Last week, snorkelling into a small bay on Chatham Island (San Cristobal), I looked up from watching a sea lion twist and turn underwater between a novelist and a neuroscientist to see a large man dressed in an incongruous overcoat standing with his back to us on a rocky outcrop. I wiped my goggles and realised I was looking at a statue. Of Darwin, naturally. Lots of other people visited these islands — Herman Melville, for one — and Darwin was just the captain’s companion on a small naval survey vessel, but it is Darwin everybody remembers. Bays, birds and bushes all bear his name.
The oddness of the Galapagos creatures cry out for his theory. Large lizards swim to graze on seaweed; tortoises have long necks and saddle-shaped carapaces on islands where they must eat taller vegetation; mocking birds have longer beaks on some islands than on others; tiny finches change beak shape during droughts through survival of the fittest. Death has shaped beauty.
On Indefatigable Island (now Santa Cruz) a few days later I learnt that though Darwin may be celebrated in the Galapagos, he is still a pariah in parts of the West. The latest Darwin film, Creation, has failed to find a US outlet, because distributors are so reluctant to upset religious fanatics. How can it possibly be true that a long dead naturalist of almost inhuman politeness and patience — who shared with many Christians a passionate hatred of slavery — still sets the world of Protestant evangelicals aflame? (Most Latin American Catholics are comfortable with Darwinism, I found.) Here is how. A week before visiting the Galapagos, I had been in Tierra del Fuego, where Darwin’s inspiration came from the human, rather than the animal, struggle for existence, and that story is darker. I had been invited along with other Darwin aficionados by a foundation created by Alvaro Fischer, a brilliant Chilean mathematical engineer, to retrace some of Darwin’s footsteps. We stepped ashore from a Chilean navy patrol boat at Wulaia Cove, on the western shore of Navarino island a short distance north of Cape Horn, in uncharacteristically calm sunshine. Wulaia Cove, which Darwin knew well, is a sheltered, shallow sea loch with scattered islands topped with windswept Lenga trees, like Scots pines but brighter green. Huge snow-covered mountains loom across the narrows to the north and west — and beyond them the Cordillera Darwin itself. Pristine forests clothe the hillsides. Upland geese, Fuegian snipe and black-faced ibis forage in the early spring grass between patches of melting snow.
But this place has ghosts. The huge middens of sea shells left by the Yamana Indians over 10,000 years have been recently ploughed up by feral pigs. There are no human beings living here now, though there is a lonely and locked museum, the most southerly in the world. Yet this was once the site of an ambitious human experiment. Four Fuegian Indians were kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy of the Beagle in 1830 to avenge the theft of a boat, and taken to England. One, Boat Memory, died of smallpox; another, York Minster, molested a third, a woman, Fuegia Basket. Jemmy Button, the fourth, became a bit of a dandy, enjoying his smart clothes, his new English language and his social whirl — which included a meeting with the king. But after the York-Fuegia incident, the pious Fitzroy decided to return the three survivors to their native land, as missionaries for civilisation and God.
It was on this journey that Darwin accompanied Fitzroy and his three Fuegians. Jemmy Button became Darwin’s particular friend, and comforted him in his seasickness. The three Fuegians were landed here at Wulaia Cove in January 1833, together with a vicar named Richard Matthews, who married York and Fuegia. A garden was dug and seeds sown. A few weeks later, Fitzroy returned to see how things were getting on. Matthews had lost most of his possessions to the local Yamana, and was about to have the hairs of his beard plucked out. He hurried back on board and was last heard of preaching sermons in Tasmania.
Fuegia and York left the area soon after, travelling west to where York’s tribe, the Alacaloof, lived. He was soon killed in revenge for a murder. Jemmy Button, meanwhile, had continued to live near Wulaia, reverting to tribal manners and costume (mainly smeared sea-lion blubber). And it was here at Wulaia Cove, on 6 November 1859, just over two weeks before The Origin of Species was published, that eight white missionaries were killed while singing a hymn in a half-built church by a group of Yamana armed with clubs. Only the cook, back aboard a schooner making lunch, survived. The man he blamed for the massacre, who was later tried and acquitted for lack of evidence by a sort of court in the Falkland Islands, was Jemmy Button, who the cook alleged was disappointed at the gifts the missionaries had brought.
If Button — Darwin’s friend — was one of the instigators of the massacre of the missionaries, two weeks before the publication of the theory of the struggle for existence, then the incident and its timing carry a portentous symbolism for Darwinism’s long struggle with religion. Today just one full-blooded Yamana woman survives; she is in her nineties, and guards her privacy in the Chilean naval base of Puerto Williams. Measles killed many in the 1860s, including Jemmy Button. Missionaries and sealers lured the rest into settlement and miscegenation. The tribe was already in trouble when Darwin knew them in the 1830s, more than he realised. The men’s staple prey of sea lions having been devastated by white sealers, they were mostly reliant on the women to dive for mussels. Perhaps this is why they struck Darwin so forcibly in their animal ‘state of nature’. For it was this encounter — far more than the finches of the Galapagos — that seems to have first shocked Darwin into thinking that species could change into other species. Darwin spent much longer in Tierra del Fuego than he did in Galapagos.
Remember that the first hunter-gatherer he met, Jemmy Button, was wearing a frock coat. Seeing Jemmy’s cousins naked, painted and wild was a shock: ‘It was without exception the most curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld: I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is a greater power of improvement… it seems yet wonderful to me, when I think over all [Jemmy’s] many good qualities, that he should have been of the same race, and doubtless partaken of the same character, with the miserable, degraded savages whom we first met here.’
Darwin’s theory did not exterminate the Yamana, or massacre the missionaries; just as Fitzroy’s experiment did not save the Yamana, or protect the missionaries. But evolution permeates the history that led to these tragedies. Two races of a single species, both descendants of Africans who crossed the Red Sea 65,000 years ago, encountered each other here in the 1800s and struggled for existence. Thanks to modern medicine and modern morals, culture has now evolved to the point where ideas can clash without people dying. Films can be boycotted without bloodshed. Before we left Wulaia Cove we conducted a little ceremony. A Chilean poet, Christian Warnken, read a Pablo Neruda poem; Ian McEwan followed with a Shakespeare sonnet. Only a flock of ibis broke the silence. There was nobody there to massacre us.
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