Tierra del Fuego is a suspenseful tale, reminiscent of Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies. It is based on the true story of the Yámana Indian, Jemmy Button, part of which is recorded in Chapter 10 of Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. The novel explores Captain Robert Fitzroy’s abduction of Jemmy Button from his home in Cape Horn and Fitzroy’s attempt to “civilize” Button in England in order to return him to his country as a bearer of “enlightened society.” The experiment leads to tragic consequences. Tierra del Fuego deals with European arrogance and exploitation without resorting to the cliché of the “Noble Savage.”
The tale is told from the point of view of John William Guevara, an “outsider” with an English father and Argentinean mother. Guevara, living between those two worlds, is one of the few characters in the novel who can foresee the tragic consequences of the “experiment” and who can best understand Jemmy Button and the political machinery behind the curtain of “civilized society.”
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