Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [47]
He pulled out another postcard, of another group of Indians from the northern part of the island. In this picture, the people wore coats made from guanaco furs and stood upright with good posture. “What do you see?” he asked.
“They look different,” I said.
“There is a difference,” he replied. “To a European, these Indians look better. Darwin was very young. With very little experience. The Indians of the north were more normal for him. Imagine what he saw here. The natives were dirty. They didn’t have clothes. They’re one-and-a-half meters tall.”
Reyes didn’t excuse Darwin’s naiveté, but his side-by-side comparison provided an explanation. For a 23-year-old from a land where everyone wore wool and lived in brick houses and drove horse-drawn carriages, people sleeping naked in the rain must have seemed a breathtaking contrast. Except for the anthropologists who have discovered new Amazonian tribes, the experience Darwin had in meeting the Fuegians cannot be replicated today. Seeing rural farmers sleeping outside in sub-zero weather in the Andes or the people living in favelas in Rio de Janeiro may inspire a similar feeling of wonder at the differences between us, but I imagine it’s nothing like the shock Darwin felt. This wasn’t just the most curious and interesting spectacle he ever beheld, it was something he repeatedly referenced later in his life, even in his scientific work. Clearly, the Fuegians had set Darwin thinking: How are we the same and yet so different? Where do these vast differences come from?
The Descent of Man, published in 1871, isn’t just Darwin grappling with a lifetime of abolitionism. It’s his attempt to finally answer a question that had leaped out at him nearly four decades earlier in the savage conditions of Tierra del Fuego.
That night in the hostel kitchen I cooked an Argentine steak, sat down to eat, and found myself opposite a young traveler. He slouched in his chair, pushed his noodle dinner around with his fork, and looked out the window at the overcast night sky. We exchanged the standard introductory formalities, and after learning he was nineteen, from Canada, and named Thomas, I asked how long he had been in Ushuaia.
“Too long, really,” he said. “This town just doesn’t do it for me. It’s too much like Canada. Maybe for you, coming from California, this weather is new or something. I can get rain and snow at home. They’ve got the same scenery. Same forests. They even took our beavers.”
(Beavers—small, furry, cute beavers—have become the brown scourge of Tierra del Fuego. Someone had the idea of introducing them in the early 1900s, to be hunted for their pelts. The pelt market collapsed almost immediately, but the beavers liked the scenery and decided to stay on and eat the island alive. The Argentine government started offering a small bounty for beaver pelts, but it didn’t help much. A local farmer explained to me that you could go out to the beaver pond, spend all day freezing cold for one decent shot at one beaver, and, if—if, he emphasized—you managed to hit one, all the other beavers within a ten-mile radius would vanish for the next few weeks. The farmer told me that they were considering introducing grizzly bears as a pest-control method.)
“At least,” I countered, “your beavers have left a trail of destruction and carnage.”
“That’s true,” Thomas said, nodding. “No natural predators. Reproducing like crazy. I saw all the dead trees in the park today.”
Thomas was impressed by the beavers. They were, he said, probably the most interesting part of the whole Tierra del Fuego experience.
He looked over at the book I was reading.
“Charles Darwin,” he said. “Why have I heard that name before?”
9: BAHIA BLANCA
The Gaucho Lifestyle
Upon reading my passport, & finding that I was a Naturalista, his respect & civility were as strong as his suspicions had