This Thing Of Darkness (60 page)

‘The Oens-men came, Capp‘en Fitz’oy, when the leafs turned red. Always when the leafs turn red there is no food, the Oens-men are hungry. So they come to my land. Yamana people always leave tents, run away. But Jemmy cannot leave mission. Have to stay with mission. Many Yamana people at mission, bad people, try to steal Jemmy’s tools, Jemmy’s clothes. Look for Jemmy’s things, not look for Oens-men. God sends Oens-men to punish them. Oens-men come from the mountains behind Woollya, surprise Yamana people. Much fighting, many dead.’

‘And York? Fuegia? Did they survive?’

Jemmy’s face clouded with anger.

‘York go to secret place under Mister Matthews’s floor, take big spade. Says he will kill anyone who comes near. Pick up big stones. Oens-men afraid - not come near him. After Oens-men are gone, York says to Jemmy, it is not safe at Woollya. We must take tools, knives, axes, all precious things, go to York’s land with Fuegia. Jemmy says yes, I will go with you. York makes big canoe. Before we leave, York sets fire to mission. Says bad people must not live there. We leave at dawn, travel west towards sunset. Sleep on island where channel goes two different ways. Jemmy wakes in night - hears noise. York is above him. York have moved quietly, like big cat. Jemmy tries to get free, but York have put his knife
here,
at Jemmy’s throat. Makes Jemmy take off clothes. York takes
everything,
Capp‘en Fitz’oy,
everything.
All Jemmy’s clothes. Take shirt, breeches, gloves, nice shiny boots. All tools,
everything.
Leaves Jemmy to die on island. He say Jemmy foolish, he say white man foolish, he say Capp‘en Fitz’oy foolish, all believe York lies. He say if Mister Matthews stayed he will kill him too. York say he too clever for white men, have clever plan from beginning. I say Capp‘en Fitz’oy not foolish, I say Capp‘en Fitz’oy English
gen‘leman.
Keep his word. York laugh at Jemmy. Not see him again.’

‘Then what happened, Jemmy? How did you get away from there?’

‘I swim home, Capp‘en Fitz’oy! York think is too far for Jemmy - many miles - thinks Jemmy will die. York say Jemmy go soft in Wal’amstow. But Jemmy good swimmer, like seal. Jemmy not soft. Jemmy swim all way back here. So York is big fool, not Jemmy.’

‘And how are you now, Jemmy? Are you well, in yourself?’

‘I am hearty, sir, never better. Jemmy eat plenty fruits, plenty birdies, ten guanaco in snow time. And too much fish,’ he avowed, patting his stomach exaggeratedly. All present knew that he was lying.

‘I am glad to hear it, Jemmy,’ said FitzRoy limply, unable to think of any other response.

Jemmy put down his fork. ‘Jemmy bring presents. Look.’ He dragged his bundle from under the table and unwrapped the blanket. ‘No money. No shops. Jemmy cannot buy presents. So he make them himself.’

With a flourish, he produced a handmade bow and arrows, and a quiver painstakingly sewn from guanaco-leather.

‘For my old friend Schoolmaster Jenkins, of St Mary’s Infants’ School. Please to give to him.’

‘I’ll make sure he gets it, Jemmy, I promise,’ said FitzRoy.

‘These are for you, Mr Philosopher.’ He handed to Darwin two immaculately carved spear-heads.

‘Why, thank you, Jemmy. That‘s ... that’s most extraordinarily generous of you.’

‘And for you too, my confidential friend.’ There were two further spear-heads for Bynoe.

‘Jemmy, I - I’m speechless.’

‘For you, my great friend Mr Bennet, and for you, Capp‘en Fitz’oy, I give you this.’ Reverentially, he unrolled two otterskins, carefully cleaned and preserved. ‘Better than guanaco-skin. Better than sealskin. Very difficult to find. I catch them myself for my friends. My friends from Englan’, who will never let me down as long as I shall live.’ Jemmy’s voice cracked as he reached the end of his speech.

‘Thanks, Jemmy,’ said Bennet, his voice so hoarse with emotion it could hardly be heard in the little cabin. A big fat tear rolled off the end of Jemmy’s nose and fell with a splat on to the linen tablecloth.

‘Jemmy, I...’ FitzRoy tailed off in desperation. A low ululation of distress could be heard floating up from the canoe outside.

‘Mister Button! Mister Button!’ came Mrs Button’s plaintive call.

‘Jemmy,’ said FitzRoy, taking the Fuegian’s hands urgently in his own, ‘do you want to come home with us? Home to England in the
Beagle?’

‘Mister Button! Mister Button!’ came another moan from outside.

‘Capp’en Fitz’oy, I ...’

Jemmy’s eyes were wet with misery. ‘Jemmy must stay here with Mrs Button. She not want to come on the
Beagle.
Much scared of white people. Mrs Button is with child.’

‘Congratulations, Jemmy ... I - I didn’t realize.’

‘Jemmy’s home is here. I am English gen’leman, Capp‘en Fitz’oy, but Jemmy’s home is here. Do you understand?’

‘I understand. I understand, Jemmy, my dear, dear friend.’ He clasped the Fuegian’s hands so tightly that his knuckles blanched.

‘But Capp’en Fitz’oy will come back? Will come back in the
Beagle
again to see Jemmy Button?’

‘I ... I’ll do my best, Jemmy. It depends where the Admiralty sends me. But I promise I will do my level best to visit you in the future.’

‘Thank you, my friend. I say to Mrs Button, Capp’en Fitz’oy will not forget Jemmy Button. He will come back. Capp’en Fitz’oy is English gen’leman.’

‘Mister Button! Mister Button!’ The call from outside was shot through with distress. FitzRoy relaxed his grip.

‘You had better go, Jemmy. I should like to keep you with us, I should like that so very much, but I fear that you must leave.’

‘Goodbye, my dearest friends. Jemmy will always remember you.’

‘And we will remember you, Jemmy, I give you my word.’

‘As an English gen’leman, Capp‘en Fitz’oy.’

‘As an English gentleman, Jemmy.’

 

The
Beagle
slipped her moorings at first light, and drifted serenely away from the shore on the morning tide. As she stood out of Ponsonby Sound, Jemmy and his wife crept wearily out from the clump of rushes where they had hidden for the night, their bodies curled protectively around a full blanket-load of presents. The Fuegian lit a signal fire to herald the ship’s departure. FitzRoy and Darwin stood on the poop and watched the insubstantial column of smoke make its connection between the lonely meadows of Woollya and the passing clouds above. A gust of wind caught it and bent it like a reed, but it refused to break.

‘Perhaps ... perhaps some shipwrecked seaman will one day hereafter receive help and kind treatment from Jemmy Button’s children. Perhaps they will be prompted by the traditions they will have heard, of men from other lands. Perhaps they will have an idea, however faint, of their duty to God as well as to their neighbour.’

‘My dear FitzRoy, I do not doubt for one second that he will be just as happy as if he had never left his country.’

‘Do you really believe so?’

‘I do.’

The tiny figure by the signal fire was waving now, his hand describing wide, metronomic arcs as if he were copying the gesture from a handbook. Discreetly, Darwin left FitzRoy to his private agonies and wandered along the deck. He found Bennet grasping the rail with a hopeless ferocity, peering into the dawn light as if terrified of the moment when he might no longer be able to distinguish Jemmy from his surroundings.

‘What really hurts, Philos,’ said the coxswain, without averting his gaze even for a second, ‘is that I know I’ll never see him again.’

‘I do not think any of us ever will.’

‘It could all have been so different. If only we’d ... if we’d ... I don’t know.’

‘May I ask you a question, Mr Bennet?’

‘By all means.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Do I believe in God? Of course I believe in God, Philos. That is ... on days like today ... sometimes it’s hard, Philos, sometimes it’s hard. But do I believe in God? Yes. Yes I do. Leastways, I’m sure I do.’

‘Raise tacks, sheets an’ mains’l haul

We’re bound for Vallaparayser round the Horn!

Me boots an’ clothes are all in pawn

An’ it’s bleedin’ draughty round the Horn!’

 

So sang the crew, with a surge of relief, as the
Beagle
and the
Adventure
finally drew a line under the year’s surveying and headed for the sanctuary of Chili’s warm, fruit-laden valleys - except that, of course, there was no longer any need to proceed via the Horn.

They had repaired the damage to the
Beagle’s
keel by running her up to the Rio Santa Cruz in Patagonia and beaching her in the estuary, where a forty-foot tide swept in and out. Laid up on the sands amid a crowd of disgruntled sealions, the little ship had assumed the proportions of a leviathan, her fat, glistening, slimy belly towering above the crew, as if she might subside and suffocate them were she to breathe out. While Carpenter May and his team set to work, FitzRoy had mounted an expedition upriver to try to reach the Andes from the east. Amid swarms of persistent horseflies, they had man-hauled the whaleboats against the icy current for three back-breaking weeks, using track ropes fastened to lanyards made from broad canvas strips. For two hundred and fifty miles they had pulled, up a lonely, twisting glen lined by black basalt cliffs. The countryside around, if one could call it that, was a featureless plain of volcanic lava, punishingly hot by day and freezing by night, its ebony sheen flat to the horizon. But the river had cut deep into the lava: the ravine up which they slogged was three hundred feet in depth and more than a mile across. Beady-eyed condors stood sentry on their basaltic battlements, but otherwise there were precious few living creatures to be seen. There were Indian tracks about their camp in the mornings, though, evidence that they had been thoroughly investigated during the night. Here, well south of the front line against General Rosas, it appeared that the white man constituted a mere curiosity and not an adversary to be feared. There were puma tracks, too, for the Indians were not the only lords desirous to know who had intruded into their land. As with the Indians, the men on watch had seen and heard nothing, not even a rustle in the reeds.

In silence the party trudged upriver, each man feeling the curious self-consciousness that comes from the knowledge of being watched. The Andes came in sight, and the river assumed the milky blue colour characteristic of glacial melt, but thereafter the mountains seemed to maintain a constant distance, refusing to come any closer. The men stood in their echoing glen and gazed at the distant snowy peaks, knowing that they had become the first Europeans to behold this view, but knowing also that they could go no further. It was, thought FitzRoy, a wild and lonely prospect, entirely fit for the breeding-place of lions.

Whether it was the isolation of their surroundings, or a sense of compromise brought on by the failure of the Woollya mission, FitzRoy and Darwin felt instinctively drawn to one another, not just emotionally but in their scientific analysis of the surroundings. Climbing the valley was like walking through a cutaway diagram of the different geological layers: with the precision of a well-set-out textbook, the scenery invited the two men to reconsider their arguments. Two weeks upriver they encountered a vast layer of marine detritus a hundred feet thick, containing smooth-rolled stones and the shattered remnants of delicate shallow-water sea-shells embedded in viscous mud. The shells, Darwin had to admit, had been smashed, crushed and mixed together as if by a great catastrophe. Whatever it was that had brought so many stones to one place must have been an event of terrifying force. Perhaps they had, after all, been torn down by the great tides of a flooded world. FitzRoy, too, felt in a mood to compromise. It had been so much easier to imagine the Biblical flood in the midst of Tierra del Fuego’s lashing storms, but here in the desiccated plain his sense of certainty began to evaporate. Could such a vast layer of sea-detritus really have been effected by a forty-day flood? Surely it would have required an inundation of immense duration to roll these shingle-stones so smooth? How many millennia would the river have taken to cut a ravine through three hundred feet of solid lava? A sense of anxiety assailed him: the new science of geology promised to order God’s universe, but here it also seemed to open the prospect that man might be more insignificant than he had ever realized. Was the world really aeons old, as Lyell was now suggesting? Was man really lost in time as well as in space?

‘“The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful doubt,”’ said Darwin, quietly, feeling Shelley’s lines appropriate to the moment. FitzRoy felt bound to agree with him.

Conrad Martens sat down to paint the scene; then, with their food almost exhausted, FitzRoy gave the order to turn back. It took them just two days to shoot back downriver, to the rejuvenating sight of the Beagle standing at anchor, fresh-painted and jaunty as a frigate, and a cheerful, welcoming, ‘Hello hello hello!’ from Sulivan.