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purpose for being there—faded from his journal. Observations on harbors, weather, seafaring, diminished until they were almost entirely eclipsed by his mounting interest in the Fuegians:
    This cruise had…given me more insight into the real character of the Fuegians, than I had then acquired by other means…. I became convinced that so long as we were ignorant of the Fuegian language, and the natives were equally ignorant of ours, we should never know much about them, or the interior of their country; nor would there be the slightest chance of their being raised one step above the low place which they then held in our estimation.
    In this practical observation, with its telling grammatical tense, lie all the imperial ambitions of England at the time when FitzRoy wrote it—not in February 1830 when he was looking for his lost whaleboat, although it is set down as a journal entry for that time, but seven or eight years later, when he was preparing his journals for publication. After Victoria had acceded to the throne in 1837, her love of India, as a prize, and of the concept of empire, was fueling British imperial expansion across the globe. When FitzRoy wrote, in 1837 or 1838, of uplifting the heathen savage while at the same time gaining knowledge of the interior of his country, he was tapping into the major preoccupation of the age to explain and justify the deepening of his own obsessive fascination for the Fuegians, and the turn this was about to take in 1830.
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    Late in February, the Beagle sailed on down the ragged southeastern coast of Tierra del Fuego and anchored in Christmas Sound, “in the very spot where the Adventure lay when Cook was here,” FitzRoy wrote in his journal.
    He was mistaken, confusing ships. The Adventure , under the command of Tobias Furneaux, had left England in company with Captain James Cook’s Resolution in July 1772, on Cook’s second great circumnavigation of exploration. The two ships cruised partly in company as far as New Zealand, but they lost touch with each other in 1773. In 1774, Cook reached Tierra del Fuego for thesecond time, after an icy, high-latitude crossing of the South Pacific from New Zealand, searching for the mythical Terra Incognita, which he concluded did not exist. (He missed seeing Antarctica by only a few hundred miles.) In mid-December 1774, Resolution closed with Tierra del Fuego near the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan, passing a headland that Cook named Cape Gloucester. For two days, Resolution scudded on southeast before a westerly gale (along the same track followed by FitzRoy in the Beagle while surveying and looking for the lost whaleboat) until it neared a black 800-foot-high rocky promontory rising from the sea, which Cook named York Minster after the great cathedral in his home county of Yorkshire. Here a southeasterly breeze stopped him, and he turned his ship into a channel and found shelter. Resolution was anchored over Christmas while Cook surveyed and charted the surrounding coastline, naming the area Christmas Sound, and so it is still called today.
    Into this spot, fifty-five years and two months later, came FitzRoy in the Beagle . “His [Cook’s] sketch of the sound, and description of York Minster, are very good, and quite enough to guide a ship to the anchoring place.”
    Just east of York Minster was a more protected anchorage, mentioned by Cook, but not examined or named by him, and into this sheltered cove FitzRoy worked the Beagle on March 1, naming it March Harbour. It seemed a good place to leave the ship for several weeks while he and Murray again set out in two different boats, no longer on a wild goose chase, but to continue their mission with surveying instruments. And here FitzRoy set carpenter May to building another whaleboat. Since there was no longer enough planking for this in the ship’s stores, May cut up a spare spar, another ship’s former topmast that was being