The Nomadic Alternative – Page 127

they might have surprised him. The Theory of Evolution in no way contradicts the savage view of man's place in nature and his continuity with other animal species. But within a hundred years they were virtually extinct, leaving a few piles of crustacean shells as the only reminder of their campsites. Colonists found Tierra del Fuego to be excellent sheep-country, and the Fuegians could never resist the temptation to rustle these mysterious animals, so easy to hunt, that Europeans had introduced into their ancestral hunting grounds. Well-intentioned missions sapped their vitality, preached to them, and clothed them. The settlers rounded them up, and herded them as they herded sheep into settlements where they died of epidemics and the despair of captivity. Pandora arrived with her box of measles and pulmonary tuberculosis when the Argentine Government imposed its administration. And nobody could dig the graves of the Indians fast enough.

Fortunately for us - if not for them - a very gifted ethnologist, Father Martín Gusinde, who worked for the ethnographical museum in Santiago, visited the Fuegians between 1918 and 1924 before their final collapse. And as if to spite the all-powerful Darwin, he published a long account of his stay with them. He showed forcefully - though perhaps not forcefully enough - that Darwin's assessment was misguided on every count. His book, Die Feuerland Indianer, concerns the Selknam as well as the Yaghan (or Yamana) tribe and is one of the masterpieces of ethnographic literature.*

The Yaghan were neither abject nor miserable. "Their creative intelligence", Gusinde writes, "and long experience have taught them to make their very meagre external resources serve them." A relentless search for food did not compel them to move. Rather they claimed to have an inborn wanderlust and passionate love of freedom, which prevented them remaining more than a day or two in the same place. A man could hardly even sit quietly by the campfire without

*Note: