The Beagle's native son: among the observations of Charles Darwin on his famous voyage is the strange story of Jemmy Button, a Yamana Indian taken from South America to England and later returned to his homeland.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Biography

When Charles Darwin sailed from England on December 27, 1831, aboard the HMS Beagle, he took the first notes that were to culminate many thousands of pages later in his celebrated works, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He acknowledged later, however, that key observations from South America--the odd biogeography of the Galapagos Islands, the catastrophic power of a Chilean earthquake, and the profusion of life in the Brazilian rain forest--crystallized his revolutionary theory of natural selection.

Also setting out from Plymouth on that five-year expedition around the globe was Darwin's very own Exhibit A, a group of Native Americans returning to their homeland in Tierra del Fuego in order to establish a Christian mission there. These three individuals, to whom the Beagle's captain, Robert Fitzroy, had given the fanciful names York Minster, Fuegia Basket, and Jemmy Button when he picked them up on his previous South American tour, served Darwin as the raw material from which he observed how Homo sapiens, like every other species, adapts to changes in its environment.

In February 1830, on the Beagle's first visit to Tierra del Fuego, Fitzroy had taken the three natives aboard as hostages to be ransomed for a stolen whaleboat. El'leparu, a man in his mid-twenties, Yokcushiu, a girl about ten years old, and another middle-aged man were seized in western Tierra del Fuego, near a headland called York Minster (hence El'leparu's name change), in the home territory of the Alakaluf tribe. As Fitzroy wrote of the three hostages, one of whom later died, "they came with us with little reluctance and appeared unconcerned." Apparently their ransom value was nil in the eyes of their tribesmen, for the whaleboat was never returned.

A month later in Ponsonby Sound, just south of the Beagle Channel at its midway point, a party of Yamaha Indians approached the ship to trade. Fitzroy threw them a handful of pearl buttons, and a teenage native boy--named Orundellico--scrambled up from the canoe for more. "Whether they intended that he should remain with us permanently I do not know," Fitzroy wrote, "but they seemed contented with the singular bargain." Thus originated the boy's shipboard name, Jemmy Button.

In England, the three surviving Indians were the object of much curiosity, despite the close supervision imposed by Fitzroy, himself only ten years older than Jemmy. The newspapers noted their odd appearances, even when dressed in proper English clothes, and reported that they feared the lion statues outside Northumberland House might eat them. One church vicar wrote that they were "cannibals with a ready appetite for vegetables."

They were granted a private audience with the king and queen, who gave Fuegia one of her bonnets and slipped a family ring onto her finger. The offer of a royal clothing allowance for the three, who at home normally went about with nothing other than a guanaco hide thrown over their shoulders, must have mystified them.

Fitzroy was certain that he and his charges could communicate freely. "They understand why they were taken, and look forward with pleasure to seeing our country as well as returning to their own," he wrote. But this remains doubtful, as Fitzroy's facility with Fuegian languages left much to be desired. He continued to think, after repeated interviews with Jemmy, that his tribe was called the "Yapoo Tekeenica," which in Yamana means, "Otter I do not understand."

This confusion probably occurred when Fitzroy first pointed to Jemmy's tribesmen and asked, in sailor's sign, their name. Jemmy might well have spied a sea otter in the distance, for the acute eyesight of the Yamana was legendary, and then, sensing he had given the wrong answer, simply shrugged his shoulders and begged off. Jemmy's subtribe in fact called itself the "Yahgashagalumoala," a mouthful that perhaps one can forgive an Englishman for not getting straight.

The Yamana language is indeed notoriously difficult. Any tongue with more words for "beach" than Arabic has for "sand" cannot be easy. Different words are used for the same object depending if the speaker is in a canoe, on a beach, or in a wigwam. A single one-word verb has the meaning of "biting...