At Sea
Our first day of the voyage dawned without a cloud in the sky and with our ship making good progress across calm seas with a helpful, following breeze. Even before breakfast was over those who had ventured out on deck or up to the bridge had had the chance to see fin and humpback whales and, following the ship, an array of south Atlantic seabirds including black-browed, wandering and royal albatross, giant petrels, and prions. Although the sky was clouding over by midday, the sea remained remarkably calm.
For these waters are not noted for their tranquility. According to George Anson, leading a British naval expedition through these waters in 1741, severe storms elsewhere in the world would here have to be reckoned as mere gales. Neither he nor his crew had ever before witnessed such mountainous seas. Anson had made his observation from a sturdy 1,000-ton naval vessel. Over a century later in 1871, when Thomas and Mary Bridges sailed from Stanley into a westerly gale to Tierra del Fuego in a slightly built eighty-ton topmast schooner, Allen Gardiner, with the supplies they had assembled to found an Anglican mission in Ushuaia, it took them fully 41 days to make the voyage. On making landfall, Mary Bridges, clutching her nine-year-old daughter who had been badly bruised when tossed by a wave out of her cot and into the cabin fire-grate, told her husband: “Dearest, you have brought me to this most desolate country and here I must remain, for I can never, never, face that ocean voyage again.” Within months her second child was born, a son named Thomas after his father, the first European born in Tierra del Fuego.
Thomas Bridges, like so many of his compatriots, had been enthralled and intrigued by the story of the four Fuegians brought back to Britain in the late 1820s by Capt. Fitzroy of HMSS Beagle, the vessel that had first charted the channel that bears it name. The three surviving members of that party had been returned to Tierra del Fuego on the vessel’s subsequent voyage, in the company of the young Charles Darwin. They were released back into their native habitat and promptly reverted to their formerly wild appearance and apparently uncouth ways: nature triumphing over nature, or so it seemed.
The Anglican mission to save and civilize the Fuegians flourished and the modern township of Ushuaia has grown from it. Thomas Bridges himself, in the eschatological spirit of Protestant missionaries, set about learning the native language in earnest so that the gospel could be preached and the scriptures read in the “uttermost parts of the earth.” He soon noticed that “the language of one of the poorest tribes of men, without any literature, without poetry, song, history or science, may yet, through the nature of its structure and its necessities, have a list of words and a style of expression surpassing that of other tribes far above them in the arts and comforts of life.” Bridges had stumbled on a salutary but for his time uncomfortable truth that peoples who are technologically our inferiors are not necessarily our moral or intellectual inferiors. In the course of his life he compiled a 30,000-word English-Yahgan dictionary that survives in the British Library having survived the vicissitudes of two world wars.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the nitrate trade through the Beagle Channel brought more and more Europeans to Tierra del Fuego and the Yahgan population began to suffer from exposure to European diseases to which they had no immunity. The first major measles epidemic in 1884 reduced the number of Yahgan speakers by one third and by 1932 less than 50 native speakers survived. The importance of biodiversity is now widely acknowledged but ethnodiversity needs to be championed for the same reasons. There is a poignant irony in the survival of Thomas Bridges’ dictionary, compiled for a living language now practically extinct.
