Nov/Dec 2003

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Early in 1870, Bartholomew Sulivan—a prominent member of the Patagonian Missionary Society, recently renamed the South American Missionary Society—received a letter from one of England's foremost natural historians. "The success of the Tierra del Fuego Mission is most wonderful, and charms me," the famous scientist wrote. "It is a grand success. I shall feel proud if your Committee think fit to elect me an honorary member of your society."

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The naturalist in question, of course, was Charles Darwin, and his interest in the Patagonian Mission expressed a rather forlorn hope that the Fuegians might, after all, be humanized. Not that such an aspiration was entirely without foundation. To be sure, he told the readers of his Descent of Man of his astonishment "on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore … for the reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors." But in that very same year—1871—one of his correspondents, Rev. Thomas Bridges, who provided Darwin with answers to a variety of queries about Fuegian habits and customs, stepped off the Allen Gardiner with his wife and young daughter to begin a 13-year stint at Ushuaia, a mission station on the southern fringes of the island.

The adopted son of Despard Bridges, the first mission superintendent of the region, Thomas had already spent much of his early life in that part of the world prior to returning to the South Atlantic in holy orders and with a hitherto untraveled wife. During these years he acquired an unprecedented knowledge of the local language—Yamana—and began to dispel many of the myths that had grown up about the Fuegians. For a start, their language was infinitely more complex than anyone had imagined. Whereas the English language ...