Free Evolution's Captain by Peter Nichols Page A

use of several opportunities to escape.
    They helped the crew whenever required; were extremely tractable and good-humoured, even taking pains to walk properly, and get over the crouching posture of their countrymen. When we were at anchor in Good Success Bay, they went ashore with me more than once, and occasionally took an oar in the boat, without appearing to harbour a thought of escape.
    On June 7, the Beagle passed through the Strait of Le Maire, out of the waters of Tierra del Fuego, and sailed north into the warming Atlantic.

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    T he term “collecting” had a particular weight attached to it in nineteenth-century Britain. Explorers in Africa, Asia, and South America felt duty-bound to collect bugs, birds, spiders, flowers, and native nose rings to ship home. Every far-flung outpost of the empire had its local amateur enthusiast: the Indian Raj hill station doctor who sent home a few butterflies, the missionary in Africa who became fascinated with dung beetles, anyone of a scientific bent who gathered examples of the local flora and fauna. He would look for them himself, and his fellow expatriates and the local natives would bring him anything thought to be worthy of his interest.
    These collectors would examine their specimens, categorize, preserve, then package the finer examples with care and send them “home” to England. Sometimes they were sent to a friend who might be storing, housing, or displaying the mounting collection, but just as often to the British Museum or some other interested repository. Country houses, museums, universities, and gentlemen’s clubs filled with specimens from around the globe. Taxidermy became a frenzied profession. England, in that age of expanding exploration and colonial possession, became a vast storehouse of every kind of transportable evidence of the warp and weft of Man and Nature.
    Notable collectors were Lord Elgin, who in 1806 looted ashipful of 2,500-year-old marble statues from the Parthenon in Athens and sent them back to England, and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose eight-year-long wanderings through the Malay Archipelago eventually resulted in 125,660 specimens of plants, insects, and animals shipped home.
    FitzRoy’s savages were a natural part of this ethos. From the moment of first contact, Eskimos, Pygmies, Polynesians, Africans, and “Ioway” American Indians had also been “collected” by European explorers. Captain Cook returned to England at the end of his second voyage with a Tahitian, Omai, who partied in London for two years before returning home with Cook on his last voyage. Fifty-eight thousand people went to see a family of Laplanders with their live reindeer exhibited in London in 1822. Two hundred years earlier, Captain George Weymouth kidnapped five Indians from an island near what is now Port Clyde, Maine, and brought them back to England. They were treated well and when eventually repatriated, they had nothing but good to say of the English. One of them, Tasquantum, or Squanto, taught some English to a friend of his, Samoset, who happened to be in the neighborhood of present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, when the Mayflower dropped anchor in December 1620. When its pilgrim passengers went ashore, they were met by Samoset who flabbergasted them by saying “Welcome” and asking if they had any beer.
    Such kidnap victims were “specimens,” as FitzRoy naturally described his Fuegians, like breadfruit or the Argentine opossum, to be collected and studied for the benefit of science—and for their own sake: what Kipling termed the white man’s burden, the patronizing presumption that it was morally incumbent upon civilized Englishmen to extend (more often than not with overwhelming force) a hand to uplift their colored inferiors. Poked and prodded in all cases, the luckier specimens were treated with genuine compassion and occasionally sent back to their homes with chests of smart clothes