EARLY ATTEMPTS AT SETTLEMENT. 275 



arts employed by them in the gaining of a livelihood. The more numer- 

 ous and more warlike and powerful of these tribes, are known as the Ala- 

 culoffs. They occupy all the west coast of the mainland, together with 

 the adjacent islands, the western stretches of the Straits of Magellan, 

 southern and western Tierra del Fuego as far east as Beagle Channel, and 

 the islands lying to the southwest. The remaining south coast of Tierra 

 del Fuego and the adjoining islands as far south as Cape Horn, are the 

 home of the Yahgans, formerly the most powerful of all the Indian tribes 

 of this region, but now nearly exterminated by the combined attacks of 

 the Onas and Alaculoffs, aided by diseases, chiefly pulmonary, introduced 

 among them through the mistaken kindness of over-zealous missionaries, 

 themselves often exceedingly deficient in the first principles of hygiene. 

 The Yahgans are doubtless only a remnant of a once powerful people 

 that inhabited the region now occupied by the Alaculoffs. They have 

 been crowded into narrower and narrower limits, until finally reduced to 

 their present territory. That they have long dwelt in their present habitat 

 is evidenced by the numerous shell-heaps that have been accumulating 

 about the more favorable camping places along the bays and inlets of this 

 coast. These shell-heaps, or kitchen-middens, have been observed attain- 

 ing to a height of twelve or fifteen feet, and to more than one hundred 

 feet in length. The time consumed in the accumulation of such quanti- 

 ties of shells indicates for them a considerable antiquity. 



Settlements in Southern Patagonia. 

 Early Attempts at Settlement. — Although this region remains to-day 

 one of the most sparsely settled of the inhabitable portions of the earth, 

 there were several attempts at early settlement; all, however, proved 

 failures. The first attempt at settlement within that part of Patagonia 

 under discussion was made by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who, in 

 1579, founded a Spanish colony of some two hundred and twenty-five 

 souls at San Felipe, about thirty miles south of the present settlement of 

 Sandy Point on the Straits of Magellan. Notwithstanding the num- 

 ber of persons left at San Felipe, and the generally inhospitable na- 

 ture of the country and climate, very little if any care was subsequently 

 bestowed upon the colony planted by Sarmiento, and when Thomas 

 Cavendish visited it in 1587, the survivors were in such a miserable 

 condition that he called the place Fort Famine, by which name it has 



