Explorers Dreamers and Thieves by Carolina Orloff

Author:Carolina Orloff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Explorers;Dreamers and Thieves;Selva Almada;Rita Indiana;Josefa Sánchez Contreras;Philippe Sands;Juan Gabriel Vásquez;Gabriela Wiener;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2024-03-19T12:38:03+00:00

The Europeans were also interested in other objects. Artefacts from Tierra del Fuego were gathered and deposited in museums and places of research, including the British Museum, in London. Somewhere I read that the objects included human remains, and that they were kept, even today, in various locations around London.

I reached out to the Museum, to enquire about the holdings. Curators responded positively, with utmost transparency. They shared papers that summarised what they had on Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. They gave details of different Indigenous communities – the Yahgan of the Beagle Channel and southern islands, the Selk’nam of the main island of Tierra del Fuego. They provided information about voyages, donations, and donors. They passed on a complete list of holdings, several hundred objects from Tierra del Fuego, gathered by intrepid voyagers I was taught about during childhood. They included Captain James Cook, and sailors and passengers on HMS Beagle. I wondered if the holdings included the ‘gifts’ offered by Jemmy Button to Captain Fitzroy.

The reported human remains were not among these holdings. It seemed that some from Tierra del Fuego were held at the Royal College of Surgeons – a ‘Calvaria, young adult, from Tierra del Fuego’ – and the Natural History Museum – a ‘thin section cranial’ from Ushuaia Bay, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The Natural History Museum separated from the British Museum in 1963. Curators at the Human Remains Department confirmed that around thirty items from Tierra del Fuego were held in their collection, including remains from the first voyage of HMS Beagle. Over at the Royal College of Surgeons, a catalogue from 1907 recorded fifteen remains, including the ‘skeleton of a female native from Tierra del Fuego’ and the ‘skull of a male Fuegian… Found in 1879, buried in an old shell-heap near Ushwaia… “a remarkably tall man”… Yahgan’. Today, the only object that remained was a cranium. Who knew what became of the rest. Destroyed in 1941, when London was bombed by the Luftwaffe? Transferred to the Natural History Museum? A visit was restricted to descendants or those engaged in scientific research. Whether this was due to the special sensitivity that attached to human remains, or because information about the circumstances in which they were obtained was problematic, I did not know.

* * *

The British Museum shared an extensive list of holdings. I identified sixteen objects of interest. Two from Dawson, seven said to be Selk’nam (Ona), and nine identified as Ona or Yahgan. The Museum invited me to visit. As the objects were not on public display, I visited the warehouse near Shoreditch, in the east of London, an innocuous building. It was March and dreary. The objects were brought up from storage, respectfully laid out with care on tables covered in white draping in a room on the first floor. Each had a label, to identify the donor, the source, the date. Many labels were original, from the nineteenth century.

A bolas, or stone ball, found on the southern extremity of Dawson Island.

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