In 1832, Charles Darwin, then a little-known 23-year-old graduate, arrived in South America aboard HMS Beagle on the first leg of his voyage around the world. His impressions were mixed. While he delighted in the metropolitan charms of Buenos Aires and Montevideo and was enchanted by Patagonia’s gauchos – rugged frontier figures in flowing ponchos and baggy trousers – he was less impressed by the rudimentary culture of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups in the far south. 

‘If the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found,’ Darwin wrote of the Haush of Tierra del Fuego. Their language, he jotted in his diary (quoting Captain Cook, who had passed through decades earlier), sounded ‘like a man clearing his throat’. For Darwin, these groups were barely human. Here were people ‘whose very signs & expressions are less intelligible to us than those of domestic animals; who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason’. Such descriptions pepper Matthew Carr’s Darwin’s Savages, an exploration of Argentina’s 19th-century colonial wars and the scientific ideologies that underpinned them. 

Darwin had arrived in Argentina during an intense period of violence. As the frontier expanded south from Buenos Aires, a messy conflict had developed. Various indigenous groups like the Mapuche – who were themselves colonists, having crossed the Andes from Chile – were pitted against English, Welsh, Scottish, Spanish, Croatian