Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

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 to lessen the disgust for the ape ancestor. Again he conveys his shaken sensibilities; once again he likens the Fuegians to wild animals; yet again he presents the striking, if distasteful realization: "Such were our ancestors."

It has been remarked of this passage that here Darwin is situating himself in relation to the central anthropological question of his time: Were the different human races of one common origin, as the old orthodox biblical view would have it (monogenism), or did they have a number of separate origins (polygenism)? Here, at the very end of his sustained theoretical defense of monogenism, of his carefully reasoned argument that, over the ages, the different races have originated from a common ancestor through the cumulative action of sexual selection, Darwin identifies himself as an emotional polygenist, as retaining his sense of absolute human difference, of antipathy to other races. To this end, he deploys his experiential authority by invoking a historically specific, intensely lived, still vivid encounter with wild, inhuman Fuegians. At the same time, in the very same paragraph, Darwin affirms his evolutionary, monogenist position —"there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians." "We" (Darwin and the Victorian reader) and the disgusting, uncivilized Fuegians, however repellent the notion, share a common origin.

That Darwin never doubted the common origin of the human races is beyond dispute. He came from a Unitarian and liberal Whig, Wedgwood-Darwin line of active opposition to slavery. It was the one social issue guaranteed to make his "blood boil." His writings emphasize the essential humanity of the black men and women, enslaved and free, whom he encountered. He was righteously revolted by the cruelties and injustices to slaves that he heard of and witnessed during the voyage of the Beagle. Their screams and groans haunted him down the years. While back in Britain the abolitionist movement campaigned to outlaw slavery in the name of a universal human brotherhood, Darwin in Brazil — where Portugal was still transporting African slaves — praised the efforts of the antislavery agitators. He recorded his abhorrence of the system and those prejudiced "polished savages in Britain" who supported it, who ranked the slave as "hardly their brethren, even in Gods eyes." He hoped for the day when the slaves with their "fine athletic figures," "underrated intellects," industrious habits, and sheer force of numbers would "assert their own rights" and "ultimately be the rulers" of the "ignorant, cowardly, & indolent" Brazilians. On board the Beagle, Darwin jeopardized his comfortable relations with FitzRoy in an emotional confrontation over the aristocratic captain's paternalistic view of Brazilian slavery as a "tolerable evil." In a later "explosion of feeling," provoked by Charles Lyell's published anti-abolitionist sentiments, Darwin went public with a passionate denunciation of the "sin" of slavery in the revised second edition of his Journal of Researches of 1845. At the onset of the American Civil War, he declared himself prepared to accept a "million horrid deaths" for the greater good of an end to this "greatest curse on earth."

It is possible, as Desmond and Moore claim, that it was Darwin's revulsion against slavery that underwrote his monogenism and, ultimately, his belief in human and biological evolution, a "concern that would lead to the emancipation of humanity from creationist bondage in the Descent of Man." Yet it is not difficult to see that Darwin's unsettling, unforgettable Fuegian encounter, his shattering realization that such bestial-seeming beings might be our forebears, his readiness to exploit that savage encounter to emphasize the utter otherness of the savage as kin in order to make an animal kinship more acceptable to his Victorian readers, registers more than a mere abolitionist crusade, a ready-made, humanitarian assumption of racial unity that fueled his evolutionary theorizing.

Even when Darwin is at his most sensitive to the plight of the slave, he still plays on the uneasy conjuncture of man and beast. He gives an account of gesturing in attempting to communicate with a "negro, who was uncommonly stupid." To Darwin's consternation, the man assumes that Darwin is about to strike him:

I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great and powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to a degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal.

Here the slave is a pitiable, servile, über-domesticated animal. At the same time, the Fuegians are untamed, untrustworthy, with the irrational instinctive ferocity "of a wild beast ... each individual would endeavour to dash your brains out with a stone, as a tiger would be certain under similar circumstances to tear you." Even the more tractable semi-civilized Indian gauchos of the Bahia Blanca "whilst gnawing bones of beef, looked, as they are, half-recalled wild beasts."

There is a reiterated bestial imagery in Darwin's Beagle renderings of other races, a confusion of the classes of human and beast, that is more than mere metaphor, and that comes strikingly to the fore in his descriptions of the savage Fuegians. It hints at the animality of Fuegian and hence our own ancestry, a proto-evolutionary transformation that marks the transition from the bestial to the human. It presages Darwin's argument in the Descent that there are no characteristics that absolutely distinguish humans from animals. More immediately, this crystallized for Darwin in 1838, when, back in England, he argued to himself the defensibility of his recently formulated transmutationist views:

Nearly all will exclaim, your arguments are good but look at the immense difference between man [and animals], — forget the use of language, & judge only by what you see. Compare, the Fuegian & Ourang outang, & dare to say difference so great.

As an extension of this collapsing of Fuegian into orangutan, there is the compulsion of Darwin's comparison between the Fuegians on shore and the civilized Fuegians on board the Beagle, insistently typified as the difference between wild and domesticated animals. Again this is more than simplistic farmyard analogy. Darwin "saw what he thought was an authentic transformation of personality from aboriginal brutishness to the softer, tamer, more civilized nature of Western humanity, 'domestic' in all senses."

By Darwin's account, the wild Fuegians "knew no government" or "domestic affection"; they lived in primitive communism; went about naked and shelterless in one of the worst climates in the world; were darkly suspect of cannibalism, infanticide, and worse; could barely communicate with one another in a primitive gargling language; and possessed the minimum of unchanging skills "like the instinct of animals." Jemmy, Fuegia, and York, on the other hand, had been schooled in modesty and morality and now knew the reforming powers of British dress, cleanliness, religious observance, and the ownership of property.

Optimistically, Darwin jotted, "3 years has been sufficient to change savages, into, as far as habits go, complete & voluntary Europeans." The older, taciturn York, Darwin was certain, would "in every respect live as far as his means go, like an Englishman." Yet he registered his reservations about the plump, vain, good-natured Jemmy, who, as a result of his civilizing experience, allegedly had become so Anglicized as to forget his own language and was "thoroughly ashamed of his own countrymen." Even so, the privileged situation and easy manners of the Beagle Fuegians formed a salutary contrast with Darwin's disturbing experience of the cringing slave, where this improving domesticating process had been perverted by the abominable "training" of slavery to an unnatural, uncivilized, propertyless servility.

1.1 The return of the native

Then, FitzRoy's civilizing project absurdly unwound. The missionary, who, with the assistance of the Beagle Fuegians, was to educate their people in basic farming and building practices, distribute clothing, and inculcate some notions of modesty, cleanliness, and Christian principles, was intimidated and expropriated of his supplies by savages, who had no sense of property rights. The Beagle returned just in time to rescue him from tribesmen who were intent on the forcible removal of his facial and body hair with mussel-shell pincers (a lesson in Fuegian bodily aesthetics for the young Darwin that he put to use in The Descent of Man). The ungrateful York Minster, sloughing off his English persona as readily as his starched shirt points, decamped with Fuegia after conspiring to separate the hapless Jemmy from his treasured British possessions.

When Darwin next saw him, Jemmy was indistinguishable from his wild companions. The once "clean, well-dressed stout lad" of the Beagle had reverted to a "naked, thin, squalid savage" and "so ashamed of himself that he turned his back" to the ship. FitzRoy "could almost have cried," while Darwin lamented, "I never saw so complete & grievous a change." Jemmy's abject regression to savagery was partially reversed by hastily produced clothing. He dined with the Captain and "ate his dinner as tidily as formerly." Inexplicably, "poor Jemmy" refused FitzRoy's offer of repatriation to England. The belated discovery that he had "got a young & very nice looking squaw" (nice looking, that is, Darwin qualified, "for a Fuegian"), cleared up the mystery of Jemmy's reluctance to return to the niceties of civilization. After an exchange of presents, he cheerfully shook hands all round in best British fashion and went back to his native life and his native wife.

It does not seem to have occurred to Darwin that Jemmy might resent what was, for all FitzRoy's justification of it, his abduction, his prolonged estrangement from family and tribe, his enforced adoption of a strange, only part-comprehended culture and language — the experiences and alien customs that distanced him from his own people on his return. Nor that what appeared degraded to Darwin was, for Jemmy, his people, his culture, and his preferred mode of living. We cannot know Jemmy's version of events, though we do have modern anthropological and other accounts that testify to the vitality and cultural richness of pre-missionary life for the four separate indigenous tribes of Tierra del Fuego. Darwin preferred the romantic explanation for Jemmy's rejection of the benefits of British civilization — the bathetic climax to FitzRoy's grand scheme: "Jemmy & his wife paddled away in their canoe loaded with presents & very happy." True love, even savage love, conquers all.