THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE 229 



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 is 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 seal* 

 ing-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 pre- 

 vented 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 concurrent, but quite inde- 

 pendent 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 over smoke and thus choked; 

 he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts 

 of their bodies which are considered best to eat. Horrid 



