I sighed. Poor misguided Camilla, making jokes about staying the hand of Henri from the other side of the tomb. But after the first stab of bitterness at the irony, I felt a smile rising to my lips. So typical of her, so full of fun, my woman. And her report, written with such verve.
Good old Carlos Wood! His meddling in 1878 insures that those natives do not end up in Europe. A diplomatic storm erupts. Van Gülich, the German ambassador to Chile, protests, defending Hagenbeck as an honorable businessman, eager to further the cause of science and civilization, helping anthropological societies in his country to study foreign racial types, a study for which young, albeit inquisitive, republics like Chile and Argentina, lacking the adequate resources, should be honored to send indigenous people to Germany. A way of contributing to European research and affording enlightenment to spectators who are the heirs of the legacy of Greece and Rome.
The ambassador is aided by an official letter from Chancellor Bismarck himself. A facetious sidenote, Fitz. Have you heard of the sausage duel? In 1865, Bismarck was so incensed by Rudolf Virchow’s criticism of his military budget that he issued a challenge to the eminent Berlin professor. Scholarly Virchow, given the choice of weapons, suggested that each rival consume one of two sausages. The loser would be the one who consumed the sausage secretly infected with a parasite that would cause diarrhea for several days. Bismarck indignantly declined to participate but, thirteen years later, when Virchow’s glorious anthropological enterprise is in jeopardy, the Chancellor leaps into the fray to defend science, commerce, and the expansion of German influence.
Though the kidnapping of 1878 is thwarted, this pressure on the Chilean government—whose army was being trained by Prussian officers and whose southern regions, now that the Mapuche Indians had been defeated thanks to the Winchester rifle, were being populated by waves of German émigrés—has its intended effects. In 1879, Jacobsen is able to legally extract a family of three Aónikenk Indians from Tierra del Fuego. Father, mother, and child are examined extensively by Virchow and his colleagues and successfully tour Germany, proving the existence of a major market for Patagonian savages.
The stage is set for our eleven Kaweshkar.
Again, their destiny depends on something that happens under the Northern Lights of our dark planet. Early in 1881, all eight Eskimos from Labrador that had been recruited by Jacobsen for upcoming exhibitions die of smallpox.
Jacobsen, on his way to Australia and Polynesia to collect ethnographic artifacts for Virchow and the Berlin Museum, finds a telegram in Buenos Aires from Hagenbeck with instructions to collect and send some Fueguians to Europe. Jacobsen, unable to do the work himself because he has to continue on to New Zealand, cables back that he knows whose services to engage. In effect, on July 10, 1881, Herr Wahlen, a German whaling captain, captures our group of Kaweshkar, falsely claiming the poor savages were in distress, and had consented to participate in a year-long ethnic tour of Europe to pay off the costs of saving their lives, which, of course, were in no danger whatsoever. Wahlen, the man who, eight years later, will provide Maître with his Selk’nam for the Paris 1889 centennial, knows the operation is illegal. He’s careful to transfer the hostages from his small schooner in the middle of the Straits of Magellan to the Thebes, a steamer heading for Europe, an operation paid for by someone called Schweers. Making sure the eleven Kaweshkar never touch land in Punta Arenas, where customs or migration officials might ask prickly questions as to the lawfulness of these proceedings.
On August 16, 1881, the Thebes arrives in Le Havre where the human cargo is inspected and approved by Saint-Hilaire. Three days later Henri—by now “baptized” Heinrich, the name of Hagenbeck’s eldest son!—and his band come ashore in Hamburg. Not for long. By the end of that month, the Jardin d’Acclimatation receives these “cannibals” with great fanfare—a last chance to see them in the flesh (and eating flesh) before this missing link of evolution vanishes from the earth.
The first one to vanish from this group, as we know, is the child of Petite Mère. I had presumed it was a girl, but in fact it’s a boy of four. Perhaps the brother of Henri. I think of him as he dies, bewildered like any kid who is ill and doesn’t even know what sort of sickness is killing him.
Nor do the others understand that something like viruses exists. By the time they reach Berlin, in late October, after having visited, if that is not too ironic a word, Dresden, Stuttgart, Leipzig, and Nuremburg—they are all sick.
I looked up from my reading. Cam had coughed—the first time she had stirred since I had opened the blue folder—a cough that seemed to echo the long-dead lungs of the ten hostages, almost as if my love could, while asleep, probe my thoughts better than when she was awake, when it had been so easy to fool her.
It was hard to accept that the woman who had written all those words, labored over them with such elegance, making such an effort to be both descriptive and lyrical, prepping that text for her lips and throat, it was painful to acknowledge that she couldn’t remember one iota of what had been so sedulously collected.
I slid out of bed and tiptoed to the drawer containing the other items from Germany and France. There were tons of mostly illegible notes and dates and chronologies, copies of letters in German addressed to Thea Umlauff (???), articles from journals and newspapers, and several books. My eye roved to two by Carl Hagenbeck, one in German, the other in English, his autobiography. “Beasts and Men” it said on the cover and inside, on the title page, in her careful, carefree script: For my Fitzroy, so you can read this voice from our past without my having to translate it.
I flipped through the pages, stopped at the photo of Hagenbeck himself. An impressive, handsome man, probably sixty or so when it was snapped, many years after he had commandeered the abduction of the Kaweshkar. A straight, prominent nose and wide forehead, a distinguished goatee, eyes that managed to be both piercing and benevolent, combining business acumen with the twinkle of humanitarian impulses. He looked more like a civil servant than someone traipsing off to Africa in search of animals.
Could this man really be behind the conspiracies that had uprooted hundreds of unfortunate natives from their homelands? He looked so . . . so . . . I struggled for the right words. Innocuous, bourgeois, righteous almost, beyond reproach, sure of himself and his cause. But that was probably the case of everyone involved in these operations, and so many more on my endless list, none of whom, save Petit, had any direct link to our family. Or had Cam discovered a connection to Hagenbeck? Or Jacobsen? Or Captain Shweers? Or Van Gulich? Or even Virchow?
As I placed the autobiography back in the drawer with the other materials, a piece of paper floated out from within its pages, with Cam’s writing on it. My heart skipped a beat. I had learned to be superstitious. Since Henri’s assault on me, every accident and coincidence seemed fraught with meaning.
But it was merely a meditation: Are we that different from these people, the spectators and the entrepreneurs? What is the difference between the animatronic Indians and dancing bears and costumed Polynesians of Disneyland and what Hagenbeck displayed at his zoo and sold to Barnum and museums? When we rubberneck at exotic folk in nature documentaries on TV or at the movies, are we that far removed from those who flocked to the people shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? When I lament the animals extracted from Africa and Ceylon do I include myself as a culprit, my research on guinea pigs and mice and those rabbits in Paris, those rabbits with their red eyes and twitchy noses. Oh, how I wish I could talk this over with my Roy! He’ll calm me down, sweet, wise, darling Fitzroy!
I sighed, disturbed by this paradisiacal vision of my virtues. If I had been as sweet as she said, truly wise, I would have refused her call the day she burst back into my life, I would have protected her from the depredations of Henri.
I had failed her.
Something bitter and self-destructive stirred inside and it took a great effort not to close the blue folder that I did not deserve to be reading, that I had ke
pt from her and from myself out of the sort of fear she had not shown while attempting to save me. But its attraction was too magnetic.
On November 14, 1881, Professor Rudolf Virchow delivered a lecture at the Hall of the Zoological Gardens in Berlin to hundreds of excited guests, many of them portly matrons and their numerous offspring. He lamented that two of the female Patagons and their children were too ill to be displayed, but for several hours, Virchow notes in an essay, the remaining women and the four men sat there, half naked, coughing frequently and definitely depressed, staring at the audience, listening to the words in German in which their condition was being depicted. Able to reproduce all those words without their meaning, because they had an astounding capacity for imitation and repetition. I haven’t translated the whole speech for you, Fitz, as I did with the Manouvrier because I’ll be home soon . . .
Here, I choked back tears. Together, together. She asleep and me reading by myself, a mockery of what she had envisaged. Maybe I had been wrong to trespass on something still incomplete, not up to her exacting standards?
Too late for these doubts. Henri and his mates were there, in Berlin, in that hall, all those people anxious to touch their skin and poke at their flesh, and Virchow was asking the audience to be calm and behave in a civilized way.
. . . and then I’ll point out Henri’s measurements, each category. Isn’t it insane, love? We know more about the length of his arms and thighs and shoulders, the circumference of his skull, than we do about you, about anybody else alive, in fact. Head diameter: 195 centimeters. His second toe was slightly curved and rather pointy, his torso muscles were overly developed from spending most of his life squatting in a canoe, his eyelid slants up, recalling Mongolian models. I’ll show you an engraving from a scientific Berlin journal, you’ll see how his hair has grown longer since Paris. Lost his vivacious look, less menacing, you know. Virchow also tells us about their diet, how they roast their fish on a fire that they never let die out. He wonders if this is not an attempt, on their part, to reproduce their Patagonian practice of keeping embers perpetually burning in their canoes. He adds that, just as they share possessions and food, men and women also have a communistic attitude toward reproductive behavior, exchanging favors indiscriminately, a charge that I am not sure is true or just made up. How could he possibly know?
What were they sick with? Virchow doesn’t provide details, besides blaming the Parisians for allowing the savages to bathe in a freezing pond each dawn. The Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reports pneumonia but says they are now well enough for fervent crowds to watch them eat, a process described by the lying Nationale Zeitung: the men devour their meat raw and then throw the scant remains to women and children, emitting loud guttural grunts of satisfaction (I think this is sheer sensationalism, meant to sell papers and tickets). Their feeding hours are published in the press, Fitz, as well as a schedule of performances of shooting skills and obsidian arrowhead manufacturing.
These reports entice so many visitors (the very word, Besuchers, the newspapers use, Fitzroy), each day more, until on November 8 they are so numerous, 37,000 paying clients, that a riot ensues. The spectators, fueled by rivers of beer, threaten to break down the fenced enclosure, forcing the Patagons to retreat into the ostrich house where they are lodged. The multitude, angered by their disappearance, demands vociferously that the Indians show themselves and start mating. Thousands, kept in check by a strong contingent of police, remain until seven in the evening, shouting, “Bring out the Fueguians, bring out the Fueguians.” Imagine Henri and his fellows listening to the bellows of the rabble as they beat against the planks of the enclosure.
This strong salacious interest in the Kaweshkar’s carnal habits was shared by scientists. In München, the captives are impatiently awaited by embryologist Van Bischoff, eager to study the native women’s sexual organs, when they arrive there in late November. Other parts of women—such as their brains—were apparently less fascinating to him, as he strenuously opposed admitting the gentler sex into any academic profession. Told that these Patagons had no shame or decency, this specialist in the ovulation of mammals expected to be able to conduct a full cavity probe. But the female Kaweshkar refuse to let him examine their genitals nor, he protests, the hymen of the young daughter.
He feels even more exasperated when informed in early 1882 by a Swiss doctor, Von Meyer, that one of the women who discouraged Von Bischoff ’s advances has died on the way to Zurich. The correspondence calls that woman Grethe, first time we hear that name. So who is it? I’ve deduced she must be either Piskouna or Trine (short for Catherine, right?), re-baptized Grethe sometime during the German tour, not sure which of the two or why there is any need to change the name. Von Bischoff is not interested in the identity of the dead, only their anatomy. He reports irately to the München Academy that he’s received the information about Grethe’s demise too late to demand that her genitals be preserved, but that he won’t give up, as he has requested that Von Meyer insure that as soon as any of the female savages expire, their organs be removed, steeped in alcohol, and shipped to him for examination. And, in effect, when two of them die in Zurich, their labia, vulva, and vaginas are cut out and packed away to München. You can see extremely explicit drawings of those body parts, Fitz, when I get back home, but truth is I’d rather you didn’t.
This nineteenth-century trafficking in human organs is made possible, according to Von Bischoff ’s papers, by the death of Lise on March 11, 1882, and Petite Mère on March 13, also in Zurich, followed half an hour later by the leader of the group, her husband, known as the Capitano. In the midst of all this horror, there is a tender moment recorded by the physician attending the couple: as Petite Mère lies dying of pneumonia, she reaches out with her foot to touch and caress the toes of her mate.
And our Henri?
He had preceded them, the first of the four that expired in Switzerland.
But not of pneumonia.
Your visitor, our visitor, died of syphilis.
According to reports by Dr. Bollinger in the München Scientific Society’s archives, Henri was taken to the hospital in Zurich on the same day, February 11, 1882, that he and the eight others disembarked in that city. On February 20, they operated on his penis. He expired a week later.
So it’s the Treponema pallidum bacterium that kills the young man, if you’ll forgive me for going all technical. A highly mobile bacterium that somebody must have transmitted to him. One candidate is Trine, as one source has her dying of syphilis as well when she—but that information is precarious, and I prefer Lise. Maybe because she was single, just as I was when we first made love, Fitz, or maybe because she hadn’t had any children yet, maybe because she dies twelve days after Henri did, let’s just leave it at that. There’s no documentation one way or the other, so I guess it’s my choice. How did Lise contract syphilis, a European disease? Almost certainly on board the ship to Le Havre, though we can’t discount Paris or one of the German cities. I’d bet on rape rather than consensual sex, Fitzroy, given the mistreatment of captive women throughout history, remote and recent. And while we’re on the happy subject of rape, another hypothesis: that Henri was defiled by some male overseer.
Something in my stomach revolts at the thought. I don’t think it’s because I find the ravaging of a woman less repellent than that of a man. I think it’s because I’ve grown fond of Henri, want to give him less cause for despoiling and soiling you, less reason to be vindictive. Make it easier to appease his rage. Or, or—yes, perhaps I wish to imagine his sexual encounter with Lise as innocent. Did it happen on September 11, 1881, in Paris, the same day his picture was taken? Drawing you closer to one another?
Not that we’ll ever find the answer. We can only hope that he received some delight from Lise when he entered her, that she gave him refuge there, in the human zoo of the Bois de Boulogne or wherever else they made love, not knowing that they were also transferring those bacteria, one to the other. That’s my hope, Fitzroy Fo
ster: that before he died in Zurich, my hope is that they enjoyed each other as we have, one thing at least that was not taken from them.
Maybe I’ll find more evidence in Zurich, Fitz, my next stop, maybe I’ll discover what was done with the dead. As to the survivors, I already know that Antonio dies in the bowels of the ship on the way home, but Pedro, the young Kaweshkar we thought might be your visitor, lived on for some years—as did the two orphaned children who managed to make it back to Tierra del Fuego. The sole female to return, well, some versions say it is Piskouna who soon dies of tuberculosis, another one, even less credible, refers to Trine having died from syphilis. Very sad and confusing: not even in death are these native women afforded their own names. Hagenbeck doesn’t mention who they are, just that, disturbed by the four that succumb in Zurich, repeating what had happened to his eight Eskimos the year before, he decides to send the rest of them back.
He hadn’t shown much concern during the tour. He writes to Jacobsen, from Nuremburg, that all is well, health-wise. And that business is good. In another letter from Dresden: Antonio and Pedro have recovered enough to join the others in a public presentation. Even in Zurich the schedule is only reduced from the usual ten hours to four and a half. The show had to go on.
But not for long. When Hagenbeck learns of the death of three more natives in March 1882, he tells Jacobsen that he is canceling the tour. At least some natives, he says, have been saved. Adding that he vows to stick to beasts and not the fabulous animals—his own words, Fitz, I am not making any of this up!—these human animals who have been so profitable.
Darwin's Ghosts Page 14