to the barbarous regions of the south …’ Darwin, in turn, wrote to his sister: ‘Every one has put on cloth cloathes & preparing for still greater extremes our beards are all sprouting. – my face at present looks of about the same tint as a half washed chimney sweeper.’
A few weeks later this ‘sprouting’ facial hair has become ‘a great grisly beard’ that, Darwin reports happily, has transformed him into ‘a wild beast’. By the time the Beagle reached Tierra del Fuego in the last weeks of 1832, the beard was so long that the young man could see the end of it when clasped in his fist. This wasn’t simply a gratifying novelty, it was practical too. During his week-long treks inland in search of mammalian fossils, stranded seashells and soil samples, Darwin often found himself obliged to bivouac at high altitude. On these occasions a beard acted as a muffler in the freezing dawns – ‘I never knew how painful cold could be.’ All the same, this didn’t stop the tyro naturalist complaining that he was feeling increasingly odd and itchy, like a bear forced into wearing an overcoat. And yet, such is the short memory of young men that by the time the Beagle eventually rounded Cape Horn and was heading north towards the elegant port of Valparaíso, where Darwin was due to lodge with an old Salopian classmate, he was grumbling once more about the chore of being ‘obliged to shave & dress decently’.
In its cyclical comings and goings, Darwin’s beard marked his criss-crossing from British gentleman to common tar to wild beast, and all the way back again. Clean-shaven, he was an emissary of British civilisation, an educated man with a family name that rang bells and with no reason to hide his pleasantly pudgy face from the world. But with a beard baffling his features, the man with a face like a chimneysweep, or even a bear, became indistinguishable from the common tars who heaved HMS Beagle around the globe. The ease with which mild, bashful young Charley Darwin could slip into this other identity – dirty, beastly and resolutely male – was thrilling. Armed with a beard, pistols and a geological hammer, he fancied that he might be confused with a ‘grand barbarian’. That, after all, is what had happened to Captain Robert FitzRoy RN, he of the impeccable lineage and finicky manners, who on the one occasion he had neglected to shave had been mistaken for a pirate.
Beard-wearing, though, did more than mark a simple boundary between civilisation and savagery, a line in the sand on which everyone could agree. The coastal ports of South America, where the Beagle officers regularly came ashore to mingle with the local elites, comprised an ethnographic free-for-all. In Bahia, Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Maldonado, Santiago and Valparaíso you would find African slaves, Jewish tailors, German blacksmiths, Arab traders, free blacks, American architects, Scottish engineers, English merchants, Argentinian gauchos, Fuegian Indians, not forgetting that large group of nondescripts and crossbreeds who belonged everywhere and nowhere. Amidst this polyglot jabber a beard became a conspicuous cultural marker, a handy feature to grab on to when trying to place a man you had only just met.
In letters home to his sisters Darwin makes jokes about how, if he were to turn up in Shropshire right this minute, he would be mistaken for a ‘Solomon’ who might start to ‘sell the trinkets’ – playing on a series of associations between Orthodox Jews, long beards and itinerant peddling. On another occasion he relates an encounter with a Uruguayan tradesman who suspects him of being a ‘Mohammedan’ simply by virtue of his long beard and his habit of washing his face.
As the tradesman’s mishit neatly demonstrates, in this mongrel world a beard could never do more than hint at a stranger’s identity. Throughout the Beagle’s voyage, Darwin was increasingly confronted with evidence that physical appearances – not just clothes but the bodies that filled and shaped them – were as much a matter of culture as of nature. On board ship were three young Fuegian Indians who had been educated at Captain FitzRoy’s expense in London. FitzRoy had collected these specimens on an earlier voyage, and hoped that now, released back to their old communities, they would form the nucleus of a Christianising mission amongst their own people. Having spent a formative year learning their Bible at a schoolmaster’s house in Walthamstow, these three young people now dressed like Britons and spoke a pidgin version of English. They had proved a big hit during their time in London, and were even presented at court. Queen Adelaide, grieving the loss of her endless babies, had made a particular pet of plump, merry ten-year-old ‘Fuegia Basket’, to whom she gave a cast-off bonnet. In their new incarnations the Fuegians appeared to Darwin like respectable members of the servant classes: vain, touchy, not always quite honest, but still recognisably creatures of the civilised world.
Jemmy Button (left) after his return to Tierra del Fuego in 1834 and (right) during his time in London (1833)
Just how far the Fuegians on board the Beagle had travelled from their earlier selves became startlingly apparent in the closing days of 1832. On 17 December the ship had anchored at the Bay of Good Success, a densely forested inlet at the very bottom of the South American landmass. Captain Cook and Joseph Banks had made land here sixty years earlier, but since then few Europeans had set foot on shore. As the Beagle nosed into the bay, Darwin got his first sight of indigenous Fuegian Indians. They had gathered on a ‘wild peak overhanging the sea’, forming something between an advance guard and a welcoming party. When the ship came closer, the tall, naked men issued an ambiguous ‘loud sonorous shout’, part threat, part salute.
It was thrilling, like something straight out of the boys’ adventure stories young Charley Darwin had lapped up during his Shrewsbury days. Writing later to his second cousin William Fox he described the watchful Fuegians with a delicious shudder as ‘savage as the most curious person would desire’. The Fuegians were equally gripped by the encounter. As they clambered down from the headland to take a closer look at the Beaglers, it became clear that the tribesmen thought that two or three of the shorter naval officers in the landing party were actually women. The seamen’s pale skin – paler anyway than the Fuegians’ ‘dirty copper colour’ – marked them as belonging to the fairer sex. This was despite the fact that the ‘ladies’ all sported heavy beards.
Here was the first sign that the Fuegians understood facial hair differently from their visitors. Although the Anglicised Fuegians were noticeably embarrassed by the ‘poor wretches’ on shore who were giving such a bad first impression of their native culture, the indigenous Fuegians were equally appalled by the returning wanderers. On being introduced to ‘York Minster’, the oldest of the Anglicised Fuegians, the locals were deeply troubled by the young man’s rough chin. They ‘told him he ought to shave; yet he had not twenty dwarf hairs on his face, whilst we all wear our untrimmed beards’, chuckled Darwin. As far as the Fuegians were concerned, foreigners were welcome to wear their disreputable whiskers, even the ladies. But they themselves would continue to keep up standards by sticking to a smooth chin. As a parting shot, one of the older tribesmen yelled at York that he was ‘dirty, and ought to pull out his beard’.
The Beaglers’ next destination was a settlement a few miles along the coast at Woollya Cove, where FitzRoy planned to set up his Anglican mission under the direction of a strangely listless young man called Richard Matthews. Matthews, aided by the three returning Fuegians – as well as York Minster and Fuegia Basket there was a fifteen-year-old boy called ‘Jemmy Button’ – would attempt to teach the local natives cleanliness and Christ. Before the mission could get under way, though, the Beagle endured a week of terrifying storms – the worst, said FitzRoy, that he had ever known. Not until mid-January 1833 was a landing party able to make its way into the cove on four small boats and begin building the mission. After so much misery it was cheering to find that the soil was deep and good, and garden beds were quickly sown with potatoes, carrots, turnips and beans, much in the manner of a rectory kitchen garden. Darwin couldn’t help noticing, though, what ‘culpable folly & negligence’ marked the choice of items that had been sent out by the ladies of the Church Missionary Society to settle twenty-two-year-old Mr Matthews into his new life at the ends of the earth: wine glasses, tea trays, soup tureens, not forgetting a handsome mahogany dressing case in which to store his razor.
It soon became clear that the tribesmen of Woollya were not as biddable as those further north. True, there was community