The Beagle's native son: among the observations of Charles Darwin on his famous voyage is the strange story of Jemmy Button, a Yamana Indian taken from South America to England and later returned to his homeland

Louis Werner

When Charles Darwin sailed from England on December 27, 1831, aboard the HMS Beagle, he took the first notes that were to culminate many thousands of pages later in his celebrated works, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He acknowledged later, however, that key observations from South America--the odd biogeography of the Galapagos Islands, the catastrophic power of a Chilean earthquake, and the profusion of life in the Brazilian rain forest--crystallized his revolutionary theory of natural selection.

Also setting out from Plymouth on that five-year expedition around the globe was Darwin's very own Exhibit A, a group of Native Americans returning to their homeland in Tierra del Fuego in order to establish a Christian mission there. These three individuals, to whom the Beagle's captain, Robert Fitzroy, had given the fanciful names York Minster, Fuegia Basket, and Jemmy Button when he picked them up on his previous South American tour, served Darwin as the raw material from which he observed how Homo sapiens, like every other species, adapts to changes in its environment.

In February 1830, on the Beagle's first visit to Tierra del Fuego, Fitzroy had taken the three natives aboard as hostages to be ransomed for a stolen whaleboat. El'leparu, a man in his mid-twenties, Yokcushiu, a girl about ten years old, and another middle-aged man were seized in western Tierra del Fuego, near a headland called York Minster (hence El'leparu's name change), in the home territory of the Alakaluf tribe. As Fitzroy wrote of the three hostages, one of whom later died, "they came with us with little reluctance and appeared unconcerned." Apparently their ransom value was nil in the eyes of their tribesmen, for the whaleboat was never returned.

A month later in Ponsonby Sound, just south of the Beagle Channel at its midway point, a party of Yamaha Indians approached the ship to trade. Fitzroy threw them a handful of pearl buttons, and a teenage native boy--named Orundellico--scrambled up from the canoe for more. "Whether they intended that he should remain with us permanently I do not know," Fitzroy wrote, "but they seemed contented with the singular bargain." Thus originated the boy's shipboard name, Jemmy Button.

In England, the three surviving Indians were the object of much curiosity, despite the close supervision imposed by Fitzroy, himself only ten years older than Jemmy. The newspapers noted their odd appearances, even when dressed in proper English clothes, and reported that they feared the lion statues outside Northumberland House might eat them. One church vicar wrote that they were "cannibals with a ready appetite for vegetables."

They were granted a private audience with the king and queen, who gave Fuegia one of her bonnets and slipped a family ring onto her finger. The offer of a royal clothing allowance for the three, who at home normally went about with nothing other than a guanaco hide thrown over their shoulders, must have mystified them.

Fitzroy was certain that he and his charges could communicate freely. "They understand why they were taken, and look forward with pleasure to seeing our country as well as returning to their own," he wrote. But this remains doubtful, as Fitzroy's facility with Fuegian languages left much to be desired. He continued to think, after repeated interviews with Jemmy, that his tribe was called the "Yapoo Tekeenica," which in Yamana means, "Otter I do not understand."

This confusion probably occurred when Fitzroy first pointed to Jemmy's tribesmen and asked, in sailor's sign, their name. Jemmy might well have spied a sea otter in the distance, for the acute eyesight of the Yamana was legendary, and then, sensing he had given the wrong answer, simply shrugged his shoulders and begged off. Jemmy's subtribe in fact called itself the "Yahgashagalumoala," a mouthful that perhaps one can forgive an Englishman for not getting straight.

The Yamana language is indeed notoriously difficult. Any tongue with more words for "beach" than Arabic has for "sand" cannot be easy. Different words are used for the same object depending if the speaker is in a canoe, on a beach, or in a wigwam. A single one-word verb has the meaning of "biting something hard when biting into something soft," like unexpectedly finding a pearl between one's teeth when eating a mussel.

What Fitzroy could not understand linguistically he tried to parse with phrenology. He examined the Indians' skull shapes and found that Jemmy was "inclined to cunning," York had "very strong passions, particularly those of an animal nature," and Fuegia was "disposed to be honest." But this quack science too failed to uncover much truth. Fitzroy also found that Darwin's nose indicated "a lack of energy and determination," which in his eyes almost disqualified one of the nineteenth century's greatest minds from joining the expedition.

When it was time for the Indians to ship out for home, their London schoolmaster and spiritual adviser wrote of Jemmy, "He seemed to have no idea of God. He confessed that he had eaten human flesh." That the charge of cannibalism should cling to the Fuegians is not surprising. They happily admitted to eating their fellowman whenever so questioned, an evident case of what social scientists today call an interviewee's "courtesy bias." To them, the concept of holy communion only confirmed what they thought their hosts wanted them to say. Yet the anthropologist Lucas Bridges, a third-generation Christian missionary to the Fuegians whose father knew Jemmy quite well, insisted that cannibalism was as foreign to their culture as was the use of chamber pots.

Still, it was chamber pots--along with wineglasses, tea trays, and soup tureens--that went aboard the Beagle as missionary supplies on its return voyage to Tierra del Fuego. The ever-practical Darwin wrote that this "showed the most culpable folly and negligence ... the means wasted on such things would have purchased an immense stock of really useful items."

Even less inspiring of confidence was the English missionary Robert Matthews, an untested teenager never before away from home, chosen to be dropped back into the wilds with Jemmy and his mates.

From February through July 1832, the Beagle charted the coastline between Bahia and the Rio de la Plata. Darwin spent some of those months in Rio, as did Fuegia, serving as nanny in the house of an expatriate English couple. Jemmy, meanwhile, became the ship's favorite. According to Darwin, "he was merry and often laughed and was remarkably sympathetic with anyone in pain; when the water was rough, I was often a little seasick, and he used to come to me and say in a plaintive voice, 'Poor, poor fellow!,' but the notion, after his aquatic life, of a man being seasick, was too ludicrous and he was generally obliged to turn on one side to hide a smile or laugh."

In December, the ship reached Tierra del Fuego. Darwin's first view of the land's inhabitants, men probably of the Ona tribe, made him shudder. "A group of Fuegians partly concealed by the entangled forest were perched on a wild point overhanging the sea," he wrote, "and as we passed by, they sprang up and waving their tattered cloaks, sent forth a loud and sonorous shout ... the party altogether resembled the devils which come on the stage in plays like Der Freishutz," a favorite opera of Darwin on the subject of the supernatural.

And here Darwin, mentally comparing Jemmy in his polished shoes and neat haircut with his countrymen in face paint and flapping guanaco capes, could not help but theorize. "Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have they come? What could have tempted or what change compelled a tribe of men to leave the fine regions of the north and to enter on one of the most inhospitable countries within the limits of the globe? ... Nature by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and the productions of his miserable country."

If "nature" truly made "habit" in one's manner of dress or diet for instance "omnipotent and its effects hereditary," might that then explain why Jemmy wore a frock coat and his brother a guanaco skin? Darwin himself admitted to a circumstantial explanation for differences in cultural taste. He recounted the story of an Indian watching him eat a meal of canned meat and then touch it with his finger, "and feeling it soft and cold, showed as much disgust at it as I should have done at putrid blubber." One culture happened to preserve its meat in tin while another kept it buried in seaweed--in the eye of the other, each an equally disgusting method.

A fierce anti-slavery advocate and friend of a captive named Button, at times Darwin could also be an obtuse observer. Watching an animated round of on-board bartering, Darwin wrote of the Indians, "after pointing to almost every object, one after the other, even to the buttons on our coats, and saying their favorite word, 'yammerschooner' ['Be kind to me,' mistakenly translated by Darwin as 'Give me'], in as many intonations as possible ... they would by simple artifice point to their young women or little children, as much as to say, 'If you will not give it to me, surely you will to such as these.'" Thinking that Jemmy had been traded for a handful of buttons, why would Darwin not also assume that these Indians were offering to trade their women and children for more of the same?

But had Jemmy really been traded for a handful of buttons by his own people, as Fitzroy always assumed? When the ship met up again with his family, Darwin finally did get to the truth. "We heard through York," he wrote, "that the mother has been inconsolable for the loss of Jemmy and had searched everywhere for him, thinking that he might have been left after having been taken in the boat."

Because the ship found it rough going around Cape Horn toward western Tierra del Fuego, the plan to leave York and Fuegia in their own territory was dropped in favor of heading for the calmer waters of Jemmy's home country in Wulaia Cove up the Beagle Channel. There Jemmy learned that his father had died in his absence, news that he received with the stoicism--his face "very grave and mysterious"--characteristic of his tribe.

Darwin likened the reunion with his mother and brothers to two horses casually ambling up to each other in a field, with only a hint at the likely reason for such restraint--that Jemmy had forgotten his own language and could barely say hello to his own blood relatives. "It was laughable but almost pitiable," noted Darwin, "to hear him speak to his wild brother in English and then ask him in Spanish ('no sabe?') whether he did not understand him."

In the shelter of Wulaia Cove, the Beagle offloaded the wineglasses and bibles, chamber pots and Christian primers, and built wigwams and planted gardens for the boy missionary and the three semi-Anglicized Fuegians. They and their goods were the object of much curiosity from Jemmy's one-hundred-twenty clansmen, and their aggressive share-and-share-alike spirit soon became overwhelming.

One night the sailors built a fire and a family of Fuegians, long accustomed to the land's cold winds, joined them around it. "We were well clothed," wrote Darwin, elaborating on his nature-and-habit theory, "and though sitting close to the fire were far from too warm; yet these naked savages, though farther off, were observed to our great surprise to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting."

Fitzroy decided to leave Wulaia for a week of exploring, allowing Matthews time to get used to being alone with his charges. Upon his return, he found the place in an uproar. The boy missionary feared for his life. Jemmy's clansmen had picked his personal goods clean. "Another party," wrote the captain, "showed by signs that they wished to strip him naked and pluck all the hairs out of his face and body. I think we arrived just in time to save his life."

So it was decided to pluck Matthews himself away and leave behind Jemmy, York, and Fuegia in hopes that on their own they might establish a beachhead for Christianity. "Poor Jemmy," wrote Darwin about his favorite of the three, "looked rather disconsolate, and would then, I have little doubt, have been glad to have returned with us." Even his own brother had stolen from him. "He remarked, 'all bad men, no sabe nothing,' and though I never heard him swear before, 'damned fools.'"

"Our three Fuegians," he continued in a more reflective vein, "though they had been only three years with civilized men, would, I am sure, have been glad to have retained their new habits; but this was obviously impossible. I fear it is more than doubtful whether their visit [to England] will have been of any use to them."

The Beagle sailed eastward and wintered in the Falklands. A year later, it returned to Wulaia to see what time had wrought of Jemmy and his mates, last seen wearing waistcoats, shoes, and stockings. The wigwams, however, were found deserted and the gardens overgrown. From out of the mists came a canoe with a nearly naked man in the bow frantically rubbing the painted tribal markings off his face.

"This man was poor Jemmy," wrote Darwin, "now a thin, haggard savage, with long disordered hair and naked except a bit of blanket round his waist. We did not recognize him till he was close to us, for he was ashamed of himself, and turned his back to the ship. We had left him plump, fat, clean, and well-dressed--I never saw so completely and grievous a change."

Jemmy told a story of deceit and treachery at the hands of York and Fuegia. They had lured him into a canoe voyage to their home country to the west, and one night at camp had robbed him of his English clothes and abandoned him at the beach.

He had returned to Wulaia only with great hardship. But now he was happy, wed to a young wife, and satisfied to return to his former ways.

He had one last meal at the captain's table and "ate his dinner as tidily as formerly," wrote Darwin. "He told us he had enough to eat, that he was not cold, and he did not wish to go back to England.... He boasted he could now talk a little of his own language, but it is a most singular fact that it appears he has taught all his tribe some English."

The day came for Jemmy to be left behind. "Every soul on board was heartily sorry to shake his hand for the last time. I do not doubt that he will be as happy as, perhaps happier than, if he had never left his own country.... When Jemmy reached the shore, he lighted a signal fire and the smoke curled up, bidding us a last and long farewell, as the ship stood on her course into the open sea."

But could England ever forget Jemmy? His parting gift of a bow and arrow for his former London schoolmaster, who had always thought his young student a cannibal, was likely less than reassuring when it finally reached him.

And then, no word from the Fuegians for more than twenty years. In October 1855, a ship sent by the Patagonia Missionary Society entered Wuiaia Cove and was met by several canoes. As its captain William Snow later wrote, he called out the name "Jemmy Button, Jemmy Button. To my amazement and joy--almost rendering me speechless--an answer came back--'yes, yes, Jam-mes Button, Jam-mes Button.'"

Jemmy scrambled aboard, his hair long and matted as he was last seen, but by all accounts looking better fed. A ship's sailor later exclaimed, "Well I'm blowed! What a queer thing! There's that blear-eyed, dirty-looking naked savage speaking as clearly to the skipper as one of us. And I be hanged too if he wasn't as polite as if he'd been brought up in a parlor." When told that two women were aboard, Jemmy requested a suit of clothes.

But Jemmy had changed. He was now aggressive and demanding. When the captain showed him his two portraits painted by the Beagle artist, the one drawn before and the other a year after he had returned home in 1832, he became angry. He boarded the ship the next day with his clothes mud covered--"hideous and deplorable." He refused their request that he visit the newly founded mission on Keppel Island in the Falklands. When he started to fight a sailor, the crew forcibly put him ashore.

Three years later, with the mission's work now more secure, the ship returned to Wulaia and found Jemmy in better humor. He agreed to go with them for five months, taking along his wife, Jamesina, and children--a twelve-year-old son, Wammestriggins, renamed "Threeboys" by the sailors, a younger daughter renamed "Fuegia," and an infant boy, Annasplonis, renamed "Anthony Button."

The reports to London in these five months all praised Jemmy's "Christian manner," describing him giving sermons and tipping his hat to ladies. But progress in compiling a dictionary of "Firelandic," as the missionaries called Jemmy's language, was slow, and they thought he purposely confused them in order to keep tribal secrets. They later learned that his translation of the Lord's Prayer began, "Dead Father, who art in heaven." Misunderstandings and ill-will mounted before Jemmy and his family were taken back to Wulaia with hurt feelings on all sides.

Another group of kinsmen replaced Jemmy at the Keppel mission for the following nine months, but accusations of theft soured that visit too. When they were returned in September 1859, Jemmy demanded more trade goods. A pay-for-work system was agreed upon when the missionaries decided to build a permanent base at Wulaia. On Sunday, November 6, eight of the nine-man crew went ashore to lead a church service for the three hundred Yamana and their warlike Ona neighbors who had gathered for the paid labor. Only the ship's cook, Alfred Cole, stayed aboard.

The ensuing horror--the massacre of eight missionaries--can only be re-created from the accounts of two eyewitnesses--Cole, who was four hundred yards offshore, and Jemmy. In a raucous and apparently spontaneous uprising, the Indians attacked with clubs and stones and then fought among themselves for the spoils. Cole jumped in a canoe and paddled away, later to be picked up by Jemmy's people and, strangely, then treated well until his rescue. He saw no signs of the dead men's bodies and made no inquiry into their fate. He was told, however, that Jemmy had slept in the captain's cabin the night of the killings. Although Coles later admitted that he had not seen Jemmy partake in the slaughter, he would testify that he believed the Fuegian, out of jealousy over goods, was responsible for the killings.

When a search party came from Port Stanley in March 1860, they found the ship stripped to its decking. Jemmy agreed to return to the Falklands to give his version of events. His deposition, as transcribed by a legal secretary, is a rambling soliloquy of nonsequiturs--saying about England, for instance, "had plenty of it--no want to go back"--that pinned all blame on the Ona. He denied the one fact that Cole swore to have seen clearly--that Jemmy's brother had bashed in the skull of the ship's catechist. But because of Jemmy's evident lack of guile, his version was accepted and he was sent home a free man.

In March 1863, another missionary ship visited Wulaia and found Jemmy himself well but many of his fellow tribesmen dead of a mysterious disease. His son Threeboys agreed to visit Keppel Island, and when he returned home a year later discovered that Jemmy had died in his absence. The body had been preserved until he could be present at his father's cremation. No prayers were said at the funeral pyre, and the Christian missionary refused to take part in what he regarded as a pagan ritual.

The lives of Darwin, Fitzroy, and Jemmy continued to intersect, however obliquely, long after they had last parted ways. Darwin's On the Origin of Species had been published the same month as the mission massacre. The keenly religious Fitzroy, sinking deeper into a melancholy partly fueled no doubt by the success of Darwin's atheistic theory, killed himself within a year of Jemmy's death. After this, with the help of local missionaries, Darwin contributed a regular stipend for the support of Jemmy's grandson, named James (Jemmy) Fitzroy Button.

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