This text is for readers interested in young Darwin, in his great "adventure" in Tierra del Fuego, his most intense and prolonged contact with natives during the long Beagle voyage. I propose to highlight his experiences in Tierra del Fuego, especially his relations with Captain Robert Fitz-Roy and with the Fuegian natives. I offer answers to this question. Why did he write about these natives with such utter derision? Young Darwin emerges as charismatic, dynamic, congenial, and absorbed by the science of nature. He vividly recalled the Fuegians near the end of his life, in 1876, though he erroneously assumed that they were cannibals of the worst sort imaginable.

Jemmy Button, a younger man, presents the figure of a Fuegian very attached to his "countrymen" though at times furiously angry at them, very fond of his British friends, though unwilling to go back to England. He acquires the allure of a symbol for the present and the future: a person in love with his "country" who simultaneously welcomes the outside world, in his case England.

Tierra del Feugo is now divided between Argentina and Chile, but the natives here have "disappeared," though some of their descendants remain. It may inspire or disappoint: thick snow, refreshing wind, sunny days... may come at any season of the year; but the landscape is always glorious.

It inspired Jeremy Button also Darwin, though differently.

This volume deals with the traditions of the Selknam and the personal relations of the author with her informants, and is part of a series of books concerning the cultures of Patagonia. The Selknam now are an extinct people that inhabited the main island of Tierra del Fuego, at the far end of South America. In the midst of this isolated, frigid and inhospitable country, they developed a nomadic life organized in small family groups or lineages that depended mainly on hunting the guanaco. Occasionally they gathered to bid farewell to their dead or to celebrate the remarkable Hain initiation ceremony. From 1880 onward, European colonization accelerated the tragic process of their extinction. Diseases from abroad as well as Indian hunters and vigilante groups were the main factors leading to their demise.

This volume describes the Selknam initiation ceremony called Hain and forms part of a series of books concerning the cultures of Patagonia. Different groups of Selknam gathered periodically to hold the ceremony in the midst of the frigid and inhospitable territory of Tierra del Fuego. The elders would build a great ceremonial hut in an open space where the male initiates could be taught and from where some of the spirits would arise. These apparently supernatural beings, with their naked bodies painted in rhythmic patterns, covered their faces with striking masks. Once disguised, they emerged from the ceremonial hut, frightening the women and children with their apparitions. They were secretly represented by Selkman men, whose true identity was revealed to the young initiates during an intensive period of physical and spiritual training to learn the secrets and traditions of their people.

The book is illustrated with the remarkable photographs take by the German anthropologist Father Martin Gusinde.