CHAP, x ] WRETCHED STATE OF THE NATIVES. 203 



men, one can hardly make one's self 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 ! A t 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 suffer 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 whale's-blubber with a hole in the middle, through which 

 they put their heads, like 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 con- 

 current, but quite independent evidence of the boy taken by Mr. 

 Low, and of Jemmy Button, it is certainly true, that when pressed 

 in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before 

 they kill their dogs : the boy, being asked by Mr. Low why they 

 did this, answered, " Doggies catch otters, old women no." This 

 boy described the manner in which they are killed by being held 



