to the Strait of Magellan, 



103 



out along the beach, whilst the females are engaged in unremit- 

 ting toils and anxiet y for the support of the family. What a dif- 

 ference between the practice of this country and that of other parts 

 of his Catholic Majesty's dominions ! Perhaps in both there is ati 

 excess. Although these Indians seem to set but little value on 

 theit women, beholdhig them with much indifference, and 

 being little if ever visited by the terrible passion of jealousy, 

 yet they did not much relish the attentions paid to them by any 

 of our people. 



We could obtain no information respecting their marriages; 

 "whether one woman is common to two or three men, or what de- 

 gree of consanguinity they observe informing those connections: 

 only we were struck with the vast disproportion between tiie 

 numbers of both sexes ; for in every family or tribe that we exa- 

 mined, there seemed to be at least three men to one woman. 

 Our notions of this nation are too imperfect to enable us to ex- 

 plain this disproportion, which must certainly be one chief 

 cause of the smallness of their numbers. 



Their language is difficult, and to all our shi[)'s company 

 was totally unintelliGjible : it seems not to be abundant in ex- 

 pression, and the pronunciation is almost entirely guttural, so 

 that the same word uttered by different Indians seemed to be- 

 come almost a different word. On this account, we never 

 came to comprehend any part of what they said, nor even to 

 he able to repeat tiielr sounds; whereas they, on the contrary, 

 repeated with great ease and readiness whatever they heard us 

 say. A favourite v*'ord, which they pronounced almost every 

 instant, was pecheri, wiiich we explain as equivalent to 

 friend. M. de Bougainville has given the wdinQ pec her i to 

 these Indians, merely from the circumstance of their inces- 

 santly using tiiat word in their conversation. 



Their dispositions seemed to be peaceable and not ill inclined: 

 they never atiempted to purloin any thing from us, notwith- 

 standing that the sight of our instruments, utensils, and tools, 

 must have created in them a vehement desire to possess them, 

 even at any hazard ; but perhaps this moderation and orderly 

 behaviour, on their part, proceeded more from a sense of their 

 own inferiority, when compared with us, than from an}^ mo- 

 ral principle or sense of the injustice of appropriating to them- 

 selves the property of others. 



To this quiet demeanour of these poor men, and the extreme 

 care bestowed by our commander, L). A. de Cordova, we must 

 attribute the perfect harmony and good understanding which 

 U^ninterruptedly prevailed between them and us, during the 

 whole time we were amongst them. We must, nevei tiieless, 

 acknowledge that, among themselves, \Ve never discovered the 



