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by Nick Hazlewood St. Martin's, 2001 384 pp.; $25.95 |
Early in 1870, Bartholomew Sulivan—a prominent member of the Patagonian Missionary Society, recently renamed the South American Missionary Society—received a letter from one of England's foremost natural historians. "The success of the Tierra del Fuego Mission is most wonderful, and charms me," the famous scientist wrote. "It is a grand success. I shall feel proud if your Committee think fit to elect me an honorary member of your society."
Nearly 40 years had elapsed since the writer of these words first found himself among the native peoples of the "Land of Fire." At that stage what impressed him most was their savage state. As the survey vessel, crammed to the teeth with scientific instruments, including 22 chronometers, pulled away from the shores of Tierra del Fuego for the last time in early March 1834, the naturalist recalled his impressions of the indigenous inhabitants. They were, he mused, "in a more miserable state of barbarism, than I had expected ever to have seen a human being." Years later that initial impression still lingered. In 1862 he told the author Charles Kingsley, that when he "first saw in Tierra del Fuego a naked, painted, shivering hideous savage" it suddenly struck him that his "ancestors must have been somewhat similar beings"—an altogether "revolting" thought. "The Fuegians rank amongst the lowest barbarians" he wrote in 1871. "For my own part," he continued, "I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper … as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions."
The naturalist in question, of course, was Charles Darwin, and his interest in the Patagonian Mission expressed a rather forlorn hope that the Fuegians might, after all, be humanized. Not that such an aspiration was entirely without foundation. To be sure, he told the readers of his Descent of Man of his astonishment "on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore … for the reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors." But in that very same year—1871—one of his correspondents, Rev. Thomas Bridges, who provided Darwin with answers to a variety of queries about Fuegian habits and customs, stepped off the Allen Gardiner with his wife and young daughter to begin a 13-year stint at Ushuaia, a mission station on the southern fringes of the island.
The adopted son of Despard Bridges, the first mission superintendent of the region, Thomas had already spent much of his early life in that part of the world prior to returning to the South Atlantic in holy orders and with a hitherto untraveled wife. During these years he acquired an unprecedented knowledge of the local language—Yamana—and began to dispel many of the myths that had grown up about the Fuegians. For a start, their language was infinitely more complex than anyone had imagined. Whereas the English language had some 25 words for family relationships, for example, Yamana had over sixty. Moreover, Yamana had more inflections than Greek and far greater economy of expression than many other languages. All this was a far cry from the assertions of earlier visitors that Yamana speech amounted to no more than a few hundred grunts. Besides this, Bridges reported that talk of cannibalism was entirely without foundation, for, as he informed the English Literary Society of Buenos Aires in 1888, the practice violated the basic laws of Fuegian society, which regarded human life as sacred. All in all, his research revealed far greater sophistication and social organization among the Fuegians than European naturalists had thus far discerned.
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