FIEEj COOKINQj AND VESSELS. 231 



nances respecting fire. '' No fire is allowed to be kindled at 

 night in the houses of the people all the year round. It is sa- 

 cred to the godj and so, after sundown, they sit and chat in the 

 dark. There are only two exceptions to the rule : first, fire to 

 cook fish caught in the night, but then it must not be taken to 

 their houses, only to the cooking-house ; and second, a light is 

 allowed at night in a house where there happens to be a con- 

 finement."^ It is likely that the American explorers may have 

 misinterpreted the surprise of the natives at seeing cigars 

 smoked, and fire produced from the flint and steel, as well as 

 the eating of raw fish and the absence of signs of cooking in 

 the dwellings. If the similar story of the islanders of Los 

 Jardines really came from an eye-witness, it may have arisen in 

 much the same way. In Kotzebue^s time, the people of the 

 Radack group (which may be perhaps the very Jardines in 

 question) were just as much astonished at the smithes forge, 

 though fire was a well-known thing to them.^ 



The circumstances of Magalhaens' discovery of the Ladrones 

 or Marian Islands, and the Phihppines, in 1521, are known to 

 us from the narrative of his companion Antonio Pigafetta, who 

 describes the manners and customs of the natives, but without 

 a hint that fire was anything strange to them. This preposte- 

 rous addition must be sought in later authors. In 1652, Horn, 

 not content with quoting Galvano^s stories of the Canaries and 

 Los Jardines, adds the natives of the Philippines as a race 

 destitute of fire.^ But the story of the Ladrone Islanders is 

 even more remarkable than this. 



The arts of these people are described by Pigafetta with 

 some detail. He mentions the slight clothing of bark worn by 

 the women, the mats and baskets, the wooden houses, the 

 canoes with outriggers, and he notices that the natives had no 

 weapons but lances pointed with fish bones, and had no notion of 

 what arrows were. They stole everything they could lay hands 

 on, and at last Magalhaens went on shore with forty men, burnt 



* Turner, ' Polynesia,' pp. 527-8, and Vocab. 



' Otto V. Eotzebue, ' Entdeckungs-Eeise ;' Weimar, 1821, vol. ii. p. 67. 

 ' Hornius, ' De Originibus Americanis ;' The Hague, 1652, pp. 204, 51. Seg 

 Goguet, vol. i. p. 69. 



