Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [45]
As they sailed back toward Wuluaia a few days later, FitzRoy noticed a group of Fuegians, whom he didn’t recognize, wearing white linens, which he did. Mathews was not the kind of missionary who would give away the shirt from his back. FitzRoy rushed onward.
Mathews, much to the captain’s relief, came out to greet the ship, looking mostly as they had left him. But his report was unsatisfactory. He had had almost everything he owned stolen. He had been threatened. His garden had been trampled. “He did not think himself safe among such a set of utter savages as he found them to be, notwithstanding Jemmy’s assurances to the contrary,” FitzRoy wrote. The Richard Mathews experiment had finished, and on February 7, FitzRoy packed Mathews onto a whale boat and sent him back to the Beagle. At least Jemmy, Fuegia Basket, and York Minster seemed to have reintegrated nicely. Some vegetables were sprouting in the garden. FitzRoy felt sanguine.
The Beagle returned to Wuluaia one year later, in February 1834. They found the wigwams empty and no sign of Jemmy onshore. Soon a canoe appeared flying a flag. “Until she was close alongside,” Darwin wrote, “we could not recognize poor Jemmy.”
“It was quite painful to behold him,” Darwin lamented. “Thin, pale & without a remnant of his clothes, excepting a bit of blanket round his waist: his hair, hanging over his shoulders; & so ashamed of himself he turned his back to the ship as the canoe approached. When he left us he was very fat, & so particular about his clothes, that he was always afraid of even dirtying his shoes; scarcely ever without gloves & his hair neatly cut. I never saw so complete and grievous a change.”
FitzRoy rushed Jemmy below deck and had him clothed in English finery, and they proceeded to take tea together. Jemmy still remembered English and had even taught some to his family and to his new wife, who introduced herself to the sailors as “Jemmy Button’s wife.” The next morning, Jemmy told FitzRoy what had happened in the past year. York Minster and Fuegia Basket had stolen all of Jemmy’s clothes and left in the middle of the night to return to York’s homeland. And a warring tribe from the northeast of Tierra del Fuego, called “Ohens” by Jemmy—now called the Onas—had raided the settlement, forcing Jemmy to flee to his own island.
Still, Jemmy did not wish to return to England. He distributed some gifts, including a few spearheads for Darwin and a bow and quiver full of arrows for his schoolmaster in England. The gifts were as comically inappropriate as the tea trays sent the other direction by the missionary society.
Perhaps the musical had absorbed a bit of Darwin’s grief. When the Jemmy actor reappeared near the end, he had lost the tight breeches and teacup and had acquired a club and a loincloth. His hair was longer and stringier. He presented FitzRoy with an animal skin and intimated via grunts that he didn’t want to go back to England now, because he was happy being a savage. Jemmy and company (still played by puppets) then grunted their way offstage while a deeply chastened FitzRoy took the spotlight for his final solo, lamenting his pride and selfishness. “I played with this boy’s soul,” he crooned. “I took a life and treated it as if it was mine, my own to guide, to take to a better world.”
The real FitzRoy, not quite so tormented, reluctantly sailed out of Ponsonby Sound after two days. “Every soul on board was as sorry to shake hands with poor Jemmy for the last time, as we were glad to have seen him,” Darwin wrote. “I hope & have little doubt that he will be as happy as if he had never left his country; which is much more than I formerly thought.” FitzRoy spoke optimistically of the small benefits that might be gained from reintroducing Jemmy, York Minster, and Fuegia Basket to their homeland. “Perhaps,” he speculated, “a shipwrecked seaman may hereafter receive