The Nomadic Alternative – Page 125

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In December 1833 Charles Darwin and his friend Captain Fitzroy stood on the deck of H.M.S. Beagle and looked at the smouldering fires of the Yaghan Indians of Tierra del Fuego. Also on board were a party of these Indians, whom Fitzroy had taken three years before for education in England. They had been nicknamed Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket and York Minster, and been a social success in London, had touched the heart and the purse of Queen Adelaide, and were now returning to their people with the arts of civilization. Their people, it was commonly held, were the least civilized in the world.

They were real savages, the "filthy Yahoos" Gulliver had encountered in his Travels. Their very humanity was doubtful and their appearance corresponded exactly to the popular conception of the savage. Encrusted with dirt and naked, they paddled their rough canoes through gale-lashed waters in a climate worse than that of the Faroe Isles. The men hunted elephant and bear seals, trapped waterfowl, and even dared plunge their gleaming white harpoons into the backs of whales. The women gathered a little vegetable food and birds' eggs, bashed limpets and mussels from rocks, and swam for other shellfish in all weathers.

As a Bible Fundamentalist Fitzroy believed all men to be the Children of Adam, who had appeared with marvellous abruptness in the year 4004 B.C. God had endowed all his children with the same gifts and all were equally capable of improvement. Consequently it dismayed him when his pupils threw off their European clothes and reverted to savagery. He wrote some very uncomplimentary things about the Fuegians in his diary. Darwin was neither surprised nor dismayed that the savages showed no aptitude for improvement. He was secretly delighted. And in his diary we catch the first glimmerings of his correct theory that man had been the product of a long period of evolution from some other ape-like animal, and at