The Life and Times of Jemmy Button.
This is a dramatic tale of the triumph of human spirit. It is also one of tragedy and catastrophe.
In 1830 Jemmy Button was bought from his uncle in Tierra del Fuego for the price of a mother-of-pearl button: he was removed from a primitive, nomadic existence, where life revolved around a hunt for food and the need for shelter, and taken halfway round the world to an England on the very edge of industrialisation, where cities were expanding at a rate never seen before or since. He learned English and Christianity, met the King and made a strong impression upon some of the major figures in Britain; Charles Darwin himself was to befriend the Fuegian and write about their time together on the voyage back to the southern tip of South America. Their friendship influenced one of the most important and controversial works of the century, 'On The Origin Of The Species'.
Jemmy was to find that life back in Tierra del Fuego could never be the same. The young man was deposited on a lonely, windswept shore and charged by the Beagle's captain with the task of "civilising" his people and of bringing God to his homeland. At first ostracised and attacked by other Fuegians, he later became the target of zealous and ambitious missionaries, many of whom gave up their lives in an effort to get to him.
In Button's life the dire consequences of a long-forgotten cultural collision at the ends of the earth became a story of survival, revenge, murder and the destruction of a whole race of people, blurring the boundaries of civilisation and savagery.
