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and fed, and introduced to Fuegia Basket. They talked and York Minster, sullen at first, grew “much more cheerful.”
    Five days later, while on a hill taking angles for his survey of March Harbour, FitzRoy saw smoke coming from a cove near the harbor entrance. Unable to resist, he ran down to the shore and had two men row him to the cove to see if this group possessedanything that might have come from the stolen whaleboat. But as the Englishmen approached, these natives became “very bold and threatening,” so FitzRoy returned to the Beagle , filled two boats with armed men, and set off after the Fuegians, who were now paddling away fast across the harbor. The Englishmen chased them to shore where a fight ensued, an exchange of rocks and gunfire, during which no one was injured except for a seaman hit by a rock. The natives escaped into the bush. FitzRoy’s men found part of the lost boat’s gear in the beached canoes, and he concluded that among this group must be the whaleboat’s thieves. (Items from the stolen boat—oars, line, beer bottles—appeared to have been so widely disseminated throughout Tierra del Fuego that FitzRoy was able to see the thieves everywhere.) He destroyed their canoes.
    The next morning he set out again with an armed party in the direction of smoke seen above nearby islands, hoping still to find his boat. Again he saw Fuegians paddling away in canoes and intercepted them. As the Englishmen’s boat reached the first canoe, its occupants jumped overboard. The crew grabbed one of them, a young man, who was hauled into FitzRoy’s boat after a fierce fifteen-minute struggle in the water. The Englishmen returned to the Beagle with this new captive, whom FitzRoy optimistically christened Boat Memory. Despite being frightened, the new Fuegian aboard “ate enormously, and soon fell fast asleep.”
    FitzRoy now had three Fuegian captives aboard the Beagle . He was as happy with them as a big game hunter with a good bag of trophies.
    â€œBoat” was the best featured Fuegian I had seen, and being young and well made, was a very favourable specimen of the race; “York” was one of the stoutest men I had observed among them; but little Fuegia was almost as broad as she was high: she seemed to be so merry and happy, that I do not think she would willingly have quitted us. Three natives of Tierra del Fuego, better suited for the purpose of instruction, and for giving, as well as receiving information, could not, I think, have been found.
    Some design for them, not fully formed, was taking shape in FitzRoy’s mind. The specimens were clothed in regulation seaman’s dress, and instructed in English.
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    With the new whaleboat completed by carpenter May, the Beagle sailed from March Harbour on the last day of that month. The ship trended southeast along the ragged shore of Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy no longer chased native fires in search of his stolen boat and concentrated on his surveying work. His Fuegian specimens were, according to him, “becoming very cheerful, and apparently contented.”
    In Orange Bay, on the Hardy Peninsula west of Cape Horn, a group of Fuegians approached the ship to barter. FitzRoy was surprised at the reaction of his captives to these visitors. They spoke a different dialect than Boat Memory and York Minster, who nevertheless recognized the newcomers and yelled at them, calling them, FitzRoy believed, “Yapoo.” They showed FitzRoy scars from wounds they’d received fighting the “Yapoos,” a distinct and different tribe, he concluded. FitzRoy also referred to them as “Yahoos”—he had undoubtedly read Gulliver’s Travels (1726), whose protagonist refers to the brutish and imaginary race of that name as “those filthy Yahoos.”
    Late in April, the Beagle anchored near Horn Island, the southernmost point of South America, the false cape, the infamous Ultima Thule