THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE 



231 



in culture, the elements would become personified. What 

 the " bad wild men " were, has always appeared to me most 

 mysterious : from what York said, when we found the place 

 like the form of a hare, where a single man had slept the 

 night before, I should have thought that they were thieves 

 who had been driven from their tribes; but other obscure 

 speeches made me doubt this; I have sometimes imagined 

 that the most probable explanation was that they were 

 insane. 



The different tribes have no government or chief; yet 

 each is surrounded by other hostile tribes, speaking different 

 dialects, and separated from each other only by a deserted 

 border or neutral territory: the cause of their warfare ap- 

 pears to be the means of subsistence. Their country is a 

 broken mass of wild rocks, lofty hills, and useless forests: 

 and these are viewed through mists and endless storms. The 

 habitable land is reduced to the stones on the beach; in 

 search of food they are compelled unceasingly to wander 

 from spot to spot, and so steep is the coast, that they can 

 only move about in their wretched canoes. They cannot 

 know the feeling of having a home, and still less that of do- 

 mestic affection; for the husband is to the wife a brutal 

 master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrid deed ever 

 perpetrated, than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron, 

 who saw a wretched mother pick up her bleeding dying 

 infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the 

 stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs ! How little can 

 the higher powers of the mind be brought into play: what is 

 there for imagination to picture, for reason to compare, for 

 judgment to decide upon? to knock a limpet from the rock 

 does not require even cunning, that lowest power of the 

 mind. Their skill in some respects may be compared to the 

 instinct of animals ; for it is not improved by experience : 

 the canoe, their most ingenious work, poor as it is, has re- 

 mained the same, as we know from Drake, for the last two 

 hundred and fifty years. 



Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have 

 they come ? What could have tempted, or what change com- 

 pelled a tribe of men, to leave the fine regions of the north, 

 to travel down the Cordillera or backbone of America, to 



