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Adapted from a BBC article                                                Monday 14th November 2005

The HMS Beagle, in which Captain Fitzroy and Charles Darwin sailed to the south Atlantic, and which had also carried four native Patagonians to Britain to be "civilised"

On Captain Robert Fitzroy's first journey to the southern hemisphere on HMS Beagle, he had taken four local "savages" from the southernmost tip of the continent (Tierra del Fuego) as retribution for the stealing of one of his whaling boats.

Fitzroy planned to ferry his four captives back to Britain and school them in the ways of Christianity and gentility. He then planned to return them to their homeland in the belief they would spread their newly instilled values through this "dark continent".

Fitzroy gave them odd names: Fuegia Basket, Jemmy Button, Boat Memory and York Minster. Boat Memory died of smallpox shortly after the Beagle docked in Plymouth. The captain took the other three to London and enrolled them in the first Church of England primary school, located in Walthamstow (then only a village).

When Fitzroy decided to return his natives to their homeland, he recruited a naturalist to accompany him on the voyage. This naturalist, who was then also a trainee pastor and - like most others at the time - a firm believer in the biblical account of the Creation, was none other than Charles Darwin.

The repatriation of the Patagonians was very disappointing. They were robbed by other natives; and York Minster, having married Fuegia Basket on their return, subsequently robbed his old travelling companion Jemmy Button.

Darwin's book On the Origin of Species was based on his trip with Fitzroy

When Fitzroy returned a year later to catch up, having traipsed around the south Atlantic with Darwin, he found Jemmy Button had simply gone back to his old way of life.

Author Peter Nichols says: "Fitzroy had to face the fact his experiment had been a total disaster, because they had reverted to savaging; their civilisation had been a gloss. It plunged him into a deep depression".

Reports that filtered back to Britain many years later would have depressed him even further. Fuegia Basket had become a prostitute and Jemmy Button stood trial for hijacking a ship of British missionaries, who were all slaughtered.

Yet, as Mr Nichols points out, without the experiment Darwin might never have set out on what turned out to be the momentous voyage through which he forged his theory of natural selection.

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