by Gavin Young
*
Punta Arenas is pleasant enough but I did not see much of it. I glimpsed a green city square, a modern hotel or two, a museum full of stuffed birds and wax models of Indians, and a small zoo containing live condors and guanacos, a species of llama with yellowy-red wool that used to be common on the Beagle Channel and Navarino Island.
To save time I flew to Navarino Island in a tiny twin-propellered plane carrying four Chilean naval petty officers. The Straits lay wide and placid in perfect weather. Beyond Useless Bay on the western shore of Tierra del Fuego Island, we came to the shimmering wasteland of the south.
Behind Sarmiento’s seven-thousand-foot peak, walls of white spread south and east, entwined as waves are before breaking on a beach. Between them lakes or spreading tentacles of sea lay like blue mirrors in elaborate dead-white frames, and blue-green glaciers crept down to them under the wintry sun. A haze lay over the whole immense wilderness which stretched as far as I could see even at the plane’s height, becoming bluer and bluer with distance until everything was swallowed up at last in the luminous, misty blue horizon.
It was breathtaking. And awesome too – for there was no human life in that whole region of earth and water, mountain and forest, snow and glacier. It was one of the angriest places on earth. The islands themselves had angry shapes; and their angry beaches were littered with the bones of ships and men.
The plane banked over the southern shore of Tierra del Fuego in clear, cold air and slid down the long, straight waterway called the Beagle Channel. Turning over the bare blob of Gable Island opposite the Argentine base at Ushuaia, the little machine landed smoothly on the airstrip of Chile’s Puerto Williams. Small blue-grey torpedo boats lay alongside a jetty. Near them, a sailor in a sandbagged bunker gazed to the north shore through powerful binoculars mounted on a tripod at similarly coloured Argentine warships.
There was snow everywhere, and ice made walking dangerous. I followed the petty officers down a steep, narrow path from the airstrip to an area of jeeps, bungalows and a flagstaff flying the blue, white and red flag of Chile, where a board announced naval headquarters.
*
The Chilean naval officers seemed glad to see an outsider, particularly from Britain. The commanding officer, Captain Frederick Corthorn Besse, housed me in the navy’s mess where I learned that the entire population of Puerto Williams, civilian and naval, had watched the progress of the Falklands War with intense concentration on their TV sets, as spectators stood on a hilltop overlooking Waterloo.
Here they had been living on the very edge of conflict. If war had come, the full force of Argentina would inevitably have fallen on Puerto Williams, and no one disputed, I found, that the Argentine armed forces were larger and stronger than Chile’s. The Chilean south would have fallen, everybody admitted, but resistance would have been fierce. A scholarly-looking lieutenant said with conviction that the whole four thousand miles of Chile’s frontier from Cape Horn to the border with Peru ‘would have been set alight’. For the moment, no one knew what would happen next, since Galtieri was still in the presidential Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires and, as I could see, Argentine warships were just across the Channel in Ushuaia Bay.
*
Captain Besse was a friendly man. He understood what I wanted to see and would help me. There was only one thing, however: he could not put me onto the naval supply vessel going to the Horn without special permission from the admiral in Punta Arenas. I would have to apply for that permission in person; he wished, he said, that someone had told me that before I’d come south. Still, there was a small commercial vessel leaving at any minute for Punta Arenas; it would take me back there to see the admiral. He pointed out its course on his wall chart – it would take me through the most barren parts of the island wilderness, through the homelands of FitzRoy’s Fuegians, even briefly out into the Pacific.
‘See you in a few days,’ he said, ‘with the admiral’s permission.’
The little cargo-passenger vessel back to Punta Arenas travelled west along the Beagle Channel, past the glum evergreen woods of Navarino Island, past the entrance to Jemmy Button’s Ponsonby Sound. The land of York Minster and Fuegia Basket presented the most savage scenery. Through these snow-patched islands the little ship moved gamely on, battling the high winds and blizzards of midwinter, dwarfed to toy-size by the towering white peaks of the Cordillera Darwin lying under their permanent snow and often lost in heavy mist. The body heat of men in layers of wool and fur-lined anoraks made a good fug in the wheelhouse, and there was an electric heater, but on deck all the clothes I had bought in Santiago hardly kept out the cold: the thick woollen cap, the two sweaters, the three shirts, the long underwear, the heavy woollen socks, the lined leather boots and the woollen gloves.
We skirted the north of Gordon Island where the Beagle Channel divided into two, and slipped under O’Brien Island. Great lumps of ice floated alongside us there, and then, leaving Londonderry Island to port, we came into Whaleboat Sound where the saga of FitzRoy’s Fuegian trio had begun. On the chart of these islands you see fierce, tortured shapes – snarling dogs’ heads, dragons’ claws, and the screaming mouths of drowning men. We entered Desolation Bay plunging and rolling, horribly exposed to the Pacific and the south-westerly wind, only regaining stability by ducking behind Basket Island, Fuegia’s home. Island succeeded island, bay opened into bay and sound into sound. You could sing with relief that you were about to emerge from some claustrophobic, rockbound passage, only to discover that that passage led into another indistinguishable from it – and that one into yet another. No wonder the early navigators lost themselves here for months in this uncharted maze. No wonder crews went mad with fear. The landscape seems to stare at you with the fixed, thoughtful look of an idiot wondering whether to crush a beetle.
The passage behind Basket Island led into another open bay, in the mouth of which the seas pounded on the islet known, understandably, as the Furies. Near the Furies the Beagle had been all but overwhelmed by a huge wave, but I was, thank God, in a well-powered ship with radar and a master and crew who knew the region. While winds howled round us, we wallowed in a vicious maelstrom of waves and the wheelhouse jerked back and forth like a metronome gone berserk. A snowstorm struck as the vessel’s nose swung northward into the Cockburn Channel up the side of Brecknock Island and the heavy white flakes piled up on the deck and glued themselves to the window of the wheelhouse, half blinding the helmsman; but by then we had the sea behind us.
Then it was plainer sailing. We skirted Bluff Cove, Point Anxious and Keats Sound quite comfortably, entering the Straits of Magellan near Dawson Island. Within a few hours we were tied up at Punta Arenas. A few hours more and the admiral had given me his permission to visit Cape Horn and I was sitting in the same twin-engined plane on the way back to Puerto Williams. There Captain Besse boomed ‘Welcome back!’ and, flourishing a cable from the admiral, told me to be ready to board a small naval craft loading supplies for Chilean posts round Cape Horn. ‘Don’t take too much baggage,’ he said. I emptied my bag except for a camera, a spare pair of trousers, socks and a bottle of pisco, and that night I lay in bed sleepless. As Hernan Cubillos had said, ‘You can’t see Cape Horn every day of the week.’ I had to read myself into oblivion with the story of the three Fuegians.
Darwin’s tale was continued in a book as remarkable as his and called Uttermost Part of the Earth. Its author, Lucas Bridges, was born in 1847 at Ushuaia, then no more than a primitive mission station established by his father only five years earlier. Lucas knew all there was to know of the Fuegians. He was brought up with the Indian people, playing with them, hunting with them, speaking their language.
Sixteen years after Jemmy’s farewell signal fire had sent up its hopeful plume of smoke just south of the Beagle Channel, a Royal Naval captain, Allen Gardiner, having recently found God, started the Patagonian Missionary Society and set sail for the Beagle Channel with six companions, one of whom, a Dr Richard Williams, gave his name muc
h later to Puerto Williams. Gardiner tried to make contact with Jemmy Button and his tribe, but failed, and the expedition was a disaster. His party was pursued with homicidal intent wherever they went by the very Indians they had come all this way to convert, and finally died miserably, like rats, of starvation, exposure and scurvy in a freezing cave on the Beagle Channel. Gardiner died, according to Lucas Bridges, in a condition of ecstasy.
Three years after this tragedy another small mission ship, named in honour of Gardiner, reached Wulaia from the mission’s headquarters on Keppel Island in the Falklands, and this time her captain easily found Jemmy Button, though the once dapper Indian was obliged to borrow a pair of trousers before being introduced to the captain’s wife. Jemmy was next spotted in 1859, when the same mission ship arrived from the Falklands bringing three Indian families, a catechist called Garland Philips and an ambitious plan to set up a mission in Wulaia there and then. A hut was at once erected to serve as a church. Excited Indians swarmed round from far and wide and were incessantly importunate. The worst pest of all the Indians proved to be Jemmy Button, who never stopped begging and was thoroughly bad-tempered. ‘Spoiled,’ the captain thought, which proved to be something of an understatement.
Despite continuous harassment from the Indians, the first church service in Tierra del Fuego was arranged. In perfect weather, three hundred Indians packed the little church and the ship’s company came too, leaving only one man on the Allen Gardiner, Alfred Cole, the cook. He was the sole non-Indian witness to survive the carnage that followed.
He heard the first lines of the hymn, then, helpless and terrified, witnessed what followed.
Some of the natives ran to the long-boat, carried off all the oars to a nearby wigwam and set the boat adrift. In the hut the hymn ceased abruptly, to be followed by a terrific hubbub. The natives had fallen on the party with clubs, stones and spears. But, wearing only loose cloaks, how had they concealed these things – so inappropriate in a Christian prayer meeting – when they came into the church?
Garland Philips and a Swedish sailor named Agusto fought their way out of the hut and reached the sea under a hail of stones. Philips waded out to the drifting long-boat and waist-deep in water, was just scrambling into it when a stone flung by Tommy Button, Jimmy’s [sic] brother, hit him on the temple. He fell back unconscious into the sea and was drowned. Agusto met with a similar fate, and ashore the rest of the little party were stoned, clubbed, or speared to death.
Cole escaped into the woods on the island opposite Wulaia, but capture was inevitable. ‘The natives stripped him of all his clothes except his belt and a ring on his finger, and plucked out his beard, moustache and eyebrows.’ (This, Bridges charitably remarks, was not necessarily prompted by cruelty, for, he says, it was in accordance with their own custom.) In fact, Cole’s life was spared and he lived with the Indians for three months, mostly stark naked, until rescued – in a desperate physical state – by another mission ship that had been sent to search for the Allen Gardiner. Cole, naturally enough, was the principal witness at the subsequent inquiry, Jemmy Button being the only other. The inquiry found beyond all reasonable doubt that Jemmy had instigated the massacre with an eye to the loot on the Allen Gardiner.
Nothing much seems to have been done about Jemmy. The inquiry was only an inquiry after all, not a meting out of justice, and Jemmy was seen alive in Wulaia in 1863, four years after the massacre, by Lucas Bridges’ father, Thomas, who was as determined as ever to set up a permanent mission in the region. By then Jemmy had three sons himself and one of them, known as Threeboy, was taken by the missionaries to the Falklands and later to London, as his father had been taken by Captain FitzRoy. Threeboy was not, however, received by Queen Victoria.
Thomas Bridges soon decided that Wulaia was not the ideal site for an agricultural mission intended to expand: the bay was too small and off the main canoe routes of the Beagle Channel. On the other hand Ushuaia, nearby on the northern shore of the Channel, offered a sheltered, accessible harbour, and so Ushuaia became the first and most famous Christian mission of Tierra del Fuego.
Yet even now the Button–Basket–York Minster saga was not played out. There was further news of Fuegia Basket in 1873, when she turned up at the Ushuaia mission. By then a hearty, if nearly toothless woman of over fifty, she was proud of her new husband, aged eighteen, who had come with her; York Minster, she said, had been killed in some tribal squabble. She remembered a little of London and of a Miss Jenkins who had looked after her in Walthamstow. She also remembered Captain FitzRoy. But when Thomas Bridges offered her a chair, she squatted beside it on the floor. And the missionary in him was sad to find she had lost her religion.
The last sight of Fuegia was recorded by Bridges ten years later on London Island, near the Furies. By then sixty-two, very weak and unhappy, she refused to respond to Thomas Bridges’ attempts to cheer her up with ‘the beautiful Biblical promises’ and Lucas Bridges, in retrospect, thought she was lucky if she escaped tabacana, the Indians’ habit of hastening the end of aged relatives by strangling them. ‘Tabacana’ – Bridges’ wry comment – ‘was kindly meant; it was carried out openly and with the approval of all except the victim, who was too inanimate to do anything about it.’
*
In Uttermost Part of the Earth Lucas Bridges, evidently an honest man who genuinely cared for the Indians, tells how white men in the early 1890s came to grab those parts of Tierra del Fuego that were excellent for sheep farming. Vast tracks of land were sold to companies and individuals on both sides of the Argentine–Chilean border. ‘I need hardly state,’ Bridges wrote, ‘that the white invaders soon found it impossible to start farms they had planned in a country over-run by these wild, undisciplined nomads. A story – widely circulated and not yet forgotten – tells that certain of the newcomers paid a pound a head for every Indian killed.’ The Indians were armed only with bows and arrows, while the white men were mounted and armed with repeating rifles. Some settlers paid five pounds for every Indian taken off their hands and transported to a mission. There were white men who looked upon all this as a meritorious act, clearing the country of predatory vermin and, at the same time, helping to reform the savages and make useful citizens of them. On the other hand, it could be regarded as condemning free natives – rightful owners of the land – to a kind of penal servitude.
Bridges follows his statement with an individual case in point – the case of Hektliohlh, ‘one of the finest Indians I ever met’. Hektliohlh and a party of men, women and children were captured by the white men. They had been taken to the government settlement at Ushuaia from which after a while they were able to escape back to their lands. Four years later, Bridges happened to visit another Christian mission on Dawson Island where seven hundred Indians were confined, some making blankets under the supervision of nuns, others working in sawmills. The latter crowded round Bridges, who spoke their language, and to him they were pathetic in their secondhand, shop-soiled garments, generally several sizes too small. Looking at them, he ‘could not help picturing them standing in their old haunts, proud and painted, dressed, as of yore, in head-dress, robe and mocassins’.
Among them was Hektliohlh, ‘who stood out amongst them for his looks and bearing’. He had been recaptured by the settlers and handed over to the mission. He had no complaint about his treatment. But, gazing in the direction of his native mountains, he told Bridges: ‘Longing is killing me.’ Which was actually the case, Bridges admits, for he did not survive very long.
Nor did any of his race. At Puerto Williams I visited what the Chilean naval officers called ‘the last of the Indians’. This lone survivor was a gnomelike woman, obviously of great age, who received me outside her hut behind the married quarters of the naval station. She spoke a few words in English, learned at a mission school years before, smiled, and let me look through the door at her table, her fire and her chair.
Bridges remained a committed missionary until his death. ‘Allen Gardiner’s plans,�
� he wrote in old age, ‘were followed to a successful conclusion. Though I am well aware that, within less than a century, the Fuegians as a race have become almost extinct I deliberately used the word “successful” ….’ So modern Tierra del Fuego’s history began with a massacre of the Christians by the Indians, and ended with the annihilation of the Indians by the Christians. No doubt a number of souls were saved in between.
Thirty-three
Twilight was thickening when we left Puerto Williams, and a wind like a hungry rat scurried up and down the Beagle Channel, gnawing at my ears and cheeks.
‘Murray Sound. Wulaia.’ I could just hear the Chilean lieutenant shouting to me through the wheelhouse door at the gloom ahead. I edged along the deck and felt my way with gloved hands down a stubby iron ladder to the stern, somewhat protected. There was a passenger to be disembarked at Wulaia. She stood by me now, her two bags beside her, while the sailors prepared to lower the rubber dinghy with the outboard motor that could run into rough or shallow bays. The supply vessel was a converted trawler; small enough – a barrel fitted with a powerful engine, radar and a wheelhouse, really – but some of the inlets here were smaller still, and the currents and shifts in the weather were dangeroug from here to Horn Island. She was painted dark blue and now that the sunlight had gone, her silhouette was black against the sky. There was a small island ahead of us, hardly more than a shadow, and a bay.