Though the Kawésqar and other canoe people lacked metal, they crafted an array of implements from natural materials. Whale bones were honed into chisels and barbed tips for harpoons and spears; dolphins’ jawbones made fine combs. The skin and sinewy tendons from seals and whales offered string for bows, slingshots, and fishing nets. Seal bladders served as pouches. Plants were woven into baskets. Bark was carved into containers—and used as torches. Shells became everything from scoops to knives sharp enough to cut through bone. And the hides from seals and sea lions provided loincloths and shoulder capes.

  European explorers, baffled by how anyone could survive in the region—and seeking to justify their brutal assaults on indigenous groups—often labeled the Kawésqar and other canoe people as “cannibals,” but there is no credible evidence of this. The inhabitants had devised plenty of ways to find sustenance from the sea. The women, who did most of the fishing, tied limpets to ropy sinews and dropped them in the water, waiting to jerk a prize upward and grab it with one hand. The men, responsible for hunting, lured sea lions by singing softly or slapping the water, then harpooned them when they rose to investigate. Hunters set snares for geese that wandered on the grasslands at dusk, and they used slingshots to pick off cormorants. At night, the Kawésqar waved torches at nesting birds to blind them before clubbing them.

  Moreover, they coped with the climate without wearing bulky clothing. To keep warm, they oiled their skin with insulating seal blubber. And in this land of fire they always kept a blaze going, using it not only for heat but also to roast meat, make implements, and send smoke signals. Logs were obtained from the myrtle tree, which would burn even when damp; baby bird feathers and insect nests provided highly flammable tinder. If a fire did go out, it was reignited by striking flint with the mineral pyrite, which contains sulfuric gases. In canoes, the fires were burned on sand or clay hearths, and the children were often responsible for stoking them.

  The Kawésqar were so well adapted to the cold that centuries later NASA, hoping to figure out ways for astronauts to survive on a frozen planet, sent scientists to the region to learn their methods. One anthropologist described how the local inhabitants sustained themselves by moving from camp to camp: “Home could be a pebble beach, a pleasant stretch of sand, familiar rocks and islets, some during the winter months, others through the long summer days. Home was also the canoe…with its fireplace, potable water, a dog or two, domestic and hunting equipment, almost everything essential….Whatever food or material they needed was in the water or along the shore.”

  * * *

  Byron, Bulkeley, and Campbell waved their hats at the paddlers, beckoning them closer. Anson’s expedition had been given a condescending manifesto from the King of England to present to any indigenous nations encountered during the voyage, offering to rescue them from their purportedly depraved conditions and to help them set up a government so that they could be a “happy people.” Yet the castaways realized that the very people the English deemed “savages” might hold the key to their salvation.

  The Kawésqar were hesitant to approach. They might have had little contact with Europeans, but no doubt they were aware of Spain’s brutal conquest of other indigenous groups to the north—and had heard tales about the murderousness of pale boat people. Magellan and his band of conquistadores, the first Europeans to reach Patagonia, had lured two young inhabitants from one of the indigenous communities—the so-called giants—onto their ship with presents, then shackled them in irons. “When they saw the bolt across the fetters being struck with a hammer to rivet it and prevent them from being opened, these giants were afraid,” Magellan’s chronicler wrote. The Spanish boasted that they converted one of them to Christianity and renamed him Paul, as if they were somehow redeemers. Yet both hostages soon died of sickness. Later, in the nineteenth century, several Kawésqar were abducted by a German merchant and exhibited at a zoo in Paris as “savages in a natural state,” drawing half a million spectators.

  Byron and his companions tried to convince the Kawésqar that they meant no harm, displaying what Byron called “signs of friendship.” As the rain perforated the sea, the paddlers drifted closer, the dogs growling, the wind thrumming. Both parties tried to communicate, but neither understood the other. “They uttered no word of any language we had ever heard,” Byron recalled.

  The three Englishmen held up bales of cloth that had been retrieved from the wreck, and offered them as gifts. The Kawésqar took them and were persuaded to come ashore. They hauled their canoes up the beach and followed Byron and Campbell through the little village of bizarre shelters, watching and being watched. Then they were led to Captain Cheap, who was evidently living in their dwelling.

  * * *

  Cheap greeted the strangers ceremoniously. They represented his best, and perhaps only, hope of finding food for his men, and they would undoubtedly have crucial intelligence on the location of hostile Spanish settlements and on the safest sea routes for escaping the island. Cheap presented each of the men with a sailor’s hat and a red soldier’s coat. Though they showed little interest in wearing such items, removing them whenever someone placed them on their bodies, they valued the color red. (The Kawésqar often painted their skin with red pigment made from burnt soil.) Captain Cheap also gave them a mirror. “They were strangely affected with the novelty,” Byron wrote. “The beholder could not conceive it to be his own face that was represented, but that of some other behind it, which he therefore went round to the back of the glass to find out.” Campbell noted that the Kawésqar were “extremely courteous in their behavior,” and that Captain Cheap “treated them with great civility.”

  After a while, the Kawésqar departed in their canoes, the blue smoke from their fires marking their passage across the sea before they vanished. Cheap did not know if he would see them again. But two days later they returned, this time carrying with them a surprising amount of food, including three sheep.

  They had obviously gone to great lengths to get hold of the sheep. The Kawésqar, who were not known to consume mutton, had likely obtained the animals by trading with another indigenous group that was in contact with the Spanish several hundred miles to the north. In addition, the Kawésqar brought the castaways what Bulkeley described as “the largest and best mussels I ever saw, or tasted.” The famished Englishmen were extremely grateful. Campbell wrote that these people served as a “good example to many well-educated Christians!”

  The Kawésqar left once more, but soon came back again with their wives and children, along with other families. There were some fifty people in total—the shipwreck being one of those attractions, like a beached whale, that drew disparate Kawésqar parties together. They seemed “much reconciled to our company,” Byron wrote, and “we found that their intention was to settle among us.” With fascination, he watched as they began to build dwellings, which they called at, by collecting tall branches and staking them into the ground in an oval. “They bend the extremities of these branches,” Byron wrote, “so as to meet in a centre at top, where they bind them by a kind of woodbine, called supple-jack, which they split by holding it in their teeth. This frame, or skeleton of a hut, is made tight against the weather with a covering of boughs and bark.” The Kawésqar had brought this bark with them in their canoes, having stripped it from their previous dwellings. Each shelter usually had two low entranceways, which were shielded by curtains of fern fronds. Inside, in the middle of the floor, there was a space for a hearth, and the damp ground around it was covered with ferns and branches for sitting and sleeping on. All this construction, Byron noted, was done with great quickness—it was yet another way the Kawésqar protected themselves from the elements.

  When one of the ailing Englishmen died, the Kawésqar gathered with the castaways around the body. “The Indians are very watchful of the dead, sitting continually near the…corpse, and carefully covering him,” Bulkeley wrote. “Every moment looking on the face of the deceased with abundance of gravity.” As the body was being lowered into the earth, the Englishmen murmured prayers, and the Kawésqar stood solemnly. “Seeing the people with their hats off during the service,” Bulkeley wrote, “they were very attentive and observant, and continued so till the burial was over.”

  Aware of how helpless the Englishmen were, the Kawésqar would regularly venture out to sea and then magically return with nourishment for them. Byron saw one woman depart with a companion in a canoe and, once offshore, grip a basket between her teeth and leap into the freezing water. “Diving to the bottom,” Byron wrote, she “continued under water an amazing time.” When she emerged, her basket was filled with sea urchins—a strange shellfish, Byron wrote, “from which several prickles project in all directions”; each urchin contained four or five yolks “resembling the inner divisions of an orange, which are of a very nutritive quality, and excellent flavor.” After the woman deposited the urchins in the boat, she sucked in her breath and went down for more.

  Bulkeley observed that some Kawésqar women dove deeper than thirty feet. “Their agility in diving, and their continuance under water for so long a time as they generally do, will be thought impossible by persons who have not been eye-witnesses,” he wrote. Byron thought that “it seems as if Providence had endowed this people with a kind of amphibious nature.”

  The Kawésqar also managed to locate fish in a lagoon, driving them into nets with the help of their dogs, which Byron described as “very sagacious and easily trained.” Bulkeley wrote, “This method of catching fish is, I believe, unknown anywhere else, and was very surprising.”

  The Kawésqar had provided Cheap with a lifeline. But after only a few days, the carpenter’s mate Mitchell and other sailors began to run amok again. Defying Cheap’s orders, they were stealing liquor and carousing and absconding with weapons from the wreck, rather than depositing them in the store tent. Byron noted that these men—“now subject to little or no control”—tried to “seduce” the Kawésqar women, which “gave the Indians such offense.”

  Word spread throughout the encampment that Mitchell and his marauders were conspiring to steal the Kawésqar’s canoes and flee the island. Cheap dispatched Byron and other allies to foil the plot by guarding the canoes. But the Kawésqar had witnessed the insidious tensions mounting among the castaways—these men who allowed their hair to grow on their faces, who had no clue how to hunt or fish, who wore constrictive clothing that prevented a fire’s heat from warming their skin, and who seemed on the brink of mayhem.

  One morning when Cheap awoke, he discovered that all the Kawésqar had gone. They’d stripped the bark from their shelters and slipped away in their canoes, taking with them the secrets of their civilization. “Could we have entertained them as we ought,” Byron lamented, “they would have been of great assistance to us.” Given that the castaways’ behavior had prompted this abrupt departure, he added, they did not expect to ever see the Kawésqar again.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Lord of Mount Misery

  Byron found a dog in the woods. The Kawésqar had left it behind, perhaps in their haste to get away. The dog came toward Byron and trailed him all the way back to camp, and at night it lay beside him, warming his body. During the day, it accompanied Byron wherever he went. “This creature grew so fond of me and faithful that he would suffer nobody to come near…without biting them,” he wrote.

  Byron was relieved to have a true companion. Since the departure of the Kawésqar, the outpost had spiraled back into chaos. The provisions were diminishing, and Captain Cheap faced an unbearable conundrum: if he continued distributing the same daily rations, he would avoid angering his men in the short term, but the food would run out sooner—and everyone would starve. So he chose to cut back on their miserably meager meals, provoking the seamen in their “tenderest point.” Bulkeley noted in his journal that they switched to a “shorter allowance of flour, one pound for three men per diem.” Days later, this amount was further reduced.

  Bulkeley, hoping to get some nourishment, went with a party to the lagoon where the Kawésqar had caught fish. But the castaways discovered nothing on their own. “Our living now is very hard,” Bulkeley wrote. “Shellfish are very scarce, and difficult to be had.”

  That June, with winter upon them, there were fewer hours of daylight, and the temperature was consistently below freezing. Rain often turned to snow or sleet. The hail, Bulkeley wrote, “beat with such violence against a man’s face that he can hardly withstand it.” Despite the gunner’s stoicism, he complained that surely no one “ever met with such weather as we have,” noting that conditions “are so extremely severe that a man will pause some time whether he shall stay in his tent and starve, or go out in quest of food.”

  One day Byron was in his shelter, trying to stay warm, when the dog, huddled beside him, began to growl. Byron looked up and saw a party of wild-eyed seamen in the doorway. They needed his dog, they said.

  What for? Byron demanded.

  They said that if they didn’t eat it they’d starve.

  Byron pleaded with them not to take the dog. But they dragged it, yelping, out of the shelter.

  Soon Byron could no longer hear the dog barking. The men had slaughtered it—Byron didn’t record if it was done by gunshot or by hand, as though he were unable to dwell on the killing. The animal was roasted over a fire while the ravenous men in the company gathered around the flames, awaiting their share. Byron remained by himself, distraught. But eventually he went over and watched the men in the smoky firelight devouring the meat and viscera. Under the circumstances, the gunner, Bulkeley, wrote, “we thought no English mutton preferable to it.”

  Byron finally reached out and took his portion. Later he found some of the discarded paws and pieces of skin, and he ate them, too. “The pressing calls of hunger drove our men to their wits’ end,” he confessed.

  The poet Lord Byron, drawing on his grandfather’s description, wrote in Don Juan:

  What could they do? and hunger’s rage grew wild:

  So Juan’s spaniel, spite of his entreating,

  Was kill’d, and portion’d out for present eating.

  * * *

  After less than a month on the island, John Bulkeley was watching the company fracture into warring parties. First, Mitchell and his band of nine outlaws deserted the main group and set up their own base, a few miles away, scouring for their own sources of food. They were known as the seceders, and it was perhaps best for everyone else that they had left the encampment. But they were armed and, as Campbell put it, “rambled wither they pleased.” It was feared that such men, while flitting through the woods, might decide to raid the main settlement, making off with the transport boats or provisions.

  One of the seamen at the encampment disappeared while foraging on Mount Misery, and a search party discovered his body stuffed in the bushes. The victim, Byron wrote, had been “stabbed in several places, and shockingly mangled”; his few supplies had evidently been taken. Byron suspected that Mitchell had committed “no less than two murders since the loss of our ship.” The discovery of the body—and the discovery that some crewmen were willing to kill to survive—shook the search party. The seamen had always made sure to bury their fallen companions; as Byron wrote, it was a common belief that “the spirits of the dead were not at rest till their bodies were interred; and that they did not cease to haunt and trouble those who had neglected this duty to the departed.” But now the men retreated hastily, leaving the half-frozen corpse on the ground.

  Rifts were also growing among the men at the settlement. Many of them—including the boatswain, John King—had become brazenly vocal in their disdain for Captain Cheap. To them, he was stubborn, he was vainglorious, and he’d led them into this hellfire and was now incapable of getting them out. Why should he be the one to determine what tasks they performed and what amount of food they were allotted? What gave him the right to rule with absolute power when there was no ship, no Admiralty, no government at all? Midshipman Campbell, who remained loyal to Cheap, lamented that many men were “continually exclaiming against the Captain, and threatening the petty officers that stood by him.”

  Cheap had expected to be able to rely on the marine captain, Robert Pemberton, and his soldiers to help suppress any unrest among the company. But Pemberton had broken away with his armed soldiers to form their own faction, though they continued to reside at the outpost. Because these marines were technically part of the Army, and because they were now back on land, Pemberton asserted his sole authority over them. In his hut, he had constructed a wooden chair, and he would sit majestically on it, surrounded by his soldiers. Above his shelter, he flew a tattered flag, marking his territory.

  Campbell noted that the Wager’s company was sinking into a “state of anarchy,” with various competing chiefs. There was so much animosity, so much internecine fury, that it was “absolutely uncertain what might be the consequence.”

  Byron, seeking to avoid what he called the cabals, moved to the edge of the village, alone. “Liking none of their parties, I built a little hut just big enough for myself,” he wrote.