Fuegia Basket

With his liberal upbringing and values, Charles (Darwin) was able to recognize his common nature with negro slaves, but the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego were the greatest challenge for civilized people, as they were reckoned to be among the “lowest Barbarians” known. The first Fuegians that Charles met were on board HMS Beagle when he joined the ship, and had been trained in European ways. When Captain FitzRoy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_FitzRoy had visited the Straits of Magellan on the previous voyage in 1830, he took three young men and a small girl from their families, just as a slave-owner might have taken one of his slaves’ children. He brought them back to England for a Christian education. One died of smallpox but the others, Jemmy Button York Minister and the nine year old Fuegia Basket, were clothed and schooled in a village on the outskirts of London. They were so plaint and took their instructions so well that captain FitzRoy was able to arrange for them to be presented to King William and Queen Adelaide at the Court of St.James’s. When Charles embarked on HMD Beagle the three were on board for their return to their people together with a missionary to make a Christian settlement among them. As the ship sailed south, Charles got to know Jemmy Button and York Minister well. He found Fuegia Basket “a nice, modest, reserved young girl, with a rather pleasing but sometimes sullen expression, and very quick in learning anything.” As he had been with John Edmonston the freed slave, Charles was “incessantly struck” while living with the Fuegians on board ship, “how similar their minds were to ours.”

When HMS Beagle reached Tierra del Fuego, Charles found that the Fuegians in their own surroundings were “without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld.” “Four or five men suddenly appeared on a cliff near to us. They were absolutely naked and with long streaming hair; springing from the ground and waving their arms around their heads, they sent forth most hideous yells. Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants. Charles felt they were “man in his lowest and most savage state.” Seeing a Fuegian in his native surroundings was like watching “the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, the rhinoceros on the wide plain, or the hippopotamus wallowing in the mud of some African river.” And “the reflection at once rushed into my mind – such were our ancestors.”

Here it was the difference that struck Charles deeply. He knew York Minister, Jemmy Button and Fuegia Basket as quiet and well-mannered young people who could follow the etiquette of an audience with the King and Queen of England. But their fellow tribesmen, yelling and waving on the rocks, looked “scarcely like earthly inhabitants.” The gulf between savagery and civilization was enormous, and yet the three young Fuegians had stepped across it.

Seeing how savages could be brought so close to civilization, Charles also recognized an element of savage in his own being. He wrote of his feelings when hunting game on the vast empty steppes of Patagonia, that the love of the chase was said to be “an inherent delight in man, a relic of an instinctive passion.” If so, he felt that living on the steppes as he had done, “with the sky for a roof, and the ground for a table,” was part of the same feeling.” “It is the savage returning to his wild and native habits.” He always looked back to the way of life in “unfrequented countries, with a kind of extreme delight, which no scenes of civilization could create.” Fuegians on their wild and rocky shores and yet seeing how similar their minds were to ours, recognizing that “such were our ancestors” and feeling himself to be “the savage returning to his wild and native habits,” was ready to step further beyond accepting boundaries in seeking to understand mankind’s place in the natural world. ~ Pages 30 -31