The fall.

• Author: Hazlewood, Nick
• Position: Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button - Excerpt

When the Beagle carried Jemmy Button back to the Yahgashaga in 1833 there were probably 3,000 Yamana Indians. In the early 1850s, there were 7,000-9,000 Fuegian Indians, of all tribes. By 1908 there were barely 170 Yamana Indians alive, by 1947 there were only 43, and fewer than 150 surviving pure Fuegians of any tribe, with roughly the same number of mixed race. It is doubtful that there are any pure Fuegian Indians today.

In the story of Jemmy Button the notion of what was savage or barbarian and what was civilized is of great importance. Civilization was defined by the apparently civilized, who also designated what was savage. Yet there was no lack of paradoxes. What was civilized about the abduction of native peoples, their removal from their families and their transportation across the world? Or about men hunting down packs of Indians and wiping them out without fear of reprisal? Or the forced herding of Fuegians into mission stations and their coercion into work programs and the trappings of European societies? It is worth bearing in mind that Jemmy Button, along with York Fuegia, and four mere Fuegians in the 1860s, went to England, were indulged in polite society and survived; they proved adaptable, intelligent, and understanding. The same could not always be said for the Europeans going the other way.

It is possible to speculate on how close the Fuegians came to avoiding their miserable end. Tierra del Fuego was a forsaken corner of the world, important only for its location on a major shipping route. By the second decade of the twentieth century it had been made largely irrelevant by the construction of the Panama Canal. As there was no longer reason for ships to risk a rounding of Cape Horn, there would have been little reason for the clash of cultures, and nobody would have had to worry about the fate of marooned sailors in these parts. Had the canal been built half a century earlier one could fairly ask whether or not some living remnant of the Fuegians would still be with us.

It is also important to consider the role, no matter how unwitting, that Jemmy Button played in his people's downfall. It was he who unlocked the...