2i6 A HARD LIFE. [chap, x, 



wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces 

 bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, 

 their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their 

 gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly 

 make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures and 

 inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject 

 of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower 

 animals can enjoy ; how much more reasonably the same 

 question may be asked with respect to these barbarians! 

 At night, five or six human beings, naked and scarcely 

 protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous 

 climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals. 

 Whenever it is low water, winter or summer, night or 

 day, they must rise to pick shell-fish from the rocks ; and 

 the women either dive to collect sea-eggs, or sit patiently 

 in their canoes, and with a baited hair-line, without any 

 hook, jerk out little fish. If a seal is killed, or the 

 floating carcass of a putrid whale discovered, it is a 

 feast ; and such miserable food is assisted by a few 

 tasteless berries and fungi. 



They often sufi'er from famine : I heard Mr. Low, a 

 sealing-master intimately acquainted with the natives of 

 this country, give a curious account of the state of a 

 party of one hundred and fifty natives on the west coast, 

 who were very thin and in great distress. A succession 

 of gales prevented the women from getting shell-fish on 

 the rocks, and they could not go out in their canoes to 

 catch seal. A small party of these men one morning set 

 out, and the other Indians explained to him that they 

 were going a four days' journey for food ; on their return, 

 Low went to meet them, and he found them excessively 

 tired, each man carrying a great square piece of putrid 

 whales' blubber with a hole in the middle, through which 

 they put their heads, as the Gauchos do through their 

 ponchos or cloaks. As soon as the blubber was brought 

 into a wigwam, an old man cut off thin slices, and 

 muttering over them, broiled them for a minute, and 

 distributed them to the famished party, who during this 

 time preserved a profound silence. Mr. Low believes that 

 whenever a whale is cast on shore the natives bury large 

 pieces of it in the sand as a resource in time of famine ; 

 and a native boy, whom he had on board, once found a 

 stock thus buried. The different tribes when at war are 

 cannibals. From the concurrent, but quite independent 



