The Ugly Brother

I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found. ...

Their appearance was so strange, that it was scarcely like that of earthly inhabitants. ...

I never saw such miserable creatures; stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint & quite naked. — One full aged woman absolutely so, the rain & spray were dripping from her body; their red skins filthy & greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gesticulation violent & without any dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow creatures placed in the same world. I can scarcely imagine that there is any spectacle more interesting & worthy of reflection, tha[n] one of these unbroken savages.

— Darwin on the Fuegians, 1832, 1834

So Darwin recorded his encounters with the "savages" of Tierra del Fuego in the diary he kept on board the Beagle. His immediate account registers both fascination and revulsion. At the same time, his shock at the profound difference of the Fuegians, the enormity of their distance from civilized man, was tempered by his assumption that these "unbroken" people may yet be "improved" by the taming hand of civilization.

At that point in time, he had reason to think so. Three of his fellow travelers on the Beagle were Fuegians, dubbed with the objectifying, Anglicized pseudonyms of Jemmy Button ("whose name" Darwin claimed, "expresses his purchase-money"), York Minster, and Fuegia Basket. Their real names were, respectively, O'run-del'lico, El'leparu, and Yok'cushly. They had been taken from a tribal state in Tierra del Fuego to England by Captain FitzRoy on a previous voyage and given the rudiments of a Christian education. They were now being returned to their native land along with a naive young missionary and assorted impedimenta of British civilization — described by FitzRoy as "serviceable articles," but including, according to Darwin, "wine glasses, butter-bolts, tea trays, soup turins, mahogany dressing case, fine white linen [and] beavor [sic] hats." It was FitzRoy's personal project of improvement that they would form the nucleus of a Christian civilization on these inhospitable shores.

In the Descent, Darwin harked back to his "continual surprise" at "how closely" these domesticated Beagle Fuegians who could speak a little English "resembled us in disposition and in most of our mental faculties." Yet their "barbarian" relatives, brutish, to his eyes devoid of all the expected attributes of humankind, pushed the boundaries of humanity to its very limits.

During his travels on the Beagle, Darwin met with a number of other races and saw many awe-inspiring sights. But at the conclusion to his diary, which became the basis of his best-selling Journal of Researches (rewritten in 1837, first published in 1839), Darwin returned to what had most struck him on his five-year voyage: the primal spectacle of "man in his lowest and most savage state":

One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? — men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savages and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal.

Words failed Darwin in attempting to describe the unbridgeable gulf between the Fuegian and his civilized observer; nor could this difference even be represented in paint, so far removed from iconography, from all aesthetic conventions, was the alien appearance of the Fuegian (whose own rudimentary aesthetic was limited to the appreciation of gaudy baubles such as blue beads and scarlet cloth). This unforgettable, unpaintable, indescribable difference (which Darwin did in fact describe over and over again in terms of the difference between wild and domesticated animals) was still with him at the end of his life. But his best-known reprise of his Fuegian encounter was in the conclusion to the Descent. There, Darwin, in an attempt to counter the Victorian horror of bestial descent, asserted his personal preference for a brave monkey or a plucky baboon as ancestor, rather than a bestial Fuegian progenitor. It repays close reading:

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of wild Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind — such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs — as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

Here, the captive monkey and the wild baboon are represented as more like Darwin and the reader, more moral — indeed, more civilized — than the alien, wild Fuegian who is nevertheless presented as closer in kin (only just) to the reader and to Darwin. In this rhetorical set piece, Darwin plays on the disgust felt for the indecent, filthy, cruel savage in order...