4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tragic Clash of Cultures, September 6, 2001
This review is from: Savage: The Life And Times Of Jemmy Button (Hardcover)
Charles Dickens wrote, "Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it." I do not know if Dickens knew about the missionary aims of the Patagonian Missionary Society, but there he surely would have found confirmation of his opinion. In _Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button_ (Thomas Dunne Books), Nick Hazlewood has written an amazing and sad story about missionaries, colonialism, and a tragic clash of cultures. Sparking the story, a shocking tale of repeated good intentions and bad results, was the high Tory captain of the HMS _Beagle_, Edward FitzRoy. FitzRoy thought it would be grand to take Fuegian specimens back to Britain. One of them, swapped for a button, became Jemmy Button, and Darwin got to see him on the _Beagle_'s trip in 1831 to take him back home (so he had influence in Darwin's _The Descent of Man_). FitzRoy's hopes were futile, as Jemmy turned native again.
In 1845, the Patagonian Missionary Society, one of the many Protestant vanguards of British colonialism, made an effort to land on Tierra del Fuego and begin proselytizing. The mission lasted a week, because the natives merely stole from it, without improvement of their souls. In 1850, a similar attempt lead to the deaths of the missionaries. Newspapers warned the Patagonian Missionary Society off any future effort, but the public loved this British bravado, and the Society was emboldened to try a new venture. It would use one of the Falkland Islands as a staging ground to which Fuegians could be ferried, civilized, converted, and returned. To this end, Jemmy was found and was kidnapped once again, along with members of his family. They became homesick and resentful, and were cycled back home, with another nine Fuegians picked up. The Society's reports were glowing, but glossed over the frequent problems. One of the basic ones was that the Fuegians had little concept of property rights, and when they liked something, they took it, and they resented any subsequent searches. When this group was returned, eight missionaries were murdered. The Society blamed the work of Satan, but as one letter to the papers said, the massacre "...was produced by the recklessness of the society and their agents, and therefore I must conclude that Satan is much maligned in this matter."
Hazlewood has told this astonishing and distressing story with a novelist's fluency. In the end, the efforts toward the Fuegians could not have been more futile. Ranchers and sheep-farmers soon began invading their island, and brought devastating diseases or simply hunted them down and shot them. No pure Fuegians survived. Those with intentions of greed harmed them as much as those with intentions of improvement under the guise of imposition of a strong culture over a weak one. Such were the benefits of civilization to the savages.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Savages all round, but sympathetically treated, July 22, 2001
This review is from: Savage: The Life And Times Of Jemmy Button (Hardcover)
The title, "Savage", is of course ironical. Captain Fitzroy thought, when he captured three Tierra Fuegian men and a young girl in 1830, that his "specimens" were the savages, even as he sailed them away from their homes and their grieving families.
So _Fitzroy_ is the savage, of course? Certainly, but Hazlewood's irony, and his capacity for imaginative compassion, is deeper than that.
Fitzroy thought he was doing good. Mutual incomprehension between the Tierra del Fuegians and passing European and American ships had led to murder: and people with muskets and ship's cannon are more efficient at murder than people with spears. If some Tierra del Fuegians could be taught English and gain an understanding of European culture and manners, there might be fewer violent encounters. And if his captives could be taught to build and cultivate crops, then they could be returned to their homes, equipped with seeds, food animals and tools, and perhaps teach their kinspeople a more comfortable and secure way of living.
Hazlewood tells the story of how this benevolent (by the standards of its time) project goes horribly wrong. The remarkable figure of Jemmy Button, the resourceful young man captured by Fitzroy (later returned to his home by Fitzroy, as promised), and how he fared in English culture and his own, is a central thread in that story. However this is history and not biography; the canvas is wider than one man.
Tragedy comes with the arrival of the Patagonian Missionary Society in the Land of Fire. Like Fitzroy they believed they came with good intentions; unlike Fitzroy they offered little of value, took much, and mostly broke their promises. They sought the help of Jemmy Button, who was back living with his people, but with a half-remembered stock of English. Button offered that help, and he and his family, and other Tierra del Fuegians were in return kept as virtual slaves in the Society's encampment. Hazlewood shows how tensions rose until the missionaries were massacred, probably by a party led by Jemmy Button.
Interestingly, despite what we think of as the racist arrogance of the Victorians, the authorities in nearby Port Stanley and in London understood the events in terms that we might consider "modern": they saw the massacre as the result of the missionary society's cruelty, bigotry and duplicity, which had placed intolerable pressure on the Tierra del Fuegians. Claims that the slain missionaries had been "martyrs" were quietly (and justly) derided, and no attempt was made to avenge their deaths.
The title "Savage", I think, refers neither to the Tiera del Fuegians nor by heavy-handed irony to the Victorians. Though the Patagonian Missionary Society does emerge as something of a villain, their villainy was too drab to be "savage". The title refers not to people but to the events that led to the destruction of the first and second missions to Tierra del Fuego.
The wholesale slaughter of Jemmy Button's people by European settlers a generation or two later is dealt with briefly at the end of the book; that was unquestionably the act of savages, but beyond the focus of this book.
This is a great book. Far from depressing despite the subject matter, it is instead encouraging about the possibility of communication and imaginative sympathy between people whose cultures, histories, technologies and languages have virtually nothing in common, so long as neither side is blinded by racist or religious arrogance.
We are in some ways as far from the Victorians as we are from the Tierra del Fuegians. It may be easier for us to imaginatively identify with Tierra del Fuegian ideas on (for example) family, sex, politics, clothing, and perhaps religion, than with the Victorians. The Victorians, particularly Hazlewood's missionaries, accepted a vast and rigid structure of ideas, almost none of which we now accept; Tierra del Fuegian attitudes are in some ways easier for a post-post-modernist to accept. (This is not to pretend that the Tierra del Fuegians were new age philosophers, let alone Noble Savages.)
So the book is an exercise in empathy for both the Victorian and Tierra del Fuegian protagonists, and reveals the humanity of both. An example is Jemmy Button's bashfulness in the presence of an Englishwoman, when a British ship arrives at his Tierra del Fuegian home twenty years after Button's return. That his discomfort turns out to be because he has married, and that Button is inclined to conceal his married status while talking with a lady ("English ladies very good," he had commented), is cheering enough, and so too is the comprehension of the British sailors when Button's wife arrives by canoe, to find out what is going on. Button's embarrassment, and the hearty congratulations of the sailors when they recognise the cause of his embarrassment, is in its own way an inspiring moment, and well captured by Hazlewood. These are not saints on either side of this cultural divide, but they are human. And they enjoy their mutual recognition without imagining, as a post-structuralist might, that they are unable to communicate because they are irredeemiably "other".
While it both inspires and also makes angry, "Savage" is also a hugely entertaining book. Hazlewood offers many revealing glimpses into peoples, white and brown, whose ways of life have long since vanished. For example this, from a 17th century sea-captain's letter to his son:
"A merchant of Loundon wrote to a factor of his beyoand sea, desired him by the next shipp to send him 2 or 3 Apes; he forgot the r, so it was 203 Apes. His factor has sent him four score, and says he shall have the rest by the next shipp ... if yorself or frendes will buy any Apes to breede on, you could never have such a chance as now."
Even then, a simple typo could have embarrassing results...
Cheers!
Laon
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