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regular traffic. By 1827, the year King’s expedition reached the Strait of Magellan for the first time, sealing and whaling vessels (usually ignored by history because their crews didn’t plant flags, slaughter locals, colonize, or make claims for distant sovereigns) had been passing through Tierra del Fuego, harvesting seals and penguins, and trading with the natives for more than fifty years. Relations had evolved considerably since the earliest contact. The Fuegians had largely forgotten their initial fears and become instead cheeky opportunists. It was the latecomers on the scene, the Englishmen in 1827, whowere the naive ones. They were smugly and vastly amused by their own abilities to impress the locals with their beads and cheap magic, underestimating not only the Fuegians’ cleverness, but their self-respect.

    Fuegian native of the “Yapoo Tekeenika” tribe, as FitzRoy mistakenly believed they called themselves. (Narrative of HMS Adventure and Beagle, by Robert FitzRoy )
    â€œThey were pleased by a ticking watch,” wrote King, of his first encounter with a group of them. While dazzling them with his watch, he surprised a Fuegian by deftly cutting off a lock of the native’s hair with a pair of scissors (perhaps he fancied a small trophy brush fashioned of the coarse hair by the ship’s carpenter, not an unusual item). The man objected until King gave the hair back to him. “Assuming a grave look, he very carefully wrapped the hair up, and handed it to a woman in the canoe, who, as carefully, stowed it away in a basket…the man then turned round, requesting me, very seriously, to put away the scissors, and my compliance restored him to good humor.”
    At another encounter, “one of the party, who seemed more than half an idiot, spit in my face; but as it was not apparently done angrily, and he was reproved by his companions, his uncourteous conduct was forgiven.” The Fuegians spat at them, and the English sneakily cut off their hair; what was courteous or idiotic was misunderstood by both sides.
    Two years later, Robert FitzRoy saw them in much the same way: they were dirty and primitive. And he brought his own elevated learning, particularly his ideas about physical appearances and phrenology, to the deduction of their innate character.
    Their features were…peculiar; and if physiognomy can be trusted, indicated cunning, indolence, passive fortitude, deficient intellect, and want of energy. I observed that the forehead was very small and ill-shaped, the nose was long, narrow between the eyes and wide at the point; and the upper lip, long and protruding. They had small, retreating chins; bad teeth; high cheekbones; small Chinese eyes at an oblique angle with the nose…. The head was very small, especially at the top and back; there were very few bumps for a craniologist.
    FitzRoy was not quite so scientific about the younger of the two women in the canoe. She “would not have been ill-looking, had she been well-scrubbed, and all the yellow clay with which she was bedaubed, washed away.”
    It was the late, too tender Pringle Stokes who saw these people most clearly. His journal descriptions of his first encounters with Fuegians in 1827 were full of carefully observed details, largely without the prejudicial filter of a self-righteous European sensibility.
    As might be expected from the unkindly climate in which they dwell, the personal appearance of these Indians does not exhibit, either in male or female, any indications of activity or strength. Their average height is five feet five inches; their habit of body is spare; the limbs are badly turned, and deficient in muscle; the hair of their head is black, straight, and coarse; their beards, whiskers, and eyebrows, naturally exceedingly scanty, are carefully plucked out…the mouth is large, and the underlip thick; their teeth are small and regular, but of bad colour. They are of a dirty copper