INDIANS AND THE BEAGLE

Tuesday Morning, 12 Feb 08, MS Nordnorge, Beagle Channel

WAYSOUTH INDIANS

In the south south lived natives crude,
Greased with fat and mostly nude.
Some were foot Indians;
Some were canoe Indians,
And their women dove for seafood.

They live in pictures that we see.
Otherwise they’re history,
Wiped out by blights
Because of some whites
Such as we.

Yesterday was spent entirely at sea. We downloaded our pictures to our computer, erased them from our main photo card, and charged our camera batteries. In three sections, I walked a total of at least six miles on the deck. The weather and seas continued amazingly moderate for this area although we’ve seen some whitecaps and experienced some rocking of the ship. In the morning we attended a lecture by Rosita Dorflinger titled “People at the end of the world – the natives of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.” In the afternoon Helen attended Stefan Kredel’s lecture on plate tectonics for the second time while I attended the WONDERFUL telling of the very interesting story of “Darwin, Fitzroy and the Beagle” by a first rate storyteller, Jim Garlinghouse. In the evening we viewed a National Geographic Movie about volcanoes; I kept falling asleep; Helen kept waking me up, and I was too sleepy afterward to write my blog entry.

The circa 1828 story of the Beagle involves its first Captain, Pringle Stokes, who committed suicide after locking himself in his cabin and brooding for a couple weeks over his failure to do a good job in his assignment to map the region. It involves the new second captain Robert Fitzroy and the naturalist Charles Darwin. They were opposites and didn’t get along at all, but Darwin always supported Fitzroy because Fitzroy was an honest man, an attitude not reciprocated. Fitzroy, too, committed suicide many years later, thinking he had been a failure in his career. The story also involves some missionaries maltreated and killed by the Indians. And it involves four Yamana Indians (English names Jimmy Button, York Minster, Fuegia Basket and Boat Memory) kidnapped by Fitzroy, taken to England to be educated and Christianized and who were returned except for Boat Memory who died of smallpox. Darlinghouse encouragd us to read Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle,” and I hope someday to do so.

The Indians were nomads who subsisted by hunting, fishing, and gathering. There were five tribes of them, each in its region within the region. (Ona, Alacalufe, Yamana, Hausch, and Tuelhueche) There were Foot Indians, and there were Canoe Indians who lived on and from the sea. The Indians were essentially nude and stayed warm by greasing themselves with animal fat. That worked for them though it made them smell bad. Clothing would not have worked for them because it would get wet and consequently remain cold. The coming of the missionaries in the mid 1800s was the beginning of the end for the Indians. We were told the full-blooded Indians are extinct or essentially so with, in some cases, only one or two old members of a tribe remaining. But maybe it’s not quite that extreme. This is in one of our handouts: “While the Alacalufe and Tuelhueche survived in reduced numbers, there remain very few individuals of indentifiable Ona, Haush or Yaghan (Yamana) populations.” In any case, it’s very sad about the Indians.

It’s high time for me to clean up and go to breakfast.

Bernie

:-)