James Bute Beagle scrimshaw found in wardrobe - recalls Darwin and Origin of Species theory A remarkable and previously unknown carved whale’s tooth which records the explorer Charles Darwin’s first encounter with Indians in Tierra del Fuego will be auctioned in the UK on Thursday November 5
News-Antique.com - Oct 28,2009 - A remarkable and previously unknown carved whale’s tooth which records the explorer Charles Darwin’s first encounter with Indians in Tierra del Fuego has been found in a Cheshire market town.
Its discovery adds weight to the theory that it was these “savages” and not only the findings on the Galapagos Islands that first convinced Darwin about evolution.
The tooth, known as scrimshaw, was carved and signed by James Bute, a Royal Navy Marine private who served on board Darwin’s ship HMS Beagle. It has a unique provenance: it passed probably as a gift from Bute to Thomas Burgess, one of his shipmates on the Beagle, and has remained lost to marine historians in Burgess’s family ever since. In recent years it was kept in a wardrobe by its present owner, its significance unknown.
It will be sold by Congleton, Cheshire auctioneer Adam Partridge on Thursday November 5. Only five other examples of Bute’s scrimshaw are known, one of which sold in September for £40,800, an auction record for scrimshaw.
One side of the new find is lightly scratch-carved with four Fuegian Indians in a canoe and the title “Canoe Indians Beagle Channel Tierra del Fuego”, while the reverse is decorated with an island landscape titled “Queen’s Island Tahiti”. White metal mounts and belt loops indicate the hollow tooth, which is 20 cms (8 inches) long, was intended as a snuff mull.
Said auctioneer Adam Partridge: “To have found such a historically important object like this in a box at the bottom of a wardrobe is astonishing. Bute is known to have served aboard the Beagle on its second survey voyage in 1831 when Darwin was invited to join the crew as naturalist. The date of the carving can be narrowed down to late 1835 or early 1836 when the ship visited the islands.
“On board were three of the four Fuegian Indians kidnapped during the Beagle’s first voyage a year earlier. They had been seized by the ship’s captain Robert Fitzroy to avenge the theft of an auxiliary boat. It is tempting to think that Bute was influenced by them when he chose the subjects to carve on the tooth.”
Fitzroy’s intention was to use the captives to bargain for information about the missing boat but subsequently he decided to take them back to London as prizes to show off to the public. They were christened by the Beagle crew as “Fuegia Basket”, a girl aged eight or nine; “York Minster”, a male aged about 26 named after a rock formation near where he was captured which resembled the British cathedral; “Boat Memory”, a younger man so named because he could not remember where he obtained the bottles of beer found in his canoe and “Jemmy Button”, a boy aged about 14, named because his captors paid his family or him with buttons.
Boat Memory died from smallpox shortly after Beagle’s arrival but the other three were feted by society, taught to speak English and introduced to Queen Adelaide. It
