The Darwin Conspiracy (26 page)

Charles watched Jemmy closely during his times on shore. Strangely, he had lost his native tongue. He addressed his tribesmen in English, and when that didn’t work, he tried his few words of Spanish. Nothing could induce him to speak the guttural grunts of the Yamana and he even seemed to have lost the ability to understand the language. York Minster, by contrast, seemed able to follow bits and pieces of it, though he remained resolutely mute. Fuegia Basket, dressed in an Easter bonnet for the occasion, was equally silent. She appeared appalled by the nakedness of the savages.

The missionary Matthews, too, was acting strangely. He stayed on board most of the time and showed no interest in the construction of his home, an odd aloof smile on his face. It was almost, remarked Charles to King, as if the entire enterprise had nothing to do with him.

On the fifth day, an ugly incident occurred: a sailor pushed an elderly Indian away from the boundary and the old man turned furious; he spat in the sailor’s face and then enacted a grisly pantomime: he pretended to strip off the man’s skin and to eat it. Charles recalled Jemmy’s warning given so many months earlier. FitzRoy ordered up some target practice on the beach to show the Yamana what English muskets could do. The natives flinched at the noise, withdrew in small nervous groups, and then inexplicably disappeared in the hills for the night, returning the next morning as if nothing had happened.

Notwithstanding the tension, FitzRoy carried on with his plan to leave Matthews at the camp. He presented it as something of a trial, saying that the
Beagle
would sail up the channel for a week or so to explore its western arm and then return to see how the missionary was getting on. The teenager was given a hearty last meal on board, which he scarcely touched, and then was rowed ashore in a spirit of forced merriment. He sat in the stern, his head high, that same disconnected smile frozen on his face while the sailors sang lustily. Jemmy and the two other Fuegians were rowed to the beach in a separate boat.

On shore, as the sailors watched from the boats, the young white man and his three companions walked up the beach toward their new homes, moving toward a silent crowd of Yamana. The crowd opened to let them pass and then closed around them and they were lost to view.

As soon as the boats rowed back, the
Beagle
set sail.

Exactly nine days later, she came back.

As the ship drew close, the sailors saw something that filled them with foreboding: Indians on the banks were wearing strips of tartan cloth and white linen—adornments that could have come only from the settlement. Charles wondered if they had sent the young man to his doom. When the ship reached Woollya, dozens of canoes were beached and a hundred or so Fuegians milled about, their bodies painted red and white and ornamented with bits of British cloth tied around their necks and their hair and wrists.

FitzRoy launched a whaleboat and stood nervously in the bow. The moment it touched land, the Yamana besieged it, shouting
“Yammerschooner”
and grabbing for gifts. Then suddenly, to the Captain’s infinite relief, Matthews appeared, running down the beach. He sprinted for the launch, jumped in, and made frantic motions to be taken out to the ship.

Onboard, he told a tale of terror. He said that the first few nights had passed peacefully enough but that then a new, more aggressive group of Indians arrived. More and more of them crowded into his hut, impor-tuning, begging, threatening. They stole his belongings, and if he tried to stop them, they flew into a rage. Twice they carried in large stones, threatening to crack open his head. On the last night, they held him down, plucking out the hairs of his beard with mussel shells. He said that if he were forced to return, he would surely be murdered.

FitzRoy, surrounded by his crewmen, walked up the beach to the huts. There he met with the three returning Fuegians. Jemmy had also been robbed and badly treated. He was no longer wearing fancy clothes and his body was covered with bruises. York Minster, a strong man with a commanding presence, had held his ground and beaten off anyone who threatened him or Fuegia Basket. But despite considerable prodding by the Captain, none of the three wanted to leave their home-land and return to England.

FitzRoy distributed a final round of gifts—the last of Matthews’s stores—in hopes that they might ease the path for Jemmy or perhaps someday secure humane treatment for a shipwrecked Englishman.

Matthews asked to be carried as far as New Zealand, where he had a brother who was also employed as a missionary, and FitzRoy readily agreed.

Leaving Woollya that evening, Charles and FitzRoy dined alone.

Rarely had Charles seen the Captain so depressed, and he realized that in the space of a single day the man was relinquishing his obsessive dream, three years in the making, of spreading God’s word to the poor, benighted natives.

“I still believe,” FitzRoy pronounced gloomily at one point, “that we are all children of Adam and Eve, though some have wandered farther from Eden than we and have simply lost all recollection of Paradise in any form.”

A week later, after some more surveying, the ship doubled back to see how the three transplanted Fuegians were doing. This time the scene was much more tranquil. In the bay, women fished from canoes.

The few Fuegians on shore seemed peaceful and remarkably uninterested in the Englishmen. The huts had been repaired and even the garden, which had been trampled, showed a few vegetable sprouts.

The three had no complaints—all, that is, but Jemmy. He invited FitzRoy, Charles, and McCormick into his hut and told them he felt badly used because they had not visited his village.

“You say you come to my contree. You no say true. You no meet my famlee. You no meet my great chief.”

FitzRoy responded instantaneously. Perhaps it was a rush of relief that the Fuegians were still alive, or the dim hope that the seed of something he had so fervently hoped to plant might still germinate, but he rose and acted like the Captain of old. He held both of Jemmy’s hands in his, closed his eyes, and raised his head, almost like a campfire preacher.

“We have much work to do first,” he intoned solemnly. “But as God is my witness, I pledge to you that we shall return, and when we do, we shall go with you to visit your village and meet your people and exchange views with your great chief.”

As the
Beagle
set sail, moving back east again toward the Atlantic,
1 7 3

Charles thought that FitzRoy regained a modicum of hope for his great experiment, but the Captain rarely spoke of it—as if talking about it might break the spell once and for all.

It took almost a year for FitzRoy to make good on his promise to return.

During that time the
Beagle
retraced her route all the way to Montevideo as she charted the eastern seaboard of South America and the Falklands. To accomplish the job, FitzRoy decided to acquire a second ship, as Sulivan had suggested, and so he advanced £1,300 of his own money to purchase an American sealing vessel, which was refitted and renamed the
Adventure.
She was to chart the shoals and shallower inlets under the command of Sulivan, who brought McCormick aboard the vessel.

The work was exacting and arduous and there were continual set-backs. FitzRoy’s clerk died on a hunting expedition. Several seamen deserted. Augustus Earle, the artist who was Charles’s good friend, became too ill to continue and was replaced by Conrad Martens, a bohemian bird of passage who readily adapted to shipboard life.

Charles’s stature on board continued to grow. His character—self-reliant, robust, enthusiastic—was emerging under hardship. On more than one occasion he proved himself a hero. Once, a party exploring deep inside the arid terrain of Patagonia got into serious difficulty; exhausted, weak with thirst, FitzRoy and the others could go no farther, and Charles alone saved them by staggering on to bring help. On another occasion, a group of crewmen on shore was so enthralled by the sight of a calving glacier that they did not realize its danger; with great quickness of mind Charles ran to secure their beached whaleboat so it would not be smashed by the wave it spawned.

In gratitude, FitzRoy named a body of water and then a promontory after Charles—Darwin Sound and Mount Darwin—and this did not sit well at all with McCormick, who could barely contain his jealousy. The surgeon groused to Sulivan that the Captain was naming landmarks after people “on the slightest of pretexts, thereby demeaning the honor for those who truly deserve it.”

Yet for the most part, whenever the ships anchored and the crews mingled, McCormick buried his feelings under a mask of indifference.

As one of the few who could ride horseback (most of the sailors were hopeless on land) he sometimes accompanied Charles on forays to hunt for game and for specimens. Though invariably he fell behind, he did unearth a number of his own, which Charles magnanimously included in his shipments.

Charles spent months on land and flourished. He enjoyed toughening up. Down south, on the frozen shore, he undertook excursions tracking and shooting seals. He slept in makeshift tents, lived in a shaggy fur overcoat, and grew a black beard so long he could grasp it with both hands. Up north, where the climate was more hospitable, he took longer and longer expeditions, meeting up with the
Beagle
hundreds of miles up the coast. Finally FitzRoy agreed, reluctantly, to let Charles make a six-hundred-mile journey from the Rio Negro all the way to Buenos Aires, much of it through land where Spaniards were battling indigenous Indians.

Charles loved it. His gun at his side, he rode with a band of hardened
gauchos
as bodyguards. He admired their gallantry and even their bloodthirstiness and began calling himself a
banditti.
He finally learned to throw the
bolas.
He hunted ostriches, amused by the way they raised their wings to sail the wind as they trotted in all directions. At night, he read
Paradise Lost
by campfire light; he had read the book so often that he developed a game: letting it fall open where it would and selecting a passage at random. Then he fell asleep under the stars, his head upon his saddle, listening to the sounds of night creatures he had never before heard.

One day he entered the area controlled by General Juan Manuel de Rosas, the notorious strong-arm leader who ran a private army and whose strategy for dealing with Indians was to surround their villages and kill every man, woman, and child. The General, who was said to be dangerous, especially when he laughed, heard there was an Englishman in the area and invited him to his encampment. He received him graciously. Charles was impressed by the General’s skill—the man could mount a high platform, drop upon the back of a wild colt, and ride it to exhaustion. Rosas gave him a laissez-passer and did not laugh once.

These happenings at last sated Charles’s appetite for adventure. This was life at its fullest. He felt himself the romantic hero of a novel, wandering the ranges of the Pampas, seeing sights and animals no Englishm
an had seen before. Shropshire seemed so small compared to this, the lives there so prosaic.

Finally, he came to the outskirts of Buenos Aires, only to find his way blocked by a military rebellion. General Rosas was laying siege to the capital. Charles managed to pass through the blockade—by dropping the General’s name and showing his laissez-passer—only to discover once he reached the harbor that the
Beagle
was no longer there. He panicked that he had been left behind.

But the ship, it turned out, was just across the mouth of the Rio de la Plata in Montevideo, and after doling out considerable bribes at road-blocks along the way, he was able to join her there. FitzRoy confided to him, during their reunion dinner in which Charles regaled him with his adventures, that at least one person on board the sister ship had been eager to depart and let Charles find his own way home.

“I’ll wager you’ll be able to guess the identity of the person advocating this particular course,” he said, smiling.

Charles did not have to guess—nor did he smile in return.

That night when he let
Paradise Lost
fall open where it would, the passage he read was unsettling. It applied so personally to him that it could have been penned with him in mind. Satan, filled with envy, is hunting down man to ruin him. To fool the Archangel Uriel into guiding him, he disguises himself as a Cherub:

For neither man nor angel can discern

Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks

Invisible, except to God alone . . .

Two weeks later, the ship entered the Beagle Channel once again and pulled up to Woollya, her crew eager to discover what had happened to the settlement and the three Fuegians. Even from a distance, they could see that the place was a shambles. Two of the huts were destroyed, only the bare wooden frames remaining. The garden had disappeared.

But one hut was still more or less intact and out of it walked Jemmy Button. He rowed out in a canoe with his new wife. It took a moment for them to recognize him. Wearing only a loincloth, he was so thin his ribs showed and his hair was matted and his face painted. He motioned for them to join him on shore. Before sitting down to talk, he dis
appeared into his hut and emerged a short while later transformed—
dressed in his fine pants with a white shirt and dinner jacket, now loose upon his frame. His wife stayed in the hut, too shy to meet the foreigners.

He said that York Minster and Fuegia Basket had long since departed. Most of his belongings had been taken but he was content enough.

“Now you promise,” he said. “I wait long time. Now you visit my contree.”

“Yes,” said Charles. “Now we come.”

FitzRoy decided to forgo the trip and remain on the ship to keep order, for some of the crew, who had by now developed a hatred for the place, had been heard to mutter mutinous phrases. Charles, McCormick, and Matthews, his spirits somewhat revived after seeing the place where he had spent his week of terror now so calm and deserted, were to travel to the village.