160 PUMA—HUMMING-BIRDS—Woop. April 1828. 
but the trial might have been more profitable at another season, 
judging from the number of seals we saw on the rocks off the 
Port, which live principally upon fish. Muscles, limpets, and 
sea-eggs abound here, and are good and wholesome of their 
kind. Birds are few in number, and of the species most common 
in these regions. No quadruped of any kind was seen; but 
the purser told me that he had observed, near the sandy beach, 
traces of a four-footed animal, resembling those of a tiger: he 
followed them to a cavern, and thence to the jungle. He also 
said that he had seen several humming-birds. 
“* With the exception of wild celery and the arbutus berry, 
I know not of any useful vegetable production that this place 
affords, unless the ‘ Winter’s-bark tree’ may be mentioned. 
Some coarse grass, fit perhaps for animals, may be there pro- 
cured. The only signs of inhabitants were some wigwams on 
the western point, which seemed to have been long forsaken : 
in their construction they were precisely similar to those erected 
by the migratory tribes in the Straits of Magalhaens:; and 
the shells of muscles, limpets, and sea-eggs, within and about 
them, showed that the former tenants of these hovels drew, like 
the Magalhaenic tribes, a principal part of their subsistence 
from shell-fish. 
«* Around the harbour are granite mountains, perfectly bare 
at their summits and north-western sides, but the lower parts 
are thickly covered in sheltered places and ravines, partly with 
trees, and partly with brushwood: among the trees growing 
here we observed, as usual, two kinds of beech, a tree like the 
cypress, but of small size, and the Winter’s-bark. The under- 
wood is composed of all the various shrubs we had met with in _ 
the Straits of Magalhaens; and this brushwood is so thickly 
spread over the lower parts of the shores of the harbour, that 
it is only by crawling over it that the distance of a few yards 
from the rocks can be gained; and being generally of insuffi- 
cient strength to support a man’s weight, it frequently gives 
way beneath him, and he is so completely buried, as to make it 
difficult for him to extricate himself. | 
*< Searcely any of the trees attain a size to render them fit 
