232 FIBEj COOKING^ AND VESSELS. 



forty or fifty of their houseSj and killed seven of the people. 

 A hundred and eighty years afterwards the Jesuit Father Le 

 Gobien brought out a new feature in the story. " What is 

 most astonishing, and what people will find it hard to believe, 

 is that they had never seen fire. This so necessary element 

 was entirely unknown to them. They neither knew its use nor 

 its qualities ; and they were never more surprised than when 

 they saw it for the first time on the descent that Magellan 

 made on one of their islands, where he burnt some fifty of their 

 houses, to punish these islanders for the trouble they had given 

 him. They at first regarded the fire as a kind of animal which 

 attached itself to the wood on which it fed. The first who 

 came too near it having burnt themselves frightened the rest, 

 and only dared look at it from afar ; for fear, they said, of be- 

 ing bitten by it, and lest this terrible animal should wound 

 them by its violent breath," etc. etc. He goes on to tell how 

 they soon got accustomed to it and learnt to use it.^ 



It is a curious illustration of the change in historical criticism 

 that has come since 1700, that the Jesuit historian should have 

 expected so singular a story, not mentioned by the eye-witness 

 who described the discovery, to be received without the pro- 

 duction of the slightest evidence, a hundred and eighty years 

 after date, and that the public should have justified his confi- 

 dence in their credulity by believing and quoting his account. 

 Whether he took it directly from any other book or not I can- 

 not tell; but it is to be observed, that if we add Galvano's 

 story about Los Jardines to Pigafetta's mention of Magalhaens 

 burning the houses of the Ladrone Islanders, we may account 

 for the appearance of all Father Le Gobien's story, except the 

 idea of the fire being an animal, which may be supplied out of 

 Herodotus. "By the Egyptians also it hath been held that 

 fire is a living beast, and that it devours everything it can seize, 

 and when filled with food it perishes with what it has de- 

 voured.'''^ 



There are stories of fireless men in America, to which I can 

 only refer. Father Lafitau speaks indefinitely of there being 



' Le Gobien, ' Histoire des Isles Marianes ;' Paris, 1700, p. 44. 

 ' Herod., iii. 16. 



