Fin del Mundo: Darwin on humans in Tierra del Fuego and elsewhere
Fig 1. Mussels and limpets in the intertidal zone on the shore of Beagle Channel, near Ushuaia, Argentina. Photo by Warren Allmon.
Introduction
The land at the southernmost tip of South America has an incongruous name. Tierra del Fuego means “land of fire” in Spanish, a strange title to give such a cold place. The name comes from the fires that the indigenous peoples lit to communicate among their frequently far-flung bands. In 1520, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan became the first European to pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of the straits that came to bear his name. When the survivors of his circumnavigation of the globe returned to Spain in 1522 (Magellan was killed in the Philippines in 1521), they described these smoke signals to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who gave the land its name. The Straits of Magellan marks the northern margin of Tierra del Fuego, separating it from the rest of the South American continent.
If, like most visitors, you come from very far away, Tierra del Fuego is a very different looking place, and does indeed feel “far away”, leading to its local nickname “fin del mundo” (the end of the world). This compact mosaic of islands, mountains, bays, and channels, dominated by one large land mass in the northeast, Isla Grande, extends from around 52 to 56 degrees south latitude (about the same as the British Isles in the north), and covers an area slightly larger than West Virginia. (Figure 2 & 3). Climatically, it is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth inhabited regularly by humans. As much as 15 feet of rain fall on its western side every year, yet in the eastern rain shadow of its snow-capped mountains annual precipitation can be as relatively low as 15 inches. Summer snow and sleet are normal occurrences. To its south, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans collide in the Drake Passage, which is routinely described as the most turbulent and storm-prone piece of ocean in the world.[1]
Fig 2. Map of Tierra del Fuego, showing important locations visited by HMS Beagle 1832-1834
Fig 3. Shore of the Beagle Channel, near Ushuaia, Argentina. Photo by Warren Allmon
Fig 4. Southern beech forest comes down to the shoreline of the Beagle Channel, near Ushuaia, Argentina. Photo by Warren Allmon
Fig 5. A Wedgwood anti-slavery ceramic medallion in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The margin says “Am I not a man and a brother?"“ Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art ( The MET; Open Access at the MET license).
The rugged landscape of Tierra del Fuego was – and largely still is – densely forested well up its mountain peaks. Fuegan forests are composed of only 4 species of trees, all of which are commonly referred to as “southern beech”: the lenga (Nothofagus pumilio), guindo (N. betuloides), ñire (N. antarctica), and winter’s bark (Drymis winteri) (Figure 4). N. pumilio and N. antarctica are deciduous; the other two are evergreen and grow at lower elevations and damper environments near the shore. These forests are dense and tangled with branches and fallen trunks, which are covered with moss and lichen. Despite the grandeur of the landscape, the darkness and frequent impassability of the forests, combined with the weather, gives the land a melancholy quality on which visitors have frequently remarked.[2] It was in this extreme and far away place that on December 18, 1832 a 24-year-old Charles Darwin first encountered indigenous non-Europeans in their native land. The experience impressed him greatly, and made a major and probably crucial contribution to his theory of evolution, especially as it applies to humans.[3]
When he published his major statement on evolution, On the Origin of Species, in 1859, Darwin included only one glancing mention of human evolution: “light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history”[4]. He would not publish a detailed account of his views of human evolution until his book Descent of Man appeared in early 1871. This restraint and delay belie what Darwin well knew was one of the major messages of his work: that just like tortoises and mockingbirds, humans were also products of natural processes of change. In his Autobiography, Darwin said that he was convinced as early as “1837 or 1838… that species were mutable productions” and that he “could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law”.[5] Yet he waited another 40 years to fully explain his reasons for that belief.
The path that led Darwin to his views about human evolution is much more complex than him simply applying what he thought about non-human animals to people. It begins even before his famous trip around the world on HMS Beagle with his upbringing. Darwin was part of a wealthy Whig family whose progressive views included abolition, and they were close friends (and married into) another prominent family – the Wedgwoods – who shared their view that slavery was evil. Charles’ grandfather Erasmus was a liberal free thinker who himself flirted with evolution and other “dangerous” ideas. His father Robert married the daughter of the wealthy and politically progressive potter Josiah Wedgwood. Charles also married a Wedgwood, his first cousin Emma. Josiah Wedgwood famously designed, mass produced, and distributed at his own expense a porcelain medallion showing an enslaved black man and bearing the words “Am I not a man and a brother” (Figure 5). Charles thus grew up surrounded by people who were passionately committed to ending slavery, in Britain and elsewhere.[6]
In addition to his upbringing, Charles also had an unusual and influential experience during his two years in medical school in Edinburgh, when he worked closely with a black man named John Edmonstone for several months, learning the art of taxidermy on birds.[7] Edmonstone had been born a slave in Guyana. “We can only guess what Darwin learned in the forty-odd hours spent with John,” write biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore, “but preservation must have accompanied talk of … the rainforest – the lure of the exotic to contrast with the snow and frost” of Edinburgh’s winter.[8] They presumably also talked of slavery. Late in life, Darwin remembered with affection these conversations, referring to Edmonstone as a “negro with whom I happened once to be intimate”[9]
It was with this background that Darwin stepped aboard Beagle in December 1831 as naturalist and captain’s companion, for a circum-global expedition of exploration and surveying.
Fig 6. Sketches of Fuegians published in Robert Fitzroy’s Narrative (1839). Image Credit: Wellcome Images (Wikimedia Commons; Creative Common Attribution 4.0 International license).
Darwin and the Fuegians
The indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego were (and are) commonly called “Fuegians” by outsiders, but this is misleadingly imprecise.[10] At the time of European contact, the natives of the archipelago were divided into several tribes that were characterized by different language and geography, and varying levels of hostility to each other. The Yahgan (or Yamana) lived primarily in the south and east, around the Beagle Channel and Murray Narrows, and relied on canoes made from bark for movement, hunting, and fishing. The Alacaluf (or Kawéskar) lived in the west and were also canoe users. The Hausch (or Manekenk) lived at the eastern tip of Tierra del Fuego, and did not use canoes. The Ona (called “Oens men” by the British) inhabited the main large island of Tierra del Fuego. Like the Haush, they did not use canoes and both tribes were therefore sometimes called “foot Indians” by Europeans. The name Selk’nam was sometimes used for the Ona, and today is sometimes used for all of the indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego.[11]
The native Fuegians were nomadic hunter-gatherers, who moved from one location to another by foot or canoes. Their diet was composed mainly of marine life gathered from the intertidal – mussels and limpets (Figure 1) – as well as seals, fish, berries, and the occasional guanaco (small deer-like relatives of lamas). They had no permanent residences, making temporary wigwams of branches wherever they stopped for extended periods, and little in the way of material culture other than spears and bows and arrows.[12] Their clothing was little more than guanaco skins worn as capes or loin cloths. In such an unforgiving climate, fires were especially valuable, and their upkeep was a great responsibility. Once started, a fire was rarely allowed to die. Embers were carried in canoes on a bed of sand and turf and rekindled on landing. This simple way of life was about as far from that of an Englishman as could be imagined.[13]
December 1832 was not actually Darwin’s first encounter with the people of Tierra del Fuego. Three of them were on the Beagle with him when it left England in December 1831. He therefore had more than a year to learn from them before arriving in their homeland.
The story of these Fuegians of the Beagle is a complicated one.[14] In brief, it goes like this. Beagle’s famous voyage with Darwin on board, from 1831 to 1836, was not the little ship’s first trip to South America. The first voyage of Beagle took place between 1826 and 1830. This too was an exploring and survey mission, but it took a dark turn when the ship’s captain, Pringle Stokes, took his own life. Into his position stepped Robert Fitzroy, just 23 years old, a highly capable and driven Royal Naval officer who, through a combination of accident and missionary zeal, carried out an extraordinary “experiment” (today we would probably say “kidnapping” or “hostage taking”), by bringing four Fuegian natives – three young men and a girl – home to England with him on Beagle. The four were given ridiculously dehumanizing names by the crew: the men were York Minster, age 26, Boat Memory, 20, and Jemmy Button, 14; the girl was named Fuegia Basket, age 9[15]. Fitzroy assumed complete responsibility for them during their time in England, paying for their room, board, and schooling. They learned English, the basics of Christianity, and even met the King and Queen. Fitzroy also made sure that they were inoculated against smallpox; Boat Memory died anyway soon after his arrival, but the other three remained healthy and appeared more or less happy during their stay. Thanks to some lobbying by some of Fitzroy’s well-placed friends, Beagle was recommissioned for a second voyage to South America, during which Fitzroy would bring the three Fuegians back to their homeland, together with an Anglican missionary, to establish what he hoped would be a Christian settlement. Beagle left England on December 27, 1831.[16]
After crossing the Atlantic, and stopping in Brazil and Uruguay, Beagle at last reached Tierra del Fuego. Darwin wrote in his diary on December 16, 1832: “We made the coast of Tierra del Fuego a little to the South of Cape St Sebastian & then altering our course ran along a few miles from the shore.”[17] Two days later, Fitzroy, Darwin, and several other members of the Beagle crew went ashore, and Darwin had his first encounter. Darwin’s often-quoted reactions to this event were vivid:
“It was without exception the most curious & interesting spectacle I ever beheld.— I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage & civilized man is.— It is greater than between a wild & domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is greater power of improvement… I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.”[18]
As the days went by and he had other encounters, his reactions remained stark. Describing a spot where a native man had slept, Darwin wrote “How very little are the habits of such a being superior to those of an animal. — By day prowling along the coast & catching without art his prey, & by night sleeping on the bare ground.” “I shall never forget how savage & wild one group was. — Four or five men suddenly appeared on a cliff near to us. — they were absolutely naked & with long streaming hair; springing from the ground & waving their arms around their heads, they sent forth most hideous yells. Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants.”[19] To his former teacher and mentor at Cambridge University, John Henslow, Darwin wrote:
“The Fuegians are in a more miserable state of barbarism, than I had expected ever to have seen a human being.— In this inclement country, they are absolutely naked, & their temporary houses are like what children make in summer, with boughs of trees.— I do not think any spectacle can be more interesting, than the first sight of Man in his primitive wildness.”[20]
Even a year later when Beagle returned to Tierra del Fuego, Darwin’s reactions were unchanged:
“… I never saw more miserable creatures; stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint & quite naked… their red skins filthy & greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gesticulation violent & without any dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world.”[21]
These passages are sometimes taken as nothing but derogatory and indicative of a racist, imperialistic world view. Museum exhibits throughout Latin America, for example, call Darwin a racist. Some scholars have also criticized him for not just these descriptions, but his implicit and explicit ranking of human races, with white Europeans at the top.[22]
Although, given the totality of his views, Darwin might not be considered a “racist” by the modern definition of the word, there is no denying that he shared many of the assumptions, prejudices, and stereotypes of his time, heritage, and social position, views that are no longer acceptable today[23]. Darwin biographer Janet Browne writes that “We should not be surprised that Darwin held entirely conventional Victorian opinions” about people who did not look or act like him. Darwin was a white, wealthy, Englishman at a time when Britain – through its global empire – was the most powerful nation in the world. “A racial hierarchy,” says Browne, “as Darwin saw it, ran from the most primitive tribes of mankind to the most civilized.” Such views “cast the notion of race into biologically determinist terms, reinforcing contemporary ideas of an inbuilt racial hierarchy and endorsing competitive imperial aggressions.”[24] Furthermore, Browne writes, “there can be no denying the impact of Darwin’s writings in providing authoritative biological backing for ideologies that combined science, eugenics, warfare, colonialism, notions of racial difference, and the superiority of white, Western societies.”[25]
Frequently missing from this charged discussion, however, is the unmistakable role that Darwin’s reaction to and observations of the Fuegians, both on board Beagle and in Tierra del Fuego, had on his evolutionary thinking. Indeed, it is no exaggeration that the utter differentness of these people and their physical environment compared to anything that Darwin had previously experienced, combined with his family background of commitment to human unity, triggered and structured his thinking toward evolution generally and human evolution in particular. As shocked as he was by their appearance and as horrified as he was by their lack of almost all of the material comforts of human society, Darwin was impressed with how the Fuegians had adapted to their extraordinarily harsh environment. The incredibleness of it seemed itself to provide Darwin with the answer to how all of this had come about:
“Whence have these people come? Have they remained in the same state since the creation of the world? What could have tempted a tribe of men leaving the fine regions of the North to travel down the Cordilleras the backbone of America, to invent & build canoes, & then to enter upon one of the most inhospitable countries in the world… There can be no reason for supposing the race of Fuegians are decreasing, we may therefore be sure that he enjoys a sufficient share of happiness (whatever its kind may be) to render life worth having. Nature, by making habit omnipotent, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate & productions of his country.”[26]
Slavery, Race, and Evolution
After the outlawing of slavery in Britain and its colonies, the focus of British abolitionists shifted to the New World, especially the American south, where slavery not only persisted but expanded enormously.[27] In the decades before the Civil War, southern slave states were increasingly insistent on the perpetuation and spread of their “domestic institution”, and this was accompanied by the development of a “scientific racism” that became known as the “American school of anthropology”. Numerous books appeared in the U.S. purporting to demonstrate empirically the inferiority of blacks compared to whites. One of the arguments made by this “school” was that blacks were, in fact, a separate species from whites, and had been separately created. This “pluralist” or “polygenic” view contrasted with the “unitarist” or “monogenic” view, which argued that humans were one species composed of closely related races. Although the views of authors were complex, supporters of slavery tended to favor polygeny, while supporters of emancipation and abolition (such as the Darwins and Wedgwoods) tended to favor monogeny.[28]
Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage in 1836, and opened his first “transmutation notebook” in July 1837, signaling his conversion to an evolutionary view of life. He now began to gather all kinds of information supporting the idea that all species shared a common ancestor and had changed over time, which he came to call descent with modification. This included humans. He compiled similarities between humans and non-humans, which could serve as evidence that humans had evolved from other animals. And he followed closely the writings of American racist polygenists such as Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, who would, after publication of the Origin, become one of Darwin’s staunchest critics. Darwin’s research was pointing him toward both the unity of humankind (for which his abolitionist upbringing had preconditioned him), and its derivation from earlier, non-human species. He was thus simultaneously arguing against slavery and for human evolution.
Everything pointed Darwin to the conclusion that all modern humans were one species, evolved from a common ancestor. A crucial part of the evidence were his observations of indigenous people, especially the Fuegians. In Descent of Man, he wrote:
“Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body, &c., yet if their whole organization be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points. Many of these points are of so unimportant or of so singular a nature, that it is extremely improbable that they should have been independently acquired by aboriginally distinct species or races. The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the “Beagle”, with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours”[29]
Such thinking about human unity, however, led inevitably to a search for explanations for human diversity, or “racial” differences.[30] Darwin sought evidence that his preferred mechanism for evolutionary change – natural selection – was responsible for such differences, but he ultimately decided that selective explanations for features such as skin color and hair texture were unlikely. This led him to invent a second hypothesis of evolutionary causation, which he called sexual selection. In simple terms, sexual selection said that organisms develop some traits not because they enhance survival but because they enhance reproduction, by making members of one sex more attractive to members of the other. When applied to humans, Darwin suggested that the differences between human “races” were a result of different features being found attractive in different populations.[31]
Fig 7. Cartoon from Punch Magazine, 1861, connecting the obvious implication of the recently published Origin of Species to the abolitionist medallion manufactured by Darwin’s Wedgwood relatives. Image Credit: Pictorial Press Llt, licensed with permission.
This is the explanation for the peculiar structure of Descent of Man, Darwin’s major statement on human evolution, which has the subtitle “and selection in relation to sex”. Descent has two parts: the first, “The origin of man”, has 250 pages, while the second has 554 (longer than the entire Origin of Species), of which 486 pages are dedicated to sexual selection in non-human animals, and 68 pages to sexual selection applied to humans. In other words, most of Descent is devoted to the application of sexual selection to non-humans.[32] In the introduction to Descent, Darwin says that “The sole object of this work is to consider, firstly, whether man, like every other species, is descended from some pre-existent form.”. Yet, counterintuitively, Descent argues for human unity (and essential equality) while explaining human differences. Darwin maintained that all humans share a common ancestor, while explaining that the differences among human “races” were due not to natural selection but to sexual selection, which followed no path toward perfection but rather a highly contingent path determined by what different peoples happen to find attractive.[33]
This complicated intellectual structure of Darwin’s thinking was the focus of a fascinating 2009 book by Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and John Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause. In this book, the authors argue that the Darwin family’s unswerving opposition to slavery was an essential ingredient in the development of Charles’ formulation of evolution, not just for humans but for all of the Earth’s species. Whether or not Desmond and Moore’s argument is completely correct (Darwin did, after all, have a lot of non-human evidence for evolution), the implied connection between slavery, race, and evolution in the Origin of Species was not lost for at least some readers and at least one Punch cartoonist, who connected humans evolving from apes to the Wedgwood legacy of advocating for abolition.[34] (Figure 7) Desmond and Moore’s argument also has the fascinating implication that Darwinian evolution might not have been developed first for non-humans and then applied to humans, but actually originated as a theory about humans which was then applied to everything else.
In this context, Darwin’s immediate reactions to the indigenous people at the end of the world, while justifiably judged as offensive by modern standards, can perhaps be seen in a slightly different light. They were recorded by a young man exploring a foreign world for the first time, according to the social mores of his day, and yet they were revolutionary in where they led their author. Yes, Darwin thought that white Europeans were superior to Fuegians, but not because they were inherently so. The differences he witnessed between Jemmy Button and the natives who had never left Tierra del Fuego spoke to the modifications brought by “civilization”, not innate inferiority. The similarities of the natives he met in Tierra del Fuego to non-humans were not evidence that those people were closer than Europeans to animals, only that European culture had obscured those similarities.
The story of Darwin’s thinking about Fuegians and evolution is also another entry in the very long list of examples of how broad his conception of evolution was from its very beginning. Almost from the moment he opened that notebook in 1837 (and perhaps before), Darwin understood that evolution applied to all life on Earth, from plants to earthworms to humans, and for humans it applied to our bodies, behavior, beauty, and everything else that makes us who and what we are. Light was indeed thrown on humans and their history, as well as on every other living thing.
Postscript: What happened to the Fuegians
Beagle departed from Tierra del Fuego for the last time in March 1834. In the following years, Jemmy Button was part of a group of Fuegians transported by missionaries for a time to the Falkland Islands. In November 1859, the Patagonian Mission Society’s ship Allen Gardiner attempted to establish a permanent mission at Wulaia, where Fitzroy had failed in 1833, but on November 6, the missionaries and all but one of the ship’s crew were killed by a group of Yamana, and Jemmy was blamed as having had a major part in the incident. At a subsequent enquiry, Jemmy was exonerated but his exact role was never determined. Jemmy apparently died in the summer of 1863 when a wave of introduced disease swept his community.
Fuegia Basket stayed with York Minster and had two children by him. In 1873 a party of Yamanas visited the mission at Ushuaia, and the group included Fuegia, who was accompanied by a much younger man whom she said was her husband. She told the missionary Thomas Bridges that York Minster had been killed in retaliation for the murder of another man. In February 1883, Bridges saw her for the last time, at London Island in the extreme west of Tierra del Fuego. She was 62 years old and in weak condition.[35]
As was true for almost all indigenous American peoples, European contact was a catastrophe for the Fuegians. When Darwin and Fitzroy were in Tierra del Fuego, there were perhaps 7,000-9,000 Fuegian natives of all tribes living there, of whom perhaps 3,000 were Yamana. As a result of European disease and intentional extermination by European settlers, by 1908 there were barely 170 Yamana alive, and by 1947 there were only 43 and fewer than 150 pure Fuegian of any tribe. The last Selk’nam born in her traditional culture died in 1966. One or two individuals of pure or mostly Fuegian heritage may have survived into the 1970s, although according to the 2017 census, 1,600 people declared themselves Yaghan in Argentina.[36]
Notes
[1] Hopwood (2000: 5-6).
[2] The first captain of the Beagle, Pringle Stokes, wrote in his in his journal about the environment of Tierra del Fuego: “Nothing could be more dreary than the scene around us. The lofty, bleak and barren heights that surround the inhospitable shores of this inlet were covered, even low down their sides, with dense clouds, upon which the fierce squalls that assailed us beat, without causing any change: they seemed as immovable as the mountains where they rested. Around us, and some of them distant no more than two thirds of a cable’s length, were rocky islets, lashed by a tremendous surf; and as if to complete the dreariness and utter desolation of the scene, even birds seemed to shun the neighbourhood. The weather was that in which … ‘the soul of man dies in him’.” (Stokes’ journal quoted in King, 1839, p. 179). Even while remarking on the region’s “savage magnificence”, Darwin wrote similarly in his journal: “There is no level ground & all the hills are so thickly clothed with wood as to be quite impassable… in this still solitude, death instead of life is the predominant spirit… Whilst looking round on this inhospitable region we could scarcely credit that man existed in it… Considering this is the middle of the summer & that the Latitude is nearly the same as Edinburgh, the climate is singularly uncongenial. Even on the fine days, there is a continual succession of rain or hail storms; so that on shore there is not a dry spot.” (Beagle Diary, 12/19/1832, 12/26/1832; Keynes, 1988, pp. 125-126, 129)
[3] Tierra del Fuego was influential to Darwin beyond his indigenous encounter. It was here, he would recall more than forty years later, that he first realized that “I could not employ my life better than an adding a little to natural science”. (Autobiography, p. 22)
[4] Darwin (1859, p. 488).
[5] Barlow (1958, p. 130).
[6] The British Parliament outlawed the international slave trade in 1807 (two years before Charles was born) and it was outlawed in British colonies in 1833.
[7] Darwin’s teacher, John Edmonstone, came to Glasgow in 1817 with his former ‘master’, Charles Edmonstone, and, now freed, took his surname. He moved to Edinburgh by at least 1823. John had traveled through the Guyanese rainforest with Edmonstone’s friend, the then-famous South American explorer Charles Waterton (1782-1865), and it may have been on these travels that he learned what became his trade in Scotland. In Edinburgh, he lived close to the University Museum, where he made a living stuffing birds shot by local gentry and giving lessons like those he gave to a 16-going-on-17-year-old Darwin. (See Desmond and Moore, 2009: 18-26; and https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/john-edmonstone-the-man-who-taught-darwin-taxidermy.html)
[8] Desmond and Moore, 2009: 24).
[9] Darwin (1871, v. 1, p. 232).
[10] I have used the term “Fuegian” in the remainder of this essay simply for convenience, rather than the more awkward “natives of Tierra del Fuego”.
[11] The name Yaghan was coined by the missionary Thomas Bridges (1842-1898), who lived among the peoples of Tierra del Fuego and founded a mission that became what is now the city of Ushuaia, Argentina, on the Beagle Channel. The name Yamana means “alive”, “living”, or “man” in their language. For more information on the native tribes, see Hazlewood (2000), De Paolo (2010: 43), and Lanata (2002).
[12] Another important element of their material culture was body paint, which Darwin went to some trouble to study, and even make a collection of its different types, during his visit (see Owen, 2019).
[13] The Fuegian’s language was originally thought by Europeans to be extremely simple, but this turned out to be completely wrong. Darwin wrote in his diary: “… Their language does not deserve to be called articulate: Capt. Cook says it is like a man clearing his throat…” (Beagle diary, 12/18/1832; Keynes, 1988: 124). After decades of living in Tierra del Fuego, however, the missionary Thomas Bridges compiled a Yamana dictionary of more than 32,000 words. “The language, he found, had more inflections than Greek, more words than English and when constructed phonetically the structure suggested the possibility of two of three more characters than the Roman alphabet… The language was far more sophisticated than had been thought.” (Hazlewood, 2000: 323-324). See also Radick (2010).
[14] The full story of the Fuegians and the Beagle is told particularly well by Hazlewood (2000).
[15] Their real names, as recorded by Captain Fitzroy in his Narrative of the first Beagle voyage (1839), were Yokcushlu (Fuegia), Orundellico (Jemmy), and El’leparu (York). See https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/yokcushlu-fuegia-basket
[16] The “mission” was established in Wulaia Cove in January 1833. The Beagle crew and missionary Richard Matthews built substantial wigwams and planted gardens with English vegetables. But after just over a week alone with the natives, Matthews reported the theft of almost all of his belongings and constant threats to his safety. He returned to Beagle, and the “experiment” was abandoned. Fitzroy, however, took some comfort in what had been accomplished:
“I cannot help still hoping that some benefit, however slight, may result from the intercourse of these people, Jemmy, York and Fuegia, with other natives of Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps a ship-wrecked seaman may hereafter receive help and kind treatment from Jemmy Button’s children; prompted, as they can hardly fail to be, by the traditions they will have heard of men of other lands; and by an idea, however faint, of their duty to God as well as their neighbor.” (Fitzroy, 1839, p. 327).
[17] Beagle Diary, December 16, 1832; Keynes (1988, p. 120)
[18] Beagle Diary, December 18, 1832; Keynes (1988, p. 122)
[19] Beagle Diary, January 20, 1833; Keynes (1988, p. 134)
[20] Darwin to Henslow, April 11, 1833. See https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-204.xml
[21] Beagle Diary, Feb. 25, 1834; Keynes (1988, p. 222)
[22] See, e.g., Rose (2009); Fuentes (2021a,b).
[23] See Saini (2019) and Peretó and Bertranpetit (2022: 5).
[24] Browne (2022a: 23-24).
[25] Browne (2022b: 388). Darwin was self-aware enough about European culture to remark about an encounter he had with some Ona in eastern Tierra del Fuego: “These Indians… speak a little Spanish & English, which will greatly contribute to their civilization or demoralization: as these two steps seem to go hand in hand.” (Beagle Diary, Feb. 13, 1834; Keynes, 1988, p. 221)
[26] Beagle Diary, Feb. 25, 1834; Keynes (1988, p. 222)
[27] See Pargas (2023).
[28] For discussion of the history of the racist “American school” see Desmond and Moore (2009).
[29] Darwin (1871, vol. 1, pp. 231-2).
[30] Modern science unanimously agrees that “race” is an invalid and useless descriptor of human variation. While there are variations that are more common in some human populations than others, there is for most traits vastly more variation within than between the groups that are commonly referred to as “races”. See, e.g., Gould (1996) and Saini (2019).
[31] For a detailed exploration of sexual selection, see Richards (2017).
[32] Ginnobili (2023: 336).
[33] Ginnobili (2023: 337).
[34] While the book was generally very favorably reviewed, not all commentators were convinced the authors make their case (see, e.g., Maienschein, 2010).
[35] Keynes (1988, p. 228); Hazelwood (2000, p. 327).
[36] This information comes from Hazlewood (2000: 354), Duncan (1991: 14), and https://www.argentina.gob.ar/sites/default/files/pueblos_originarios_patagonia.pdf. See also https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/dec/21/darwin-in-patagonia-tracing-the-naturalists-route-around-south-america
References and Further Reading
Barlow, N., editor, 1958, The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882. With the original omissions restored. Collins, London, 253 p.
Browne, J., 2022a, The historical background to Darwin’s Descent of Man. In Illuminating human evolution. J. Bertranpetit and J. Peretó, eds., Springer Nature, Singapore, pp. 17-27.
Browne, J., 2022b, Reflections on Darwin historiography. Journal of the History of Biology, 55: 381-393.
Darwin, C.R., 1859, On the origin of species. John Murray, London, 502p.
Darwin, C.R., 1871, The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. 2 vols. John Murray, London, 423, 474 p.
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