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Savage
The Life and Times of Jemmy Button
By Nick Hazlewood St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2000 Nick Hazlewood
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8028-3
CHAPTER 1
In 1520 the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to pass from the Atlantic into the Pacific by way of the straits that would henceforth bear his name. To his north lay the barren wastelands of Patagonia, to the south a harsh and uninviting territory that he thought to be the tip of a huge land mass known as Tierra Australis or Terra Incognita. Here, it was believed, there existed an Anti-Earth, a place where everything was upside down, back to front and inside out. In this mixed-up continent, which stretched as far as Antarctica, snow and rain fell upwards, the sun was black and the people were sixteen-fingered beasts known as Antipodeans. Little surprise that Magellan did not stop to explore the territory, although after hearing the roar of a sea on a still farther coast, he surmised that if this was a huge continent, then what he was seeing was a series of islands at its crumbling apex.
Legend has it that from the deck of his flagship, the Trinidad, he traced mysterious plumes of smoke across the sky. Only eighteen of the original 290 men arrived back in Spain alive from this first, accursed circumnavigation of the globe, and when the survivors described what were almost certainly Indian signals to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, he replied that there is no smoke without fire, and christened the land Tierra del Fuego – the Land of Fire.
In the popular imagination Magellan's sighting of the strange land of Tierra del Fuego was heralded as a vision of hell, with the distant fires being the pyres on which souls of the dead were incinerated, and the strait itself acting as nothing less than a Styx-like passage to the shores of Hades. Time and exploration were to reveal the truth about the land at the end of the world: the bitter tempests, the fearful williwaws and the swirling seas may have continued to conjure up a picture of the underworld, but only as a metaphor. Sitting between 52° and 56° south, this bleak outpost is a windswept complex of tightly knit channels and islands covering roughly the same area as Ireland. It is separated from the mainland of South America by the Straits of Magellan and dominated by one large island to the east and to the north, the Isla Grande. It is in Tierra del Fuego that the Andes finally tumble, under the pressure of successive glaciations and appalling weather conditions, into a cruel sea. As much as five metres of rain drench its western flank every year, yet in the eastern rain shadow of the colossal mountains annual precipitation can be as relatively low as half a metre. Here gales rip across sombre plains bringing an unpredictability to an otherwise gloomy but surprisingly mild climate. It is a land that inspired awe in its early European explorers, preserved in the names of much of its terrifying geography: Fury Bay and Fury Island, Useless Bay, Desolation Bay, Port Famine, Devil Island and, of course, it is here, at Cape Horn, that the Atlantic and Pacific meet like two Goliaths doing battle.
The sculpting hands of this southern wilderness were huge ice sheets which, acting on the volcanic tail of the Andes chain, advanced and retreated over millions of years. For almost nine-tenths of the last 800,000 years the landscape of Tierra del Fuego has been shaped by the action of massive glaciers nurtured in the high and wet peaks of the Andes in the western half of the archipelago. Powerful rivers of glacial meltwater poured down the steep south and western sides of the mountains into the Pacific, chiselling out fjords and carving complex and jagged islands. To the east, glacial meltwater cut the large basins, the impressive bays and the lakes that pockmark the region, glaciofluvial deposits pushed out the undulating ridges of morainic detritus and the vast plains of outwash gravel that stretch as far as the Atlantic. The sense of the majesty, ferocity and inhospitality of the area was reflected in the writings of the early European explorers. Francis Fletcher, the chaplain who accompanied Sir Francis Drake around the globe in 1577, was clearly in awe of the
grisly sight of the cold & frozen mountains, reaching their heads yea the greatest part of their bodyes into the cold & frozen region, where the power of reflection of the Sonn never toucheth to dissolve the Ise & Snow: so that the Ise & Snow hang about the Spire of the Mountaine circulerwise as it were regions by degrees one above another & one Exceeding another in breadth in a wonderfull order as may apeare ... from those hills distilled so sharpe a breath that it seemed to enter into the bowells of nature, to the great discomfort of the lives of our men.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Tierra del Fuego, with its forests of sourthern beech trees, its wild grassy plains and vast boggy moors, was virgin territory for the European explorers who ventured this far south, but it had long been inhabited by tribes of Fuegian Indians. A number of theories exist regarding the peopling of the archipelago, but the most likely begins back at the time of the initial crossing of the Bering Straits into Alaska, when humans set foot in the Americas for the first time. In the thousands of years that followed, there was a slow demographic movement across the continent as tribes of hunter-gatherers sought out amenable homes. The search, and intercommunal violence, drove groups across and down North and Central America then into the southern continent. Here, during the Ice Age, they found Patagonia and its Fuegian extension inhospitable and barren. About 14,000 years ago, when the ice began to retreat, enabling a southerly spread of flora and fauna, the wandering tribes followed. These were unsophisticated, primitive people, for whom a stretch of water as wide as the Straits of Magellan would have been an impenetrable frontier. Strong evidence shows, though, that as much as 11,000 years ago varying climatic conditions led to long periods when the straits were bridged by land exposed as water levels dropped. Groups of people could pass over onto northern Tierra del Fuego until around 8,000 years ago when warmer global conditions caused sea levels to shoot up. The straits were flooded and those who had crossed them were trapped – the first inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego.
At the very ends of the earth, the island fragmentation, scant resources and awful weather conditions split the native people into isolated groups, who over the intervening millennia were to become distinct, differentiated by technological advances such as canoes and weapons, diet and, most significantly, language. By the early nineteenth century it is estimated that there were 9,000 native Fuegians divided among four tribes, defined by geography, linguistics and mutual antipathy. They were the Selk'nam (alternatively known as the Ona or Oens-men), the fearsome peoples of the main island; the Alakaluf (or Kaweskar) of the western lands; the Haush (or Mannekenk) who lived on the south-eastern tip of Tierra del Fuego; and the Yamana.
* * *
Outsiders called them Yahgans, Yapoos or Tekeenicas, but Yamana was the word the canoe Indians of the Beagle Channel region used to describe and distinguish themselves from foreigners, whether Fuegian or European. In simple translation it meant people and described a race of bronze-skinned Aborigines who dwelt at the extreme of Tierra del Fuego, survivors clinging to the southern-most edge of the habitable world. They lived a fragile existence in small nomadic groups across a territory south of a line mapped by the British from Desolation Bay in the west, to Spaniard Harbour in the east. The men averaged less than five foot two in height and the women, who were even shorter, tended towards obesity, brought on by long periods of inactivity and a diet of seal blubber. Nevertheless they were a powerful race of people, with strong-featured faces, straggling jet-black hair, stout bodies and tapering limbs.
At the heart of their territory was the Yahgashaga, the Yamana word for the channel of a mountain valley, which was known in English as the Murray Narrows. Here, in the waters and on the banks of the Beagle Channel and Ponsonby Sound, the Yamana fished, hunted and scoured the coastline for food. The prizes were birds' eggs, fish and beached whales, mussels and limpets and, in the thickly forested western flank of Navarin Island, berries and the occasional animal. On these shores the Yamana endured makeshift lives, in temporary wigwams with frames of branches and coverings of twigs, grass and leaves. They were built into small hollows that offered little protection against a clattering wind.
Despite the adverse climate and the paucity of their shelter, the Yamana wore little clothing. Hides could be obtained from otters, foxes, seals and occasionally the llama-like guanaco, but these rarely provided much more than an apron and a stole for the shoulders. In what little class distinction existed among these people, an impoverished Yamana – one who had failed to obtain a fur – would be called api-tupan, skin only.
There were few rules or laws to Yamana life, and while there is evidence that they were superstitious, it appears they had no concept of a Superior Being or God. According to their folklore, when the first settlers came to Tierra del Fuego the men had all the unpleasant tasks in life: making meals, building huts, minding the children and tending the fires. Women were free spirits who wore masks and practised witchcraft; they led the hunting and fishing, and came and went as they pleased. The men, however, were biding their time. Neglected and oppressed, they rose in rebellion, seized the terrifying masks and killed the women, sparing none but the baby girls. To these they repeated a mantra: their only duty in life was to serve. After years of indoctrination the men were able to relax, their dominance successfully established.
If this story had any basis of truth, though, it was not reflected in the day-to-day dealings of the indigenous people, for while men claimed some authority over their women, they also respected and deferred to their spouses – unlike the Selk'nam, who held women in strict submission. Nevertheless there was a well-defined sexual division of labour. Yamana women had great power and responsibility. They carried out the domestic chores – prepared the food and looked after the children – but they also controlled the canoes, did most of the paddling and caught mullet, smelt and conger eel with strands of their hair, cut and plaited into a fine line and baited with discarded fish tails. Such was their standing that the women kept all the fish they caught and decided with whom they would share it.
Men took greater responsibility for land-based activities: whereas the women were proficient swimmers, their husbands were barely able to float. They therefore took charge of hunting, collecting fuel, repairing canoes and tending fires.
The provision of food was the Yamana's most constant concern. They used slings, snares and spears of finely honed and barbed bone to hunt shags and steamer ducks; highly prized, vicious dogs hounded sea otters out of kelp jungles and chased guanacoes off the coast and into the sea, where they were easy meat for the waiting canoes. Against whales and seals they flung specially designed spears with heads connected to the shaft by leather thongs that would detach when they hit the target. The beleaguered creature would drag the shaft through the water, until its energy dissipated and the the pursuing Yamana overtook it and pounced. Mussels and limpets were scraped off the rocks at low tide. The Yamana's meat intake was supplemented by berries – belacamaim (rain berry), shanamaim (swamp berry), the bright red clumps of sepisa and the grape-like goosh.
Meat and blubber were often consumed raw, but sometimes cooked over the family fire, which was perhaps the most valuable element of all: for cooking, as a buttress against cold and, with smoke, a warning signal to others of visitors or danger. The upkeep of a fire was a great responsibility: once built it was rarely allowed to die and then only through carelessness. A fire was watched day and night, and if it went out, glowing embers had to be cadged off a neighbour.
The Yamana were nomads, who passed their days shifting from one location to another in bark canoes or large dug-outs. In these circumstances their fires posed a particular problem: how to keep them alight while at sea. Each canoe was fitted with a plinth of sand and turf upon which a small blaze could be placed and transported without posing any risk to the vessel (canoes were far from watertight anyway, so there was little danger and there was the added bonus of heat during freezing journeys). When a family pulled into a rocky cove for the night and was unable to beach the boat, the woman would paddle the canoe to the shore and the man would lift the fire off the plinth and carry it to land. Once the operation was completed the woman would row out – sometimes hundreds of metres – to a bed of sea kelp, where she would moor the boat with fronds then jump into the icy water to swim back to her family and the warmth of a glowing bonfire.
It was around these fires that the latest news would be spread by passing travellers: sightings of whale or seal; where the alacush (steamer duck) was nesting; and the death of distant relations. And it was here that the many tales of Yamana folklore were passed down to new generations: of how canoes were invented, and of the stone man that ate young girls. Amid tales of incest, infidelity, menstruation, violence and anthropomorphism, young children would have heard how the truculent Wasana had been turned into a mouse, of how the rockfish got its flat head, and stories of the wild men who lived in the woods or the monsters that dwelled in the lakes.
* * *
The story of Tierra del Fuego has been told many times by exploiters, explorers and settlers – in the chronicles and narratives of the likes of Magellan, Drake, de Sarmiento, van Noort, Anson, Fitzroy, Darwin and Bridges to name but a few. But the Fuegians are absent, save as freaks and novelties or nuisances and obstacles to the advance of the white man and his civilisation. To most of the Europeans and North Americans who ventured into these parts, they were a primitive and wretched group of savages, lawless atheists who lived in squalor – as Darwin was to say, they were 'the most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld' – and thus undeserving of a history. Eventually, when they began to be heard, as in the accounts of the Ushuaia mission station, established in the 1870s, it was both too late and their listeners too plagued by Victorian values and prejudices. Most tragically, by the time historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and ethnographers with a different, more sympathetic approach to the native population arrived on the scene, there was virtually no one left to study. Wiped out in a genocide launched from the barrel of a gun and the spread of alien diseases, much of the history of the Fuegian peoples died with them.
At the time that this story begins, in May 1830, there would have been nothing extraordinary about a Yamana boy called Orundellico. Not long into his teens, he lived on the shores of the Yahgashaga in a loose grouping of father, mother, brothers, sisters and several uncles and their families. As winter was closing in and the skies blackened, news began to filter through of the activities of white men in their area. This would not have troubled Orundellico's people. Their relations with these strange visitors had largely been cordial and when, around 7 May, the white man eventually appeared, it caused little consternation. The arrival of the foreigner opened up opportunities for the bartering of dogs and dried fish, sparkling stones, metal objects, and the lengths of cloth they craved.
Alerted that a large boat bearing Europeans was plying the area, Orundellico's family boarded three canoes and went in chase. They carried fish and skins to trade. Alongside Orundellico were several men he would have known as his uncles. Each would have been anxious to intercept the foreigners before any other group could get to them. That way the spoils of trade were greater. It would, therefore, have been with some satisfaction that, within sight of the coast, they encountered the large boat alone and hailed it with their offerings, waving their arms and banging their chests with clenched fists. All seemed normal, the white men expressed interest, the fish were being examined, trinkets were being received and then something unexpected happened. The basic facts are clear: over the course of the next few minutes Orundellico was removed from his canoe and carried on board the foreigners' boat. A large button was thrown to an uncle as payment. Then the white men sailed away with Orundellico. What is less clear is the level of coercion, the degree of willingness on the Fuegians' part to trade one of their own and how far they understood the transaction. The only account we have of this moment is that of Robert FitzRoy, commander of the Beagle, and in charge of the whale-boat in question. His report of 11 May 1830 reads:
... we continued our route, but were stopped when in sight of the Narrows by three canoes full of natives, anxious for barter. We gave them a few beads and buttons, for some fish; and, without any previous intention, I told one of the boys in a canoe to come into our boat, and gave the man who was with him a large shining mother-of-pearl button. The boy got into my boat directly, and sat down. Seeing him and his friends seem quite contented, I pulled onwards, and, a light breeze springing up made sail. Thinking that this accidental occurrence might prove useful to the natives, as well as to ourselves, I determined to take advantage of it. The canoe, from which the boy came, paddled towards the shore ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Savage by Nick Hazlewood. Copyright © 2000 Nick Hazlewood. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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