeaking of pigsâ¦the shouts, the oaths and quarelling on all sides, the ringing of bells, and the roar of voices that issued from every public house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng, rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene which quite confused the senses.
The same hubbub arose over the selling of fish at nearby Billingsgate, where the streets were awash with a briny soup of fish scales, guts, and blood. And on the other side of the road, along the banks of the Thames, boys and women smoking short clay pipes picked through piles of refuse, looking for tin, old shoes, bones and oyster shells, anything useful, “with faces and upper extremities begrimed with black filth, and surrounded by and breathing a foul, moist, hot air, surcharged with the gaseous emanations of disintegrating organic compounds,” as a concerned medical officer wrote.
The smell that washed over the Fuegians as they passed through London was a rich one. The Thames, viscous with sewage and refuse, stank at high tide and low; the streets reeked with decomposing food and litter, “street mud” and “night soil.” This blended with “the Scents that arose from Mundung as Tobacco, Sweaty Toes, Dirty Shirts, the Shit-tub, stinking Breaths and uncleanly carcasses.” There was the stench of tanneries and glue manufactories, lime kilns, tallow, stables, decaying wood, boiled cabbage, and the odor of graveyards.
From a suburb, the noise of London was said to be “like the swell of the sea-surge beating upon a pebbly shore when it is heard far inland.” But in the city the noise was not so white, not the blended, homogenized din of our own time. Contained in the intimacy of narrow streets and alleyways, it was a bedlam of particulate and identifiable sounds: from herds of market-bound animals, roosters and barking dogs, the shouting and shrieking of men, women, and boys, including the incessant hawking of street sellers, the whinnying, rearing, and sharp hoof-fall of horses, the jangle of harness, the thundering of coaches, carts, wagons, ships' horns on the river, the ringing of hand bells and clock towers, the streetworks and traffic bottlenecks that were a constant feature of nineteenth-century London, the hammering of blacksmiths, artisans, coopers, and armorers, the crying of babies.
If the English weather was “fair” that morning in December, it would have resembled at best conditions in Tierra del Fuego. But the climate of London in the early nineteenth century was
colder than it is now, and the city was plagued by terrible smogs. Dense cold fogs were made much worse by the widespread burning of “sea coal,” a cheap, poor-quality coal carried down the North Sea by coaster colliers from the north of England. Burned in thousands of fireplaces, industrial furnaces, and coal-powered steam engines, sea coal spewed a heavy smoke into the air that condensed over the city like the fallout from a volcano. The poet William Wordsworth and his wife and a friend were forced to abandon their coach a mile from home one day in December 1817 in a fog so dense that the coachman could no longer find his way. They could not see the houses on either side of the street and groped the rest of the way home between railing and curb like blind people, in a fog “not only thick but of a yellow colour [that] makes one as dirty as smoke.”
All this and more assaulted the Fuegians, who had just spent a month in the relative quiet and fresh air of Plymouth. Twenty-first-century humans, reared on
Star Trek
and
Star Wars,
abducted and taken to another world by intergalactic travelers, would probably be less vertiginously displaced than the natives of Tierra del Fuego in London.
Their only comfort in this maelstrom of dislocation were their shipmates, Murray, Bennett, and preeminently FitzRoy, the evident master of this universe. They must have placed in him a growing trust born of overwhelming need.
But a few miles farther on, the city fell away to countryside. Only seven miles from London, as it existed then, Walthamstow lay beyond open fields and across the river Lea, at the edge of Epping Forest, a small country town of 4000 inhabitants. The only way to reach it in 1830 was by road; the railway would not connect with it until the 1840s.
The master of the infants school, William Jenkins, and his wife awaited them. FitzRoy recorded the arrival.
[The Fuegians] were much pleased with the rooms prepared for them at Walthamstow; and the schoolmaster and his wife were
equally pleased to find the future inmates of their house very well disposed, quiet, and cleanly people; instead of fierce and dirty savagesâ¦. The attention of their instructor was directed to teaching them English, and the plainer truths of Christianity, as the first object; and the use of common tools, a slight acquaintance with husbandry, gardening, and mechanism, as the second.
The Walthamstow Infants School had been established by the Reverend William Wilson in 1824. Wilson had come under the sway of a well-known educator of the day, Samuel Wilderspin, who believed that the age level for children entering national schoolsâsix and sevenâwas far too late. Wilderspin thought that two was the preferred age, particularly for instruction in spiritual matters, which he felt were too important to be left to the haphazard example of poorly educated parents of dubious moral values. Wilson, the wealthy son of a manufacturer, was persuaded by Wilderspin to sponsor the country's first Church of Englandâsanctioned infants school. It was initally housed in a barn. A few years later Wilson had a new building constructed for the school beside the church graveyard.
Here the Fuegians sat learning English, arithmetic, and “the plainer truths of Christianity” in a classroom adorned with biblical pictures and quotations.
In 1825, Wilson published a book,
The System of Infants Schools
, in which he described his ideas and methods. He wanted to see children at school as early as possible,
[in] the most impressible years of our existence. The evil which is within us is then fomented, or the principles of religion and moral excellence were then first inculcated and encouragedâ¦. Muscular action is made a component and necessary part of the system. Every lesson is accompanied with some movement of the personâ¦the whole frame is at different periods called into action and restored to rest. The beat of the foot, the clap of the
hands, the extension of the arms, with various other postures, are measures of the utterance of the lesson as they proceed. The position is also frequently changed. The infants learn sitting, standing or walking.
Fuegia, aged nine or ten when she arrived at Walthamstow, and Jemmy, about fourteen, made good progress. Their eight months of captivity aboard the
Beagle
had equipped them with a rudimentary vocabularyâa sailorly argot hardly suitable for a Christian infants school but which nonetheless readied them for further instruction. By all accounts, the two younger Fuegians were responsive, eager pupils, and their “improvement” charmed their benefactors.
They exhibited distinct traits, recorded by FitzRoy and others: Jemmy Button showed a taste for English dress that bordered on dandyism. He “was fond of admiring himself in a looking glass.” His speech became peppered with some of the quainter expressions of the day, so that his few quotes that have come down to us (probably because his listeners were amused by them) seem almost to satirize his dress and situation: “Hearty, sir, never better,” he would respond to an inquiry after his health. He must have been fun; the butt of much humor, but enjoying the joke himself, and happy to provide it. He made many friends.
Little, round Fuegia Basket exuded an empathic sweetness that endeared her to everybody. FitzRoy had been the first to come under her spell, and had been more unwilling to part with her, to send her ashore with the other child hostages in Tierra del Fuego, than he was able to convincingly explain. “She seemed to be so happy and healthy, that I determined to detain her as a hostage for the stolen boat,” he wrote at a point when such hostage-taking had proved futile. To the
Beagle
's crew, who had made her “a pet on the lower deck”; to the English families she stayed with in Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, and to the many people she met in England, Fuegia was an irresistible charmer.
But the hulking, brooding York Minster, aged twenty-six, charmed no one. He did not enjoy the classroom, in which he was expected to sit alongside two-, three-, and four-year-olds, singing, clapping, mouthing by rote his ABCs and chants about how to wash one's face and hands, exercising his man's body in tandem with the movements of babes. There would have been no cultural gap large enough to save him from the most abject humiliation in this. He preferred mechanical instruction in smith's or carpenter's work; he paid attention to what he saw and heard about animals; he reluctantly helped with the gardening around the school and church, perhaps feeling this was women's work; but it's not surprising that he had “a great dislike” for schoolwork. Or that he was moody and unresponsive to the finer influences he was exposed to. York was too old and fully formed to change, to sparkle with Christian values. He remained a true captive, imprisoned in himself by a culture that had no place or use for him, no appreciation of his natural self, that wanted to eradicate the skills and tendencies formed in him by his own, and only natural, environment. The difference in age between him and his fellow Fuegians was too great to allow for any kind of real friendship with them. He was as marooned in England as was Crusoe on his island, and though no one seems to have guessed as much, blaming his sullen behavior on savage intractability, he must have been a profoundly lonely and unhappy man.
Because he failed to charm FitzRoy, York Minster was possibly not given the chance to charm anyone else. Fuegia Basket and Jemmy Button, because of their youth and more malleable personalities, were taken on outings with FitzRoy. Whether York Minster accompanied them is unclear: “They [the Fuegians] gave no particular trouble; were very healthy; and the two younger ones became great favourites wherever they were known. Sometimes I took them with me to see a friend or relation of my own, who was anxious to question them,” FitzRoy wrote. If York was left behind on these occasions, it wouldn't have helped his attitude.
But the other two became sought-after guests. FitzRoy's fam
ily, social, scientific, and professional worlds gave him an extraordinarily broad acquaintance across the dominant strata of English society. Everyone who knew him or heard about FitzRoy and his savages would have been curious to see them, and he received on their behalf more invitations than they were able, or than he saw fit, to accept. They visited wealthy aristocrats, the foundation of FitzRoy's world, who received them in large houses dazzling with furnishings and oversize paintings, serviced by retinues of servants. They were frequent visitors to FitzRoy's sister, Fanny Rice-Trevor, whom the Fuegians called “Cappen Sisser.” She gave them many gifts, paid great attention to them, took them shopping for clothes with FitzRoy or coxswain Bennett, and they developed a real affection for her, talking of her often at the time, and long afterward. Fanny moved in exalted circles, attending events at court such as the queen's birthday, and undoubtedly spoke of her brother's “Indians” to many people who would have been eager to meet them.