A Storied Tradition of Hellish Inhumanity

On completing Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, a certain emotion hangs with me, which is best illustrated through the path of his narrative, and the fact that I often read it as a reprieve from the increasingly demanding peddlers of current events (a category which encompasses, unfortunately, the social media of many of my acquaintances.)

Darwin traces a path down the eastern coast of South America, and among the remarks on local geology and natural history, he includes passing anecdotes of the obscene cruelty toward the native people begun by the Spanish and continued by the citizens of these new sovereignties. The dream of eradication, and even the fervor for the idea, is conveyed by the cheerful Argentinians as ‘the most righteous of wars, because it is against savages’. In another instance, when travelling along Patagonia with a gaucho accompaniment, Darwin is told about a lone, great tree of the plains, which sits isolated for hundreds of miles in every direction and is a holy place for the natives as well as a navigational beacon. The native men, at the first sighting of the tree, will hold their hands up and shout in a form of ritual and reverence. The guacho continues to remark, in a mundane fashion, how they will often wait until a native group leaves the tree and then steal the offerings left behind.

The journal is bookended by a final denunciation of slavery by Darwin, in recording the indignity and suffering witnessed in his final mooring in Brasil. In particular, he chastises those who witness indentured servants of civilization and believe that all slaves are kept well by their masters. Throughout, Darwin includes matter-of-fact histories of each region visited, which invariably infer a campaign of either eradication or cultural suppression, depending on the disposition of the conquering people.

The centerpiece of this extended interview with the history of human cruelty is the story of the return of Jemmy Button, a young man who was taken from his native people in Tierra Del Fuego to be taught civilization and Christianity, so that he might seed his people with goodwill toward european travelers for future generations. As his English name commemorates, Jemmy’s life was purchased from his father for a single button made from mother-of-pearl. He spends the journey southward proudly remarking that his people are most advanced and civilized, and that ‘no devil exists in my country’. Jemmy’s story ends when he is left with his people, whose language he cannot remember. His father has died since his departure, but the Fuegan superstition would forever prevent the discussion of the details of his fate. The Anglican missionary, after a trial period of a few days, refuses to stay with the Fuegans and leaves with the Beagle. A year later, the crew would learn that another Fuegan who was returned with Jemmy left in the night to find his own people further west in the Strait of Magellan, but not before robbing Jemmy and his mother of all their possessions.

Within this record of the path of a life, and an account of the brutal conditions and treatment amongst themeslves of the natives, Darwin takes a moment to recall an incident ‘witnessed on the west coast by Byron, who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding dying infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs’, and a brief interview with a young Fuegan boy who described to Darwin how, in times of famine, Fuegans would eat their elderly women before they would eat their dogs.This is because, the child remarks, dogs can catch otters but old women cannot. When questioned further, the boy describes how when the hunger begins, an old woman will sometimes flee into the forest, anticipating her fate, after which the men will run her down and drag her to the camp. The boy recounts the scene with amusement, and mock screams, in telling how the women’s faces are held above the fire until the smoke chokes them to death.

All of these intimate brushes with immense cruelty, painted onto native, conquerer, Christian, pagan, and nation, bordered by brief histories of such things beyond the memory of writing, and interspersed further still by Darwin’s musings of the origin of the continents, the eons of transmutation of the species, the immense age of the world, and the fossils of creatures long-since destroyed, illustrate most effectively a kind of ultimate truth about the setting of our little world. What horrors are beheld today which truly deprive us of some glory left in the past? That past could not have been the past that Darwin sailed within, or indeed any past before his time. And what indignities of humankind, or sins against God, can be said to exceed the long tract (one might say a storied tradition) of hellish inhumanity perpetrated between ourselves as readily as nature has forever checked the fit and infirmed in equal measure?

The soothing, sweet nothings of civility have held the stage for so long that their vision of utopia is accepted as an ultimate truth as readily as the divine right of kings was beheld in earlier days. What a cruelty it has been onto ourselves to have taught each rising generation a dream of perfection, and worse still to have done so under the good intention that ‘any amount in the right direction is enough’. As though teaching one to step toward heaven can act as some engine of ethics, when heaven was never promised, one has no authority to promise it, and whatever invented direction in which it lies is as fabricated as the space itself. Is it simply that we are a restless thing, that we would always be happier to be moving? Contentedness is a symptom of inhumanity to moralists, whose heaven will never exist in-place or around us. They would hope to die, if not on the summit of Mount Olympus, then on the trail toward that peak so that their death-marker can forever adorn the roadside and record their righteousness to others who march to their deaths in a similar manner. Instead, they are on the long, flat road to Damascus, and will not only perish before seeing that great city, but even before Christ can appear to them and reveal what harm they have done.

Worse still is the truth of contentedness, or quietism, or inaction. One might convince such a person to undertake the construction of Damascus here, in place, and work toward bettering what is within their grasp rather than promising themselves and others some mirage. The fate of that will also be, to perish before the stones resemble anything like heaven. But then, one says, that the next generation here can continue on the stones and build higher, and that one day heaven will be built in-place. Then, their death-marker will supply some of the mortar within the foundation, and likewise record their righteousness to all eternity. But they presume that the foundations they laid can extrapolate upward into the shape of heaven, as though the tower of Babel would have required no planning to undertake in any stage, while ommitting that the ultimate foresight would have been to remain in the dirt where we belonged, and leave heaven be.

Suppose then that we ought to not only hold very still, and also build nothing, and also say nothing? Are we to be like Job, with dust on our head in reverance for the lowest form of ourselves and the ultimate cruelty of all things (personified often as God)? Our death-marker in such a case will instead be some oddity, of something which was and conducted an unknowable existence, and then wasn’t. And what of it?

Napolean died on the road to Olympus, the Marxists were scattered in the sundering of their tower, the Buddhas died on a desert road, and Fuegan child was dashed to death on the rocky shores of a wretched archipelago under a sky of perpetual, freezing rain. So much for a better world, the end of hunger, peace on Earth, and good will to all men. So much for stolen glory, the closing of pearly gates, the rape of nations, the sickness of the contemporary soul.

I am here, and so are you. No more can be said.