Uttermost part of the earth. Tierra del Fuego's Indians and Settlers: A personal story.

We who latter passed many years of our lives in daily contact with these people can find only one explanation for this shocking mistake. We suppose that, when questioned, York Minster, or Jimmy Button, would not trouble in the least to answer truthfully, but would merely give the reply that he felt was expected or desired. In the early days their limited knowledge of English would not allow them to explain at any length, and, as we know, it is much easier to answer “yes” than “no”. so the statements with which these young men and little Fuegia Basket have been credited were, in fact, no more than agreement with suggestions made by their questioners.

We can imagine their reactions when asked what was, to them, a ridiculous question, such as:
“Do you kill and eat men?”
They would at first be puzzled, but when the enquiry was repeated and they grasped its meaning and realized the answer that was expected, they would naturally agree. The interrogator would follow this with:
“What people do you eat?”
No answer.
“Do you eat bad people?”
“Yes.”
“When there are no bad people, what then?”
No answer.
“Do you eat your old women?”
“Yes.”

Once this game was started and their knowledge of English increased, theses irresponsible youngsters, encouraged by having their evidence so readily accepted and noted down as fact, would naturally start inventing on their own. We are told that they described, with much detail, how the Fuegians ate enemies killed in battle and, when there were no such victims, devoured their old women. When asked if they ate dogs when hungry, they said they did not, as dogs were useful for catching otter, whereas the old women were of no use at all. These unfortunates, they said, were held in the thick smoke till they choked to death. The meat, they stated, was very good.

This delectable fiction once firmly established, any subsequent attempt at denial would not have been believed, but would have been attributed to a growing unwillingness to confess the horrors in which they had formerly indulged. Accordingly, these young story-tellers allowed their imaginations full rein and vied with each other in the recounting of still more fantastic tales, emboldened by the admiration of the other two.

The belief that the Fuegians were cannibals was not the only mistake Charles Darwin made about them. Listening to their speech, he got the impression that they were repeating the same phrases over and over again, and therefore came to the conclusion that something like one hundred words would cover the whole language. We who learned as children to speak Yaghan know that, within its own limitations, it is infinitely richer and more expressive than English or Spanish. My father’s Yahgan (or Yamana) - English Dictionary, to which I shall refer later, contains no fewer than 32000 words and inflections, the number of which might have been greatly increased without departing from correct speech.

The Yahgans had, at the very least, five names for “snow”. For “beach” they had even more, depending on a variety of factors: the position of the beach in relation to that of the speaker, the direction in which it faced, whether the speaker had land or water between it and himself – and so on. Words varied with the situation of the speaker. A word used in a canoe might differ from that used to describe the same thing when the speaker was on dry land. Further variations were brought in by the compass direction of the hearer and whether he, too, was ashore or afloat. For family connections sometimes so distant that, in English, they would need a sentence to explain, the Yahgans had as many as fifty different words, each descriptive of a particular, and often involved, relationship. Among the variations of the verb “to bite” was a single word that meant “coming unexpectedly on a hard substance when eating something soft” – e.g. a pearl in a mussel.

Not so, however, at the Laiwaia settlement on Navarin Island, which had been started in January, 1868, with Okoko, Pinoi, Lukka and Jack. After Jack had left, the others had been overwhelmed by the jealousy of their poorer fellows. There had been fighting, and at nearby spot a man had certainly been killed. George Okoko, head man of the settlement had had his house burnt down when he was out fishing. He had hastened to dig his potatoes (four sacks, all that his enemies had left him) and had escaped…

On other islands results were not so spectacular. Sometimes the rabbits were exterminated by birds of prey before they had had a chance to multiply; sometimes they found the land too wet or rocky for burrowing; and sometimes the natives hunted them with dogs until none remained.

In Stirling House and the Lawrences’ home down the road all the children were struck down at once. In the orphanage Mrs. Whaits had thirty Yahgan children on her hands, all victims of the epidemic. My mother and Yekadahby, neither of whom had ever heard of typhoid-pneumonia, formed a different opinion from that of Doctors Alvarez and Fenton, and dealt with us accordingly. Mrs. Lawrence and her sister, Miss Martin, who had come to live with them at the settlement, agreed with the diagnosis of Mother and Yekadahby - an– so did mrs. Whaits. They all decided that it was measles.

None of the grown members of the Mission party, who had all had measles in their youth, contracted the complaint, which goes to prove that this time the ladies knew better than the medical men. It is astonishing that this childish ailment, contagious in civilized communities, yet seldom fatal, should wipe out over half the population of a district and leave the survivors so reduced in vitality that another fifty per cent succumbed during the next two years, apparently from the after-effects of the attack. It must be that our ancestors, for generations past, have suffered from periodical epidemics of measles, and we, in consequence, have gained a certain degree of immunity from it. On the other hand, the Yahgans, though incredibly strong, and able to face cold and hardship of every kind and to recover almost miraculously from serious wounds, had never had to face this evil thing, and therefore lacked the stamina to withstand it. It is hardly to be wondered at that the doctors failed to recognize it for what it really was, when it appeared in such a virulent form.