DARWIN ON THE FUEGIANS AND PATAGONIANS. 749 



not to like the so-called giants, they were so thoroughly good-hu- 

 mored and unsuspecting ; they asked us to come again. They seem 

 to like to have Europeans to live with them ; and old Maria, an im- 

 portant woman in the tribe, once begged Mr. Low to leave any one 

 of his sailors with them. They spend the greater part of the year 

 here ; but in summer they hunt along the foot of the Cordillera ; 

 sometimes they travel as far as the Rio Negro, seven hundred and 

 fifty miles to the north. They are well stocked with horses, each 

 man having, according to Mr. Low, six or seven, and all the 



Fig. 5. Patagonian Spurs and Pipe. 



women, and even children, their one own horse. In the time of 

 Sarmiento (1580) these Indians had bows and arrows, now long 

 since disused ; they then also possessed some horses. This is a 

 very curious fact, showing the extraordinarily rapid multiplica- 

 tion of horses in South America. The horse was first landed at 

 Buenos Ayres in 1537, and the colony being then for a time de- 

 serted, the horse ran wild ; in 1580, only forty -three years after- 

 ward, we hear of them at the Strait of Magellan ! Mr. Low in- 

 forms me that a neighboring tribe of foot-Indians is now chang- 

 ing into horse-Indians ; the tribe at Gregory Bay giving them 

 their worn-out horses, and sending in winter a few of their best 

 skilled men to hunt for them. 



June 1st. We anchored in the fine bay of Port Famine. It 

 was now the beginning of winter, and I never saw a more cheer- 

 less prospect ; the dusky woods, piebald with snow, could be only 

 seen indistinctly through a drizzling, hazy atmosphere. We were, 

 however, lucky in getting two fine days. On one of these, Mount 

 Sarmiento, a distant mountain six thousand eight hundred feet 

 high, presented a very notable spectacle. I was frequently sur- 

 prised, in the scenery of Tierra del Fuego, at the little apparent 

 elevation of mountains really lofty. I suspect it is owing to a 

 cause which would not at first be imagined, namely, that the 



