ship were three young Fuegian Indians who had been educated at Captain FitzRoy’s expense in London. FitzRoy had collected these specimens on an earlier voyage, and hoped that now, released back to their old communities, they would form the nucleus of a Christianising mission amongst their own people. Having spent a formative year learning their Bible at a schoolmaster’s house in Walthamstow, these three young people now dressed like Britons and spoke a pidgin version of English. They had proved a big hit during their time in London, and were even presented at court. Queen Adelaide, grieving the loss of her endless babies, had made a particular pet of plump, merry ten-year-old ‘Fuegia Basket’, to whom she gave a cast-off bonnet. In their new incarnations the Fuegians appeared to Darwin like respectable members of the servant classes: vain, touchy, not always quite honest, but still recognisably creatures of the civilised world.
Jemmy Button (left) after his return to Tierra del Fuego in 1834 and (right) during his time in London (1833)
Just how far the Fuegians on board the Beagle had travelled from their earlier selves became startlingly apparent in the closing days of 1832. On 17 December the ship had anchored at the Bay of Good Success, a densely forested inlet at the very bottom of the South American landmass. Captain Cook and Joseph Banks had made land here sixty years earlier, but since then few Europeans had set foot on shore. As the Beagle nosed into the bay, Darwin got his first sight of indigenous Fuegian Indians. They had gathered on a ‘wild peak overhanging the sea’, forming something between an advance guard and a welcoming party. When the ship came closer, the tall, naked men issued an ambiguous ‘loud sonorous shout’, part threat, part salute.
It was thrilling, like something straight out of the boys’ adventure stories young Charley Darwin had lapped up during his Shrewsbury days. Writing later to his second cousin William Fox he described the watchful Fuegians with a delicious shudder as ‘savage as the most curious person would desire’. The Fuegians were equally gripped by the encounter. As they clambered down from the headland to take a closer look at the Beaglers, it became clear that the tribesmen thought that two or three of the shorter naval officers in the landing party were actually women. The seamen’s pale skin – paler anyway than the Fuegians’ ‘dirty copper colour’ – marked them as belonging to the fairer sex. This was despite the fact that the ‘ladies’ all sported heavy beards.
Here was the first sign that the Fuegians understood facial hair differently from their visitors. Although the Anglicised Fuegians were noticeably embarrassed by the ‘poor wretches’ on shore who were giving such a bad first impression of their native culture, the indigenous Fuegians were equally appalled by the returning wanderers. On being introduced to ‘York Minster’, the oldest of the Anglicised Fuegians, the locals were deeply troubled by the young man’s rough chin. They ‘told him he ought to shave; yet he had not twenty dwarf hairs on his face, whilst we all wear our untrimmed beards’, chuckled Darwin. As far as the Fuegians were concerned, foreigners were welcome to wear their disreputable whiskers, even the ladies. But they themselves would continue to keep up standards by sticking to a smooth chin. As a parting shot, one of the older tribesmen yelled at York that he was ‘dirty, and ought to pull out his beard’.
The Beaglers’ next destination was a settlement a few miles along the coast at Woollya Cove, where FitzRoy planned to set up his Anglican mission under the direction of a strangely listless young man called Richard Matthews. Matthews, aided by the three returning Fuegians – as well as York Minster and Fuegia Basket there was a fifteen-year-old boy called ‘Jemmy Button’ – would attempt to teach the local natives cleanliness and Christ. Before the mission could get under way, though, the Beagle endured a week of terrifying storms – the worst, said FitzRoy, that he had ever known. Not until mid-January 1833 was a landing party able to make its way into the cove on four small boats and begin building the mission. After so much misery it was cheering to find that the soil was deep and good, and garden beds were quickly sown with potatoes, carrots, turnips and beans, much in the manner of a rectory kitchen garden. Darwin couldn’t help noticing, though, what ‘culpable folly & negligence’ marked the choice of items that had been sent out by the ladies of the Church Missionary Society to settle twenty-two-year-old Mr Matthews into his new life at the ends of the earth: wine glasses, tea trays, soup tureens, not forgetting a handsome mahogany dressing case in which to store his razor.
It soon became clear that the tribesmen of Woollya were not as biddable as those further north. True, there was community singing one night, in which the Fuegians joined enthusiastically if ‘ludicrously’ out of time. But things turned sour when York Minster insisted on yelling ‘Monkeys-dirty-fools-not-men’ at the Fuegians in an unmistakable tone of disgust, while one of the older tribesmen made an alarming pantomime of pretending to skin and chop up a man. They are ‘so bold Cannabals that one naturally prefers separate quarters’, confided a jittery Darwin to his journal, his head full of the shocking stories that had been circulating about the nightmares that awaited at the very edge of the world. Yet despite the distinct possibility that young Mr Matthews was being eyed up for the Fuegians’ cooking pot, Captain FitzRoy gave the orders for the Beagle’s crew to depart. They would return, he promised the young missionary, in several days’ time to see how the little band of Christian soldiers was getting on.
Almost immediately, life became unbearable for Matthews, who had ‘no peace by day and very little rest at night’, according to what Darwin heard later. The Fuegians swarmed into his wigwam, and requested everything they saw – ‘Yamershooner’: ‘Give me’ – and when he said no, they took it anyway. One group stayed outside, making a racket to stop Matthews sleeping, while others picked up rocks and threatened to kill him. The three Anglicised Fuegians from the Beagle made no attempt to help when yet another group held the missionary down and ‘teased him by pulling the hair of his face’. There was obviously something about the young man’s whiskers that the Fuegians found comical, even slightly obscene. When, as FitzRoy had promised, a party from the Beagle made its return on 6 February, Matthews was spotted running towards the boats, screaming. As he was pulled on board he gaspingly explained that just five minutes earlier his flock had been plucking out the hairs of his beard one by one, using mussel shells as pincers. ‘I think,’ wrote Darwin that night, ‘we returned just in time to save his life.’
Darwin’s observations on beards – his own and other people’s – were to take root in his thinking and writing over the next forty years. In the books and articles that issued from his study at Down House he would repeatedly test the line that ran between nature and culture, the given and the made. What did it mean, exactly, that the ‘savage’, ‘miserable’, ‘abject’ Fuegians, who seemed at times to be barely human, turned out to have all the prejudices of Home Counties aunts when it came to wispy chins? And why had the returning Fuegians, whom Darwin had been convinced would continue to live as civilised Britons, reverted to their ‘grievous’ ways within months of being repatriated? Thinking more generally, why was it the case that only men had the ability to grow facial hair – at least if you discounted the Fuegians’ assumption that white women routinely sported bushy beards? And to what extent was human hairiness evidence that, far from being crafted in the image of God (another enthusiastic beard-wearer, if you could believe the paintings), man was simply an animal that had found a way of walking on its hind legs?
II
Arriving back in Britain at the beginning of October 1836, Darwin lost no time in sifting through his harvest of plant and fossil specimens before forwarding them to specialists for identification. Especially important here was the material he had gathered from the Galápagos Islands, nineteen tiny volcanic specks of land straddling the Equator, stocked with species that were not found anywhere else in the world. Self-taught ornithologist John Gould got the bird samples, clergyman Leonard Jenyns the fish, while anatomist Richard Owen of the Royal College of Surgeons received the fossil mammals, amongst which were some extraordinary finds. Most spectacular were a rodent the size of a rhinoceros and an armadillo
