h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello anhaga,
I am new to h2g2 so please excuse me if I don't get this right. I was interested in your piece on the Fuegians FitzRoy took to England - particularly the York Minster and Fuegia Basket story. I have not encountered the part about their "encounter in a ditch" in any of my sources, can you tell me your source for this? Many thanks!

Hi anhaga, me again. Sorry - I realized the "ditch" bit came from another site (new humanist via google). But I am still interested in your source for the idea that YM raped FB. I haven't found this very many other places - FitzRoy and Darwin do say York was possessive and jealous over Fuegia and meant to marry her, and Nick Hazlewood explicitly denies it. Others don't mention it. They may very well all be covering up, of course - and I haven't read everything! The story does get mixed around a lot, given its connection to the "Darwin Industry".

I believe my source for that bit may have been the biography of FitzRoy, 'Evolution's Captain', by Peter Nichols. I don't have a copy at hand, so I can't verify right now.

Hope this helps.

Thanks heaps anhaga! I haven't got my hands on this book yet. I can see I'm going to end up hassling P. Nicholls himself for his source at this rate. I'll let you know what I find out if I do. If you haven't got already found this one,I recently read "Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button" by Nick Hazlewood which has some excellent stuff about the Fuegians in it. For example, most books say they were Yaghans/Yagans/Yahgans/Yamana, but in fact only Jemmy was - the other three were Alacalufe (now called Kaweskar). This is clear from FitzRoy's Narrative, both by where they were picked up and from his vocab lists, but most historians can only imagine ONE type of tribal other I suppose... Hazlewood manages the two.
I really enjoyed your entry - it's great.

I've got a request in to my local library for both the Nichol book and for John and Mary Gribbin's biography of FitzRoy. Apparently the Gribbins' book is very scholarly in its references.

Hi again,
I've got the Gribbins' book (overdue) from my local library - it's very readable. They are extremely sympathetic to FitzRoy all through his life (I gather from reviews that Nicholls is not?) and appear to have done heaps of detailed archival research so they can quote from his unpublished letters and logs. A lot of the book is about after the Beagle voyage, though. This is another text that does not mention any ditches...

I've got the Nichols book in front of me now. He gets the story of the (statutory) rape from hints in 'Cape Horn' by Felix Reisenberg, published in 1939. I'll try to hunt that down as well.

Thanks again anhaga! I really appreciate this.
I'll hunt for this book too (trying to read everything...)

Hi again,
So ironic I had to share this. I went hunting for Riesenberg and he's at my Library!(at least in a 1950 edition, at least so the catalogue says...) Ask questions across the globe and all the time...