Free Evolution's Captain by Peter Nichols

to all seamen known as Cape Horn. FitzRoy and a party rowed ashore, climbed the island’s height, and took the usual observations. Then they put aside their instruments and erected an 8-foot high pile of stones over a memorial to dead seamen, broke out the Union Jack, and toasted the health of King William IV. Like tourists everywhere, like the plundering Oxford scholars in Greece or the astronauts who visited the moon, when they rowed away from the island they took with them fragments of Cape Horn.
    Early in May the Beagle anchored in a bay on the east coastof Lennox Island, north of Cape Horn. Three boats headed off to survey the area around wide Nassau Bay. FitzRoy went in one of them with a group of seamen, heading west across Nassau Bay and then north toward a narrow channel discovered by Murray on a boat trip a few weeks earlier. Murray Narrows, as FitzRoy named it, led into what appeared to be a wide straight channel that ran east and west through the heart of Tierra del Fuego, which FitzRoy called Beagle Channel.
    FitzRoy met Fuegians in canoes and ashore, the same Yapoos encountered earlier. Unlike the aggressive, boat-thieving Yamana Fuegians farther west, these natives were mainly interested in barter. They had clearly had contact with sealing vessels, whose voracious appetite for every kind of skin made the Yapoos now attempt to hide their guanaco hides at the sight of the Englishmen. They offered instead fish, which they traded for beads and buttons. With one group, FitzRoy traded a knife for a “very fine dog.”
    On May 11, near the entrance to Murray Narrows, FitzRoy’s boat was intercepted by three canoes eager for trade.
    We gave them a few beads and buttons, for some fish; and, without any previous intention, I told one of the boys in a canoe to come into our boat, and gave the man who was with him a large shining mother-of-pearl button. The boy got into my boat directly, and sat down. Seeing him and his friends quite contented, I pulled onwards, and, a light breeze springing up, made sail. Thinking that this accidental occurrence might prove useful to the natives, as well as to ourselves, I determined to take advantage of it…. “Jemmy Button,” as the boat’s crew called him, on account of his price, seemed to be pleased at his change.
    With orders to be in Rio de Janeiro by June 20, FitzRoy turned the Beagle eastward to survey what remained of the coast of Tierra del Fuego before turning north to Rio and, beyond that, England.
    Four Fuegian captives still remained aboard. FitzRoy now had a plan for them.
    I had…made up my mind to carry the Fuegians…to England; trusting that the ultimate benefits arising from their acquaintance with our habits and language, would make up for the temporary separation from their own country. But this decision was not contemplated when I first took them on board; I then only thought of detaining them while we were on their coasts; yet afterwards finding that they were happy and in good health, I began to think of the various advantages which might result to them and their countrymen, as well as to us, by taking them to England, educating them there as far as might be practicable, and then bringing them back to Tierra del Fuego…. In adopting the latter course I incurred a deep responsibility, but was fully aware of what I was undertaking.
    According to FitzRoy, the Fuegians “understood clearly when we left the coast that they would return to their country at a future time, with iron, tools, clothes, and knowledge which they might spread among their countrymen.” The four natives could not possibly have comprehended such a scheme from a rudimentary exchange that might have communicated, at most, “You come with us, get tools, knives, we bring you back.” But, according to FitzRoy, the only chronicler-witness to what was said and understood, the Fuegians appeared content and interested in self-improvement and made no