CHAP, x.] ItELIGION OF THE FUEGIANS. 205 



always appeared to me most mysterious : from what York said, 

 when we found the place like the form of a hare, where a single man 

 had slept the night before, I should have thought that they were 

 thieves who had been driven from their tribes; but other obscure 

 speeches made me doubt this; I have sometimes imagined that the 

 most probable explanation was that they were insane. 



The different tribes have no government or chief; yet each is 

 surrounded by other hostile tribes, speaking different dialects, and 

 separated from each other only by a deserted border or neutral terri- 

 tory : the cause of their warfare appears to be the means of subsist- 

 ence. Their country is a broken mass of wild rocks, lofty hills, and 

 useless forests: and these are viewed through mists and endless 

 storms. The habitable land is reduced to the stones on the beach ; in 

 search of food they are compelled unceasingly to wander from spot to 

 spot, and so steep is the coast, that they can only move about in their 

 wretched canoes. They cannot know the feeling of having a home, 

 and still less that of domestic affection ; for the husband is to the 

 wife a brutal master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrid 

 deed ever perpetrated, than that witnessed on the west coast by 

 Byron, who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding dying 

 infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones 

 for dropping a basket of sea-eggs! How little can the higher 

 powers of the mind be brought into play : what is there for imagi- 

 nation to picture, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide 

 upon ? to knock a limpet from the rock does not require even 

 cunning, that lowest power of the mind. Their skill in some re- 

 spects may be compared to the instinct of animals ; for it is not 

 improved by experience : the canoe, their most ingenious work, 

 poor as it is, has remained the same, as we know from Drake, for 

 the last two hundred and fifty years. 



Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have they 

 come ? What could have tempted, or what change compelled a 

 tribe of men, to leave the fine regions of the north, to travel down 

 the Cordillera or backbone of America, to invent and build canoes, 

 which are not used by the tribes of Chile, Peru, and Brazil, and 

 then to enter on one of the most inhospitable countries within the 

 limits of the globe ? Although such reflections must at first seize on 

 the mind, yet we may feel sure that they are partly erroneous. There 

 is no reason to believe that the Fucgians decrease in number ; 

 therefore we must suppose that they enjoy a sufficient share of 



