WRETCHED STATE OF THE NATIVES 11^ 



pulled alongside a canoe with six Fuegians. These were the 

 most abject and miserable creatures I anywhere beheld. On 

 the east coast the natives, as we have seen, have guanaco cloaks, 

 and on the west, they possess seal-skins. Amongst these central 

 tribes the men generally have an otter -skin, or some small scrap 

 about as large as a pocket-handkerchief, which is barely suffi- 

 cient to cover their backs as low down as their loins. It is 

 laced across the breast by strings, and according as the wind 

 blows, it is shifted from side to side. But these Fuegians in the 

 canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was 

 absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, 

 together with the spray, trickled down her body. In another 

 harbour not far distant a woman, who was suckling a recently- 

 born child, came one day alongside the vessel, and remained 

 there out of mere curiosity, whilst the sleet fell and thawed on 

 her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked baby ! These 

 poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces 

 bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their 

 hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures vio- 

 lent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe 

 that they are fellow -creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. 

 It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some 

 of the lower animals can enjoy : how much more reasonably the 

 same question may be asked with respect to these barbarians ! 

 At night five or six human beings, naked and scarcely protected 

 from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the 

 wet 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 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 sealing- 

 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 prevented the women from 

 getting shellfish on the rocks, and they could not go out in 



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