WHALING VOYAGE. 
199 
(Commodore Byron) figured. If we regard it with 
wonder for these associations, or for the awful sublimity 
of its own aspect— its extreme barrenness, ruggedness, 
and stormy locality— for one of these things, or alto- 
gether, it must always continue to be a place of great 
interest to the traveller ; and its being the southernmost 
point of the great American continent, stretching into 
the constantly troubled ocean, and dividing the mighty 
Pacific and Atlantic, entitle it to the consideration of 
the wanderer. 
We passed its southernmost point on the 5th of 
January 1831, within a musket shot of the shore. I 
can only say that it is a mass of as rugged and inhospi- 
table looking land as any person could wish to see, 
although we passed it in its mid-summer. It appeared 
most cheerless and melancholy. By what means the 
poor human inhabitants of this dreary place survive the 
long and intense winters, I am at a loss to know ; for its 
very midsummer appeared to us an English winter of 
the worst kind. 
The population appears to consist but of a few, and 
these are probably rapidly on the wane ; for Weddle, in 
his account of these regions, represents them as a wretched 
race of beings, who are miserably clad, and subsist prin- 
cipally upon shell-fish, which they gather from the rocks 
which bound the tempestuous ocean ; he calls them the 
Terra del Fuegians, because they inhabit the land of 
that name, which forms Cape Horn itself, and is sepa- 
rated from the great continent by the Straits of Magellan. 
Weddle observes that, although they appear so much 
